The cash component of the M1 monetary supply, which represents actual money (rather than checks, travelers checks, stocks and the like where the instrument is like cash, but not represented with U.S. currency) is something like 500 billion. That is, there is something like 500 billion dollars in paper and coin money floating around there, and this represents a steady increase from the 1940's, when the Fed's information starts. (Source: http://www.stls.fed.org).
Electronic wire transfers between banks, wire transfers between people, paperless checks (which are just a request to a bank to transfer money electronically), letters of credit, credit instruments--all of these things have been around well before computers. Some of these devices are by definition an invasion of privacy: an overseas letter of credit is often used by small businesses to indicate to overseas trading partners that money is available--generally, the letter of credit and representation to the overseas partner is made by the bank, and not by the person who pulled the letter.
That we have started being concerned with privacy issues and can now create paperless checks (that's what you're doing when you pay bills on-line from your checking account to a payee who can accept on-line payments) doesn't mean these things haven't been around since damned near the start of the Fed nearly a hundred years ago. The only things that are new is that it's faster and more convenient to do on your home computer, and we are now more concerned with the Internet about our personal information being sold to third parties so they can mail bomb our homes with junk mail.
What is with the comment "Very good article. Too bad we aren't learning from the British and Soviet mistakes."?
We're not yet in Afghanistan--which means we haven't made any mistakes yet to determine if we have or have not learned from past British and Soviet mistakes in the first place.
While your example works well in theory, the costs of a computer is more than the non-recoverable expenses of development. The cost also includes hard costs, or rather, the actual hardware costs of building the machine, which can in general be a lot more than the hardware development costs. Further, as Apple completely controls the hardware in the box, it is possible for Apple to reduce the total cost of the computer significantly by getting rid of legacy hardware. This is how Apple has been able to quite effectively compete in the low end of the market with the iBook and iMac models and yet make a fair profit instead of dying a slow death a'la Gateway or Compaq.
Assume for a moment that Congress gets it's way on this. The amount of data that is transmitted across the internet each day is staggering: trillions of bytes of data is not easy to sift through.
If the U.S. Government gets it's way, we need to place the highest restrictions on what the government may do with the data, and when it may sift through that data. That allows the government to decrypt and get at data in extraordinary circumstances such as the destruction of the World Trade Center and killing of thousands of lives. But we should then come down on law enforcement like a ton of bricks if someone goes through the data for non-extra ordinary circumstances, or violates personal privacy.
I personally have no problems with being anonymous because the amount of data to track my computer usage is too large to make sifting through very easy. That is, I don't mind anonymonity through obscurity. But in extraordinary cases like this (and *ONLY* in extraordinary circumstances like this) should the government be permitted to sift through all the quadrillions of bytes of transmitted data to look for one or two e-mail messages and decrypt them.
The upside of GUI tools, and why I use the CodeWarrior IDE, is that they streamline a number of tasks, making it fast and easy to create a simple application. They also integrate a number of tools which I find quite useful for building a simple application, such as class browsers. The CodeWarrior IDE is excellent for building an application which may consist of a few hundred C++ files, all compiled and linked to a single executable.
However, sometimes you're not building an application. Sometimes you need the power of a Makefile to do something more complicated than "compile everything, and link everything into a single.exe". And that's where something like the CodeWarrior IDE falls down.
GUI tools work extremely well in the problem space they were designed. The CodeWarrior IDE was designed for building large Macintosh applications, such as a word processor or a drawing program: something which largly consists of a single executable program built from several dozen or several hundred source files. The CodeWarrior IDE contains a number of tools which help manage the complexity of all of those source files: file grouping in the project window, class browsing--all geared towards managing a single executable with a ton of classes and sources.
Building a Macintosh printer driver with the Codewarrior IDE (which consists of a half-dozen separately linked code resources) is a pain in the neck, but doable. The last game I worked on, which consisted of a very simple engine running an ad-hoc compiled scripting language was a royal pain in the ass: first, build the compiler. Then, outside of the compiler environment run the compiler on the half-dozen scripts. Then, in the compiler environment, build the game. With a makefile this would have been reduced to one step. And I could have prevented errors where the compiled scripts were built with the wrong version of the script compiler.
I think the short answer is you use the right tools for the job.
What I do to test a hole like this is to create a small, new test page that is disconnected from the site, and upload it. Then, I may add a comment to some random HTML file burried in the site (something like a "hello world" comment at the top of the page) and try to replace an existing HTML file. Then, I try to delete the file I created in step one.
None of these changes alter the appearance of the web site, but they test if you can upload, change and delete a file on the server.
As to if this is illegal or not, one element of determining if something marginal like this is illegal is intent. This is akin to noticing if the lock on a gate is broken--you may wind up crossing a few inches inside the gate to determine if the door opens inward, so technically you are tresspassing. But only the most anal DA would try to have you put in jail for crossing six inches into someone else's property to check a gate latch that you then promptly warn them about.
