Well, I've been at this long enough to see a number of methodologies come down the pike and then go down the pike. Most of them had some merit, few of them close to the kind of merit claimed for them.
The problem is inflated expectations, and UML was probably the worst case of inflated expectations ever. Having a shared notation is a good thing. Expecting a notation to think for you is foolish. Worrying about flaws in the notation more than flaws in the thinking represented (as often happened) is madness.
I've never tried what the GGP suggests, but I imagine it's a lot like the "grammar checker" in Word, which was nearly useless as a guide to grammar. However, it did tend to offer a lot of advice, albeit bad, useless or confusing, in places that needed work. So, I found it quite helpful as way of detecting grammatical problems, less so as a means of solving them.
So I imagine if you ran your code through UML-izer, and you (the author) couldn't make head or tail of it, it'd probably be a quicker way of detecting sloppiness than going through the code reference by reference.
Oh, please. Can't you stop your brain from parotting Cliff's Notes for a just a minute?
Yes, it is true that IngSoc was a portmanteu of English Socialism and a poke in the eye to his countrymen who worshipped "Uncle Joe" (that's Stalin to you and me). But it might surprise you that Orwell considered himself a Socialist. He even volunteered in the Spanish Civil War.
What he was criticizing was a stupid attitude, by which credulous people, hypnotized by slogans and words, offered themselves up to be exploited and slaughtered.
You are right that fascism is antithetical to the free market, but not in the way you are suggesting. Collectivization is not an end for the fascists; it is just another thing they are willing to do for their amoral purposes. You are right that fascism is about melding state power to industrial power, but what you've missed is that it curries favor with industrial power, and takes good care of industrial power.
Which is not the same thing as taking care of industry. Industry does best when the powerful within it do not feel fully secure. The powerful in industry, if allowed to control government, will use government power to protect their interests, against competition. They may even seek to squash innovation that threaten fundamental changes to markets they control. It's not hard to find examples.
- and Oak is unquestionably arguing for corporate governance enforced through legislation:
I have news for you. It is and always has been, at least here in the US and probably other common law countries. For example, the law regulates the actions of the board with respect to discrimination against the interests of stockholders who don't have a controlling interest. The law also regulates the actions of the board and management with respect to the interests of potential investors.
Historically, corporations had to hold a charter from the sovereign (or in the case of democracies the legislature). Then the legislating bodies created laws which basically allowed corporations to forgo that formality, but it still remains that corporations are creatures of the law. The benefits that stockholders gain from incorporating, such as protection for their business's creditors, are granted by the law making body of a state, which can attach whatever conditions they wish to that grant.
If you don't like it, you don't have to incorporate. But chances are you will, because the benefits the public grants you in incorporation are so huge.
Now why would the public grant people who want to run a business these huge benefits? Because the public gets benefits as well. Although there are negatives to incorporation, as there are to anything, it is net a win-win scenario.
So it should be considered questionable whether any specific measure tilting the balance of the incorporation deal toward the public is a good thing for the public, because the public already benefits tremendously from incorporation. But it's not automatically bad for the public. Nor is it automatically bad for the shareholders of corporations.
You have to talk specifics. In principle the public could change the deal in ways that make it better for the public, but in practice most ways of trying to make it better wouldn't work. This doesn't mean it's not worth considering, but you can't talk about "it" because there is no single "it" to talk about. Some regulations are simply bad ideas; others aren't such bad ideas. It's probably true that every regulation has the potential to do more harm than good. But it's certain that overall regulation, in our society, does more good than harm. This doesn't make "regulation a good thing"; it's not a thing that can be talked about that way. It's a category of things.
Now, I think it is better to think about this in terms of unintended consequences of the scheme of incorporation. Corporations are mighty machines for amassing wealth, and one of the unintended consequences is the outsized political power and influence it gives certain people in strategic positions to direct that wealth to politicians. We should be aware that anything we do to address unintended consequences like this is regulation, and therefore capable of doing harm. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it.
Well, things turn out better for the descendants, but it isn't completely nice for the generation making contact. For one thing, you're as likely to infect their children as to save them.
Arrogance is assuming that it is we who have everything to show them, and that what they know and how they live has no value.
Arrogance is treating a people who are apparently getting along fine without us as wards of the state.
Arrogance is assuming that we have the right to plan the use of the land they are already using because we've drawn political boundaries that include that territory.
I agree, there are many good things about contact. But it's dangerous. While in a moral sense these people are our equals, they are not our equals in practical power. These people don't have guns, and aircraft, and the resources of a nation state and industrial economy to draw upon. So when it comes to contact, they don't get to dictate terms. It is up to the people who do get to dictate terms to consider the interests of those who don't.
It is paternalistic, but there's no helping it. First contact can only be done once. Do it wrong and you endanger their culture, even their lives.
Speaking of which, I've been playing around with making bows recently.
Those bows look pretty well designed and made. And these guys look well fed, so they're probably a good shot. They could probably put an arrow between your eyes at fifty yards. Depending on the power of their bows, they could hit a target like the helicopter at twice that range. If they did, the arrows would very likely penetrate the skin of the helicopter and still have enough momentum to seriously injure anybody inside.
There are stories of European explorers encountering Cherokee archers; the flint arrowheads (which weren't razor sharp, by the way; they were sharper) could penetrate a steel breastplate, shattering and killing the victim with stone shrapnel. I read of one rider who was wearing cuirassier's armor who was pinned to his horse when an arrow penetrated his thigh armor.
Given that these people are woodland people who hunt and fight on foot, they probably have similar bows. They look rather broad limbed and tapered, a design that results in a reliable, powerful and fast casting bow of reasonable draw weight.
