Most libertarians do believe in government, regulations, police, fire departments etc. Their complaint regarding government is often that the wrong level is addressing an issue, that state or local levels should be handling a particular issue rather than the federal (national) level; that the causes of various problems vary from region to region and are better addressed at a more local level.
This reminds me of Raymond Smullyan's universal refutation of philosophy: "That's what *you* say."
You ought to be specific whoen you mean "most libertarians." Do you mean "most people who are self-described libertarians?" "Most people who meet some authoritative definition 'X' of 'libertarian'?" Or "Most people who meet *my* definition of 'libertarian'?"
We can have any kind of screeners we want. We just have to decide on the job specification, post it at a high enough salary to attract a sufficient number of qualified candidates.
We *don't* have the kind of screeners we want simply because we'd rather take the hit in personal safety and dignity than in our wallet.
wants to let individuals sue *employees* for implementing the policies *our elected representatives* have put in place?
Why not allow individuals to sue politically appointed officials who set the policy, and lawmakers to pass laws the laws behind the policy? Wouldn't that be more fair?
Do you really, in your heart of hearts, believe that the Founding Fathers, if they were alive today, would consider a hard drive full of a citizen's personal and confidential files to be in any way less deserving of the same legal protections afforded someone's wallet or their file cabinet?
Although I agree with your conclusion, I am troubled by this style of reasoning because (a) anybody can imagine the founding fathers have any kind of reaction they'd want the founders to have to conditions unimaginable in the founder's lifetime; (b) it assumes the founders were of one mind on what "liberty" means, which they manifestly were not; and (c) it deifies the founders, as if they had some kind of privileged access to the truth which we don't have.
The founders did an amazingly good job, but they screwed up in many instances, sometimes in ways that they had enough information to know better but were not morally up to facing (slavery), in other cases in ways they could not have avoided. Take the Bill of Rights; it's very parochial with respect to historical era, talking about people being secure in their papers and effects. *We* know that what is important is the *information* in those papers, and if you don't think that didn't cause confusion, look at the history of the SCOTUS stance on unreasonable searches and seizures. On the other hand, the ninth and tenth amendments are something rare, a political admission of fallibility and limited foresight. It is on that basis that the Bill of Rights has been interpreted to cover things like contraception which surely was not part of the consideration when the founders drafted and the states ratified the Bill. Who knows what answer we would get if we went back in time and put the question of contraception to the founders? Even if we could, why should we assume that they would automatically come up with a better answer than us?
I think Lincoln had it right when in the Gettysburg Address he described the United States as a kind of experiment in what liberty means and its practical application to human life. The founders managed to get hold of a kernel of truth... or perhaps find the trail head of a long path into the future. They did not even attempt to make a clear, unambiguous statement of that truth in legal or philosophical terms that would answer all questions of government for all time. They never even attempted to actually specifically describe many of the rights they were attempting to secure but only (in a parochial but typically American way) restrain certain known threats to those rights.
Still, they did a pretty good job. They simply didn't *finish it*.
Ever seen a 50-year-old ER nurse? 90% of the time, they are callused to the suffering around them. It comes with repeated exposure to the environment, and although their demeanor may seem rough to others, they are extremely efficient and skilled.
Which only shows how much more *advanced* computer geeks are. We're rude from the time we hatch out of our *eggs*. And we're justified in not reacting to the suffering around us. We don't need to *react* because we *caused* it.
Golly, your wish is granted. Too bad you didn't wish for a plastic pen that didn't suck.
I've got one of these, and after five minutes of using it I chucked it in the drawer. It's nowhere near as nice as using a stylus on a resistive screen when you want to do something precise.
My thoughts exactly. Might be a good place to hunt for caves.The giant sinkhole is promising.These have led to the discovery of some of the deepest caves in the world.
Well... yes. China produces everything from utter shit to really wonderful stuff. Most of the crap that the GP is complaining about exists because we Americans are suckers for a price that is too good to be true. We'll buy apiece of junk for half price ten times as often.
There is no question that in the long run China is *capable* of producing anything we can. They can certainly produce an airliner as good as any from the US or Europe in the relatively near term. The question is whether they *will*, and if they do, how we will know. I'd have doubts about this airliner, because it is a showcase project being orchestrated by a government which is extremely sensitive to unflattering news. If some enterprising reporter turns up some horrible risk to the people flying in this plane, reporting that would actually be considered a crime against the state, not a public service.
