Unfortunately, you are simply wrong on several counts. Please go and read up on the "first past the post" electoral system, which is used in the UK. It is entirely possible for a party that didn't win the popular vote to have an absolute majority of parliamentary seats (precisely because we have more than two mainstream political parties, in fact) which is one reason so many other groups are increasingly calling for a system based on proportional representation.
In case you hadn't noticed, the current Labour government were elected by only about 22% of the population, thanks to our bizarre first-past-the-post system. (It was only around 1/3 of those who actually voted, and actually lost the popular vote in England, for the record.)
The current Labour government did face millions of people in the streets protesting against the war in Iraq, yet ignored them and went ahead anyway.
The current Labour government set up an on-line petitions web site to collect public feedback. The overwhelming majority of signatories in the first few days were for a single petition, opposing the proposed road charging measures, with nearly 2 million people signing up. The government's immediate reaction was dismissive, and made it clear that they have no intent to change their policy any time soon.
Please understand this: the current government is toast. They have been toast since almost the day they won that "historic third term" based on dubious election mechanics. They have no integrity, and no accountability until the next general election, which could still be several years away. Their only concern at this point is to entrench as much of their abusive policy as possible and cement Blair's "legacy" before they are kicked out. It's like having a five-year lame duck government running the show. What does a lame duck administration care about protests? There is no mechanism for the people to remove them from power early, and they have zero chance of securing a fourth victory, so protests don't matter to them at all.
I greatly admire The Something Must be Done philosophy. It suggests a degree of discipline that pushes society as a whole to improve itself, act on its problems and not try to excuse itself as a victim of circumstances. It shows people value personal responsibility and back their feelings with real actions. And while in some aspects this may be an idealization, it shows a set of values which are lost on the general Brazilian culture.
Unfortunately, what we really have isn't Something Must Be Done, it's We Must Be Seen To Be Doing Something. Whether that something actually helps doesn't matter.
Thus we get idiocy like tanks parked around the outside of an airport because of a terrorist threat that has been known for many years. This is more about a few dramatic headlines than it is about protecting people's life and liberty.
Similarly we get government pushing a whole raft of new legal penalties -- ASBOs being the most infamous -- when the basic problem is that kids are now allowed to grow up with neither parents nor teachers being able to lay a finger on them for fear of being accused of child abuse, and thus we have grown a whole generation whose priorities are "me, me, me" and who have no respect for others or for any kind of authority figure.
Last week, a military veteran and opposition government spokesman lost his position in the opposition because he made a statement that there are people of various minorities in the armed forces who frankly aren't good enough but who get away with things because they play the discrimination card. What the spokesman said wasn't itself discriminatory, and was almost certainly true. Black NCOs who served under him have been appearing on national television, explaining that this guy had essentially zero tolerance for racism in his group. And yet the leader of the opposition, no doubt thinking of the political correctness of mentioning anything about racism without strongly condemning it in the same breath, fired the guy in a heartbeat.
And now, we are converging on the ultimate screw-up: prioritising government surveillance of the population and powers to disrupt people's lives without due process, which will be abused on occasion but cause many accidental mistakes, on the off chance that they trap the next terrorist attack that will kill 1% as many people as die on our roads every year.
I'd agree with much of your post, but I think there's an unwritten assumption about programming style in what you wrote: you seem to be restricting your scope to imperative languages with mutable state (talking about locks and threading, for example).
If you're working in a language that doesn't permit generally mutable state, it's much easier to use concepts of design by contract, essentially because all you have to do is check that when you've finished constructing a new value, it is valid for whatever type it has. Of course, such languages have disadvantages as well.
I suspect that a great deal of work in programming languages over the next few years is going to focus on how to identify and localise side-effects more explicitly. Pure functional languages that don't allow mutable state at all seem to be quite inefficient, and have fundamental problems for high performance applications that have yet to be resolved. Things like the monads widely used in Haskell today provide some powerful features like mutability but built on a much sounder base than many of today's imperative languages, but at the cost of horrendous syntactic overheads, which kinda spoils one of the big advantages of adopting a functional language: conciseness.