Re:Free Markets, Public Works, and Monopolies
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Rhythms Flatlines
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· Score: 3, Informative
IMHO, this is one of the more intelligent comments I've read on the Internet for a while.
I do think it's worth defining a "natural monopoly" here. A "natural monopoly" is any situation where, for all practical purposes, only a single solution may be implemented. For example, it would be impractical for every local phone carrier to install copper wire from the local switching box to my house--we have at least a dozen phone companies; a dozen separate wire pairs, one for each phone company would be rediculous. Or take the freeways--it would be nearly insane to have 10 private freeway toll companies build 10 parallel freeways along each freeway corridor--we would have to effectively pave the planet to allow each toll company to compete.
In situations where a common resource exists because of this sort of a "natural monopoly" is created, in my opinion it is best to place this "common resource" into the public trust--that is, to have the government run this public resource. That's because competition is impractical--the 10 freeways per freeway corridor, or the 12 cables per house makes head-to-head competition impractical.
In my opinion these common public resources must be placed in the hands of the government or, at least, in the hands of a not-for-profit organization heavily administered by the government (as the U.S. Post Office is, for all practical purposes). That's because any natural monopoly forming around a public resource which is motivated by profit, as the Bell companies are or the California Electrical companies are--this leads to corruption. It leads to corruption because the monopolies (such as the Bells), in an effort to increase profit, can only increase it by affecting the regulatory process. (And in the case of the Baby Bells or the California Electrical companies, "affecting the regulatory process" == "bribing local officials to turn the other way.") And sometimes (as in the case of the California Electrical companies) this sort of "regulatory lobbying" can lead to disasterous results.
I'm not a socialist. I'm a died-in-the-wool capitalist. But in natural monopoly situations where competition is impractical (such as the last mile of copper to the house, or in building freeways), "Capitalism" doesn't exist. Effective capitalism can only exist when competition exists, and when new players can enter the playing field and compete.
Older workers (I'm hitting the big 4-oh this year) have negatives beyond age. We often have wives and families, which mean we're unwilling to work 6-80 hour weeks and on weekends.
Which is to me amazingly silly, given that after about 50 hours, most people are unable to concentrate well enough on their work that you may as well send them home.
I remember one shop I did some work for where the programmers "worked" for 60-80 weeks. Management was rather flexable as to how they "worked", understanding that sometimes productivity is helped when a programmer takes a couple of minutes from his work to allow a problem to perculate. Most of the programmers were 20-something.
Well, having spent a month with them, I discovered they hardly did any work at all! The programming "pit" (the area where the programmers worked) was basically one large social club; perhaps they worked an average of 20 hours a week if that--most of the time spent on the computers were spent surfing various "fantasy football" web sites and making bets. Turns out that even a large chunk of the time they spent "working" was done developing an in-house betting system that would allow them to play fantasy football against each other!
*sigh*
When I was 25, perhaps I would have enjoyed spending 60 hours a week there. But today, I'd rather go home to my wife than hang out and play fantasy football with a bunch of fellow geeks. And I honestly don't care if management is too stupid to realize that they're not as "hard working" as they appear.
Currently I freelance. Which means I'm in a perpetual state of looking for a new job. So far, I have been rejected *three times* for a consulting gig in the last seven years by managers who basically said "we can't hire you, because the skill set you would provide us is so well suited to our needs and the price you would provide us is so good that we would become overly dependant on you." It didn't matter to them that as part of the contract, I would document my work so that another programmer could pick up where I left off--in fact, my offer to document the work was apparently part of the problem.
I can sort of understand the point of not being at a single person's mercy. But it strikes me as rather brain-dead.
The only value-add I can see is the provision of the document in printed form, for which customers are asked to pay. This works so long as printed books are the dominant form of knowlege distribution. This is rapidly changing. At some point in the vary near future, such printed and bound documents will become secondary to the online publication of the same works - for me it' just a matter of getting a better monitor so I don't go bug eyed after reading 10 pages online.
I dunno; there' something to be said about a portable device which requires no batteries which permits me to view a single document file, fits comfortably in my hands, and has a sufficiently high enough resolution and uses a lighting technology which doesn't give me headaches like staring at a LCD or a cathode ray tube.
Now as soon as LCD technologies allow the construction of a 300dpi LCD display about 5"x8" or so, and has a sufficiently fast enough refresh rate that it does't screw with my eyes, perhaps I'll rethink books. But I think we're more than one or two years away from having a device like this for under a hundred bucks...
For an introduction to programming course, Java may not be all that bad a language. Java hides a number of implementation details (such as memory management) which, while extremely important for a well-rounded programmer to learn, just gets in the way of a beginning programmer who is learning about loops and method invocation. And, at least at the level of writing expressions and loops, it's similarity to C should help people make the transition later to C/C++.
Of course I wouldn't use Java for embedded software development, nor would I personally want to use Java for anything that is compute intensive. But by hiding a number of details, IMHO it's not a bad language for beginners.