Well, it says the hardware ran linux at X speed, and windows at less than X speed...
Actually the article doesn't say that. The hardware was different: the Linux configuration had more nodes than the Windows configuration. This *might* have been for some technical reason, or it might have been for some extraneous reason (e.g., they have better things to do with this beast than run benchmarks on it).
In any case, the difference between the Windows and Linux scores was for practical purposes insignificant. It was a *benchmark*, not a real computation. Even if the benchmark is pretty good, the mix of resources used by a real program won't match it exactly (e.g. an app that uses less floating point calculations but more memory allocations might see a very different result).
Microsoft's aim is not to run on research clusters, but to make inroads into businesses that have in-house Windows system administration and programming capabilities and might have use for high performance computing. If so, the linpack benchmark is probably close to irrelevant for many applications.
Sure, if you stipulate the class EV must be entirely disjoint from the class hybrid, you can make the *ontological* argument that the Volt is "not an EV."
From a *practical* standpoint, the Volt will be the first widely marketed vehicle that gets a significant portion of its energy from the electric grid. For many users it will get the *majority* of its energy from the grid. That is a huge milestone toward diversifying the energy sources used for personal transportation. It achieves this milestone without shoving a serious vehicle range limitation down early adopters' throats just to win a pointless semantic pissing match.
Actually, why one size fits all? Why not multiple app stores? Choose the app store you trust an which meets your need.
Better yet, why not let anybody vett applications then sign the installer? You as a user would choose which certifiers to trust. Some certifiers might be *necessary*, others *sufficient*. This would be great for IT departments who issue Android phones. They could require all apps to be certified by them, or by a set of trusted analysis.
I'll take a crack at it. In a nutshell, the hardware to do tablets has been around for some time, but not a user interface that makes the idea of a tablet really work.
Did you ever learn to ice skate? If you haven't, just bear with me and I'll think you'll see what I mean. Before you try skating, you see people zooming around on the ice. Some of them are skating backwards, others are weaving in and out of the other skaters, and you think, "that looks like fun." Then you strap on the skates and find out that for *you*, it's all falling on your ass and barely being able to move at all and that not necessarily in the direction you want to go, mind you.
Now tablet UIs are all about direct manipulation. You grab things and move them around. It's supposed to be intuitive. It's not supposed to have weird quirks that you have to work your way around. What people expect when they buy a tablet is the equivalent of a pair of magic skates that allow them to skate like an Olympic champion just by putting them on. As the UI designer, you've got to eliminate the learning curve, smooth over the bumps, take care of all the fiddly muscle-memory kind of thing that user's can't put into words (but they can describe the results of lacking it: you fall on your ass).
That means you really have to re-think the interface from the ground-up for people who will be manipulating things directly on-screen.
But what the market *got* was Windows with touchscreen drivers. It was the kind of thing that makes sense in the abstract. The Windows rationale has been its huge library of apps and a user base who'd already bought those apps. The value proposition was not self-consistent: all the same old software you are used working the same way it always has... but with a tablet UI.
I have a Windows 7 convertible tablet/netbook. A few apps that take over the screen and were built from the ground up as tablet apps work just fine. But trying to use apps designed for *Windows* has all the suckage any Microsoft hater could hope for. It's almost the worst case UI scenario. It works *just enough* that you're tempted to try it, then the damned thing dumps you on your ass.
Apple did a great job of bootstrapping their tablet with the iPhone an iPod Touch. People didn't expect a platform with a huge app library, they were delighted to use them for Apple's own touch enabled apps. Then once there was a reasonable third party app library they introduced a tablet, and never bothered worrying about getting MacOS apps to work with a touch UI, which would have sucked no matter how brilliant they tried to be.
I think we'll see some credible Android tablets soon. It's still not easy to do a good touch interface, but nobody is trying to make legacy UI apps work.
Not really. Joo Joo was a major innovation in spectacular Apple competitor fiascoes.