However, multi-core and multi-processor machines are fast becoming mainstream, and loose imperative programming languages have failed to provide satisfactory tools to take advantage of these architectures. I expect this to drive a general move towards more declarative rogramming styles in the industry. Meanwhile the academics, who have seen it all before, will be working on more powerful models of scoping and side effects, well beyond the glorified block scope/lambda calculus stuff that most of today's mainstream programming languages are effectively built on. Once we start getting programming languages with more powerful ways to signify when it is acceptable for what sorts of side effects (including changes in state) to occur, we'll have the sort of foundation needed for your ideas about being inside/outside an object, and compilers will have the sort of framework needed to optimise DbC checks so they're only applied when they're really needed and don't carry unfortunate performance penalties.
Design by Contract adds more complexity to code, particularly if you're dealing with a language that doesn't natively support it.
Sure, but so do writing explicit interfaces to modules, writing unit tests, and for that matter, writing comments. It's just a question of whether introducing that complexity at the time you write (and maintain) the code brings compensating benefits down the line.
Only a small proportion of development time is typically spent physically writing code, so these defensive programming techniques can be used pretty much on auto-pilot. The implementation costs are therefore relatively small. Given that they can prevent many bugs or save much time during later development, I would argue that they are well worth adopting, unless you already have something in place that provides similar benefits via some other means.
(This isn't to say that the parent poster's point isn't valid, or that aiming to keep your code as simple as possible is a bad thing, of course.)
People have a tendency to confuse bluster and arrogance with ability and experience.
They do, yet in my experience, these things are inversely correlated. This applies to all guidance/oversight roles, including business analysts, software architects, consultants, and indeed managers themselves. As I've commented here before, you can always identify a good leader by three characteristics:
They can set a clear direction and convey this to others.
They organise adequate resources and set realistic expectations.
Having done the above, they get out of the way as much as possible.
The third one is usually the easiest way to identify morons. If you come across a leader in software development who places more value on reports and metrics so they can track things than they do on supporting the developers and test teams working for them, then you know you're dealing with an incompetent.
And yes, that does mean many leaders in software development organisations today are incompetent. That's why the genuinely good people are worth so much.
Hijackers simply start shooting passengers until they remotely fly him where he wants to go.
This is why you never negotiate with terrorists. Not that this will be much comfort to either the victims on the plane the first time it happens, or the commanders/negotiators on the ground who have to talk to the terrorists knowing what the consequences will probably be, of course.
It's a bit like the attitude of the submarine commander I saw in a TV documentary a few years ago:
Interviewer: Do you hope you'll launch a nuke one day?
Captain: Of course not. Millions of innocent people would die if we ever did that.
Interviewer: So would you do it if you were ordered to?
Captain: Absolutely, and without hesitation.
Sorry, all our pilots are dealing with other aircraft. Your plane is being held in a queue, and will be landed by the next available air traffic controller. Your hijacking is important to us. Please wait, and a hostage rescue team will be with you shortly.
Since we're doing so well at mocking combat and/or Mr Bauer in this discussion, let's not forget the classic "automatic weapon that has no recoil even when unloading an entire magazine in 2 seconds", or Jack's trademark "mobile phone with infinite battery life". I never quite mastered the martial arts of Ang Lee, either.;-)
Though on a related note, TFA is wrong about kicking/shooting someone through the air without taking off yourself. This certainly can be done under some circumstances, given that you're standing on a floor and have both upward resistance from the floor and friction on your side.
Let me preface this reply by saying that I've never personally chosen to work in London, so this is based only on the offers I've personally had but declined, and things I know friends have taken.
The short answer is that for high-tech jobs, the salaries in London can be anywhere from 30% to 100% higher than outside. Of course there are some that fall below that, and a few (mainly around the City) that pay significantly more. For example, a reasonably senior developer job worth £50k outside London would probably pull £70-80k in London.
But direct comparisons of salaries in the UK can be quite misleading, because some places pay salary and let you choose how to spend it, while others pay lower salaries but have genuinely compensating perks. And of course, the kind of business that's based in London and pays an extra £25k tends to believe your soul is included in the price.;-)
For what it's worth, no, that kind of difference doesn't really pay the cost of London living, at least not in any of the nicer areas where house prices are astronomical these days. It does, however, easily cover the costs of a season ticket to commute in by train from one of the nice surrounding counties, as long as you're prepared to give up 1-2 hours of your life every day on top of the typical London working hours.