But that makes any comment which goes against the party line a "troll" by your lose interpretation, doesn't it? After all, any comment which goes against the party line gets a rather predictable response here.
The problem is that the original poster wasn't "trolling", (which comes from it's meaning of fishing by trailing a baited line behind a slow moving boat). That is, he wasn't fishing for flames. While it is true that in some cases giving one's comments may not be a good thing (such as a christian trying to convert people on alt.pagan), that only means that considering something a troll requires some context.
In a news discussion forum which is for "nerds", it is important to realize that there is a wide variety of opinions which do not tow the party line. By such a lose interpretation of "trolling", we run the danger of kicking out anyone whose opinions run contrary to popular opnion. And we run the risk of mixing in things like "I think Microsoft Windows 2000 is a fairly good operating system" with "I want to screw Natale Portman." posts--which, for those of us who are open minded enough to want to hear the descenting opinion, makes the use of moderation completely pointless.
I've discovered that not towing the party line will get you modded down just as fast as actually trolling. The problem is that some of the moderators here seem to think the definition of "trolling" is anything which they strongly disagree with.
Of course I expect this message to get modded down. Go figure.
Not to pick nits, but Monopoly isn't zero sum. Every time you pass Go, you collect $200.
I think you'll be hard pressed to find any game which isn't "zero sum" by the notion you're talking about, because eventually someone has to win by either having the highest score at some arbitrary contest, or by taking all the resources from everyone else on the playing field.
All I know is, as a resident of Glendale, CA, one of the only cities in the Los Angeles area which has it's own generation plant (approximately 1 1/2 miles down the road from me), there are advantages of having a city council who is willing to tell the stupider eco-freeks to fuck off. (I say "stupider" because the 8 steam power generation plants are partially fueled by methane gas recovered from the city-run compost dump--a fact that is happily ignored by those eco-freeks who have a "mission" and no brains.)
That means while the rest of the state is going dark as PG&E and Edison goes belly up, I can run around and flip on all the lights in my house! Wooh hoo!
Air polution is a problem, and requires solutions which curbs air polution.
However, to suggest the carbon pollution (including methane gas from third world farming concerns) we've thrown up in the last century will affect the weather in a substantial way, while one good volcanic erruption which throws out more carbon pollution in a few weeks than we have in the last century will not cause weather pattern changes strikes me as incredibly silly.
I have always been concerned with the politics of global warming, because it could distract attention from the environmental problems that really do need fixing, such as local air quality and local water quality.
Which begs the question, if you are Dischordian, why are you giving consistant information? I mean, wouldn't a true Dischordian calendar be achieved by doing the following:
Re:Today is Heisei Juu, Nijuuichigatsu Hatsuka.
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13 Month Calendar?
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Try telling a shipper in Iran to expect their package to land in the shipping port on 2 Teveth 5761. Or that the moon shot must launch precisely on 13 Dhu al-Qa'da calibrated by the muslem sect living in northern Iraq. Or that today is the day of Izzat of the month of Masail of the year Vav of the 9th Vahid of the 1st Kull-i-Shay.
The Gregorian calendar is used throughout the world as a sort of calendrical lingua franca because it was one of the first calendrical systems to be spread throughout the world and gain universal acceptance. And, like English becoming the dominant language of the Internet, the Gregorial calender's dominance occured largely out of coincidence: it became the dominant calendrical system at a time when a universal calendrical system was needed throughout the world.
In many ways it's immaterial that the year 2000 refers to the birth of Christ in the Christian theological systems (but is apparently 4 years off); it beats setting the zero year to an arbitrary event such as the birth of a particular Japanese Emperior, and having to change all of the records because he died and was replaced by a new Emperior. All that matters is that a constant zero is used. And that we use the zero of the birth of the Christian Massiah is as good a zero as using the biblical creation of the Universe (Hebrew), the founding of the Roman Empire (old Roman or old Julian), or the start of the fourth (and final) cycle of creation of the Universe in Hindu chronology.
It just happens to be the commonly accepted zero that was in use when electronic communications made world-wide time syncronization important.
Re:Why do we need months? Today is 2000.356
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Blaim the Babylonians, whose astronomical observations also gave us the Hebrew calendar (which is basically the Babylonian calendar, but with a few minor modifications thrown in in order to make certain Jewish holidays land on the right days of the week).
The Babylonians considered 60 a sacred number. They also gave us 360 degrees in a circle (as there are roughly 360 days in a year), and 24 hours in a day (because they split the day into 12 equal parts, and the night into 12 equal parts, one for each sign of the zodiac). They also gave us 12 zodiac signs, as there are approximately 12 lunar months in a solar year.
Of course the Babylonians knew it was closer to 365.24 days in a year and more like 12 7/19(?) lunar months in a solar year. But they had this thing for rounding the numbers into more even ones for religious reasons.