Bows and arrows may not be very "advanced", but underestimating how deadly a well designed bow in the hand of a skilled archer can be might well be the last thing you ever did. The helicopter might have scared these guys shitless, but when they grabbed their bows I'll bet they were quite confident that they could kill anything that came within bowshot stone dead. And they'd probably be right.
Well, I may have misunderstood, but I thought that Apple demanded and received a cut of the service fees customers paid AT&T.
So, Apple's incentive was that they made more money.
Also, I think there is an element of long term strategy. Nobody knows better than Jobs that big, splashy product launches can be followed by more big splashy product launches.
I bet a lot of people switched to AT&T just to get an iPhone. I bet there aren't a lot of people who would be willing to spend the launch price for an iPhone on their carrier, who didn't eventually get one.
So, think of it this way: Apple probably sold as many iPhones as they could make at a price that was shocking, but not utterly insane. Naturally they could manufacture more at an insane price, but they probably wouldn't have made more profit, and certainly not as much of a splash. The way the whole iPod thing works is you've got to see somebody else with one, then want one for yourself.
Now notice that as soon as the demand slackened, they dropped the price, which means they're watching the adoption curve carefully. When they've milked the universe of people willing to switch to AT&T for everything they can (demonstrating their monster clout to all the other carriers at the same time), they'll have a new, really cool iPhone waiting. If they've calculated things right, this will be right around the time their exclusive deal with AT&T runs out.
Which means that a whole bunch of people who've been sitting on the fence because of AT&T will be able to get one with their current carrier -- for a hefty consideration. It'll be like the second coming of Beatlemania, or like Jobs was peddling an elixir that cured cancer and increased your sex appeal by 800%.
It will be like nothing you've ever seen before.
Anyways, that'd be Jobsian strategic thinking. He stays ahead by planning ahead.
While Java did get a lot better with 1.5, it wasn't that bad before. The biggest fault, in my opinion, was the object/primitive dichotomy without autoboxing.
The biggest problem with Java were the frameworks built around it. The philosophy of using checked exceptions of course an obvious problem with those frameworks, but even worse was the ways that many Java frameworks had of complicating your life rather than simplifying it.
I think many frameworks were built around unrealistic idealizations of problems not well understood, in which rare special cases drive so much of the developer's experience. In part this was hubris leading to overengineering in the name of best practices. In part this was the desire to productize frameworks -- even some open source frameworks could be characterized this way.
I think the Spring framework was a turning point for the Java community. It showed that a framework could be powerful without intruding into the coding process and littering systems with references.
I know of no other profession where I can retain my job no matter what unless I shoot a kid in the face while I'm on duty. That is a monstrous policy with horrible side effects.
It's not really a policy problem. It's an implementation problem.
Teachers can be dismissed for things far short of committing violence on their students, but the case against them has to be documented. The problem is the administrators, particularly, depending on your state, the principal. Where a bad teacher flourishes, there is a bad administrator standing behind them.
I agree with your general sentiment that teachers deserve a decent salary. The problem is, the other things you mentioned, lesson planning, homework grading, counseling parents, that's now all done during their regular "business hours", unlike my generation where teachers did much of that after school and on their own time.
Which is, on balance, a positive development. The problem was that the bad teachers didn't do enough of this. I'd say the overall quality of teaching is better now than it was back then, probably because of that. I suspect the best teachers are still spending a lot of time. I know they're often buying supplies and materials for their classrooms out of their own pockets, or begging them from parents.
You have gotten so used to bashing Republicans that you really are missing the point that both parties are corrupt and extending government beyond the constitutionally defined limits.
Perhaps they are "both corrupt", but that's neither here nor there with respect to this issue.
What is going here is an instance of "Eating your seed corn." People do that when they are too stupid to look to the future, or too focused on the short term.
In this case, we're focused on the short term because we're up to our eyeballs in deficits. We went on a spending spree while cutting taxes at the same time. The results were predictable, and by some, desirable. It was called the "starving the beast" theory, and it was used by those who were supposedly against Federal spending as a justification for doing more Federal spending. This is exactly the result which the advocates of "starving the beast" were striving for: to make it financially impossible to sustain spending on things that aren't in their view "essential".
I agree, it makes no difference which party was responsible for the budget in question. The damage was already done.
Well, they don't make you take a test before they put the "fundamentalist" label on you, or before you claim that label for yourself.
In fact, the way words like "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" are used as if they were synonyms, which they are not. Also, some of the ideas of Pentecostalism are associated with Fundamentalism, and indeed many individuals these days practice a mix of both, but they are really different (and somewhat antithetical) things.
Usually, when we hear "fundamentalist", it is used to refer to somebody who is a conservative, evangelical Christian who believes in Biblical literalism and practices an ecstatic form of worship in a large, media driven community.
In fact, this is something of a recent mish-mash of distinctive and sometimes opposing American religious groups. For example, up until the mid twentieth century, Christian fundamentalists were antagonistic to the kind of mystical worship practiced by Pentecostalism. That is because the Christian Fundamentalist movement is essentially pseudo-rational in nature.
"Creation Science" is quintessential Christian Fundamentalism in its historic form. Fundamentalists of this sort don't see themselves as anti-science. They see themselves as pro-science, but against an intellectually corrupt scientific establishment. It is therefore quite practical for a "fundamentalist" to pursue a scientific career, provided it is in a field that either has a well established fundamentalist counter-movement, like biology, or one in which Biblical issues don't arise very often, for example solid state physics. You won't find many "Fundamentalists" in scholarly fields like Near Eastern languages or Biblical Archeology -- not for long at any rate.