This wasn't a case of somebody showing up with a crappy styrofoam boogie board long after the wave had passed. This was management realizing they had their crappy styrofoam board in about the right place in time to catch the wave, then drowning as they experienced a giant greed orgasm.
Hmmm. I'm not sure you got that precisely right, because it would be all too easy to think you need the greatest number of features or specific features like Flash or multitasking.
What you've got to do when you introduce a product is find a group of people who *might* buy it then show them something that makes them want to buy it. What could be more obvious an simple in concept, or more difficult in practice?
What you need is a clear message.
Jobs it the greatest living master of this. Note how Apple doesn't put everything it possibly can into each generation of product. That's smart, because explaining too many features clutters the message.
When Steve introduces a new product, you come away with three impressions: (1) the device is beautiful, (2) it is different and (3) I picture myself having a wonderful experience with this device I cannot have any other way. That's the formula he uses to trigger your buy reflex, every single time. Anything else is superfluous. No Flash? Well, he doesn't need to give his customers Flash until not having Flash becomes a distraction from his message. When it does, he'll give it to them and they'll applaud him as a hero. Why? Not because Flash is something nobody else has, but because now they can picture themselves using the beautiful, novel features of the latest iPhone.
From what I've seen, the Windows 7 phone is something I can imagine Steve Jobs whipping the faithful into a buying frenzy over, if only it weren't branded as Microsoft Windows. The problem is that *message* we're getting from Microsoft is "this time we didn't screw up" an "this is one product the people who worked on are proud of for a change." They don't even have a mechanism for focusing their customer base on their product, other than traditional advertising.
Well it did work for them. It cost them *electoral* victory, but shifting the focus of political discourse toward the personal got them the policies they wanted.
In what way are they a right wing version of Media Matters? Does everything boil down to nothing more than "my side vs. your side?"
Media Matters is an attempt by people on the left to balance what they see as right wing media bias. You may think that is absurd; maybe it even *is* absurd. But they don't pretend to be anything other than a one sided source of information. It says so right on their about us page:
Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.
So right there if you're a conservative, you *know* what they're promoting is from your point of view liberal nonsense. If you are a moderate, you *know* Media Matters is giving you half the story because *they told you that*.
Now here's an except from NLPC's "About Us":
NLPC was founded to promote ethics, and to give the Code [of Ethics] the visibility it deserves.
The author of the Code is Sen. Paul Douglas (D-IL) who served from 1948 to 1964. A "Sense of Congress" resolution that passed on July 11, 1958 urged adherence to the Code by all government officials.
Golly, sounds *bipartisan* ("all government officials), or maybe even *Democrat leaning*, doesn't it?
I think there's a big difference between openly arguing one side of a question and arguing one side while pretending to be fair and balanced. But perhaps some have reached the point where "public discourse" means picking the lie you'd prefer to believe.
Look for a lot, lot more calls for the House to investigate the Obama administration. The new majority in the House will not be able to pass any of its program, but it will have the subpoena power to make political theater. With enough smoke, some voters will believe there's fire.
Well, that's really a flawed analogy, because COBOL is a language and Java is really about *frameworks*. Of all those Java programmers out there, how many are working on projects that don't rely on some open source framework or library? That don't use Spring or Hibernate or Struts? That's not even counting Apache's Commons or Xerces.
When the fight comes, it's going to be completely different. It'll be Oracle trying to get a jiu-jutsu hold on a vast body of software using control of a small but strategic body of intellectual property.
Hmm. When the Soviets paraded their military hardware in Red Square, it wasn't as if we didn't know they had it. But we *did* pay attention.
If you think about it, the most strategically efficient form of sabre rattling is, in effect, saying "look at me rattling my sabre." It reminds the other guys to be worried about your sabre without disclosing anything they hadn't known before.
Having lived through much of the Cold War, the notion of us rattling our sabres then *denying we did any such thing* is entirely plausible. It used to go like this (sometimes with the roles reversed).
USA: We are for peace, diplomacy [sabre rattles], and economic cooperation...
Soviets: Hold it! America just rattled their sabre! Hey, non-aligned nations, America is war mongering!
USA (smirking): How offensive! Did you hear that non-aligned nations? The Soviets are trying to poison the atmosphere of peaceful cooperation we have built here. [sabre rattles]
Soviets: Did you here that? They did it again!
