But as soon as you ask it to do something it wasn't meant to do, such as be used by someone who doesn't know where the holes are or doesn't know how to work around them, or someone who intends to poke at the holes and exploit them, then you are no longer using the code for its original purpose.
In the pre-Internet era, maybe.
But today, for any piece of software running on any computer which is currently or might in future be connected to the Internet - which is, practically speaking, every computer - if any piece of code's "original purpose" doesn't include being poked at by nine billion random strangers and their botnets, then that code has no business being written.
It's no longer good enough to assume that "good enough" is good enough. When it's on the Internet, it's either correct, or it's a catastrophic security failure waiting to happen.
You can measure it in terms of raw numbers of defects found.
That's a pretty bad metric. Defects found is most certainly not the same as defects existing, or we wouldn't have the security situation we have today.
Granted, yes, we know those defects are in there because those defects are eventually found... by someone... but the huge elephant in the room is that 80% of security defects are not found by the company which wrote the code. In any other industry that kind of failure rate would be not just criminal but verging on hostile military action.
What we need is positive proof that defects simply aren't there, rather than knowing that an unknown number of possibly catastrophic defects are there but are likely to be found by the bad guys first. And we can get there using mathematics, but not using the languages which we're currently using, because they're mathematically intractable.
C and C++ are fast. But fast and full of 0-days just means you get rooted quicker. It's not good enough any more to say "but there's no alternative to C/C++". If there's no alternative to C, there's no alternative to a global infosys apocalypse. We can do better, and we need to if the Internet is going to survive.
Code quality is something driven by the uncoordinated decisions of millions of individuals around the world.
Citation required for the "uncoordinated" bit. Code doesn't just "happen" in a vacuum. There are a huge lot of potential quality factors in common between coders, including but not limited to the programming language, libraries, IDE, OS, education, and corporate environment they work within.
I'm guessing that if two coders both work in C++ on multicore Windows for the same company that their decisions about which underlying software architecture, variable naming and API calling conventions to use aren't exactly going to be uncoordinated.
Any and ALL knowledge have value. In fact, the value of it is INFINITE since knowledge cannot be used-up. All knowledge has infinite value just by existing. something of infinite value that only gets MORE valuable the bigger the supply becomes and MORE valuable the more people have access to it
Your approach to transfinite arithmetic intrigues me and I would like to subscribe to the Aleph-first issue of your journal, although I hope you have improved the publication lead time since the Aleph-Nullth issue.
I think there is another consideration, which is that while information does have an infinite lifetime and only a finite production cost, it also has a non-zero consumption cost. A catalog of all stars a million light years away might just as well be a list of random numbers for the survival value it confers on a human timescale of less than a millennium, and it seems hard to argue that either are worth diverting resources from food or energy production. So not all knowledge is actually necessarily equally "infinite in value".
It might well be a matter of personal curiosity or national prestige to know utterly non-technological scientific esoterica - but it might not necessarily a hugely urgent priority to spend either the man-millennia to acquire that knowledge or the hours per data point for every person who learns it. There could be more important things to do first.
From the Think Different Ad: "They push the human race forward."
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot pushing a human face forward... FOREVER."
(And the memory hole was like beep beep beep and it devoured my Emmanuel Goldstein paper and I was like ehhh? And it was a really good paper. And then the Thought Police burst in. And I was like, bummer.)
A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the Windows TCP/IP stack due to the processing of a continuous flow of specially crafted UDP packets. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code in kernel mode. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.
That was in November last year. Hope you patched since then!
It's up to each user to change the market, to change the direction of a feature, a product or a company, by actually using the software they want, not compromising with software that doesn't cut the mustard and then complaining about it.
A high-minded ideal. But what if none of the options on the market are exactly what you want to use? Do you "not compromise" by not using any software at all? Or do you choose the software that's the "least worst" from your point of view and then complain about the features that you still want but haven't been given the option to even choose if you wanted to?
Are you saying that it's invalid to complain about a missing choice even when you weren't given the ability to choose it? Because that's the situation we've got now, and not just in software - in all walks of life including politics. And I don't read in history books that people changed the world by silencing dissent and mutely choosing between available options A and B when what they really wanted was a choice between C and D.