The Babylonians also originated many of the stories which appear (in mutated form) in Genesis. The 7 days in a week is Babylonian, as they considered 7 sacred. (Because it's approximately 1/4th of a Lunar month. That is, 7 days because it's 7 days from new moon to first quarter, first quater to full moon, etc.)
They also originated a story of creation which evolved into the 7 day story of Genesis, in order to fit the length of their week. So (at least this is my understanding) it took God 6 days to create the universe and one day to rest in order to fit the length of a sacred Babylonian week, and not the other way around.
Okay, so I'm being a real calendrical geek. Sorry.
Re:Why do we need months? Today is 2000.356
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While the current calendar is solar based (meaning that events are tied to solar events), the duration of a month definitely comes from lunar events. That is, the fact that the length of a month is approximately the length from one new moon to another is not just coincidence.
Most man-made calendrical systems use a "month" which is roughly (or precisely) based on lunar events. (The Chinese and Islamic calendars are based on lunar events--the Chinese calculate, and the Muslems observe.) The few exceptions I can think of use months that are based on a day count that has mystical significance, but a day count which is roughly one lunar cycle in length. (The Baha'i's 19-day month, for example, or the Discordian 60-day month. Here, by "roughly" I mean they don't pick months that are longer than a year in duration, or shorter than about a week in duration.)
The only exception to this that I can think of is the ISO weekly calendar which records the date as the current day of the week and the number of 7-day weeks from the Gregorian New Year.
The flip side of this is that there is only one calendrical system I can think of that is purely lunar-based, and that's the Islamic calendar, with precisely 12 months. That calendrical system drifts by about a half a month per solar year. All other calendrical systems are either purely solar (by unlinking the length of a month from the lunar cycles they were drived from), or luni-solar (such as the Chinese or the Hebrew, which use complex formulas to insert "leap months" into the year, giving some years 13 months instead of 12).
Okay, so I'm a bit of a calendrical geek.
Ask me sometime why 60 minutes in an hour or 7 days in a week...:-)
Re:Gregorian fixed problems. What doe this fix?
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13 Month Calendar?
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And note that the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars did not involve a substantial change to the calendar--other than causing a 10 day shift, primarly it only changed the leap year rules to omit centuries not divisible by 400. Everything else was the same: the names of the months, the general pattern of days in a month, the 7 day week: all remained the same except for these two minor adjustments. That made the change to the Gregorian Calendar quite easy for most people to swallow.
Futher, the switch to the Gregorian Calendar from the Julian was not uniform: while divised in 1582, it took almost three to four hundred years for all the countries of the world to switch. (Most predominately Catholic european nations switched in the 1580's-1600's; Protestant countries switched in the 1750's, and some countries, such as Afganistan, waited as late as the 1920's. (!).
In today's world, switching from one calendrical system to another would be virtually impossible, given how highly dependant we have become around the world on a unform date/time counting system for shipping and communications. In most areas of the world (such as in the Middle East) where other calendrical systems are used, the Gregorian calendar is also used as a sort of calendrical "lingua franca".
So I agree--why fix what isn't broken? The only major change that will be needed with the Gregorian calender may be an adjustment to the leap year rules in order to prevent drift going out tens of thousands of years. And I suspect we'll be long forgotten before there is enough accumulated drift to cause people to tinker with the leap year rules.
1792, and they dropped it because people did not like 10 day work weeks for the same reason the government of France advocated it: because people who get the weekends off are expected to work 9 days instead of 6 before the weekend starts (they got one day a week off).
Which tells me if you want a chance in hell of convincing people to change the number of days in a work week, make the number >, such as 5 days a week. (Meaning we only have to work 3 days before getting a two day weekend...)
Re:The Fascinating Story Behind the Calendar
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13 Month Calendar?
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And, to clinch it all, it isn't even the long cycle of the Mayan calendar which wraps in 2012; it's a shorter, 400 year cycle that ends in 2012. That is, the long count cycles from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. The last time the Mayan calendar wrapped from 11.19.19.17.19 to 12.0.0.0.0 was on 18 September 1618AD.
It'd be a pisser if the universe ended every 400 years.
Firstly, charity is something you should do because you want to, not because it allows you to save some money from the taxman. The idea of charity is not to provide affluent geeks with a ready-made tax break, it's to raise money for good causes.
Giving to charity is something that will be more often done by affluent people than people who aren't quite as well off. Why? Because affludent people by definition have more money to throw around. The tax break is to remind affluent people to give rather than hoard their money, and to encourage them to give back to a community and a world that gave them so much.
I think it's tragic that charity is only considered to be useful as a tax dodge, and that even then it's more "geek chic" to promote the EFF than the hundreds of charities genuinely improving people's lives.
If thinking of donating part of their considerable wealth as a "tax dodge" gets people to give back to a world and a civilization that has given them so much, then why not? I strongly believe if you have a lot, you need to give back some to those around you--there is no higher purpose of great wealth than to use it to make the world a better place. And frankly I couldn't give a damn if we encourage those who do have to give back by making them think it will make them sexier and live longer lives to boot!