There is a lot more diversity in religious belief than our labels allow for. The right wing Christian movement has laid claim to a number of American religious traditions, sometimes conflicting traditions. They're even flirting with Catholicism, which was long seen by native Protestants of all stripes as alien and wicked. Bringing these traditions under a single terminological roof is about institutional and political power. We sometimes call that roof "Evangelicalism" and sometimes "Fundamentalism", even though these are again two different historical phenomenon. The two words serve complementary political purposes: to unite those under the roof, and to stand them against those outside.
So, a teacher with NO experience can walk into a teaching job and start earning almost as much as most households in maine.
Well, in Maine, only 24% of the workforce has a college degree; it's a bit below the national median. To be fair, you have to compare the teacher salary to salaries of other college graduates. Nationwide, there's a big difference. A person with a college degree earns, on average, about $49,000 vs. about $32,000 for the entire population.
As far as three months of vacation is concerned, it certainly is a nice perk. But I assume that you've never done any teaching if you think it's all time off. People who've never done it think you just walk into a classroom and start teaching. It doesn't work like that.
I'm not a teacher, but I have taught in enrichment programs, and I found I needed about an hour of preparation for every hour in the classroom to do a good job. Now somebody teaching for a living probably doesn't need quite as much time, but what they do doesn't begin and end in the classroom. There is lesson preparation and planning, homework grading, professional development, and counseling parents.
Like a lot of things in life, it's not as easy as it looks.
It isn't a crime to give somebody doing something this important and difficult a reasonable salary for their educational attainment, and some nice benefits. Give them much, and expect much from them.
Well, I run Xubuntu on a laptop with 2GB of RAM....
The reason is that I do almost all my work these days on virtual machines. There are all kinds of benfits from working mainly in virtual machines that I won't go into here, but the reason I use Xubuntu over Ubuntu is that it uses slightly less memory. Most of the time the performance of the virtual machines is not noticeably sluggish, but every so often you run into memory limitations. Using less in the first place means that it happens less often and recovers faster.
Probably I should consider using a distro designed for some resource constrained machine, like DSL. However my current setup works well enough that I haven't been motivated to try DSL or some other minidistro. I'd be interested if others have.
Wow, you actually feel oppressed by Consumer Reports.
I will say that sometimes they do miss some important points when they deal with specialized products. I remember once seeing a review of bicyles that included a braking distance rating -- just like for cars. Well, all the bikes in the price range they were testing probably used the same or very similar Japanese component sets on rims of the same alloy. Any remaining difference in stopping distance would be determined by (in order): adjustment, rider technique, net weight, rotational mass (wheel weight). So there's not much to be gained for a serious rider looking at braking distance.
Also, there is the matter of comfort. The two most comfortable seats I've ever had were unpadded. One was a classic leather seat, the other was a plain, hard plastic shell. I never found that adding padding made the seat more comfortable, in fact quite the contrary. I found padding cut off the circulation after an hour or so in the saddle.
But that particular observation is not valid for somebody who takes his bike out for an hour or two a dozen or so times a year. If you ride on the order of a hundred miles or more per week, what you find comfortable is different.
Likewise, tire differences might make a difference in braking for a weekend rider, who is more likely to brake without adjusting his weight distribution, and thus is more likely to skid.
What I'm getting at is that if you aren't the kind of person who as a more specialized source of consumer information, the CR reports are probably fairly useful.
How can people seriously call these things "ultra mobile" when they have to keep getting plugged into a wall outlet?
Easy.
You see, "ultra-" as a prefix means "beyond or on the other side of". "Ultraviolet" light is not violet -- the fact that its not violet is half of what qualifies it for the "ultra-" prefix.
Presumably, giving the thing a battery life that is too short to be practical helps keep it lighter -- for the price you pay for it. A cheap lead acid battery would probably power the thing for a considerable time, if you wouldn't mind lugging four or five pounds of largish battery around. But low weight and small size are what make so called "ultraportable" devices attractive over, say, laptops. By increasing (at a given price level) two of the factors which make a device attractive for mobile use, you render it impratical for mobile use.
Therefore, unlike other devices supposedly in this category, this is a true "ultraportable".
Well -- identical twins have idential DNA -- or close to it. They aren't identical in their character, however.
The thing to remember is that while we might not have as much difference between candidates as we'd like, small differences make a big difference, if they're over something that's important enough. Lots of people have been complaining for a long time that the Democrats and Republicans are too much alike. They're probably right. It doesn't mean that things wouldn't have been different, for better or worse, if Al Gore had beeng granted Florida's electoral votes in 2000.
Many Democrats don't see much difference between McCain and Bush; many Republicans don't see much difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Some don't see much differnce between McCain and Obama. None of these people are wrong, except to the degree that they think the "small" differences between those individuals won't have big practical impacts on the life of the country.
Like amateur AI programmers vs. WoW players or something?
I wouldn't assume those sets are disjoint.
I'm thinking more of the guy who set up his home inventory system in Access, and considers himself hot stuff with PowerPoint animations, carries a BlackBerry, and takes this as proof he understands Technology.
The whole Ted Stevens "Series of Tubes" flap is an example. As has been pointed out, it is very reasonable to use this as a first approximation of how the Internet works for some purposes. Just not the specific purposes in question. Not knowing the limits of your knowledge is not only embarassing, it is dangerous when you are a lawmaker.
And that's where technological overconfidence becomes hubris, when you stop relying upon your ow personal experience and start relying upon received wisdsom without realizing you have done so. A top drawer lawer, if he was fully aware of his own technological ignorance, would grasp useful and misleading aspects of the "tubes" analogy in about five minutes. In about five more, he'd get on to the real substance of net neutrality, which is gaining control over markets by limiting vendor access to customers.
