I don't think the problem is that someone offered $5000, I think the problem is someone is charging $15000 for a $5000 job.
More likely that $15,000 is the kind of price the customer expects to be charged. Regardless of if they are actually paying for $15,000 worth of work.
I don't think that each customer should have to pay for your overblown comp sci degree when a 15 year old(I'm 30) can do the same in half the time. This is not rocket science and if someone spent $50,000 for a degree in writing outdated COBOL, then a 100 line perl script or 3 class java applet shouldn't cost 1000s of dollars.
The customer dosn't have any clue how much the work is worth. They are working on the assumption that if they pay something around the mode or the median bid they are getting a fair deal.
There are a number of prerequisites to having an efficient free market. One of them is that all parties have equal and unlimited access to information. Since IT is kinda young - the ability to absorb technology related information is not exactly permeating upper management. This leads to a less efficient free market.
There is another factor involved. That is the mass application of copyright and patents to proprietary software. The only section of software where a free market is even possible is open source.
I agree but don't fully understand why people often default on the expensive==good mentality. One idea is that it is somehow genetically encoded into most people.
The problem is that it's rarely applied consistently sometimes conpletly illogically.
You're missing the point of I.C. Nobody is interested in paying you to sit around in unclean clothes jerking off. They like to work with people that come off professionally.
So they need to put together a bid large enough to cover new clothes and prostitutes...
You can't sit on slashdot and complain about how unfair it is and how stupid all the people that control the money are, or you can understand how to succeed.
It would be interesting to find out if the same companies, even the same individual manages, would take a similar attitude were the contract for building, painting, wiring, plumbing, etc.
It seems silly to me for an organization that HAS continuous righ-of-ways to bother with troubled technologies when they can actually lay their own fiber, and charge silly amounts of money to other companies to lease their left over strands
Because laying new cable is expensive. Especially if you have no ductwork in place. Hence lots of interest in new technologies to enable old cable to be used for new things.
The biggest problem is getting the signal through the pole pigs (can-type transformers on top of the hydro poles) -- they are big iron monstrosities that don't pass much past 1kHz or so due to their design.
One method which can be used is to simply wire some high voltage capacitors across the primary and secondary of the transformer -- they'll conduct at high frequencies (you tune this) and voila -- your signal jumps the transformer.
The fun bit is that whilst the output is something like 117-0-117 the input is likely to be be either a single phase to ground or 120 degree 3 phase.
Including an idea which has been around for a long time. Wonder if the USPO checks against expired and refused patents in their prior art search...
Patent it with 18 extra claims that limit scope.
In the process try and stick as much jargon and obscure language in the application and refer to new machines and systems. There is even a term to describe this, "patent fraud".
Your "email joke" argument fails because, in its own words, those crimes were committed by "muslim male extremists aged 17-40."
How do you actually tell someone's religion by looking at them? Just as not all people of semitic appearance are muslim not all muslims are of semitic appearance.
If the vast majority of certain crimes are committed by certain groups of people, is it reasonable to focus your interest on those groups of people?
Focusing on that group may well be based on flawed reasoning. Knowing that "most crimes of type X are committed by people in group Y" does not imply that "most people in group Y have committed or will commit crimes of type X".
Me, I think that focussing equally on the 90% group and the 10% group is massively discriminatory against the 10% group, not to mention being downright stupid.
It would be quite possible to have this situation and have a greater proportion of criminals in the 10% group. If people in both groups were equally likely to commit crimes then you'd have 9 times more criminals in the former than the latter. The only time you'd get more criminals in the minority group would be if they were more than 9 times as likely to be criminals.
We could save a whole lot of trouble by having everyone chained up and electronically monitored at birth. We could most likely achieve a zero percent crime rate.
You wouldn't have a 0% crime rate, but you'd know exactly who the crooks were. They would be the ones not in chains and not themselves monitored.
And in the last quarter century, police powers in this country have increased DRASTICALLY. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cops have near absolute power in some respects.
Not only that power attracts the corrupt and easily corruptable
More laws are passed each year. EVERY new law creates a new crime.
Including in cases where the new law is redundant Just as policing appears to be measured by numbers of arrests and tickets issued. Passing laws appears to be seen as some kind of metric of legislature performance. With crime prevention and review of existing legislation taking more of a back seat.