Slashdot Mirror
The cash component of the M1 monetary supply, which represents actual money (rather than checks, travelers checks, stocks and the like where the instrument is like cash, but not represented with U.S. currency) is something like 500 billion. That is, there is something like 500 billion dollars in paper and coin money floating around there, and this represents a steady increase from the 1940's, when the Fed's information starts. (Source: http://www.stls.fed.org).
Electronic wire transfers between banks, wire transfers between people, paperless checks (which are just a request to a bank to transfer money electronically), letters of credit, credit instruments--all of these things have been around well before computers. Some of these devices are by definition an invasion of privacy: an overseas letter of credit is often used by small businesses to indicate to overseas trading partners that money is available--generally, the letter of credit and representation to the overseas partner is made by the bank, and not by the person who pulled the letter.
That we have started being concerned with privacy issues and can now create paperless checks (that's what you're doing when you pay bills on-line from your checking account to a payee who can accept on-line payments) doesn't mean these things haven't been around since damned near the start of the Fed nearly a hundred years ago. The only things that are new is that it's faster and more convenient to do on your home computer, and we are now more concerned with the Internet about our personal information being sold to third parties so they can mail bomb our homes with junk mail.
What is with the comment "Very good article. Too bad we aren't learning from the British and Soviet mistakes."?
We're not yet in Afghanistan--which means we haven't made any mistakes yet to determine if we have or have not learned from past British and Soviet mistakes in the first place.
While your example works well in theory, the costs of a computer is more than the non-recoverable expenses of development. The cost also includes hard costs, or rather, the actual hardware costs of building the machine, which can in general be a lot more than the hardware development costs. Further, as Apple completely controls the hardware in the box, it is possible for Apple to reduce the total cost of the computer significantly by getting rid of legacy hardware. This is how Apple has been able to quite effectively compete in the low end of the market with the iBook and iMac models and yet make a fair profit instead of dying a slow death a'la Gateway or Compaq.
Assume for a moment that Congress gets it's way on this. The amount of data that is transmitted across the internet each day is staggering: trillions of bytes of data is not easy to sift through.
If the U.S. Government gets it's way, we need to place the highest restrictions on what the government may do with the data, and when it may sift through that data. That allows the government to decrypt and get at data in extraordinary circumstances such as the destruction of the World Trade Center and killing of thousands of lives. But we should then come down on law enforcement like a ton of bricks if someone goes through the data for non-extra ordinary circumstances, or violates personal privacy.
I personally have no problems with being anonymous because the amount of data to track my computer usage is too large to make sifting through very easy. That is, I don't mind anonymonity through obscurity. But in extraordinary cases like this (and *ONLY* in extraordinary circumstances like this) should the government be permitted to sift through all the quadrillions of bytes of transmitted data to look for one or two e-mail messages and decrypt them.
The upside of GUI tools, and why I use the CodeWarrior IDE, is that they streamline a number of tasks, making it fast and easy to create a simple application. They also integrate a number of tools which I find quite useful for building a simple application, such as class browsers. The CodeWarrior IDE is excellent for building an application which may consist of a few hundred C++ files, all compiled and linked to a single executable.
.exe". And that's where something like the CodeWarrior IDE falls down.
However, sometimes you're not building an application. Sometimes you need the power of a Makefile to do something more complicated than "compile everything, and link everything into a single
GUI tools work extremely well in the problem space they were designed. The CodeWarrior IDE was designed for building large Macintosh applications, such as a word processor or a drawing program: something which largly consists of a single executable program built from several dozen or several hundred source files. The CodeWarrior IDE contains a number of tools which help manage the complexity of all of those source files: file grouping in the project window, class browsing--all geared towards managing a single executable with a ton of classes and sources.
Building a Macintosh printer driver with the Codewarrior IDE (which consists of a half-dozen separately linked code resources) is a pain in the neck, but doable. The last game I worked on, which consisted of a very simple engine running an ad-hoc compiled scripting language was a royal pain in the ass: first, build the compiler. Then, outside of the compiler environment run the compiler on the half-dozen scripts. Then, in the compiler environment, build the game. With a makefile this would have been reduced to one step. And I could have prevented errors where the compiled scripts were built with the wrong version of the script compiler.
I think the short answer is you use the right tools for the job.
What I do to test a hole like this is to create a small, new test page that is disconnected from the site, and upload it. Then, I may add a comment to some random HTML file burried in the site (something like a "hello world" comment at the top of the page) and try to replace an existing HTML file. Then, I try to delete the file I created in step one.
None of these changes alter the appearance of the web site, but they test if you can upload, change and delete a file on the server.
As to if this is illegal or not, one element of determining if something marginal like this is illegal is intent. This is akin to noticing if the lock on a gate is broken--you may wind up crossing a few inches inside the gate to determine if the door opens inward, so technically you are tresspassing. But only the most anal DA would try to have you put in jail for crossing six inches into someone else's property to check a gate latch that you then promptly warn them about.