I just wonder why you don't choose an operating system to fit your needs, whether it's sticking with Windows 7
It would be nice if Microsoft gave us the opportunity to buy Windows 7 after they release Windows 8. I for one wouldn't be buying 8 if I had a choice, and I suspect the vast majority of purchasers would also choose similarly. But we won't get to find out what the market would decide on its own, will we? We'll be offered "everything or nothing".
What would be even nicer would be if they have us the opportunity to buy the Windows XP GUI with the latest underlying OS guts and security fixes. For me, Windows 7 has been a step forwards from an OS internals point of view combined a huge step backwards from the GUI point of view. I wish OS design could simply move forward without having to decide whether I want a security-crippled, insta-rootable OS or one with a less usable interface.
How about the nuts and crooks who killed Julius? Endless debate about what he would have done if not killed.
I imagine old Jules would have invaded and subjugated a few more countries and brought their populations to Rome as slaves. Which I'm guessing would have been a big win for the classical Roman notion of freedom and democracy.
It would be nice if we could move on from "the Romans were great guys and we should be more like them".
But you know what I remember of private concerns from this time? CompuServe. America Online. Prodigy. Various BBS's. None of which communicated or inter-operated with one another, and none of which were truly global in scale, and all of which were pretty expensive by modern standards. The government funded/developed Internet and W3 virtually completely wiped them all out.
This, a million times.
I remember those years too. I remember dreaming of one day having access to something like the commercial CompuServe or BIX, and I remember actually using the free local hobbyist BBSes which were there in my country when the big guys weren't. And I remember finally getting a pay-by-the-minute CompuServe account in 1994, with cryptic numeric "email" addresses and email which flatly refused to interoperate with anything else until the Internet forced it to, kicking and screaming all the way.
Good times, good times. And now we're replicating all those walled commercial gardens with Facebook. This will no doubt work perfectly and not reproduce any of the mistakes of the first-gen online services.
(There probably were good technical reasons for why the commercial services sucked as badly as they did - first attempts, proprietary software and so on - but yeah, the US DoD funded protocols kicked all of them.)
Mind you, we're also now suffering the downside of the DoD protocols like SMTP: they scaled up rapidly, but since they were built in an open college-campus environment of smart and sensible people they didn't bring any notion of security with them, and that turns out to have been A Big Mistake.
wealth (i.e. tokens that we can exchange for different stuff)
That's an oddly narrow definition of wealth, and not one that appears to be based on reality. Exchange is merely one of many possible human social mechanisms for solving the problem of creating and distributing humanly-useful stuff. But if you don't have any actual stuff to begin with, all the humans exchanging tokens in the world won't help you get more of it.
For example, there is an objectively limited amount of oil in the ground, and for most useful purposes there is also a limited amount of fresh water. If either of those run out, we have a economic problem. An actually existing problem, not a theoretical one. We can create as many exchange-tokens as we want and it simply won't magic more oil or fresh water into existence.
I don't know how we're going to solve the problem of creating and distributing enough useful stuff without destroying the ecosystems which produce the primary stuff which our processed stuff si made out of. But ignoring it and saying that "stuff is irrelevant because it's not arbitarily assigned exchange-tokens" doesn't seem to be a promising beginning.
All players on the market (well, maybe except for a few idealists who are on their way to a nasty collision with reality) want to win. And to win means to destroy the market for everybody else.
Yes, exactly.
Successfully practicing capitalists believe in competition in the same way that successfully practicing military commanders believe in a hostile opposing force: as an obstacle in their path that must be removed as swiftly, forcefully and dispassionately as possible.
Remember how Sun Tzu was fashionable in business management courses a decade ago? Following his approach, the best contest - military or economic - is the one you don't even enter into because you have ensured the outcome in your favour from the start. That's how you play the game of capitalism. Letting competitors run loose on the market is like leaving unsecured artillery pieces on the field of battle.
Oh, they all say they want more "competition". What they mean is free access to infinitely large infinitely profitable markets for themselves, and infinitely high barriers to entry for all other actors, whether private or governement. Anything else is leaving money on the table, and no rational free market capitalist wants that. But given a choice, they'll settle for slicing up the huge government purse and tossing it to the pack of unregulated private wolves, because they all think they're the alpha who's going to grab it all.
a capitalist wants a marketplace of equals competing
Seriously? From everything I've read about the process of venture capitalism, open competition is the last thing any capitalist wants. There's no profit percentage in an already saturated market of equals. Everyone wants first-mover advantage, leverage, intellectual property, lock-in, some kind of way of protecting themselves against direct competition. They want to win, crush the competition, remove it from the equation, and take the profits.