Same thing with crime. Most police crime is never known about. Only when it is captured on camera. Recently, in my area, city police officers beat a suspect to death, while he was IN CUFFS, and in the JAIL of all places...
Not much in the way of press on that, except locally. 6 months later I've not heard of ONE cop being dismissed, much less tried for murder.
You can have not only the situation where a police officer commiting a crime is treated less seriously (which IMHO should be considered a "high crime" attract a higher sentence and not be subject to any statute of limitations) but a crime is treated more seriously if a police officer is a victim. e.g. if someone being killed through being knocked down by a car is described as "murder" then odds on the dead person is a cop.
1. The best way to PREVENT crime is to be visible in places where crime is a possibility. This means VISIBLE patrols, not unmarked cars cowering in a blind curve on the highway that goes downhill looking for speeders.
A problem is that "sucess" for policing appears to have become judged in terms of arresting people, issuing tickets. As opposed to detering and preventing crime. It is also important to ensure that police officers are themselves never considered above the law. Otherwise it's too easy for a crook hide their crimes by becoming a police officer.
At the university I attended, one of the on-campus organizations wanted to raise awareness about date-rape. They wanted to promote the notion that a date rapist does not look like the stereotypical rapist (whatever one of those looks like). So, they posted lists of randomly chosen names of male students around campus under the heading of "potential rapists".
These people want to knock down stereotypes, so they perpetrate a few. They would have been better to publish a completly random set of names from the local population, regardless of they were men or women, student or non student. Or even simply publish their own names, a supposed "anti rapist" organisation provides good cover for a real rapist.
I can't credit for this, but the war on drugs is seeming more and more like the 100 years war.
That was actually a real war though. Those are actually possible to win. A "War on Drugs" or a "War on Terrorism" are fundermentally impossible to win. The former is basically a rehash of alcohol prohibition, with about the same level of "sucess". As for the latter fighting a war against a tactic for waging war is just completly nonsensical. It's more "War on people the US dosn't like, but excluding those we think might be capable of much in the way of retaliation". i.e. the US would not be going after Iraq if it was at all likely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
I remember seeing a documentary where a DEA statistician ran the numbers on cost, inflationary pressures, and the average income of users and found that to actually start affecting the bottom line of the cocaine dealers, we would need to interdict over 95% of all incoming cocaine.
Was this before or after finding out that the CIA was involved in the drug trade. If the DEA was being effective at stopping drug shipments into the US they'd wind up stepping on the toes of someone the US thinks is an essential friend and ally. At least at present, should matters change the DEA dosn't usually play much of a role in "regime change". Anyway the new government in Panama, Afganistan, etc might want to continue shipping drugs to the US.
They know they're not ever going to be able to do this - but do you really think anybody who's livelihood depends on being paid to continually fight this war is going to come out and say, "You know.. we could really be spending this money somewhere else"?
About the only thing you can expect is that if the thing ever looks winable they'll make sure then don't:) With the "War on Drugs" the only possible way to win is not to play.
While products like cannabis, shrooms, and speed may be grown/synthesized locally, cocaine and heroin is not.
I'm sure that things a lot more exotic than opium and coca are grown commercially in North America and Europe. If the drugs were legal and relying on a foreign supplier was considered a bad idea local production probably really isn't that difficult.
Which brings me to my point: If marijuana is legalized, then the drug dealers will be out of buisiness and won't be committing drug-related crimes!
Rather they will be out of the business of selling marijuana. If there are still illegal drugs there will still be black market drug dealers.
And whats more, then police can concentrate on harder drugs that not only cause more crime on the dealer-side of things, but cause addicted-people to become violent and to loot and steal for drug-money
The whole "hard" and "soft" drug concept is a political fiction. The definitions have little to do with the effects, addictivness or toxicity of the drug. Nicotine is highly toxic and highly addictive, yet is legal. Paracetamol is highly toxic, yet legal. Also once a drug becomes illegal prospects for further research are limited. People addicted to drugs steal to pay the inflated prices of black market dealers.
Then, if you're still with us, check out this [nih.gov]. The fourth paragraph details lab experiments where it was found that giving THC to rats caused a loss of brain cells.
None of the links given actually point to the research itself. Very important here is exactly how the drug was administered, how much and what the control was. e.g. if the rats inhaled marijuana smoke then they would need to be controlled against smoke from THC free hemp. There was research which showed that that marijuana smoke caused brain damage to rats, problem was that the cause was carbon monoxide. Smoking just about any plant material is dangerous, regardless of if there is any kind of drug there.