IMHO, this is one of the more intelligent comments I've read on the Internet for a while.
I do think it's worth defining a "natural monopoly" here. A "natural monopoly" is any situation where, for all practical purposes, only a single solution may be implemented. For example, it would be impractical for every local phone carrier to install copper wire from the local switching box to my house--we have at least a dozen phone companies; a dozen separate wire pairs, one for each phone company would be rediculous. Or take the freeways--it would be nearly insane to have 10 private freeway toll companies build 10 parallel freeways along each freeway corridor--we would have to effectively pave the planet to allow each toll company to compete.
In situations where a common resource exists because of this sort of a "natural monopoly" is created, in my opinion it is best to place this "common resource" into the public trust--that is, to have the government run this public resource. That's because competition is impractical--the 10 freeways per freeway corridor, or the 12 cables per house makes head-to-head competition impractical.
In my opinion these common public resources must be placed in the hands of the government or, at least, in the hands of a not-for-profit organization heavily administered by the government (as the U.S. Post Office is, for all practical purposes). That's because any natural monopoly forming around a public resource which is motivated by profit, as the Bell companies are or the California Electrical companies are--this leads to corruption. It leads to corruption because the monopolies (such as the Bells), in an effort to increase profit, can only increase it by affecting the regulatory process. (And in the case of the Baby Bells or the California Electrical companies, "affecting the regulatory process" == "bribing local officials to turn the other way.") And sometimes (as in the case of the California Electrical companies) this sort of "regulatory lobbying" can lead to disasterous results.
I'm not a socialist. I'm a died-in-the-wool capitalist. But in natural monopoly situations where competition is impractical (such as the last mile of copper to the house, or in building freeways), "Capitalism" doesn't exist. Effective capitalism can only exist when competition exists, and when new players can enter the playing field and compete.
Older workers (I'm hitting the big 4-oh this year) have negatives beyond age. We often have wives and families, which mean we're unwilling to work 6-80 hour weeks and on weekends.
Which is to me amazingly silly, given that after about 50 hours, most people are unable to concentrate well enough on their work that you may as well send them home.
I remember one shop I did some work for where the programmers "worked" for 60-80 weeks. Management was rather flexable as to how they "worked", understanding that sometimes productivity is helped when a programmer takes a couple of minutes from his work to allow a problem to perculate. Most of the programmers were 20-something.
Well, having spent a month with them, I discovered they hardly did any work at all! The programming "pit" (the area where the programmers worked) was basically one large social club; perhaps they worked an average of 20 hours a week if that--most of the time spent on the computers were spent surfing various "fantasy football" web sites and making bets. Turns out that even a large chunk of the time they spent "working" was done developing an in-house betting system that would allow them to play fantasy football against each other!
*sigh*
When I was 25, perhaps I would have enjoyed spending 60 hours a week there. But today, I'd rather go home to my wife than hang out and play fantasy football with a bunch of fellow geeks. And I honestly don't care if management is too stupid to realize that they're not as "hard working" as they appear.
Been there, done that.
Currently I freelance. Which means I'm in a perpetual state of looking for a new job. So far, I have been rejected *three times* for a consulting gig in the last seven years by managers who basically said "we can't hire you, because the skill set you would provide us is so well suited to our needs and the price you would provide us is so good that we would become overly dependant on you." It didn't matter to them that as part of the contract, I would document my work so that another programmer could pick up where I left off--in fact, my offer to document the work was apparently part of the problem.
I can sort of understand the point of not being at a single person's mercy. But it strikes me as rather brain-dead.
The only value-add I can see is the provision of the document in printed form, for which customers are asked to pay. This works so long as printed books are the dominant form of knowlege distribution. This is rapidly changing. At some point in the vary near future, such printed and bound documents will become secondary to the online publication of the same works - for me it' just a matter of getting a better monitor so I don't go bug eyed after reading 10 pages online.
I dunno; there' something to be said about a portable device which requires no batteries which permits me to view a single document file, fits comfortably in my hands, and has a sufficiently high enough resolution and uses a lighting technology which doesn't give me headaches like staring at a LCD or a cathode ray tube.
Now as soon as LCD technologies allow the construction of a 300dpi LCD display about 5"x8" or so, and has a sufficiently fast enough refresh rate that it does't screw with my eyes, perhaps I'll rethink books. But I think we're more than one or two years away from having a device like this for under a hundred bucks...
For an introduction to programming course, Java may not be all that bad a language. Java hides a number of implementation details (such as memory management) which, while extremely important for a well-rounded programmer to learn, just gets in the way of a beginning programmer who is learning about loops and method invocation. And, at least at the level of writing expressions and loops, it's similarity to C should help people make the transition later to C/C++.
Of course I wouldn't use Java for embedded software development, nor would I personally want to use Java for anything that is compute intensive. But by hiding a number of details, IMHO it's not a bad language for beginners.
The malapropism police say that you need an odd kind of toe truck to tow the party line.
