Re:Is communism bad in theory or only in practice?
on
Google's China Problem
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe someone can clarify to me what exactly is bad about communism.
Very easy: The politicians, psychopaths, gangsters, opportunist and other power crazed animals that created regimes called communist across the world mostly made the live of the people of said courntries miserable. For this reason, communism has a really bad name. On top of that, it's a rather impractical philosophy which tends to ignore the way most current societies work, thus creating very quickly big gaps between theory and implementation.
A good part of the allure of communism was that it tried to distance itself as far as possible from capitalism and the atrocities that were commited in it's name in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. But once people subscribed to this philosophy came to power, being the crooks they were, they just went on and committed the same kind of atrocites or worse.
In some countries (eg France, Italy), the communist parties are just are respected as other parties and they don't seem to be really doing worse only because of their philosophy. This could also be because those parties adopted a pragmatic line that doesn't seem to offend their voters.
In the end, it all boils down how a the members of those movements behave and their philosophical motivation ist just window dressing. Satanists caring for sick people to give them more time to sin and damn them to hell are a lot preferrable to devout christians torching gynecological clinics in the name of a rightous and loving god.
One thing that irritates me about this whole debate is the implicit assumption that China being Communist is just a technicality and not a big huge mega problem. People just pretend that the issue isn't there and just hope it will go away if they put their blinders on. They just go about "trying to do the best they can" while completely ignoring the nature of the big ugly hideous beast breating down their throat.
Having some experience with eastern European countries during their communist regime, I can tell you it really is just a technicality for day to day live.
On one hand, people first and foremost are interested to live in peace and comfort and want to see their children doing the same. If they can achieve this, the philosophical aspects of the current emperor of the land is of no importance. On the other hand, if they can't they will damn whatever emperor makes their live miserable and at some point will seek to improve their lot by exchanging emperor.
For the less philosophical level this means: If you starve or are terrorised by the killer squads, you don't give shit about if those responsible are brandishing little red books or are the stoutest supporters of free capitalism.
This all leads to the simple conclusion, that communism (as much as capitalism or all other -isms) are just minor technicalities only mostly happy people with nothing better to do can worry about.
Either the americanos accept, that treaties work both way and they will have to accept foreign rulings. If this happens often enough, smart companies will set up in countries with favourable laws and get athe rulings they like without the american justice being able to say much about it.
Or they refuse to honour those international treaties America forced down everybody's throat to allow american corporations to circumvent local laws. In this case, even better and Disney and its henchmen will have a harder time suing foreign grannies for dowloading movies.
In any case, the fallout will be interesting.
And what about this ominous free speech all those americanos seem to be so hang up upon? Well, good riddance to that travesty of a human right. Everytime a fat american doesn't like it to be told to shut up, he comes with the free speech mace to club all opposition into submission. Why else do you think the USA rank only on place 22 in the Freedom of the press index while most European countries with a much saner approach to personal freedoms come first. Even Canada is ranked before the USA.
Cursing is a sign of weakness and leads to more trouble than the satisfaction is worth. I found to always be direct but polite is more efficient and in the long term gives less negative side effects. And if you can't say anything good about a person you don't realy care about, better don't say anything at all. Calling too many peoples arseholes just dilutes the meaning and put those really deserving this description into a better light by association.
As to the buzzwords, for me works best if I speak to management in simple terms even my grandmother would understand. If I get exposed to a barrage of buzzwords from other manageroids, simply restating their drivel in simple words exposes its meaninglessness and does wonders to deflate them and presents them as charlatans. And asking managers to confirm after some very positively formulated statement that they just proposed to fire half the department is just priceless.
A lot of federal agencies have policies about using foreign hardware/software for reasons just like this. Go USA!
Oh yes, while the notebooks carried the IBM lable, they were good american products, while now they're evil chinese. Very interesting approach, considering that the computers were built all the time in the same factory in China.
I guess, if you'd have to buy american-only computers, you won't be able to purchase from Dell, IBM, HP, Toshiba, Sun and most other brands.
Has any of those mighty business analyst ever thought, that there might be a good reason why things are the way they are? That perhaps all those people doing business now aren't complete idiots and actually have some idea what they're doing and aren't waiting for a bunch of college kid to tell them how the world works?