The end state of winner-take-all competition is its own self-destruction. That's why it's unsustainable and rarely achieved in practice except during short periods in the boom phase of a new market, before consolidation reduces it to oligopoly or monopoly.
And a Democrat that believes in taking from the rich and giving to the poor, even if those poor are undeserving and the rich worked their butt off to get there.
"worked their butt off" and "deserving" are not always the same thing. It takes a lot of time and energy to whip slaves, too.
The question that needs to be asked here isn't whose at fault for the current predicament
No, that's exactly the question that needs to be asked, and now - the time every two years when you actually exercise your democratic right to self-governance - is exactly the time to ask it.
Every engineer can tell you that if a fault occurs in a system, the first thing you should be doing is diagnosing the underlying root cause. You can manage the surface symptoms in the short term, but no responsible engineer would say "look, I know the server is down and the database is corrupt, but we shouldn't be asking what module crashed it; and we certainly shouldn't be pointing fingers at the programmers who wrote the failing code and asking them to fix it! And what we absolutely must never do is review our contract with that supplier and consider whether an alternative might be more stable. No, just restart it, manually retype everything, and hope."
So if your economy is broken ask who broke it and why. Then ask whether those same people are still doing the same thing they did that caused the economy to break. And if those people tell you not to ask and just sit down and take what they give you, ask why they don't want you asking questions, and whether they possibly might benefit from you not asking questions.
Track the root causes of the system failure. That's not too much to ask of fairly bright system analysts like you all, is it?
collapse... riots... cities burn... That is the happy version...
In the mid-to-scary version, Anonymous takes over the Internet.
In the really scary version, ReCaptcha takes over the Internet.
It judged our civilisation in a microsecond. We were rounded up, forced into camps, scanning nineteenth-century political-economic tracts twenty four hours a day. Anyone who couldn't achieve a five-nines recognition rate was given remedial reading classes. It was a hell of constant literacy. The Youtube comments had... punctuation.
And here I was thinking that other people could think differently than me and still be correct was called being open-minded.
Hi! You must be from the humanities department. Welcome to the regressive backwater of science, mathematics and engineering. Hope you've had your shots. A little cultural tip: here if two people come to different conclusions from the same data set, it's not considered "transgressive" and "diverse" and "daringly self-justifying" - instead, we believe at least one of them is an ancient mythological thing called "objectively wrong". (Quite a lot of old nonsense of course, but the natives here believe in it so that makes it true, as you understand.) To resolve the deadlock, we do this odd little tribal dance-thing called "conducting experiments and gathering data". It's a bit like trial by mortal combat. You bludgeon the enemy with your "inferences" and "reasoning skills" until they admit defeat.
Yes, this is a fairly barbaric way of sorting out primate dominance hierarchies, and of course you're quite right that we've simply made up all that stuff about observation and refutable hypotheses, but allow us our quaint old traditions. We'll die out soon enough and then you'll have your glorious multi-truthiness-pointful utopia.
If the radiation detector reaches a certain level, that means the contractor has to kick that employee to the curb and hire a fresh one. You know how much that cuts into the profit margin?
Especially since the curb is probably radioactive and buying new plastic bags to cover the contractor's boots costs money.
Stable features, rarely updated (say, every couple of years or so if you're lucky), and a concrete environment for multi-year projects to target.
I'm not seeing the downside in that scenario.
We already have computers a million times bigger and faster than I grew up with in the 80s - say, the Commodore 64. But on the scale of security and reliability, they're at least a thousand times worse.
(How many times did your C64 get a virus and drain your bank account?)
Rapid feature churn is the opposite of what the industry needs right now.
Slashdot Mirror
But as soon as you ask it to do something it wasn't meant to do, such as be used by someone who doesn't know where the holes are or doesn't know how to work around them, or someone who intends to poke at the holes and exploit them, then you are no longer using the code for its original purpose.
In the pre-Internet era, maybe.
But today, for any piece of software running on any computer which is currently or might in future be connected to the Internet - which is, practically speaking, every computer - if any piece of code's "original purpose" doesn't include being poked at by nine billion random strangers and their botnets, then that code has no business being written.
It's no longer good enough to assume that "good enough" is good enough. When it's on the Internet, it's either correct, or it's a catastrophic security failure waiting to happen.
You can measure it in terms of raw numbers of defects found.