:-)
Sorry, foot fetish.
Or maybe it's the fact that there isn't a spelling checker and a grammer checker here--and sometimes, a cigar is jut a cigar, too.
But that makes any comment which goes against the party line a "troll" by your lose interpretation, doesn't it? After all, any comment which goes against the party line gets a rather predictable response here.
The problem is that the original poster wasn't "trolling", (which comes from it's meaning of fishing by trailing a baited line behind a slow moving boat). That is, he wasn't fishing for flames. While it is true that in some cases giving one's comments may not be a good thing (such as a christian trying to convert people on alt.pagan), that only means that considering something a troll requires some context.
In a news discussion forum which is for "nerds", it is important to realize that there is a wide variety of opinions which do not tow the party line. By such a lose interpretation of "trolling", we run the danger of kicking out anyone whose opinions run contrary to popular opnion. And we run the risk of mixing in things like "I think Microsoft Windows 2000 is a fairly good operating system" with "I want to screw Natale Portman." posts--which, for those of us who are open minded enough to want to hear the descenting opinion, makes the use of moderation completely pointless.
I've discovered that not towing the party line will get you modded down just as fast as actually trolling. The problem is that some of the moderators here seem to think the definition of "trolling" is anything which they strongly disagree with.
Of course I expect this message to get modded down. Go figure.
Not to pick nits, but Monopoly isn't zero sum. Every time you pass Go, you collect $200.
I think you'll be hard pressed to find any game which isn't "zero sum" by the notion you're talking about, because eventually someone has to win by either having the highest score at some arbitrary contest, or by taking all the resources from everyone else on the playing field.
All I know is, as a resident of Glendale, CA, one of the only cities in the Los Angeles area which has it's own generation plant (approximately 1 1/2 miles down the road from me), there are advantages of having a city council who is willing to tell the stupider eco-freeks to fuck off. (I say "stupider" because the 8 steam power generation plants are partially fueled by methane gas recovered from the city-run compost dump--a fact that is happily ignored by those eco-freeks who have a "mission" and no brains.)
That means while the rest of the state is going dark as PG&E and Edison goes belly up, I can run around and flip on all the lights in my house! Wooh hoo!
Air polution is a problem, and requires solutions which curbs air polution.
However, to suggest the carbon pollution (including methane gas from third world farming concerns) we've thrown up in the last century will affect the weather in a substantial way, while one good volcanic erruption which throws out more carbon pollution in a few weeks than we have in the last century will not cause weather pattern changes strikes me as incredibly silly.
I have always been concerned with the politics of global warming, because it could distract attention from the environmental problems that really do need fixing, such as local air quality and local water quality.
Which begs the question, if you are Dischordian, why are you giving consistant information? I mean, wouldn't a true Dischordian calendar be achieved by doing the following:
void FindDiscordianDate(short *day, short *month, short *year)
{
*day = 79 * rand();
*month = 5 * rand();
*year = 5000 * rand();
}
:-)
Try telling a shipper in Iran to expect their package to land in the shipping port on 2 Teveth 5761. Or that the moon shot must launch precisely on 13 Dhu al-Qa'da calibrated by the muslem sect living in northern Iraq. Or that today is the day of Izzat of the month of Masail of the year Vav of the 9th Vahid of the 1st Kull-i-Shay.
The Gregorian calendar is used throughout the world as a sort of calendrical lingua franca because it was one of the first calendrical systems to be spread throughout the world and gain universal acceptance. And, like English becoming the dominant language of the Internet, the Gregorial calender's dominance occured largely out of coincidence: it became the dominant calendrical system at a time when a universal calendrical system was needed throughout the world.
In many ways it's immaterial that the year 2000 refers to the birth of Christ in the Christian theological systems (but is apparently 4 years off); it beats setting the zero year to an arbitrary event such as the birth of a particular Japanese Emperior, and having to change all of the records because he died and was replaced by a new Emperior. All that matters is that a constant zero is used. And that we use the zero of the birth of the Christian Massiah is as good a zero as using the biblical creation of the Universe (Hebrew), the founding of the Roman Empire (old Roman or old Julian), or the start of the fourth (and final) cycle of creation of the Universe in Hindu chronology.
It just happens to be the commonly accepted zero that was in use when electronic communications made world-wide time syncronization important.
Blaim the Babylonians, whose astronomical observations also gave us the Hebrew calendar (which is basically the Babylonian calendar, but with a few minor modifications thrown in in order to make certain Jewish holidays land on the right days of the week).
The Babylonians considered 60 a sacred number. They also gave us 360 degrees in a circle (as there are roughly 360 days in a year), and 24 hours in a day (because they split the day into 12 equal parts, and the night into 12 equal parts, one for each sign of the zodiac). They also gave us 12 zodiac signs, as there are approximately 12 lunar months in a solar year.
Of course the Babylonians knew it was closer to 365.24 days in a year and more like 12 7/19(?) lunar months in a solar year. But they had this thing for rounding the numbers into more even ones for religious reasons.