Where are all those so-terribly-bright entrepreneurs from the 90s today? Most of them are failures and learned the hard way that the ideas outside the box have been kicked out of the box because they don't work. Very clever to tell people to sift through the intellectual refuse instead of learning from other people's experience.
And before launching into the search of the next disruptive technology, one should first check how many came along in the past 20 years. I guess there were no more than 5 worldwide, the rest were just millions of little evolutionary steps from within the box.
Good business sense would mandate to send your potential competition on a wild goose chase for the next disruption while going on working the established market with proven ideas.
But 10,000 assclowns runing around named "1337j3d1" swingin their lightsabers around is not Star Wars.
On the other hand, those 10000 clowns are the best reason for Senator Palpatine to build an army of clones to whipe out the Jedi. Your comment explains a lot about Starwars 1-3 (chronologically).
The question would be whether AOL plays nicely. If they have a non-profit rate, does that mean that they WILL absolutely demand their inch of green?
I really hope, AOL will charge those non-profit organisations the same as other businesses. Why should televangelists, corrupt political parties or other assorted whiny do-gooder have it easier to get to me? If a company tries to sell used condoms or recycled viagra, at least it tries to be productive.
When one thinks about, the bulk email tax AOL is proposing isn't such a bad thing. Yes, it won't eliminate the spam from companies paying for it, but at least it will reduce the viagra and refinance spams. And the paid-for spam can always be eliminated by the regular spam filters.
In the end, for the average user the spam level is probably reduced and companies stupid enough to pay AOL for the right to spam will have less money left to spend it on other annoying schemes.
The only bitter aftertaste left is, that AOL will make money out of it - assuming it really find people willing to pay for the priviledge to spam AOL-users.
To put that into an example, someone is going to have a very hard time convincing me that a fourth language is required, if a system were already using C++, Java and Ruby
My point was, that approving of the 2nd and 3rd language is alreqady a bad idea in projects that need maintenance. If you already have Java (or C++, Cobol or whatever takes your fancy), it's very hard to come up with valid reasons to approve another language that justify the problems it creates for maintenance, except perhaps for SQL as a second language for the database stuff.
There is really no difference what language they wrote, if they can demonstrate a reason for using a different one and there are no strings attached (e.g. as there are for anything attached to.NET) then no problem.
This attitude may work well in small throw-away projects, but from experience I can tell you, maintaining a mixed language product is hell. Just think about the awful mess you're going to have 5 years down, when you need to do an upgrade. If the whole project is written in one language, you're going to have to find only one replacement compiler/library/development environment - which can be hard enough. If you have a mix of exotic languages, you basically can forget it, just rewrite the whole mess.
The same applies to training. The original developers may have been the biggest guru in the necessary languages, but where are you going to find maintenance drones that are fluent enough in all of them? Training a halfwit well enough to maintain some crappy C-Code is hard enough, trying to train him in C, Ruby, Scheme and Haskell is impossible. And even if you'd succeed, Mr C-Ruby-Scheme-Haskell-Halfwit won't stay once he comes out of training, he'll be gone to the next job before the ink on his new resume dried.
All in all, if you're doing long term projects stay with one language and try not to use too many extra libraries where you don't have the source code available.
For companies with large field forces, knowing where an employee is can be a benefit to allow better planning in case of delays (traffic jams, spendign longer at the previous customer site, etc)
But I agree with you, for office jobs it's just a way to snoop on employees.
In my experience, employer try to treat their employees as cattle but very often they're very shy to put it in writing. Also, very often the low- and mid-level managers are on the power trip and most abusive - the upper management usually can't be bothered with such details while on the golf course.
This often boils down to the situation, that if those requests and abuses are ignored, they have no serious consequenses. If my employer abuses the privilege of knowing where I can be reached outside business hours, it simply will be revoked. I left in such situations my business mobile phone in a drawer in my desk when I left in the evening.
Last time it took only two incidents until my boss understood, that I'm not his personal slave and that outside business hours it's up to my good will only if I do his bidding. Most catastrophes can wait until monday morning anyway or are caused by bad planning.
For this reason, having a mobile phone that gives my location while at work is no problem for me.