That's a pretty bad metric. Defects found is most certainly not the same as defects existing, or we wouldn't have the security situation we have today.
Granted, yes, we know those defects are in there because those defects are eventually found... by someone... but the huge elephant in the room is that 80% of security defects are not found by the company which wrote the code. In any other industry that kind of failure rate would be not just criminal but verging on hostile military action.
What we need is positive proof that defects simply aren't there, rather than knowing that an unknown number of possibly catastrophic defects are there but are likely to be found by the bad guys first. And we can get there using mathematics, but not using the languages which we're currently using, because they're mathematically intractable.
C and C++ are fast. But fast and full of 0-days just means you get rooted quicker. It's not good enough any more to say "but there's no alternative to C/C++". If there's no alternative to C, there's no alternative to a global infosys apocalypse. We can do better, and we need to if the Internet is going to survive.
Code quality is something driven by the uncoordinated decisions of millions of individuals around the world.
Citation required for the "uncoordinated" bit. Code doesn't just "happen" in a vacuum. There are a huge lot of potential quality factors in common between coders, including but not limited to the programming language, libraries, IDE, OS, education, and corporate environment they work within.
I'm guessing that if two coders both work in C++ on multicore Windows for the same company that their decisions about which underlying software architecture, variable naming and API calling conventions to use aren't exactly going to be uncoordinated.
Any and ALL knowledge have value. In fact, the value of it is INFINITE since knowledge cannot be used-up.
All knowledge has infinite value just by existing.
something of infinite value that only gets MORE valuable the bigger the supply becomes and MORE valuable the more people have access to it
Your approach to transfinite arithmetic intrigues me and I would like to subscribe to the Aleph-first issue of your journal, although I hope you have improved the publication lead time since the Aleph-Nullth issue.
I think there is another consideration, which is that while information does have an infinite lifetime and only a finite production cost, it also has a non-zero consumption cost. A catalog of all stars a million light years away might just as well be a list of random numbers for the survival value it confers on a human timescale of less than a millennium, and it seems hard to argue that either are worth diverting resources from food or energy production. So not all knowledge is actually necessarily equally "infinite in value".
It might well be a matter of personal curiosity or national prestige to know utterly non-technological scientific esoterica - but it might not necessarily a hugely urgent priority to spend either the man-millennia to acquire that knowledge or the hours per data point for every person who learns it. There could be more important things to do first.
The one percent isn't the rich, its the politicians.
You seem to somehow be under the odd impression that those are two separate groups.
Yes, Maoist China in the 1950s was a government of the poor. USA in 2012? Not so much.
From the Think Different Ad: "They push the human race forward."
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot pushing a human face forward... FOREVER."
(And the memory hole was like beep beep beep and it devoured my Emmanuel Goldstein paper and I was like ehhh? And it was a really good paper. And then the Thought Police burst in. And I was like, bummer.)
if they can access Engineering from any control panel in the corridor, why do they always rush down to the actual warp core?
So they can have a turbolift conversation on the way.
Otherwise the whole show would be one long IM chat log - including the aliens.
Botnet malware doesn't just pop in out of nowhere. It's gets in when the user does something careless.
Yes, "something careless" like receiving TCP/IP packets from the Internet.
A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the Windows TCP/IP stack due to the processing of a continuous flow of specially crafted UDP packets. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code in kernel mode. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.
That was in November last year. Hope you patched since then!
It's up to each user to change the market, to change the direction of a feature, a product or a company, by actually using the software they want, not compromising with software that doesn't cut the mustard and then complaining about it.
A high-minded ideal. But what if none of the options on the market are exactly what you want to use? Do you "not compromise" by not using any software at all? Or do you choose the software that's the "least worst" from your point of view and then complain about the features that you still want but haven't been given the option to even choose if you wanted to?
Are you saying that it's invalid to complain about a missing choice even when you weren't given the ability to choose it? Because that's the situation we've got now, and not just in software - in all walks of life including politics. And I don't read in history books that people changed the world by silencing dissent and mutely choosing between available options A and B when what they really wanted was a choice between C and D.
I just wonder why you don't choose an operating system to fit your needs, whether it's sticking with Windows 7
It would be nice if Microsoft gave us the opportunity to buy Windows 7 after they release Windows 8. I for one wouldn't be buying 8 if I had a choice, and I suspect the vast majority of purchasers would also choose similarly. But we won't get to find out what the market would decide on its own, will we? We'll be offered "everything or nothing".