This is something even a pretty sophisticated engineer might miss, because he's too close. You have to be interested in economics, not the details of protocol implementations.
I don't recall the second issue ever being happily settled. Isn't that what conservatives and liberals have been fighting over for years?
As a whole, no. I'm talking about specifics, not political philosophy. Many specific points have been settled for a long time, but are being reopened by people operating under false pretenses.
True, there are many laws that need updating for technological reasons, but these laws need to be strengthened and extended, not weakened. For example the Pen Register act requires a warrant for the use of a Pen Register -- a device which records the impulses in an old analog telephone switch, and thus who you are calling. This isn't philosophically different from demanding the email logs of an ISP, which is not covered by the act.
Technology is reopening some of these issues, and the argument is that things have changed so much that the old concerns for the freedom and privacy of the citizen aren't as important in the face of new and unprecedented threats.
Really? The threats coming from people who are acting against the law's proscriptions don't look all that new. Today we're worried about Al Qaeda; thirty years ago we were worried about the KGB, as well as domestic subversives and radicals.
The argument is that the people are more technologically empowered to commit crimes. That is true. They're also much more dependent upon technology. That means that on balance the government (and its private sector agents -- another new development) has gained more power to meddle and pry than people have gained to transgress.
So on balance, things have changed in a fundamental way, but not so that we should avoid restoring the protections of, say the Pen Register Act. On the contrary, we should go well beyond those protections.
When you are developing, you are a user. Which means you are a pain in the ass to somebody.
Once the box goes out the door, it means it's in the hands of users, who will be a pain in the ass to you.
The way to make money in tech is to find something that people will pay money for (duh), but the important point is that it doen't have to be much money, so long as they never ever call you for support. I know a guy who launched possibly as many as a dozen commercial software products, in every case addressing a real need somebody had. With one exception, each of those products staggered into oblivion under the burden of support costs.
Anyway, this guy's pet peeve are people who make more profit than he ever saw selling ring tones. Unfortunately, he hasn't learned his lesson: profit comes from low support costs. If your support costs are zero, then you've created the proverbial printing press for money.
The way this applies is that you want a distro that has as close to nothing in it consistent with being able to run your application. You do not want your customers calling becuase an update to Ubuntu has broken their box.
I'd probably roll my own distro. Certainly I'd be doing a custom kernel in any case, because every K of RAM or disk used to support something that isn't in my box comes out of my profit margins: bigger "disk", bigger memory, less room for growth. By the time you've stripped everything out you don't need, all the daemons, and utilities and drivers and whatnot, you're practically there anyway.
I'd probaly start with uCLinux -- it works for Cisco, after all, and runs on some pretty low end (cheap) hardware. Don't know how this interacts with the need for Mono or what his app does, but it makes sense to start with something that's already pretty small. Otherwise, if I were planning on deploying on x86 hardware I'd roll my own using Linux from Scratch and simulating the hardware in vmware.
It's true that technology changes some things, like the economics of using copyright to provide economic support to creators. But a lot of the time technology is used as an excuse to reopen issues happily settled long ago, on things like the first sale doctrine, or the intrusion of the government into the private lives of citizens.
I don't look to tech geeks political leadership. I want somebody smart (which most geeks are) with their head screwed on straight (and geeks are as all over the map on this). If he's a tech geek, well that's nice, but not necessary. If he's got the right aims, and is smart enough to cut through the mumbo jumbo, that's enough.
In particular, I'd be wary of amateur tech geeks -- people who are computer enthusisasts, but not for anything that counts. I wouldn't rule them out, but I'd look extra close at their tech policies, which may exhibit a "knows enough to be dangerous" character.
It's taking a software update that renders a machine you are relying upon hors de combat until you fix it. Wifi issues are particularly vexing, because you'll need another machine from which to pray to Google, or at least a real Ethernet jack.
Of course, you shouldn't do any updates when you are on a tight deadline, but you don't always know when you'll be in a hurry in advance.
For years, I had good experiences when running Linux on ThinkPads. Then I got cheap and bought a Toshiba, and was treated to lessons on things like how the Linux kernel handles hotplug devices every time I did an Ubuntu update.
If I were equipping people working for me, I'd definitely go with Linux preinstalled, because presumably the vendor has chosen components with good Linux support. But even if not, you have somebody to call.
Toshiba is cheap, and pretty anti-Linux. I've often wondered if they deliberately sabotage Linux on their laptops; the answer to many "compatibility" issues is to tell Toshiba's ACPI bios that you're Windows Vista -- then suddently some stuff that doesn't work magically starts working.
All inexperienced developers think that it will be a "necessary first step in clearing out years of cruft", until they actually try it. Then they realise that the "years of cruft" often had good reasons for being there and solving the problems the "cruft" solved is actually extremely hard and not always elegant.
I don't think you can discuss the issue so abstractly. Ultimately, refactoring is rewriting. It's just incremental. The line between refactoring and rewriting is fuzzy; if I had to draw it somewhere, it would be around being able to do a functional build more or less any time you want to. If you can do a nightly build, you're definitely "refactoring"; if you go six months without being able build anything, you are definitely "rewriting".
I think the real issue is understanding. The problem isn't programmers wanting to write new code, the problem is programmers not wanting to understand existing code. Once you understand the existing code, then you can make an informed decision about how you want to handle it.
When most loan fraud is done via identity theft, how does this initiative assist in finding the people committing actual fraud? Well, consumer credit is a different thing. What they are dealing with is the home equity crisis. While it's not unheard of, it's hard to fence a house -- in the felonious sense of the word. So insiders who are inflating their sales and commissions by falsifying aspects of loan deals are a bigger fraction of the fraud being committed than in something like credit card fraud. So the idea is that this keeps a sharp operator from committing fraud, then skipping town and setting up shop in a different place under an assumed (or stolen) name.