The mobile provider knows which cell your phone had contacted last. If the last contact is a little old, your cell phone can be paged to find it. This paging is always done when there's a call for you, but it can be done at any time. Usally the cell phone networks page the mobile phones a few times a day on their own. This alone gives a rough estimate where your cell phone is located.
If more precision is necessary, there are applications that request from your mobile the signal strenght of the available cells and triangulate from this data a better location. Depending on how the network is laid out, this can give very good results.
So if you want to have a peaceful time in the pub, best just take the battery out of your phone. This way it drops out of the network without signing off and you can always blame no reception. As an alternative, select nice pubs in cellars with no coverage.
This applies to GSM and UMTS networks. I have no idea if it also works that way with those weird american networks.
If you have in a game a real economy with limited resources, it will break even faster when new players join. Either they will have a hard time to come up with money because none is available, or the resources made available for them are taken by high level players. No fun in both situations.
In the end, creating money all the time is the only way to give a fair start to new players.
you can't drive your car at 200MPh - that is to say, you can. But it's against the law.
Here you're completely wrong. You can modify the car, and it's not even against the law to do it. There's a whole series of motor sport events that let people doing this compete with each other.
The only thing that you may not do, is drive your modified car on public roads without having your car recertified by the authorites.
Your analogy is good, only the conclusions you reach from it are wrong.
The whole point of avoiding quotes is to avoid writing tripe answers like 'Yes, I agree' or 'wtg'. It offers the chance to resume what one is agreeing to exactly.
Yes, it takes more time to write and yes, you need to think about what you agree to first, but in the long run covers your behind better. It's sad, but in the end what counts is only what you wrote, not what you meant.
And specially in corporate mails, people being the lazy slobs they are, it gives you a big advantage if your spin of the facts gets quoted by the rest and the original is buried in the archive. Don't make it so easy on them to remember what it all was really about.
There's an easy solution to your quoting problem: Don't quote.
Think about ehat you want to say and write a self-contained reply without the ugly point for point nit-picking style promoted by quoting.
This has the added benefit, that your receipients either take your interpretation of what was said before or have to work and dig through their own archive.
I had the experience, that this leads to calmer mail exchanges.
The oh-so-secret algorithms you hide in your code lead only to the creation of two classes of accoutant companies: Those who hire people who know the algortihm (usually some ex-IRS employees) and those who don't.
Why else do you think, the tax accounting companies of ex-ministers of finance or of the wife of such a minister are so popular?
All in all, it leads to the old argument about security through secrecy.
In the software industry, I've seen only two kinds of productivity.
One was to measuring mindnumbing repetitive tasks, all alike. Here the highest productivity was usually reached by people having perfected the art of doing it as sloppy as possible producing results just barely above inacceptable. Fortunately those tasks have been mostly been outsourced or automatised.
All other productivity is is just empty management speak to make one feel superior to the guy in the next chair. Companies are paying their employees not for results but for the priviledge to make them jump through hoops at the discretion of management. This is for the simple reason, that management is usally totally clueless and incapable of setting useful goal leading to desirable results.
Under these rules, the most productive employee is the one who manages to escape all the senseless, misguided or futile assignement and wastes the minimum amount of time at work killing time on/..
European Passport have at the lower edge a line printed with the OCR-B font which encodes all the necessary data from the passport. All border stations have a small OCR scanner to swipe passports.
This system is simple, robust, easy to verify in case of inconsistency (eg the reader reads something else than the rest of the passport shows) and quite cheap to implement both on the passport and for the reader.
To top it off, the system raises very few privacy concerns, as the content of the encoded line is the same as the human readable part and everybody can easily verify this. No secret data hidden there.
Only when it's counting votes. The PTBs never seem to have problems counting how much money I owe.
Well no they have the same and worse problems, but the system is self correcting.
If they charge you too much and you don't realise it, it's even better than a correct good count.
If they charge you too much and you complain, they make you jump through a lot of hoops and let you prove they're wrong. If you succeed, they may correct the error.
If they undercharge you and don't realise it, you're lucky.
If they undercharge you but realise it, they just fine you for not handing over the correct amount in the first place.
You see, in most cases they just don't care.
With voting, those mechanism don't work, and errors stay errors. With the braindead presidential election system the united states favour, errors get amplified.