USA: Incorrigible, aren't they?
When you use a display of military might for diplomatic purposes, the more you soft pedal it the more effective the threat. If you're *explicit* about it, the other side *has* to demonstrate to the world that it's not intimidated.
Now personally, I see three possibilities, but I'm not prepared to choose between them:
(1) Launch by US, screw-up in public relations. (2) Launch by US, deliberate sabre rattling. (3) Launch by some other country [note 1] to demonstrate to us we can't track their subs. If they never own up to it, that's pratically sabre rattling. Everyone will think it was one of ours, but *we* know damn well it wasn't.
note 1: In Boston, the name of this country would rhyme with "minor".
(1) The Unix Programming Environment (K&P) (2) The C Programming Language (K&R) (3) Software Tools (K&P) (4) The Elements of Programming Style (K&P) [optional]
In those days, I was always amazed that so many people tried to program on Unix without having read these books forward and back. After you read those, all that was left was to read the manuals cover to cover, which took a few months but was worth doing. That was a good spare time activity back in the days when compiling and linking took a long, long time.
It's an entirely different kind of world today. I doubt many people know even the standard Java libraries as well as we knew Version 7 and System III of Unix, not only the details but the design philosophy as well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay "Self-Reliance", claims that society does not progress; it simply changes. We gain some things but lose others. I suppose that depends on your definition of "progress"; I certainly wouldn't want to go back to those days. We have unquestionably gained, but we've lost something too as programmers, a sense of mastery and control over our destiny. So much of our time today is spent dealing with the fallibility of others, in wrestling with frameworks that are powerful but so complex they're inevitably full of excruciating design flaws. We don't think it extraordinary at all for a good fraction of our time on a project to be working around flaws in other layers of the solution.
It wouldn't be porn to people who think that the concept of lust has no place in the Bible,
Without taking a position one way or the other in that question, what is illustrated in Song of Songs is erotic love, not lust. These have many superficial characteristics in common, and have considerable connection to each other, but they differ in one essential respect: lust is easy to satisfy; erotic love is impossible to satisfy. As an illustration of this distinction, you might be very interested in having intercourse with some porn star without having any interest in spending every moment of the rest of your life with her.
Lust is just one of the ways in which erotic love manifests itself, along with exaggerated interest in everything the loved object says or thinks. All of these phenomena can be caused by erotic love, but can also exist independently of it.
From a certain standpoint, you could argue that lust is a simple, healthy physical drive whereas erotic love looks a lot like mental illness.
Well, I will admit it is quite possible that I don't "get it", but as a senior engineer with decades of experience who has seen the program in operation firsthand, I think I'm qualified to make some observations.
I'll add one more. Engineers are not exactly made; nor are they born. Rather, they are made from people who are born to be engineers, and there's a certain window of opportunity for accomplishing that.
Please read this carefully, before you get bent out of shape about my "not getting it".
A *great* software engineer has the capacity to create *many* jobs around himself. Even a very good one can do this. The supply of people who, by the time they are about to enter college are prepared to become even a decent engineer is limited. Nor is this a problem we can fix with overnight with slogans or dramatic gestures like kicking all the foreign engineers out of the country, which is only going to accelerate offshoring.
If you want more American students to choose an engineering path, you've got to make sure there are domestic jobs for them when they expect to graduate. In order for there to be jobs for them, there must be a thriving domestic technology industry. In order for that to exist, you need to have plenty of talented engineers. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference where those engineers came from, but it makes a *hell* of a lot of difference where they're going to.
Now I understand the folks who want to eliminate or cut back the H1-b program because as it is structured now it's a swindle designed to make moving American jobs to low wage countries easy. But getting rid of the program isn't going to fix the damage done to the country's intellectual infrastructure. It'll make that damage worse.
My suggestion for creating more jobs for American engineers: allow any foreigner who shows real promise to come over here, then make it attractive for the most successful ones to put down roots here. In fact, if an employer can't get at least half the H1bs he sponsors to become permanent residents, he should lose the privilege of sponsoring them.
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Most libertarians do believe in government, regulations, police, fire departments etc. Their complaint regarding government is often that the wrong level is addressing an issue, that state or local levels should be handling a particular issue rather than the federal (national) level; that the causes of various problems vary from region to region and are better addressed at a more local level.