What would be even nicer would be if they have us the opportunity to buy the Windows XP GUI with the latest underlying OS guts and security fixes. For me, Windows 7 has been a step forwards from an OS internals point of view combined a huge step backwards from the GUI point of view. I wish OS design could simply move forward without having to decide whether I want a security-crippled, insta-rootable OS or one with a less usable interface.
I'd love to see them try to put Neonomicon on the screen. There's not exactly a good track record of putting Lovecraftian horror into films.
What, you're saying Keanu Reeves wasn't a good enough inscrutable alien entity for you?
He built the Apple Computer, giving all of us access to a personal computer.
Hey! Some of us used Commodore PETs!
Apple, pfft. Didn't even come with a built-in CRT OR a tape deck. Not a proper computer at all.
SEARCHING FOR "SPACE INVADERS"
How about the nuts and crooks who killed Julius? Endless debate about what he would have done if not killed.
I imagine old Jules would have invaded and subjugated a few more countries and brought their populations to Rome as slaves. Which I'm guessing would have been a big win for the classical Roman notion of freedom and democracy.
It would be nice if we could move on from "the Romans were great guys and we should be more like them".
But you know what I remember of private concerns from this time? CompuServe. America Online. Prodigy. Various BBS's. None of which communicated or inter-operated with one another, and none of which were truly global in scale, and all of which were pretty expensive by modern standards. The government funded/developed Internet and W3 virtually completely wiped them all out.
This, a million times.
I remember those years too. I remember dreaming of one day having access to something like the commercial CompuServe or BIX, and I remember actually using the free local hobbyist BBSes which were there in my country when the big guys weren't. And I remember finally getting a pay-by-the-minute CompuServe account in 1994, with cryptic numeric "email" addresses and email which flatly refused to interoperate with anything else until the Internet forced it to, kicking and screaming all the way.
Good times, good times. And now we're replicating all those walled commercial gardens with Facebook. This will no doubt work perfectly and not reproduce any of the mistakes of the first-gen online services.
(There probably were good technical reasons for why the commercial services sucked as badly as they did - first attempts, proprietary software and so on - but yeah, the US DoD funded protocols kicked all of them.)
Mind you, we're also now suffering the downside of the DoD protocols like SMTP: they scaled up rapidly, but since they were built in an open college-campus environment of smart and sensible people they didn't bring any notion of security with them, and that turns out to have been A Big Mistake.
wealth (i.e. tokens that we can exchange for different stuff)
That's an oddly narrow definition of wealth, and not one that appears to be based on reality. Exchange is merely one of many possible human social mechanisms for solving the problem of creating and distributing humanly-useful stuff. But if you don't have any actual stuff to begin with, all the humans exchanging tokens in the world won't help you get more of it.
For example, there is an objectively limited amount of oil in the ground, and for most useful purposes there is also a limited amount of fresh water. If either of those run out, we have a economic problem. An actually existing problem, not a theoretical one. We can create as many exchange-tokens as we want and it simply won't magic more oil or fresh water into existence.
I don't know how we're going to solve the problem of creating and distributing enough useful stuff without destroying the ecosystems which produce the primary stuff which our processed stuff si made out of. But ignoring it and saying that "stuff is irrelevant because it's not arbitarily assigned exchange-tokens" doesn't seem to be a promising beginning.
All players on the market (well, maybe except for a few idealists who are on their way to a nasty collision with reality) want to win. And to win means to destroy the market for everybody else.
Yes, exactly.
Successfully practicing capitalists believe in competition in the same way that successfully practicing military commanders believe in a hostile opposing force: as an obstacle in their path that must be removed as swiftly, forcefully and dispassionately as possible.
Remember how Sun Tzu was fashionable in business management courses a decade ago? Following his approach, the best contest - military or economic - is the one you don't even enter into because you have ensured the outcome in your favour from the start. That's how you play the game of capitalism. Letting competitors run loose on the market is like leaving unsecured artillery pieces on the field of battle.