If they'd just tally all votes for each candidate across the nation and whoever has most votes becomes president, nobody would care whether a few blacks in Florida were allowed to vote or not. It just would even out.
But simple and robust design isn't cool these days, it has to flashy an feature-laden.
Oh what a wonderful idea! Get 5 cheap disks, make an raid array and store everything. Safe backup for eternity.
So what's going to happen a few years down the road:
Assuming you you kept your disks well, you'll end up with fine very fine disks of historical value which you won't be able to attach to any computer of the day. Can you read MFM and RLL disk today (assuming you still know what those were)? Do you still find a controller that fits into your computer? Is the operating system still able to read the file system (Anyone still remember Ontrac disk partition programs)? Do you still have programs able to open the files you saved?
If you decide to keep your data always online, sooner or later some accident will take care of them without you realising the fact.
If you trust storage companies, who do you trust to be still in business 30 or 40 years from now and still honoring your contract? If they go bankrupt you lost everything.
If you want to preserve some of your work to show your grand-children, you better take a backup medium that has been around for the last 30 years and still can be widely and read. This leaves us with... with... uh... paper. Everything else can only be considered a fad.
This might sound a little pessimistic, but my cupboard full of old floppy disks (8 and 5 1/4 inch, hard and soft sectored, CPM and other formats), 9 track tapes, optical disks and other mementos from work done in the past don't leave much faith in long term storage for digital data.
Aas with dumpster diving, some people may get some unintended side benefits out of the junk published by others in blogs. But that doesn't give blogs of any form more meaning. As much as I'm not shopping to accommodate the dumpster divers, people aren't blogging for social profilers.
The only benefit of blogging is that it's harmless to others and doesn't pollute the enviromnent too much.
Text blogging is bad enough, where lots of people with nothing worthwhile to say about write about their boring life.
Photo blogging is worse, because those same boring people take picture of ugly and uninteresting places and people. To make things worse, most people don't get out enough to provide a reasonable variety in subject and have a total lack of photography skill resulting isn awful pictures.
Now comes video blogging, where those same people unable to get a life run around with a video camera to capture uninteresting ugly people in boring places making ineptly a fool out of themselves.
For all three categories, if any of those bloggers had any skill at writing, taking pictures or filming, they would be hired to do it for a living and not waste their time updating blogs.
The only blogs of interest contain good-looking naked women best presented by professionals to make it look like snapshots. But this is a different well-established industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe someone can clarify to me what exactly is bad about communism.
Very easy: The politicians, psychopaths, gangsters, opportunist and other power crazed animals that created regimes called communist across the world mostly made the live of the people of said courntries miserable. For this reason, communism has a really bad name. On top of that, it's a rather impractical philosophy which tends to ignore the way most current societies work, thus creating very quickly big gaps between theory and implementation.
A good part of the allure of communism was that it tried to distance itself as far as possible from capitalism and the atrocities that were commited in it's name in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. But once people subscribed to this philosophy came to power, being the crooks they were, they just went on and committed the same kind of atrocites or worse.
In some countries (eg France, Italy), the communist parties are just are respected as other parties and they don't seem to be really doing worse only because of their philosophy. This could also be because those parties adopted a pragmatic line that doesn't seem to offend their voters.
In the end, it all boils down how a the members of those movements behave and their philosophical motivation ist just window dressing. Satanists caring for sick people to give them more time to sin and damn them to hell are a lot preferrable to devout christians torching gynecological clinics in the name of a rightous and loving god.
Having some experience with eastern European countries during their communist regime, I can tell you it really is just a technicality for day to day live.
On one hand, people first and foremost are interested to live in peace and comfort and want to see their children doing the same. If they can achieve this, the philosophical aspects of the current emperor of the land is of no importance. On the other hand, if they can't they will damn whatever emperor makes their live miserable and at some point will seek to improve their lot by exchanging emperor.
For the less philosophical level this means: If you starve or are terrorised by the killer squads, you don't give shit about if those responsible are brandishing little red books or are the stoutest supporters of free capitalism.
This all leads to the simple conclusion, that communism (as much as capitalism or all other -isms) are just minor technicalities only mostly happy people with nothing better to do can worry about.