The Babylonians also originated many of the stories which appear (in mutated form) in Genesis. The 7 days in a week is Babylonian, as they considered 7 sacred. (Because it's approximately 1/4th of a Lunar month. That is, 7 days because it's 7 days from new moon to first quarter, first quater to full moon, etc.)
They also originated a story of creation which evolved into the 7 day story of Genesis, in order to fit the length of their week. So (at least this is my understanding) it took God 6 days to create the universe and one day to rest in order to fit the length of a sacred Babylonian week, and not the other way around.
Okay, so I'm being a real calendrical geek. Sorry.
While the current calendar is solar based (meaning that events are tied to solar events), the duration of a month definitely comes from lunar events. That is, the fact that the length of a month is approximately the length from one new moon to another is not just coincidence.
:-)
Most man-made calendrical systems use a "month" which is roughly (or precisely) based on lunar events. (The Chinese and Islamic calendars are based on lunar events--the Chinese calculate, and the Muslems observe.) The few exceptions I can think of use months that are based on a day count that has mystical significance, but a day count which is roughly one lunar cycle in length. (The Baha'i's 19-day month, for example, or the Discordian 60-day month. Here, by "roughly" I mean they don't pick months that are longer than a year in duration, or shorter than about a week in duration.)
The only exception to this that I can think of is the ISO weekly calendar which records the date as the current day of the week and the number of 7-day weeks from the Gregorian New Year.
The flip side of this is that there is only one calendrical system I can think of that is purely lunar-based, and that's the Islamic calendar, with precisely 12 months. That calendrical system drifts by about a half a month per solar year. All other calendrical systems are either purely solar (by unlinking the length of a month from the lunar cycles they were drived from), or luni-solar (such as the Chinese or the Hebrew, which use complex formulas to insert "leap months" into the year, giving some years 13 months instead of 12).
Okay, so I'm a bit of a calendrical geek.
Ask me sometime why 60 minutes in an hour or 7 days in a week...
And note that the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars did not involve a substantial change to the calendar--other than causing a 10 day shift, primarly it only changed the leap year rules to omit centuries not divisible by 400. Everything else was the same: the names of the months, the general pattern of days in a month, the 7 day week: all remained the same except for these two minor adjustments. That made the change to the Gregorian Calendar quite easy for most people to swallow.
Futher, the switch to the Gregorian Calendar from the Julian was not uniform: while divised in 1582, it took almost three to four hundred years for all the countries of the world to switch. (Most predominately Catholic european nations switched in the 1580's-1600's; Protestant countries switched in the 1750's, and some countries, such as Afganistan, waited as late as the 1920's. (!).
In today's world, switching from one calendrical system to another would be virtually impossible, given how highly dependant we have become around the world on a unform date/time counting system for shipping and communications. In most areas of the world (such as in the Middle East) where other calendrical systems are used, the Gregorian calendar is also used as a sort of calendrical "lingua franca".
So I agree--why fix what isn't broken? The only major change that will be needed with the Gregorian calender may be an adjustment to the leap year rules in order to prevent drift going out tens of thousands of years. And I suspect we'll be long forgotten before there is enough accumulated drift to cause people to tinker with the leap year rules.
1792, and they dropped it because people did not like 10 day work weeks for the same reason the government of France advocated it: because people who get the weekends off are expected to work 9 days instead of 6 before the weekend starts (they got one day a week off).
Which tells me if you want a chance in hell of convincing people to change the number of days in a work week, make the number >, such as 5 days a week. (Meaning we only have to work 3 days before getting a two day weekend...)
And, to clinch it all, it isn't even the long cycle of the Mayan calendar which wraps in 2012; it's a shorter, 400 year cycle that ends in 2012. That is, the long count cycles from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. The last time the Mayan calendar wrapped from 11.19.19.17.19 to 12.0.0.0.0 was on 18 September 1618AD.
It'd be a pisser if the universe ended every 400 years.
Firstly, charity is something you should do because you want to, not because it allows you to save some money from the taxman. The idea of charity is not to provide affluent geeks with a ready-made tax break, it's to raise money for good causes.
Giving to charity is something that will be more often done by affluent people than people who aren't quite as well off. Why? Because affludent people by definition have more money to throw around. The tax break is to remind affluent people to give rather than hoard their money, and to encourage them to give back to a community and a world that gave them so much.
I think it's tragic that charity is only considered to be useful as a tax dodge, and that even then it's more "geek chic" to promote the EFF than the hundreds of charities genuinely improving people's lives.
If thinking of donating part of their considerable wealth as a "tax dodge" gets people to give back to a world and a civilization that has given them so much, then why not? I strongly believe if you have a lot, you need to give back some to those around you--there is no higher purpose of great wealth than to use it to make the world a better place. And frankly I couldn't give a damn if we encourage those who do have to give back by making them think it will make them sexier and live longer lives to boot!