This reminds me of Raymond Smullyan's universal refutation of philosophy: "That's what *you* say."
You ought to be specific whoen you mean "most libertarians." Do you mean "most people who are self-described libertarians?" "Most people who meet some authoritative definition 'X' of 'libertarian'?" Or "Most people who meet *my* definition of 'libertarian'?"
We can have any kind of screeners we want. We just have to decide on the job specification, post it at a high enough salary to attract a sufficient number of qualified candidates.
We *don't* have the kind of screeners we want simply because we'd rather take the hit in personal safety and dignity than in our wallet.
wants to let individuals sue *employees* for implementing the policies *our elected representatives* have put in place?
Why not allow individuals to sue politically appointed officials who set the policy, and lawmakers to pass laws the laws behind the policy? Wouldn't that be more fair?
Do you really, in your heart of hearts, believe that the Founding Fathers, if they were alive today, would consider a hard drive full of a citizen's personal and confidential files to be in any way less deserving of the same legal protections afforded someone's wallet or their file cabinet?
Although I agree with your conclusion, I am troubled by this style of reasoning because (a) anybody can imagine the founding fathers have any kind of reaction they'd want the founders to have to conditions unimaginable in the founder's lifetime; (b) it assumes the founders were of one mind on what "liberty" means, which they manifestly were not; and (c) it deifies the founders, as if they had some kind of privileged access to the truth which we don't have.
The founders did an amazingly good job, but they screwed up in many instances, sometimes in ways that they had enough information to know better but were not morally up to facing (slavery), in other cases in ways they could not have avoided. Take the Bill of Rights; it's very parochial with respect to historical era, talking about people being secure in their papers and effects. *We* know that what is important is the *information* in those papers, and if you don't think that didn't cause confusion, look at the history of the SCOTUS stance on unreasonable searches and seizures. On the other hand, the ninth and tenth amendments are something rare, a political admission of fallibility and limited foresight. It is on that basis that the Bill of Rights has been interpreted to cover things like contraception which surely was not part of the consideration when the founders drafted and the states ratified the Bill. Who knows what answer we would get if we went back in time and put the question of contraception to the founders? Even if we could, why should we assume that they would automatically come up with a better answer than us?
I think Lincoln had it right when in the Gettysburg Address he described the United States as a kind of experiment in what liberty means and its practical application to human life. The founders managed to get hold of a kernel of truth... or perhaps find the trail head of a long path into the future. They did not even attempt to make a clear, unambiguous statement of that truth in legal or philosophical terms that would answer all questions of government for all time. They never even attempted to actually specifically describe many of the rights they were attempting to secure but only (in a parochial but typically American way) restrain certain known threats to those rights.
Still, they did a pretty good job. They simply didn't *finish it*.
Ever seen a 50-year-old ER nurse? 90% of the time, they are callused to the suffering around them. It comes with repeated exposure to the environment, and although their demeanor may seem rough to others, they are extremely efficient and skilled.
Which only shows how much more *advanced* computer geeks are. We're rude from the time we hatch out of our *eggs*. And we're justified in not reacting to the suffering around us. We don't need to *react* because we *caused* it.
Golly, your wish is granted. Too bad you didn't wish for a plastic pen that didn't suck.
I've got one of these, and after five minutes of using it I chucked it in the drawer. It's nowhere near as nice as using a stylus on a resistive screen when you want to do something precise.
My thoughts exactly. Might be a good place to hunt for caves.The giant sinkhole is promising.These have led to the discovery of some of the deepest caves in the world.
Well ... yes. China produces everything from utter shit to really wonderful stuff. Most of the crap that the GP is complaining about exists because we Americans are suckers for a price that is too good to be true. We'll buy apiece of junk for half price ten times as often.
There is no question that in the long run China is *capable* of producing anything we can. They can certainly produce an airliner as good as any from the US or Europe in the relatively near term. The question is whether they *will*, and if they do, how we will know. I'd have doubts about this airliner, because it is a showcase project being orchestrated by a government which is extremely sensitive to unflattering news. If some enterprising reporter turns up some horrible risk to the people flying in this plane, reporting that would actually be considered a crime against the state, not a public service.