How wonderful this situation is:
Either the americanos accept, that treaties work both way and they will have to accept foreign rulings. If this happens often enough, smart companies will set up in countries with favourable laws and get athe rulings they like without the american justice being able to say much about it.
Or they refuse to honour those international treaties America forced down everybody's throat to allow american corporations to circumvent local laws. In this case, even better and Disney and its henchmen will have a harder time suing foreign grannies for dowloading movies.
In any case, the fallout will be interesting.
And what about this ominous free speech all those americanos seem to be so hang up upon? Well, good riddance to that travesty of a human right. Everytime a fat american doesn't like it to be told to shut up, he comes with the free speech mace to club all opposition into submission. Why else do you think the USA rank only on place 22 in the Freedom of the press index while most European countries with a much saner approach to personal freedoms come first. Even Canada is ranked before the USA.
Cursing is a sign of weakness and leads to more trouble than the satisfaction is worth. I found to always be direct but polite is more efficient and in the long term gives less negative side effects. And if you can't say anything good about a person you don't realy care about, better don't say anything at all. Calling too many peoples arseholes just dilutes the meaning and put those really deserving this description into a better light by association.
As to the buzzwords, for me works best if I speak to management in simple terms even my grandmother would understand. If I get exposed to a barrage of buzzwords from other manageroids, simply restating their drivel in simple words exposes its meaninglessness and does wonders to deflate them and presents them as charlatans. And asking managers to confirm after some very positively formulated statement that they just proposed to fire half the department is just priceless.
Oh yes, while the notebooks carried the IBM lable, they were good american products, while now they're evil chinese. Very interesting approach, considering that the computers were built all the time in the same factory in China.
I guess, if you'd have to buy american-only computers, you won't be able to purchase from Dell, IBM, HP, Toshiba, Sun and most other brands.
Has any of those mighty business analyst ever thought, that there might be a good reason why things are the way they are? That perhaps all those people doing business now aren't complete idiots and actually have some idea what they're doing and aren't waiting for a bunch of college kid to tell them how the world works?
Where are all those so-terribly-bright entrepreneurs from the 90s today? Most of them are failures and learned the hard way that the ideas outside the box have been kicked out of the box because they don't work. Very clever to tell people to sift through the intellectual refuse instead of learning from other people's experience.
And before launching into the search of the next disruptive technology, one should first check how many came along in the past 20 years. I guess there were no more than 5 worldwide, the rest were just millions of little evolutionary steps from within the box.
Good business sense would mandate to send your potential competition on a wild goose chase for the next disruption while going on working the established market with proven ideas.
But 10,000 assclowns runing around named "1337j3d1" swingin their lightsabers around is not Star Wars.
On the other hand, those 10000 clowns are the best reason for Senator Palpatine to build an army of clones to whipe out the Jedi. Your comment explains a lot about Starwars 1-3 (chronologically).
I really hope, AOL will charge those non-profit organisations the same as other businesses. Why should televangelists, corrupt political parties or other assorted whiny do-gooder have it easier to get to me? If a company tries to sell used condoms or recycled viagra, at least it tries to be productive.
When one thinks about, the bulk email tax AOL is proposing isn't such a bad thing. Yes, it won't eliminate the spam from companies paying for it, but at least it will reduce the viagra and refinance spams. And the paid-for spam can always be eliminated by the regular spam filters.
In the end, for the average user the spam level is probably reduced and companies stupid enough to pay AOL for the right to spam will have less money left to spend it on other annoying schemes.
The only bitter aftertaste left is, that AOL will make money out of it - assuming it really find people willing to pay for the priviledge to spam AOL-users.
My point was, that approving of the 2nd and 3rd language is alreqady a bad idea in projects that need maintenance. If you already have Java (or C++, Cobol or whatever takes your fancy), it's very hard to come up with valid reasons to approve another language that justify the problems it creates for maintenance, except perhaps for SQL as a second language for the database stuff.
This attitude may work well in small throw-away projects, but from experience I can tell you, maintaining a mixed language product is hell. Just think about the awful mess you're going to have 5 years down, when you need to do an upgrade. If the whole project is written in one language, you're going to have to find only one replacement compiler/library/development environment - which can be hard enough. If you have a mix of exotic languages, you basically can forget it, just rewrite the whole mess.