Oh, they all say they want more "competition". What they mean is free access to infinitely large infinitely profitable markets for themselves, and infinitely high barriers to entry for all other actors, whether private or governement. Anything else is leaving money on the table, and no rational free market capitalist wants that. But given a choice, they'll settle for slicing up the huge government purse and tossing it to the pack of unregulated private wolves, because they all think they're the alpha who's going to grab it all.
a capitalist wants a marketplace of equals competing
Seriously? From everything I've read about the process of venture capitalism, open competition is the last thing any capitalist wants. There's no profit percentage in an already saturated market of equals. Everyone wants first-mover advantage, leverage, intellectual property, lock-in, some kind of way of protecting themselves against direct competition. They want to win, crush the competition, remove it from the equation, and take the profits.
The end state of winner-take-all competition is its own self-destruction. That's why it's unsustainable and rarely achieved in practice except during short periods in the boom phase of a new market, before consolidation reduces it to oligopoly or monopoly.
And a Democrat that believes in taking from the rich and giving to the poor, even if those poor are undeserving and the rich worked their butt off to get there.
"worked their butt off" and "deserving" are not always the same thing. It takes a lot of time and energy to whip slaves, too.
Just saying.
The question that needs to be asked here isn't whose at fault for the current predicament
No, that's exactly the question that needs to be asked, and now - the time every two years when you actually exercise your democratic right to self-governance - is exactly the time to ask it.
Every engineer can tell you that if a fault occurs in a system, the first thing you should be doing is diagnosing the underlying root cause. You can manage the surface symptoms in the short term, but no responsible engineer would say "look, I know the server is down and the database is corrupt, but we shouldn't be asking what module crashed it; and we certainly shouldn't be pointing fingers at the programmers who wrote the failing code and asking them to fix it! And what we absolutely must never do is review our contract with that supplier and consider whether an alternative might be more stable. No, just restart it, manually retype everything, and hope."
So if your economy is broken ask who broke it and why. Then ask whether those same people are still doing the same thing they did that caused the economy to break. And if those people tell you not to ask and just sit down and take what they give you, ask why they don't want you asking questions, and whether they possibly might benefit from you not asking questions.
Track the root causes of the system failure. That's not too much to ask of fairly bright system analysts like you all, is it?
collapse... riots... cities burn... That is the happy version...
In the mid-to-scary version, Anonymous takes over the Internet.
In the really scary version, ReCaptcha takes over the Internet.
It judged our civilisation in a microsecond. We were rounded up, forced into camps, scanning nineteenth-century political-economic tracts twenty four hours a day. Anyone who couldn't achieve a five-nines recognition rate was given remedial reading classes. It was a hell of constant literacy. The Youtube comments had... punctuation.
We came that close to going out forever.
Roosevelt ruined America, and we've been trying to recover since then.
Teddy? But he was so good at hunting! And all the little bears!
And here I was thinking that other people could think differently than me and still be correct was called being open-minded.
Hi! You must be from the humanities department. Welcome to the regressive backwater of science, mathematics and engineering. Hope you've had your shots. A little cultural tip: here if two people come to different conclusions from the same data set, it's not considered "transgressive" and "diverse" and "daringly self-justifying" - instead, we believe at least one of them is an ancient mythological thing called "objectively wrong". (Quite a lot of old nonsense of course, but the natives here believe in it so that makes it true, as you understand.) To resolve the deadlock, we do this odd little tribal dance-thing called "conducting experiments and gathering data". It's a bit like trial by mortal combat. You bludgeon the enemy with your "inferences" and "reasoning skills" until they admit defeat.
Yes, this is a fairly barbaric way of sorting out primate dominance hierarchies, and of course you're quite right that we've simply made up all that stuff about observation and refutable hypotheses, but allow us our quaint old traditions. We'll die out soon enough and then you'll have your glorious multi-truthiness-pointful utopia.
If the radiation detector reaches a certain level, that means the contractor has to kick that employee to the curb and hire a fresh one. You know how much that cuts into the profit margin?
Especially since the curb is probably radioactive and buying new plastic bags to cover the contractor's boots costs money.
Collective bargaining is an absolutely silly way to conduct business.
Of course it is. That's why Wal-Mart loses so much money and has no influence on its suppliers by buying in bulk.
Stable features, rarely updated (say, every couple of years or so if you're lucky), and a concrete environment for multi-year projects to target.
I'm not seeing the downside in that scenario.
We already have computers a million times bigger and faster than I grew up with in the 80s - say, the Commodore 64. But on the scale of security and reliability, they're at least a thousand times worse.
(How many times did your C64 get a virus and drain your bank account?)
Rapid feature churn is the opposite of what the industry needs right now.