Unfortunately 99% of this crisis fits the standard market bubble paradigm. The difference is that this hits people... er... where they live. Once the irrational exhuberance is taken out of the market, the opportunity for fraud is greatly reduced.
In fact, we have the opposite problem: investors are spooked. Coming down hard on fraud might help a tiny bit, but primarily investors are spooked by their own collective insanity.
If it makes investors a bit less risk averse, it's worth doing, but I doubt it will. We need to get a bit more momentum going in the credit market. Financial markets have about a ten year memory, so the time to really come down hard on fraud will be in about five years.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I've been at this long enough to see a number of methodologies come down the pike and then go down the pike. Most of them had some merit, few of them close to the kind of merit claimed for them.
The problem is inflated expectations, and UML was probably the worst case of inflated expectations ever. Having a shared notation is a good thing. Expecting a notation to think for you is foolish. Worrying about flaws in the notation more than flaws in the thinking represented (as often happened) is madness.
But you don't use it for debugging.
I've never tried what the GGP suggests, but I imagine it's a lot like the "grammar checker" in Word, which was nearly useless as a guide to grammar. However, it did tend to offer a lot of advice, albeit bad, useless or confusing, in places that needed work. So, I found it quite helpful as way of detecting grammatical problems, less so as a means of solving them.
So I imagine if you ran your code through UML-izer, and you (the author) couldn't make head or tail of it, it'd probably be a quicker way of detecting sloppiness than going through the code reference by reference.
Oh, please. Can't you stop your brain from parotting Cliff's Notes for a just a minute?
Yes, it is true that IngSoc was a portmanteu of English Socialism and a poke in the eye to his countrymen who worshipped "Uncle Joe" (that's Stalin to you and me). But it might surprise you that Orwell considered himself a Socialist. He even volunteered in the Spanish Civil War.
What he was criticizing was a stupid attitude, by which credulous people, hypnotized by slogans and words, offered themselves up to be exploited and slaughtered.
You are right that fascism is antithetical to the free market, but not in the way you are suggesting. Collectivization is not an end for the fascists; it is just another thing they are willing to do for their amoral purposes. You are right that fascism is about melding state power to industrial power, but what you've missed is that it curries favor with industrial power, and takes good care of industrial power.
Which is not the same thing as taking care of industry. Industry does best when the powerful within it do not feel fully secure. The powerful in industry, if allowed to control government, will use government power to protect their interests, against competition. They may even seek to squash innovation that threaten fundamental changes to markets they control. It's not hard to find examples.
I have news for you. It is and always has been, at least here in the US and probably other common law countries. For example, the law regulates the actions of the board with respect to discrimination against the interests of stockholders who don't have a controlling interest. The law also regulates the actions of the board and management with respect to the interests of potential investors.
Historically, corporations had to hold a charter from the sovereign (or in the case of democracies the legislature). Then the legislating bodies created laws which basically allowed corporations to forgo that formality, but it still remains that corporations are creatures of the law. The benefits that stockholders gain from incorporating, such as protection for their business's creditors, are granted by the law making body of a state, which can attach whatever conditions they wish to that grant.
If you don't like it, you don't have to incorporate. But chances are you will, because the benefits the public grants you in incorporation are so huge.
Now why would the public grant people who want to run a business these huge benefits? Because the public gets benefits as well. Although there are negatives to incorporation, as there are to anything, it is net a win-win scenario.
So it should be considered questionable whether any specific measure tilting the balance of the incorporation deal toward the public is a good thing for the public, because the public already benefits tremendously from incorporation. But it's not automatically bad for the public. Nor is it automatically bad for the shareholders of corporations.
You have to talk specifics. In principle the public could change the deal in ways that make it better for the public, but in practice most ways of trying to make it better wouldn't work. This doesn't mean it's not worth considering, but you can't talk about "it" because there is no single "it" to talk about. Some regulations are simply bad ideas; others aren't such bad ideas. It's probably true that every regulation has the potential to do more harm than good. But it's certain that overall regulation, in our society, does more good than harm. This doesn't make "regulation a good thing"; it's not a thing that can be talked about that way. It's a category of things.
Now, I think it is better to think about this in terms of unintended consequences of the scheme of incorporation. Corporations are mighty machines for amassing wealth, and one of the unintended consequences is the outsized political power and influence it gives certain people in strategic positions to direct that wealth to politicians. We should be aware that anything we do to address unintended consequences like this is regulation, and therefore capable of doing harm. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it.
Well, things turn out better for the descendants, but it isn't completely nice for the generation making contact. For one thing, you're as likely to infect their children as to save them.
Arrogance is assuming that it is we who have everything to show them, and that what they know and how they live has no value.
Arrogance is treating a people who are apparently getting along fine without us as wards of the state.
Arrogance is assuming that we have the right to plan the use of the land they are already using because we've drawn political boundaries that include that territory.
I agree, there are many good things about contact. But it's dangerous. While in a moral sense these people are our equals, they are not our equals in practical power. These people don't have guns, and aircraft, and the resources of a nation state and industrial economy to draw upon. So when it comes to contact, they don't get to dictate terms. It is up to the people who do get to dictate terms to consider the interests of those who don't.
It is paternalistic, but there's no helping it. First contact can only be done once. Do it wrong and you endanger their culture, even their lives.
Speaking of which, I've been playing around with making bows recently.