Well, it says the hardware ran linux at X speed, and windows at less than X speed...
Actually the article doesn't say that. The hardware was different: the Linux configuration had more nodes than the Windows configuration. This *might* have been for some technical reason, or it might have been for some extraneous reason (e.g., they have better things to do with this beast than run benchmarks on it).
In any case, the difference between the Windows and Linux scores was for practical purposes insignificant. It was a *benchmark*, not a real computation. Even if the benchmark is pretty good, the mix of resources used by a real program won't match it exactly (e.g. an app that uses less floating point calculations but more memory allocations might see a very different result).
Microsoft's aim is not to run on research clusters, but to make inroads into businesses that have in-house Windows system administration and programming capabilities and might have use for high performance computing. If so, the linpack benchmark is probably close to irrelevant for many applications.
Sure, if you stipulate the class EV must be entirely disjoint from the class hybrid, you can make the *ontological* argument that the Volt is "not an EV."
From a *practical* standpoint, the Volt will be the first widely marketed vehicle that gets a significant portion of its energy from the electric grid. For many users it will get the *majority* of its energy from the grid. That is a huge milestone toward diversifying the energy sources used for personal transportation. It achieves this milestone without shoving a serious vehicle range limitation down early adopters' throats just to win a pointless semantic pissing match.
Actually, why one size fits all? Why not multiple app stores? Choose the app store you trust an which meets your need.
Better yet, why not let anybody vett applications then sign the installer? You as a user would choose which certifiers to trust. Some certifiers might be *necessary*, others *sufficient*. This would be great for IT departments who issue Android phones. They could require all apps to be certified by them, or by a set of trusted analysis.
Satre put it in a nutshell: "Hell is other people."
I'll take a crack at it. In a nutshell, the hardware to do tablets has been around for some time, but not a user interface that makes the idea of a tablet really work.
Did you ever learn to ice skate? If you haven't, just bear with me and I'll think you'll see what I mean. Before you try skating, you see people zooming around on the ice. Some of them are skating backwards, others are weaving in and out of the other skaters, and you think, "that looks like fun." Then you strap on the skates and find out that for *you*, it's all falling on your ass and barely being able to move at all and that not necessarily in the direction you want to go, mind you.
Now tablet UIs are all about direct manipulation. You grab things and move them around. It's supposed to be intuitive. It's not supposed to have weird quirks that you have to work your way around. What people expect when they buy a tablet is the equivalent of a pair of magic skates that allow them to skate like an Olympic champion just by putting them on. As the UI designer, you've got to eliminate the learning curve, smooth over the bumps, take care of all the fiddly muscle-memory kind of thing that user's can't put into words (but they can describe the results of lacking it: you fall on your ass).
That means you really have to re-think the interface from the ground-up for people who will be manipulating things directly on-screen.
But what the market *got* was Windows with touchscreen drivers. It was the kind of thing that makes sense in the abstract. The Windows rationale has been its huge library of apps and a user base who'd already bought those apps. The value proposition was not self-consistent: all the same old software you are used working the same way it always has ... but with a tablet UI.
I have a Windows 7 convertible tablet/netbook. A few apps that take over the screen and were built from the ground up as tablet apps work just fine. But trying to use apps designed for *Windows* has all the suckage any Microsoft hater could hope for. It's almost the worst case UI scenario. It works *just enough* that you're tempted to try it, then the damned thing dumps you on your ass.
Apple did a great job of bootstrapping their tablet with the iPhone an iPod Touch. People didn't expect a platform with a huge app library, they were delighted to use them for Apple's own touch enabled apps. Then once there was a reasonable third party app library they introduced a tablet, and never bothered worrying about getting MacOS apps to work with a touch UI, which would have sucked no matter how brilliant they tried to be.
I think we'll see some credible Android tablets soon. It's still not easy to do a good touch interface, but nobody is trying to make legacy UI apps work.
Not really. Joo Joo was a major innovation in spectacular Apple competitor fiascoes.
This wasn't a case of somebody showing up with a crappy styrofoam boogie board long after the wave had passed. This was management realizing they had their crappy styrofoam board in about the right place in time to catch the wave, then drowning as they experienced a giant greed orgasm.