I see what you're saying, and I don't think I disagree with it. But with the possible exception of Khan, the examples you described still come from that nice, clean, tidy universe. The good guys still win, at least the vast majority of the time. If The Best of Both Worlds had been an episode in a darker series, the final line would have been "Feeling... is irrelevant" in a monotone voice, with a slow turn of the head to show that the Borg modifications had grown back.
The problem with enterprise is that it jammed the time travel shit down everyone's throats. I hate time travel episodes. They make no sense.
I'm not sure I completely agree with that. After all, Babylon 5 had a significant time travel thread running across several series. However, they used it subtly and sparingly, and it was consistent throughout. I think that was an example of a good time travel story arc in a sci-fi show, which is a long way from the one-off, inconsistent, self-referential stereotypes that featured too often in Star Trek series.
I definitely agree that Trek should get grittier with more imperfect, and hence BELIEVABLE, deeper characters; when DS9 was at its best it was really good for that reason. However, the fact that DS9 was never as popular as TNG ratings-wise may sadly persuade the studio execs away from that direction.
The thing is, what sets Star Trek apart from other sci-fi shows is exactly that it isn't gritty and believable. It is sci-fi in a near-perfect universe. The ships are clean inside and out, and the uniforms are pressed immaculately (unless the bridge is already on fire). When an entire starship blows up, the crew of the Enterprise take it stoically. Whole wars go on, yet the main characters are mostly unaffected either physically or emotionally. Poverty is eliminated. Medical science can cure almost anything.
Compare and contrast with any of the other major future/space sci-fi series in recent years, from Babylon 5 to Battlestar Galactica. Consider the obvious plot device of killing off a character...
[[[Warning: Spoilers for early Star Trek films, early TNG series, Voyager finale, Babylon 5 season 4 and early reimagined BSG series follow]]]
In the TNG episode Thine Own Self, Troi is training to become a command officer, and is faced with a dilemma of sending a friend to his death to save the ship in a simulated test. In the Babylon 5 episode The Long Night, Sheridan sends a whole group of Ranger ships to certain death for real, with no guarantee that his plan will even work. He asks the captain of the lead ship whether he's married, after he's given the order. The episode later watches Sheridan sitting in his office listening to the radio chatter as they all die.
In the final episodes of Voyager, we see an alternate Janeway sacrifice herself for the good of her ship. It's brief, and then we're back to celebrating. In B5, Sheridan is told long before leaving for the Shadow homeworld that if he goes there he will die, and deliberately chooses to go anyway. The story arc of the consequences of that decision runs right up to the final episode, Sleeping in Light, set 20 years after the main story. That last episode contains one of very few TV moments that still brings a tear to my eye.
In one of the early Star Trek movies, Kirk's son is killed by a Klingon. Kirk swears and makes a pained expression. In BSG, Adama's son is killed in an accident, caused by the negligence of someone very dear to him, and we see the consequences and how they both have to live with it.
[[[End of spoilers]]]
You can look at many other issues from the series the same way. In Star Trek, we have hints of underclasses. In B5, we have the area of "down below", which features prominently in several episodes, where real people suffer real problems because of real mistakes. In Star Trek, when a shuttle is in trouble we bounce it off an atmosphere and tractor beam it home. In BSG, it crashes or explodes, killing or stranding whoever was on board, even if there are major characters involved. In Star Trek, admirals are good guys or traitors. In BSG, we have the whole Pegasus story arc, where very bad stuff happens because two good people have different perspectives.
Basically, the thing that makes the Star Trek franchise different from everything else is the fact that their universe is clean and tidy and full of good people Doing The Right Thing(TM) and with a happy ending to each episode. Many other series have done Gritty Realism(TM) already, probably better than anyone in the ST world ever will. They should not go there.
If you leave a computer unprotected on the internet, and never take steps to protect it, are you acting negligently and thus liable for the damage it causes?
I think you could make a very strong argument that this should be the case, within reason.
The amount of damage done to both individuals and businesses using the 'net by morons who can't be bothered to follow basic security practices is staggering.
Booting the morons off the net is one possible solution, but given the number of morons involved and the increasing importance of Internet access for daily life, it's a bit draconian.
However, fining the morons something small but significant if their machine is being repeatedly compromised because they haven't followed basic security procedures would drive home the message that their negligence is harming others. If you want to improve the Internet, pass laws allowing such fines to be made, run a serious public information campaign for three months telling people how to "Get Secure" or something, and then hit a few thousand people with a $50 fine (or whatever your local equivalent is) if they're still ignoring the advice.