Those bows look pretty well designed and made. And these guys look well fed, so they're probably a good shot. They could probably put an arrow between your eyes at fifty yards. Depending on the power of their bows, they could hit a target like the helicopter at twice that range. If they did, the arrows would very likely penetrate the skin of the helicopter and still have enough momentum to seriously injure anybody inside.
There are stories of European explorers encountering Cherokee archers; the flint arrowheads (which weren't razor sharp, by the way; they were sharper) could penetrate a steel breastplate, shattering and killing the victim with stone shrapnel. I read of one rider who was wearing cuirassier's armor who was pinned to his horse when an arrow penetrated his thigh armor.
Given that these people are woodland people who hunt and fight on foot, they probably have similar bows. They look rather broad limbed and tapered, a design that results in a reliable, powerful and fast casting bow of reasonable draw weight.
Bows and arrows may not be very "advanced", but underestimating how deadly a well designed bow in the hand of a skilled archer can be might well be the last thing you ever did. The helicopter might have scared these guys shitless, but when they grabbed their bows I'll bet they were quite confident that they could kill anything that came within bowshot stone dead. And they'd probably be right.
Well, I may have misunderstood, but I thought that Apple demanded and received a cut of the service fees customers paid AT&T.
So, Apple's incentive was that they made more money.
Also, I think there is an element of long term strategy. Nobody knows better than Jobs that big, splashy product launches can be followed by more big splashy product launches.
I bet a lot of people switched to AT&T just to get an iPhone. I bet there aren't a lot of people who would be willing to spend the launch price for an iPhone on their carrier, who didn't eventually get one.
So, think of it this way: Apple probably sold as many iPhones as they could make at a price that was shocking, but not utterly insane. Naturally they could manufacture more at an insane price, but they probably wouldn't have made more profit, and certainly not as much of a splash. The way the whole iPod thing works is you've got to see somebody else with one, then want one for yourself.
Now notice that as soon as the demand slackened, they dropped the price, which means they're watching the adoption curve carefully. When they've milked the universe of people willing to switch to AT&T for everything they can (demonstrating their monster clout to all the other carriers at the same time), they'll have a new, really cool iPhone waiting. If they've calculated things right, this will be right around the time their exclusive deal with AT&T runs out.
Which means that a whole bunch of people who've been sitting on the fence because of AT&T will be able to get one with their current carrier -- for a hefty consideration. It'll be like the second coming of Beatlemania, or like Jobs was peddling an elixir that cured cancer and increased your sex appeal by 800%.
It will be like nothing you've ever seen before.
Anyways, that'd be Jobsian strategic thinking. He stays ahead by planning ahead.
I'll disagree slightly.
While Java did get a lot better with 1.5, it wasn't that bad before. The biggest fault, in my opinion, was the object/primitive dichotomy without autoboxing.
The biggest problem with Java were the frameworks built around it. The philosophy of using checked exceptions of course an obvious problem with those frameworks, but even worse was the ways that many Java frameworks had of complicating your life rather than simplifying it.
I think many frameworks were built around unrealistic idealizations of problems not well understood, in which rare special cases drive so much of the developer's experience. In part this was hubris leading to overengineering in the name of best practices. In part this was the desire to productize frameworks -- even some open source frameworks could be characterized this way.
I think the Spring framework was a turning point for the Java community. It showed that a framework could be powerful without intruding into the coding process and littering systems with references.
It's not really a policy problem. It's an implementation problem.
Teachers can be dismissed for things far short of committing violence on their students, but the case against them has to be documented. The problem is the administrators, particularly, depending on your state, the principal. Where a bad teacher flourishes, there is a bad administrator standing behind them.
Which is, on balance, a positive development. The problem was that the bad teachers didn't do enough of this. I'd say the overall quality of teaching is better now than it was back then, probably because of that. I suspect the best teachers are still spending a lot of time. I know they're often buying supplies and materials for their classrooms out of their own pockets, or begging them from parents.
Perhaps they are "both corrupt", but that's neither here nor there with respect to this issue.
What is going here is an instance of "Eating your seed corn." People do that when they are too stupid to look to the future, or too focused on the short term.
In this case, we're focused on the short term because we're up to our eyeballs in deficits. We went on a spending spree while cutting taxes at the same time. The results were predictable, and by some, desirable. It was called the "starving the beast" theory, and it was used by those who were supposedly against Federal spending as a justification for doing more Federal spending. This is exactly the result which the advocates of "starving the beast" were striving for: to make it financially impossible to sustain spending on things that aren't in their view "essential".
I agree, it makes no difference which party was responsible for the budget in question. The damage was already done.
Well, they don't make you take a test before they put the "fundamentalist" label on you, or before you claim that label for yourself.
In fact, the way words like "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" are used as if they were synonyms, which they are not. Also, some of the ideas of Pentecostalism are associated with Fundamentalism, and indeed many individuals these days practice a mix of both, but they are really different (and somewhat antithetical) things.
Usually, when we hear "fundamentalist", it is used to refer to somebody who is a conservative, evangelical Christian who believes in Biblical literalism and practices an ecstatic form of worship in a large, media driven community.
In fact, this is something of a recent mish-mash of distinctive and sometimes opposing American religious groups. For example, up until the mid twentieth century, Christian fundamentalists were antagonistic to the kind of mystical worship practiced by Pentecostalism. That is because the Christian Fundamentalist movement is essentially pseudo-rational in nature.
"Creation Science" is quintessential Christian Fundamentalism in its historic form. Fundamentalists of this sort don't see themselves as anti-science. They see themselves as pro-science, but against an intellectually corrupt scientific establishment. It is therefore quite practical for a "fundamentalist" to pursue a scientific career, provided it is in a field that either has a well established fundamentalist counter-movement, like biology, or one in which Biblical issues don't arise very often, for example solid state physics. You won't find many "Fundamentalists" in scholarly fields like Near Eastern languages or Biblical Archeology -- not for long at any rate.