The same applies to training. The original developers may have been the biggest guru in the necessary languages, but where are you going to find maintenance drones that are fluent enough in all of them? Training a halfwit well enough to maintain some crappy C-Code is hard enough, trying to train him in C, Ruby, Scheme and Haskell is impossible. And even if you'd succeed, Mr C-Ruby-Scheme-Haskell-Halfwit won't stay once he comes out of training, he'll be gone to the next job before the ink on his new resume dried.
All in all, if you're doing long term projects stay with one language and try not to use too many extra libraries where you don't have the source code available.
> Exactly how will that improve efficiency?
For companies with large field forces, knowing where an employee is can be a benefit to allow better planning in case of delays (traffic jams, spendign longer at the previous customer site, etc)
But I agree with you, for office jobs it's just a way to snoop on employees.
In my experience, employer try to treat their employees as cattle but very often they're very shy to put it in writing. Also, very often the low- and mid-level managers are on the power trip and most abusive - the upper management usually can't be bothered with such details while on the golf course.
This often boils down to the situation, that if those requests and abuses are ignored, they have no serious consequenses. If my employer abuses the privilege of knowing where I can be reached outside business hours, it simply will be revoked. I left in such situations my business mobile phone in a drawer in my desk when I left in the evening.
Last time it took only two incidents until my boss understood, that I'm not his personal slave and that outside business hours it's up to my good will only if I do his bidding. Most catastrophes can wait until monday morning anyway or are caused by bad planning.
For this reason, having a mobile phone that gives my location while at work is no problem for me.
The mobile provider knows which cell your phone had contacted last. If the last contact is a little old, your cell phone can be paged to find it. This paging is always done when there's a call for you, but it can be done at any time. Usally the cell phone networks page the mobile phones a few times a day on their own. This alone gives a rough estimate where your cell phone is located.
If more precision is necessary, there are applications that request from your mobile the signal strenght of the available cells and triangulate from this data a better location. Depending on how the network is laid out, this can give very good results.
So if you want to have a peaceful time in the pub, best just take the battery out of your phone. This way it drops out of the network without signing off and you can always blame no reception. As an alternative, select nice pubs in cellars with no coverage.
This applies to GSM and UMTS networks. I have no idea if it also works that way with those weird american networks.
If you have in a game a real economy with limited resources, it will break even faster when new players join. Either they will have a hard time to come up with money because none is available, or the resources made available for them are taken by high level players. No fun in both situations.
In the end, creating money all the time is the only way to give a fair start to new players.
you can't drive your car at 200MPh - that is to say, you can. But it's against the law.
Here you're completely wrong. You can modify the car, and it's not even against the law to do it. There's a whole series of motor sport events that let people doing this compete with each other.
The only thing that you may not do, is drive your modified car on public roads without having your car recertified by the authorites.
Your analogy is good, only the conclusions you reach from it are wrong.
The whole point of avoiding quotes is to avoid writing tripe answers like 'Yes, I agree' or 'wtg'. It offers the chance to resume what one is agreeing to exactly.
Yes, it takes more time to write and yes, you need to think about what you agree to first, but in the long run covers your behind better. It's sad, but in the end what counts is only what you wrote, not what you meant.
And specially in corporate mails, people being the lazy slobs they are, it gives you a big advantage if your spin of the facts gets quoted by the rest and the original is buried in the archive. Don't make it so easy on them to remember what it all was really about.
There's an easy solution to your quoting problem: Don't quote.
Think about ehat you want to say and write a self-contained reply without the ugly point for point nit-picking style promoted by quoting.
This has the added benefit, that your receipients either take your interpretation of what was said before or have to work and dig through their own archive.
I had the experience, that this leads to calmer mail exchanges.
The oh-so-secret algorithms you hide in your code lead only to the creation of two classes of accoutant companies: Those who hire people who know the algortihm (usually some ex-IRS employees) and those who don't.
Why else do you think, the tax accounting companies of ex-ministers of finance or of the wife of such a minister are so popular?
All in all, it leads to the old argument about security through secrecy.
The wonderful myth of productivity strikes again.
/..