The simple fact that it *ISN'T* a competitive market. If you want the latest Robbie Williams-CD (or whatever) you have precisely *one* supplier capable of legally delivering it. This is not anywhere close to the definition of competitive market....
Sorry, I obviously wasn't clear. I agree with you: this is not a competitive market. As such, the normal rules about monopoly/oligopoly businesses and price fixing apply. A typical reaction to such markets is to impose government regulation on behalf of the consumer, with the regulator having the power to compel the businesses in advantageous positions to supply products at a fair price.
People should do this when hiring wedding-photographers too by the way, but are typically to clueless to realize, so first they pay a good salary for the production of the photos -- and then the photographer owns the resulting work (which mean only he is allowed to duplicate it -- which he will -- for a modest 1000% overcharge)
Yes, people should do that with wedding photographers, and it seems that in recent years that market has been shifting as people got wise to the old-fashioned photographers' scam.
I know not of even a single western government that outrigth buys its schoolbooks, rather than paying indirectly trough buying copies, and letting the publisher keep all control. Depressing.
It is indeed. But in this particular case, it's the fault of inept government rather than copyright law per se.
Research tends to be like that too. Public grants, private results. It's a complete disgrace if you ask me. If I pay for it with my taxes, I want the result to belong to the public.
I agree wholeheartedly, but again this is a problem with inept research funding bodies, who give up public money without demanding public benefits. If they changed their policy, a few academics might whinge a bit about the unfairness of it all, but the research would still happen because you can't challenge the policy on either an economic or an ethical basis.
Anyone want a bet that the AC parent just missed out on a good job because of a history of job hopping coming to light during recruitment? I'm sensing a lot of anger there...;-)
But others are a natural result of copyrigth. For example, monopoly: The *CORE* of copyrigth is that one person or one company owns the rigths to copy a certain work. That is a monopoly by definition. (btw a monopoly ain't illegal: *abusing* one is) Or another example: Price-fixing. Price-fixing means various companies who "should" compete with eachothers decide instead that they're better of agreeing on a higher price and all sell for this price while competing on other areas.
I don't see, however, how you can be guilty of price-fixing when by law you have a monopoly on a certain product. You don't need to cooperate with anyone to "fix" prices. You alone dictate it.
OK, but if that's the whole story, what keeps the prices of CDs so high when the marginal cost of production is relatively low? Normally in a competitive market, we would expect prices to tend towards the marginal cost as the scale increases and up-front costs are spread more thinly, yet in this industry, that has never happened on a wide scale.
A charitable person might reply that the record labels fund a lot of artists who never make it, and have to recoup those losses on the few artists who hit the big time. A more cynical person might suggest that the record labels have very one-sided deals with new artists and carry little of the failure cost themselves anyway, but since the market is effectively an oligopoly with a few big players, they can all comfortably overcharge because as long as none of them breathes too hard, the house of cards stays up.
I don't have any easy answers either (and am wary of anyone who claims to) but the core of my belief is that compensating creativity with per-copy charges is fundamentally broken in a world with zero marginal cost. Financing (in whatever form) should go straigth at the target: creation.
I don't think I really disagree with any of that, nor with your objection to one-size-fits-all, nor even with your example using school textbooks. But my question remains: if copyright is broken, how do we fix it? Certainly in the case of school textbooks, it seems odd that a government would rely on copyright when it is in a position to commission works for hire directly. The latter is pretty much always going to be a better option for those who can afford it and are effectively the entire market anyway, but those people are in a strong bargaining position to start with. The same approach doesn't help in the more general case of mass market, cheap products with expensive development costs, though. That's where the idea of copyright works best today, and that's where I've yet to see a viable alternative proposed that addresses the weaknesses in the principle of copyright while still being fair to all parties.
Maybe a single buggy application on their phones can take down their entire West Coast network,
Speaking as someone who used to do QA for mobile radio networks: yes, it is entirely possible that a single rogue application (running on thousands of handsets) can take out your data network. Bandwidth is not infinite, as those who've tried making a call or sending a text message at 12:01am on 1 January in the middle of a park with 100,000+ people in it can tell you.
My reaction, from the Engineering Dept "we clear up the mess" school of thought, was yes, they probably will upset a tiny number of customers doing this. And they really won't care at all, because one rogue app taking out their entire network for four hours while the on-call guys work out what caused the spike in traffic will upset a much greater fraction of their customers.