There is a lot more diversity in religious belief than our labels allow for. The right wing Christian movement has laid claim to a number of American religious traditions, sometimes conflicting traditions. They're even flirting with Catholicism, which was long seen by native Protestants of all stripes as alien and wicked. Bringing these traditions under a single terminological roof is about institutional and political power. We sometimes call that roof "Evangelicalism" and sometimes "Fundamentalism", even though these are again two different historical phenomenon. The two words serve complementary political purposes: to unite those under the roof, and to stand them against those outside.
Well, in Maine, only 24% of the workforce has a college degree; it's a bit below the national median. To be fair, you have to compare the teacher salary to salaries of other college graduates. Nationwide, there's a big difference. A person with a college degree earns, on average, about $49,000 vs. about $32,000 for the entire population.
As far as three months of vacation is concerned, it certainly is a nice perk. But I assume that you've never done any teaching if you think it's all time off. People who've never done it think you just walk into a classroom and start teaching. It doesn't work like that.
I'm not a teacher, but I have taught in enrichment programs, and I found I needed about an hour of preparation for every hour in the classroom to do a good job. Now somebody teaching for a living probably doesn't need quite as much time, but what they do doesn't begin and end in the classroom. There is lesson preparation and planning, homework grading, professional development, and counseling parents.
Like a lot of things in life, it's not as easy as it looks.
It isn't a crime to give somebody doing something this important and difficult a reasonable salary for their educational attainment, and some nice benefits. Give them much, and expect much from them.
Which is great and all, but what we usually need is more of a summary executioner.
Well, I run Xubuntu on a laptop with 2GB of RAM....
The reason is that I do almost all my work these days on virtual machines. There are all kinds of benfits from working mainly in virtual machines that I won't go into here, but the reason I use Xubuntu over Ubuntu is that it uses slightly less memory. Most of the time the performance of the virtual machines is not noticeably sluggish, but every so often you run into memory limitations. Using less in the first place means that it happens less often and recovers faster.
Probably I should consider using a distro designed for some resource constrained machine, like DSL. However my current setup works well enough that I haven't been motivated to try DSL or some other minidistro. I'd be interested if others have.
Wow, you actually feel oppressed by Consumer Reports.
I will say that sometimes they do miss some important points when they deal with specialized products. I remember once seeing a review of bicyles that included a braking distance rating -- just like for cars. Well, all the bikes in the price range they were testing probably used the same or very similar Japanese component sets on rims of the same alloy. Any remaining difference in stopping distance would be determined by (in order): adjustment, rider technique, net weight, rotational mass (wheel weight). So there's not much to be gained for a serious rider looking at braking distance.
Also, there is the matter of comfort. The two most comfortable seats I've ever had were unpadded. One was a classic leather seat, the other was a plain, hard plastic shell. I never found that adding padding made the seat more comfortable, in fact quite the contrary. I found padding cut off the circulation after an hour or so in the saddle.
But that particular observation is not valid for somebody who takes his bike out for an hour or two a dozen or so times a year. If you ride on the order of a hundred miles or more per week, what you find comfortable is different.
Likewise, tire differences might make a difference in braking for a weekend rider, who is more likely to brake without adjusting his weight distribution, and thus is more likely to skid.
What I'm getting at is that if you aren't the kind of person who as a more specialized source of consumer information, the CR reports are probably fairly useful.
Easy.
You see, "ultra-" as a prefix means "beyond or on the other side of". "Ultraviolet" light is not violet -- the fact that its not violet is half of what qualifies it for the "ultra-" prefix.
Presumably, giving the thing a battery life that is too short to be practical helps keep it lighter -- for the price you pay for it. A cheap lead acid battery would probably power the thing for a considerable time, if you wouldn't mind lugging four or five pounds of largish battery around. But low weight and small size are what make so called "ultraportable" devices attractive over, say, laptops. By increasing (at a given price level) two of the factors which make a device attractive for mobile use, you render it impratical for mobile use.
Therefore, unlike other devices supposedly in this category, this is a true "ultraportable".
Well -- identical twins have idential DNA -- or close to it. They aren't identical in their character, however.
The thing to remember is that while we might not have as much difference between candidates as we'd like, small differences make a big difference, if they're over something that's important enough. Lots of people have been complaining for a long time that the Democrats and Republicans are too much alike. They're probably right. It doesn't mean that things wouldn't have been different, for better or worse, if Al Gore had beeng granted Florida's electoral votes in 2000.
Many Democrats don't see much difference between McCain and Bush; many Republicans don't see much difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Some don't see much differnce between McCain and Obama. None of these people are wrong, except to the degree that they think the "small" differences between those individuals won't have big practical impacts on the life of the country.
I wouldn't assume those sets are disjoint.
I'm thinking more of the guy who set up his home inventory system in Access, and considers himself hot stuff with PowerPoint animations, carries a BlackBerry, and takes this as proof he understands Technology.
The whole Ted Stevens "Series of Tubes" flap is an example. As has been pointed out, it is very reasonable to use this as a first approximation of how the Internet works for some purposes. Just not the specific purposes in question. Not knowing the limits of your knowledge is not only embarassing, it is dangerous when you are a lawmaker.
And that's where technological overconfidence becomes hubris, when you stop relying upon your ow personal experience and start relying upon received wisdsom without realizing you have done so. A top drawer lawer, if he was fully aware of his own technological ignorance, would grasp useful and misleading aspects of the "tubes" analogy in about five minutes. In about five more, he'd get on to the real substance of net neutrality, which is gaining control over markets by limiting vendor access to customers.