By the same token, PCP makes people into violent supermen, so its use should be forbidden.
Problem is that all this does is mean that all of the supply is black market, of unknown dosage and purity. You can't simply "uninvent" a drug or legislate the rules of chemistry.
I'm not aware of a method to test whether a person is under the influence of marijuana. If a breathalizer-type test was available for marijuana, the argument to legalize it would gain tremendous ground.
You may wind up which a chicken and egg situation. Since it would be hard to develop such a test, probably even get funding to research how to approach the problem, whilst the drug itself is illegal.
We support drugs like Oxy and Morphine, yet we have a problem allowing the use of Marijuana for medicinal purposes b/c that may show people that the government thinks Marijuana is ok.
The situation with Marijuana is complicated since it comes from a plant where the drug is far from the only useful part.
The article clearly states that the photos are taken by a squad created to arrest drug dealers. These people are scum of the earth. Just wait until a few dealers move into your neighborhood and bring with them a rash of burglaries.
In which case there is a very simple way to put most of these drug dealers out of business. That is to learn the lesson from history that prohibition causes more problems than it solves. You can't simply make drugs disappear. It is more or less a simple choice between drugs being supplied by gangsters or by legitimate business.
The idea of "product placement" goes back to these days as well. If you watch the old kinescopes (check your local video store for these), you'll see the cast perform the commercial right in the middle of a scene. "Wouldn't you like some fresh Knudsen milk on that?" "Oh, yes Knudsen makes the best milk." The cast of "I Love Lucy" was required to smoke during every episode; they were sponsored by Philip Morris.
The term "soap opera" originally applied to soap commercials pretending to be drama.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the problem is that someone offered $5000, I think the problem is someone is charging $15000 for a $5000 job.
More likely that $15,000 is the kind of price the customer expects to be charged. Regardless of if they are actually paying for $15,000 worth of work.
I don't think that each customer should have to pay for your overblown comp sci degree when a 15 year old(I'm 30) can do the same in half the time. This is not rocket science and if someone spent $50,000 for a degree in writing outdated COBOL, then a 100 line perl script or 3 class java applet shouldn't cost 1000s of dollars.
The customer dosn't have any clue how much the work is worth. They are working on the assumption that if they pay something around the mode or the median bid they are getting a fair deal.
We're a country that likes high prices and high discounts.
The larger the price the bigger the discount which can be applied and still retain a high price.
Many B2B companies (e.g. oil field suppliers) don't even offer "normal" price to any of their customers.
Another example is airline tickets, where often few people pay the full price.
There are a number of prerequisites to having an efficient free market. One of them is that all parties have equal and unlimited access to information. Since IT is kinda young - the ability to absorb technology related information is not exactly permeating upper management. This leads to a less efficient free market.
There is another factor involved. That is the mass application of copyright and patents to proprietary software. The only section of software where a free market is even possible is open source.
I agree but don't fully understand why people often default on the expensive==good mentality. One idea is that it is somehow genetically encoded into most people.
The problem is that it's rarely applied consistently sometimes conpletly illogically.
perhaps they arent so clueless as you think. Software developement IS expensive, if done properly.
There is a perception that software development is expensive
Why else do you think XP, for example, costs £250, even though its going to sell millions of copies?
Microsoft is a monoploy who can charge more or less what they like, which also means they have little incentive to improve their own productivity.
So if you`re too cheap, you`re almost certainly doing something wrong.
Or possibly you are the only one doing something right. About all that can be said is that you are not doing what everyone else is doing.
You're missing the point of I.C. Nobody is interested in paying you to sit around in unclean clothes jerking off. They like to work with people that come off professionally.
So they need to put together a bid large enough to cover new clothes and prostitutes...
You can't sit on slashdot and complain about how unfair it is and how stupid all the people that control the money are, or you can understand how to succeed.
It would be interesting to find out if the same companies, even the same individual manages, would take a similar attitude were the contract for building, painting, wiring, plumbing, etc.
It seems silly to me for an organization that HAS continuous righ-of-ways to bother with troubled technologies when they can actually lay their own fiber, and charge silly amounts of money to other companies to lease their left over strands
Because laying new cable is expensive. Especially if you have no ductwork in place. Hence lots of interest in new technologies to enable old cable to be used for new things.