You better bring something that no one else has.
Hmmm. I'm not sure you got that precisely right, because it would be all too easy to think you need the greatest number of features or specific features like Flash or multitasking.
What you've got to do when you introduce a product is find a group of people who *might* buy it then show them something that makes them want to buy it. What could be more obvious an simple in concept, or more difficult in practice?
What you need is a clear message.
Jobs it the greatest living master of this. Note how Apple doesn't put everything it possibly can into each generation of product. That's smart, because explaining too many features clutters the message.
When Steve introduces a new product, you come away with three impressions: (1) the device is beautiful, (2) it is different and (3) I picture myself having a wonderful experience with this device I cannot have any other way. That's the formula he uses to trigger your buy reflex, every single time. Anything else is superfluous. No Flash? Well, he doesn't need to give his customers Flash until not having Flash becomes a distraction from his message. When it does, he'll give it to them and they'll applaud him as a hero. Why? Not because Flash is something nobody else has, but because now they can picture themselves using the beautiful, novel features of the latest iPhone.
From what I've seen, the Windows 7 phone is something I can imagine Steve Jobs whipping the faithful into a buying frenzy over, if only it weren't branded as Microsoft Windows. The problem is that *message* we're getting from Microsoft is "this time we didn't screw up" an "this is one product the people who worked on are proud of for a change." They don't even have a mechanism for focusing their customer base on their product, other than traditional advertising.
Well it did work for them. It cost them *electoral* victory, but shifting the focus of political discourse toward the personal got them the policies they wanted.
Well I do know the history of the Democratic Party and Paul Douglas was not one of the people you refer to. Not by a long shot.
In what way are they a right wing version of Media Matters? Does everything boil down to nothing more than "my side vs. your side?"
Media Matters is an attempt by people on the left to balance what they see as right wing media bias. You may think that is absurd; maybe it even *is* absurd. But they don't pretend to be anything other than a one sided source of information. It says so right on their about us page:
Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.
So right there if you're a conservative, you *know* what they're promoting is from your point of view liberal nonsense. If you are a moderate, you *know* Media Matters is giving you half the story because *they told you that*.
Now here's an except from NLPC's "About Us":
NLPC was founded to promote ethics, and to give the Code [of Ethics] the visibility it deserves.
The author of the Code is Sen. Paul Douglas (D-IL) who served from 1948 to 1964. A "Sense of Congress" resolution that passed on July 11, 1958 urged adherence to the Code by all government officials.
Golly, sounds *bipartisan* ("all government officials), or maybe even *Democrat leaning*, doesn't it?
I think there's a big difference between openly arguing one side of a question and arguing one side while pretending to be fair and balanced. But perhaps some have reached the point where "public discourse" means picking the lie you'd prefer to believe.
Look for a lot, lot more calls for the House to investigate the Obama administration. The new majority in the House will not be able to pass any of its program, but it will have the subpoena power to make political theater. With enough smoke, some voters will believe there's fire.
Well, that's really a flawed analogy, because COBOL is a language and Java is really about *frameworks*. Of all those Java programmers out there, how many are working on projects that don't rely on some open source framework or library? That don't use Spring or Hibernate or Struts? That's not even counting Apache's Commons or Xerces.
When the fight comes, it's going to be completely different. It'll be Oracle trying to get a jiu-jutsu hold on a vast body of software using control of a small but strategic body of intellectual property.
Hmm. When the Soviets paraded their military hardware in Red Square, it wasn't as if we didn't know they had it. But we *did* pay attention.
If you think about it, the most strategically efficient form of sabre rattling is, in effect, saying "look at me rattling my sabre." It reminds the other guys to be worried about your sabre without disclosing anything they hadn't known before.
Having lived through much of the Cold War, the notion of us rattling our sabres then *denying we did any such thing* is entirely plausible. It used to go like this (sometimes with the roles reversed).
USA: We are for peace, diplomacy [sabre rattles], and economic cooperation ...
Soviets: Hold it! America just rattled their sabre! Hey, non-aligned nations, America is war mongering!
USA (smirking): How offensive! Did you hear that non-aligned nations? The Soviets are trying to poison the atmosphere of peaceful cooperation we have built here. [sabre rattles]
Soviets: Did you here that? They did it again!