This is something even a pretty sophisticated engineer might miss, because he's too close. You have to be interested in economics, not the details of protocol implementations.
As a whole, no. I'm talking about specifics, not political philosophy. Many specific points have been settled for a long time, but are being reopened by people operating under false pretenses.
True, there are many laws that need updating for technological reasons, but these laws need to be strengthened and extended, not weakened. For example the Pen Register act requires a warrant for the use of a Pen Register -- a device which records the impulses in an old analog telephone switch, and thus who you are calling. This isn't philosophically different from demanding the email logs of an ISP, which is not covered by the act.
Technology is reopening some of these issues, and the argument is that things have changed so much that the old concerns for the freedom and privacy of the citizen aren't as important in the face of new and unprecedented threats.
Really? The threats coming from people who are acting against the law's proscriptions don't look all that new. Today we're worried about Al Qaeda; thirty years ago we were worried about the KGB, as well as domestic subversives and radicals.
The argument is that the people are more technologically empowered to commit crimes. That is true. They're also much more dependent upon technology. That means that on balance the government (and its private sector agents -- another new development) has gained more power to meddle and pry than people have gained to transgress.
So on balance, things have changed in a fundamental way, but not so that we should avoid restoring the protections of, say the Pen Register Act. On the contrary, we should go well beyond those protections.
Well, I think you make a really good point.
When you are developing, you are a user. Which means you are a pain in the ass to somebody.
Once the box goes out the door, it means it's in the hands of users, who will be a pain in the ass to you.
The way to make money in tech is to find something that people will pay money for (duh), but the important point is that it doen't have to be much money, so long as they never ever call you for support. I know a guy who launched possibly as many as a dozen commercial software products, in every case addressing a real need somebody had. With one exception, each of those products staggered into oblivion under the burden of support costs.
Anyway, this guy's pet peeve are people who make more profit than he ever saw selling ring tones. Unfortunately, he hasn't learned his lesson: profit comes from low support costs. If your support costs are zero, then you've created the proverbial printing press for money.
The way this applies is that you want a distro that has as close to nothing in it consistent with being able to run your application. You do not want your customers calling becuase an update to Ubuntu has broken their box.
I'd probably roll my own distro. Certainly I'd be doing a custom kernel in any case, because every K of RAM or disk used to support something that isn't in my box comes out of my profit margins: bigger "disk", bigger memory, less room for growth. By the time you've stripped everything out you don't need, all the daemons, and utilities and drivers and whatnot, you're practically there anyway.
I'd probaly start with uCLinux -- it works for Cisco, after all, and runs on some pretty low end (cheap) hardware. Don't know how this interacts with the need for Mono or what his app does, but it makes sense to start with something that's already pretty small. Otherwise, if I were planning on deploying on x86 hardware I'd roll my own using Linux from Scratch and simulating the hardware in vmware.
Well, good.
It's true that technology changes some things, like the economics of using copyright to provide economic support to creators. But a lot of the time technology is used as an excuse to reopen issues happily settled long ago, on things like the first sale doctrine, or the intrusion of the government into the private lives of citizens.
I don't look to tech geeks political leadership. I want somebody smart (which most geeks are) with their head screwed on straight (and geeks are as all over the map on this). If he's a tech geek, well that's nice, but not necessary. If he's got the right aims, and is smart enough to cut through the mumbo jumbo, that's enough.
In particular, I'd be wary of amateur tech geeks -- people who are computer enthusisasts, but not for anything that counts. I wouldn't rule them out, but I'd look extra close at their tech policies, which may exhibit a "knows enough to be dangerous" character.
No, there is something worse.
It's taking a software update that renders a machine you are relying upon hors de combat until you fix it. Wifi issues are particularly vexing, because you'll need another machine from which to pray to Google, or at least a real Ethernet jack.
Of course, you shouldn't do any updates when you are on a tight deadline, but you don't always know when you'll be in a hurry in advance.
For years, I had good experiences when running Linux on ThinkPads. Then I got cheap and bought a Toshiba, and was treated to lessons on things like how the Linux kernel handles hotplug devices every time I did an Ubuntu update.
If I were equipping people working for me, I'd definitely go with Linux preinstalled, because presumably the vendor has chosen components with good Linux support. But even if not, you have somebody to call.
Toshiba is cheap, and pretty anti-Linux. I've often wondered if they deliberately sabotage Linux on their laptops; the answer to many "compatibility" issues is to tell Toshiba's ACPI bios that you're Windows Vista -- then suddently some stuff that doesn't work magically starts working.
I don't think you can discuss the issue so abstractly. Ultimately, refactoring is rewriting. It's just incremental. The line between refactoring and rewriting is fuzzy; if I had to draw it somewhere, it would be around being able to do a functional build more or less any time you want to. If you can do a nightly build, you're definitely "refactoring"; if you go six months without being able build anything, you are definitely "rewriting".
I think the real issue is understanding. The problem isn't programmers wanting to write new code, the problem is programmers not wanting to understand existing code. Once you understand the existing code, then you can make an informed decision about how you want to handle it.
Unfortunately 99% of this crisis fits the standard market bubble paradigm. The difference is that this hits people
In fact, we have the opposite problem: investors are spooked. Coming down hard on fraud might help a tiny bit, but primarily investors are spooked by their own collective insanity.
If it makes investors a bit less risk averse, it's worth doing, but I doubt it will. We need to get a bit more momentum going in the credit market. Financial markets have about a ten year memory, so the time to really come down hard on fraud will be in about five years.