The biggest problem is getting the signal through the pole pigs (can-type transformers on top of the hydro poles) -- they are big iron monstrosities that don't pass much past 1kHz or so due to their design.
One method which can be used is to simply wire some high voltage capacitors across the primary and secondary of the transformer -- they'll conduct at high frequencies (you tune this) and voila -- your signal jumps the transformer.
The fun bit is that whilst the output is something like 117-0-117 the input is likely to be be either a single phase to ground or 120 degree 3 phase.
Take a current idea that's obvious to anyone.
Including an idea which has been around for a long time. Wonder if the USPO checks against expired and refused patents in their prior art search...
Patent it with 18 extra claims that limit scope.
In the process try and stick as much jargon and obscure language in the application and refer to new machines and systems.
There is even a term to describe this, "patent fraud".
Your "email joke" argument fails because, in its own words, those crimes were committed by "muslim male extremists aged 17-40."
How do you actually tell someone's religion by looking at them? Just as not all people of semitic appearance are muslim not all muslims are of semitic appearance.
If the vast majority of certain crimes are committed by certain groups of people, is it reasonable to focus your interest on those groups of people?
Focusing on that group may well be based on flawed reasoning. Knowing that "most crimes of type X are committed by people in group Y" does not imply that "most people in group Y have committed or will commit crimes of type X".
Me, I think that focussing equally on the 90% group and the 10% group is massively discriminatory against the 10% group, not to mention being downright stupid.
It would be quite possible to have this situation and have a greater proportion of criminals in the 10% group. If people in both groups were equally likely to commit crimes then you'd have 9 times more criminals in the former than the latter. The only time you'd get more criminals in the minority group would be if they were more than 9 times as likely to be criminals.
We could save a whole lot of trouble by having everyone chained up and electronically monitored at birth. We could most likely achieve a zero percent crime rate.
You wouldn't have a 0% crime rate, but you'd know exactly who the crooks were. They would be the ones not in chains and not themselves monitored.
Fact is, there IS no one to "police the police".
How can this be done effectivly
And in the last quarter century, police powers in this country have increased DRASTICALLY. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cops have near absolute power in some respects.
Not only that power attracts the corrupt and easily corruptable
More laws are passed each year. EVERY new law creates a new crime.
Including in cases where the new law is redundant
Just as policing appears to be measured by numbers of arrests and tickets issued. Passing laws appears to be seen as some kind of metric of legislature performance. With crime prevention and review of existing legislation taking more of a back seat.
Same thing with crime. Most police crime is never known about. Only when it is captured on camera. Recently, in my area, city police officers beat a suspect to death, while he was IN CUFFS, and in the JAIL of all places...
Not much in the way of press on that, except locally. 6 months later I've not heard of ONE cop being dismissed, much less tried for murder.
You can have not only the situation where a police officer commiting a crime is treated less seriously (which IMHO should be considered a "high crime" attract a higher sentence and not be subject to any statute of limitations) but a crime is treated more seriously if a police officer is a victim. e.g. if someone being killed through being knocked down by a car is described as "murder" then odds on the dead person is a cop.
1. The best way to PREVENT crime is to be visible in places where crime is a possibility. This means VISIBLE patrols, not unmarked cars cowering in a blind curve on the highway that goes downhill looking for speeders.
A problem is that "sucess" for policing appears to have become judged in terms of arresting people, issuing tickets. As opposed to detering and preventing crime. It is also important to ensure that police officers are themselves never considered above the law. Otherwise it's too easy for a crook hide their crimes by becoming a police officer.
At the university I attended, one of the on-campus organizations wanted to raise awareness about date-rape. They wanted to promote the notion that a date rapist does not look like the stereotypical rapist (whatever one of those looks like). So, they posted lists of randomly chosen names of male students around campus under the heading of "potential rapists".
These people want to knock down stereotypes, so they perpetrate a few. They would have been better to publish a completly random set of names from the local population, regardless of they were men or women, student or non student. Or even simply publish their own names, a supposed "anti rapist" organisation provides good cover for a real rapist.
I can't credit for this, but the war on drugs is seeming more and more like the 100 years war.