USA: Incorrigible, aren't they?
When you use a display of military might for diplomatic purposes, the more you soft pedal it the more effective the threat. If you're *explicit* about it, the other side *has* to demonstrate to the world that it's not intimidated.
Now personally, I see three possibilities, but I'm not prepared to choose between them:
(1) Launch by US, screw-up in public relations.
(2) Launch by US, deliberate sabre rattling.
(3) Launch by some other country [note 1] to demonstrate to us we can't track their subs. If they never own up to it, that's pratically sabre rattling. Everyone will think it was one of ours, but *we* know damn well it wasn't.
note 1: In Boston, the name of this country would rhyme with "minor".
People my age can't be expected to remember more than 3.5 things.
back in the day:
(1) The Unix Programming Environment (K&P)
(2) The C Programming Language (K&R)
(3) Software Tools (K&P)
(4) The Elements of Programming Style (K&P) [optional]
In those days, I was always amazed that so many people tried to program on Unix without having read these books forward and back. After you read those, all that was left was to read the manuals cover to cover, which took a few months but was worth doing. That was a good spare time activity back in the days when compiling and linking took a long, long time.
It's an entirely different kind of world today. I doubt many people know even the standard Java libraries as well as we knew Version 7 and System III of Unix, not only the details but the design philosophy as well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay "Self-Reliance", claims that society does not progress; it simply changes. We gain some things but lose others. I suppose that depends on your definition of "progress"; I certainly wouldn't want to go back to those days. We have unquestionably gained, but we've lost something too as programmers, a sense of mastery and control over our destiny. So much of our time today is spent dealing with the fallibility of others, in wrestling with frameworks that are powerful but so complex they're inevitably full of excruciating design flaws. We don't think it extraordinary at all for a good fraction of our time on a project to be working around flaws in other layers of the solution.
It wouldn't be porn to people who think that the concept of lust has no place in the Bible,
Without taking a position one way or the other in that question, what is illustrated in Song of Songs is erotic love, not lust. These have many superficial characteristics in common, and have considerable connection to each other, but they differ in one essential respect: lust is easy to satisfy; erotic love is impossible to satisfy. As an illustration of this distinction, you might be very interested in having intercourse with some porn star without having any interest in spending every moment of the rest of your life with her.
Lust is just one of the ways in which erotic love manifests itself, along with exaggerated interest in everything the loved object says or thinks. All of these phenomena can be caused by erotic love, but can also exist independently of it.
From a certain standpoint, you could argue that lust is a simple, healthy physical drive whereas erotic love looks a lot like mental illness.
Well, I will admit it is quite possible that I don't "get it", but as a senior engineer with decades of experience who has seen the program in operation firsthand, I think I'm qualified to make some observations.
I'll add one more. Engineers are not exactly made; nor are they born. Rather, they are made from people who are born to be engineers, and there's a certain window of opportunity for accomplishing that.
Please read this carefully, before you get bent out of shape about my "not getting it".
A *great* software engineer has the capacity to create *many* jobs around himself. Even a very good one can do this. The supply of people who, by the time they are about to enter college are prepared to become even a decent engineer is limited. Nor is this a problem we can fix with overnight with slogans or dramatic gestures like kicking all the foreign engineers out of the country, which is only going to accelerate offshoring.
If you want more American students to choose an engineering path, you've got to make sure there are domestic jobs for them when they expect to graduate. In order for there to be jobs for them, there must be a thriving domestic technology industry. In order for that to exist, you need to have plenty of talented engineers. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference where those engineers came from, but it makes a *hell* of a lot of difference where they're going to.
Now I understand the folks who want to eliminate or cut back the H1-b program because as it is structured now it's a swindle designed to make moving American jobs to low wage countries easy. But getting rid of the program isn't going to fix the damage done to the country's intellectual infrastructure. It'll make that damage worse.
My suggestion for creating more jobs for American engineers: allow any foreigner who shows real promise to come over here, then make it attractive for the most successful ones to put down roots here. In fact, if an employer can't get at least half the H1bs he sponsors to become permanent residents, he should lose the privilege of sponsoring them.