In the software industry, I've seen only two kinds of productivity.
One was to measuring mindnumbing repetitive tasks, all alike. Here the highest productivity was usually reached by people having perfected the art of doing it as sloppy as possible producing results just barely above inacceptable. Fortunately those tasks have been mostly been outsourced or automatised.
All other productivity is is just empty management speak to make one feel superior to the guy in the next chair. Companies are paying their employees not for results but for the priviledge to make them jump through hoops at the discretion of management. This is for the simple reason, that management is usally totally clueless and incapable of setting useful goal leading to desirable results.
Under these rules, the most productive employee is the one who manages to escape all the senseless, misguided or futile assignement and wastes the minimum amount of time at work killing time on
I'm also totally baffled by this RFID craze.
European Passport have at the lower edge a line printed with the OCR-B font which encodes all the necessary data from the passport. All border stations have a small OCR scanner to swipe passports.
This system is simple, robust, easy to verify in case of inconsistency (eg the reader reads something else than the rest of the passport shows) and quite cheap to implement both on the passport and for the reader.
To top it off, the system raises very few privacy concerns, as the content of the encoded line is the same as the human readable part and everybody can easily verify this. No secret data hidden there.
Only when it's counting votes. The PTBs never seem to have problems counting how much money I owe.
Well no they have the same and worse problems, but the system is self correcting.
If they charge you too much and you don't realise it, it's even better than a correct good count.
If they charge you too much and you complain, they make you jump through a lot of hoops and let you prove they're wrong. If you succeed, they may correct the error.
If they undercharge you and don't realise it, you're lucky.
If they undercharge you but realise it, they just fine you for not handing over the correct amount in the first place.
You see, in most cases they just don't care.
With voting, those mechanism don't work, and errors stay errors. With the braindead presidential election system the united states favour, errors get amplified.
If they'd just tally all votes for each candidate across the nation and whoever has most votes becomes president, nobody would care whether a few blacks in Florida were allowed to vote or not. It just would even out.
But simple and robust design isn't cool these days, it has to flashy an feature-laden.
Oh what a wonderful idea! Get 5 cheap disks, make an raid array and store everything. Safe backup for eternity.
... with ... uh ... paper. Everything else can only be considered a fad.
So what's going to happen a few years down the road:
Assuming you you kept your disks well, you'll end up with fine very fine disks of historical value which you won't be able to attach to any computer of the day. Can you read MFM and RLL disk today (assuming you still know what those were)? Do you still find a controller that fits into your computer? Is the operating system still able to read the file system (Anyone still remember Ontrac disk partition programs)? Do you still have programs able to open the files you saved?
If you decide to keep your data always online, sooner or later some accident will take care of them without you realising the fact.
If you trust storage companies, who do you trust to be still in business 30 or 40 years from now and still honoring your contract? If they go bankrupt you lost everything.
If you want to preserve some of your work to show your grand-children, you better take a backup medium that has been around for the last 30 years and still can be widely and read. This leaves us with
This might sound a little pessimistic, but my cupboard full of old floppy disks (8 and 5 1/4 inch, hard and soft sectored, CPM and other formats), 9 track tapes, optical disks and other mementos from work done in the past don't leave much faith in long term storage for digital data.
Aas with dumpster diving, some people may get some unintended side benefits out of the junk published by others in blogs. But that doesn't give blogs of any form more meaning. As much as I'm not shopping to accommodate the dumpster divers, people aren't blogging for social profilers.
The only benefit of blogging is that it's harmless to others and doesn't pollute the enviromnent too much.
Text blogging is bad enough, where lots of people with nothing worthwhile to say about write about their boring life.
Photo blogging is worse, because those same boring people take picture of ugly and uninteresting places and people. To make things worse, most people don't get out enough to provide a reasonable variety in subject and have a total lack of photography skill resulting isn awful pictures.
Now comes video blogging, where those same people unable to get a life run around with a video camera to capture uninteresting ugly people in boring places making ineptly a fool out of themselves.
For all three categories, if any of those bloggers had any skill at writing, taking pictures or filming, they would be hired to do it for a living and not waste their time updating blogs.
The only blogs of interest contain good-looking naked women best presented by professionals to make it look like snapshots. But this is a different well-established industry.