That was actually a real war though. Those are actually possible to win. A "War on Drugs" or a "War on Terrorism" are fundermentally impossible to win. The former is basically a rehash of alcohol prohibition, with about the same level of "sucess". As for the latter fighting a war against a tactic for waging war is just completly nonsensical. It's more "War on people the US dosn't like, but excluding those we think might be capable of much in the way of retaliation". i.e. the US would not be going after Iraq if it was at all likely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
I remember seeing a documentary where a DEA statistician ran the numbers on cost, inflationary pressures, and the average income of users and found that to actually start affecting the bottom line of the cocaine dealers, we would need to interdict over 95% of all incoming cocaine.
:) With the "War on Drugs" the only possible way to win is not to play.
Was this before or after finding out that the CIA was involved in the drug trade. If the DEA was being effective at stopping drug shipments into the US they'd wind up stepping on the toes of someone the US thinks is an essential friend and ally. At least at present, should matters change the DEA dosn't usually play much of a role in "regime change". Anyway the new government in Panama, Afganistan, etc might want to continue shipping drugs to the US.
They know they're not ever going to be able to do this - but do you really think anybody who's livelihood depends on being paid to continually fight this war is going to come out and say, "You know.. we could really be spending this money somewhere else"?
About the only thing you can expect is that if the thing ever looks winable they'll make sure then don't
While products like cannabis, shrooms, and speed may be grown/synthesized locally, cocaine and heroin is not.
I'm sure that things a lot more exotic than opium and coca are grown commercially in North America and Europe. If the drugs were legal and relying on a foreign supplier was considered a bad idea local production probably really isn't that difficult.
Which brings me to my point: If marijuana is legalized, then the drug dealers will be out of buisiness and won't be committing drug-related crimes!
Rather they will be out of the business of selling marijuana. If there are still illegal drugs there will still be black market drug dealers.
And whats more, then police can concentrate on harder drugs that not only cause more crime on the dealer-side of things, but cause addicted-people to become violent and to loot and steal for drug-money
The whole "hard" and "soft" drug concept is a political fiction. The definitions have little to do with the effects, addictivness or toxicity of the drug. Nicotine is highly toxic and highly addictive, yet is legal. Paracetamol is highly toxic, yet legal. Also once a drug becomes illegal prospects for further research are limited.
People addicted to drugs steal to pay the inflated prices of black market dealers.
Then, if you're still with us, check out this [nih.gov]. The fourth paragraph details lab experiments where it was found that giving THC to rats caused a loss of brain cells.
None of the links given actually point to the research itself. Very important here is exactly how the drug was administered, how much and what the control was. e.g. if the rats inhaled marijuana smoke then they would need to be controlled against smoke from THC free hemp.
There was research which showed that that marijuana smoke caused brain damage to rats, problem was that the cause was carbon monoxide. Smoking just about any plant material is dangerous, regardless of if there is any kind of drug there.
By the same token, PCP makes people into violent supermen, so its use should be forbidden.
Problem is that all this does is mean that all of the supply is black market, of unknown dosage and purity. You can't simply "uninvent" a drug or legislate the rules of chemistry.
I'm not aware of a method to test whether a person is under the influence of marijuana. If a breathalizer-type test was available for marijuana, the argument to legalize it would gain tremendous ground.
You may wind up which a chicken and egg situation. Since it would be hard to develop such a test, probably even get funding to research how to approach the problem, whilst the drug itself is illegal.
We support drugs like Oxy and Morphine, yet we have a problem allowing the use of Marijuana for medicinal purposes b/c that may show people that the government thinks Marijuana is ok.
The situation with Marijuana is complicated since it comes from a plant where the drug is far from the only useful part.
The article clearly states that the photos are taken by a squad created to arrest drug dealers. These people are scum of the earth. Just wait until a few dealers move into your neighborhood and bring with them a rash of burglaries.
In which case there is a very simple way to put most of these drug dealers out of business. That is to learn the lesson from history that prohibition causes more problems than it solves.
You can't simply make drugs disappear. It is more or less a simple choice between drugs being supplied by gangsters or by legitimate business.
The idea of "product placement" goes back to these days as well. If you watch the old kinescopes (check your local video store for these), you'll see the cast perform the commercial right in the middle of a scene. "Wouldn't you like some fresh Knudsen milk on that?" "Oh, yes Knudsen makes the best milk." The cast of "I Love Lucy" was required to smoke during every episode; they were sponsored by Philip Morris.
The term "soap opera" originally applied to soap commercials pretending to be drama.