They will probably also kick people who unlock hardware and violate this rule summarily and/or sue someone who violates it and does serious damage, sooner or later, and frankly I won't have any sympathy for those people when it happens. As long as they're up-front about it, you're welcome to use another service instead, and use the non-standard apps in exchange for risking a loss of connectivity now and then.
Jumping ship so often also cannot be easily explained when you have a long term pattern of it. If I were interviewing someone, regardless of what they said, it would raise major red flags.
Exactly.
The other thing to consider from the original question is the benefits claimed. If this person is really getting a "promotion" each four months, then that tells you how much the promotions are worth. Similarly, while 30-40% per jump is on the high side, it seems normal in this industry for salaries to start pretty low but ramp up fast over the first 2-3 years. Without changing jobs at all, I was boosting my respectable-but-not-great starting salary by maybe 20-25% every 4-6 months for the first couple of years. That was a few years ago now, so maybe things ramp up faster now, or maybe they start lower and this guy is just catching up with the field. Either way, I doubt he's really doing as well from all those moves as he thinks he is in terms of either finances or career development.
While your arguments make sense, you're reading into my post things that I did not write. In particular, there are two big differences between compensating the originator of a work, and compensating the originator's legacy with 100% of all future profits made off that work.
And for what it's work, I'd be the last person to argue that copyright is ideal in its current form. There are a lot of abuses going on that are assisted by the current system, to be sure. But I happen to think that most of those abuses are also illegal under other, more general laws (price fixing, monopoly/oligopoly restrictions, etc.) regardless of what copyright says.
I've seen a lot of people say that copyright is broken, but so far, I've not seen anyone give a serious suggestion for a better alternative that retains the practical benefits, and still beats the problems that are genuinely caused by copyright itself rather than other abuses that are already illegal anyway. For the example in your reply to my other post, say, what alternative model would you propose that takes advantage of the low distribution costs of on-line media, yet still compensates those who worked to produce the material fairly?
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, you are simply wrong on several counts. Please go and read up on the "first past the post" electoral system, which is used in the UK. It is entirely possible for a party that didn't win the popular vote to have an absolute majority of parliamentary seats (precisely because we have more than two mainstream political parties, in fact) which is one reason so many other groups are increasingly calling for a system based on proportional representation.
Ah, idealism. How quaint.
In case you hadn't noticed, the current Labour government were elected by only about 22% of the population, thanks to our bizarre first-past-the-post system. (It was only around 1/3 of those who actually voted, and actually lost the popular vote in England, for the record.)
The current Labour government did face millions of people in the streets protesting against the war in Iraq, yet ignored them and went ahead anyway.
The current Labour government set up an on-line petitions web site to collect public feedback. The overwhelming majority of signatories in the first few days were for a single petition, opposing the proposed road charging measures, with nearly 2 million people signing up. The government's immediate reaction was dismissive, and made it clear that they have no intent to change their policy any time soon.
Please understand this: the current government is toast. They have been toast since almost the day they won that "historic third term" based on dubious election mechanics. They have no integrity, and no accountability until the next general election, which could still be several years away. Their only concern at this point is to entrench as much of their abusive policy as possible and cement Blair's "legacy" before they are kicked out. It's like having a five-year lame duck government running the show. What does a lame duck administration care about protests? There is no mechanism for the people to remove them from power early, and they have zero chance of securing a fourth victory, so protests don't matter to them at all.
Unfortunately, what we really have isn't Something Must Be Done, it's We Must Be Seen To Be Doing Something. Whether that something actually helps doesn't matter.
Thus we get idiocy like tanks parked around the outside of an airport because of a terrorist threat that has been known for many years. This is more about a few dramatic headlines than it is about protecting people's life and liberty.
Similarly we get government pushing a whole raft of new legal penalties -- ASBOs being the most infamous -- when the basic problem is that kids are now allowed to grow up with neither parents nor teachers being able to lay a finger on them for fear of being accused of child abuse, and thus we have grown a whole generation whose priorities are "me, me, me" and who have no respect for others or for any kind of authority figure.
Last week, a military veteran and opposition government spokesman lost his position in the opposition because he made a statement that there are people of various minorities in the armed forces who frankly aren't good enough but who get away with things because they play the discrimination card. What the spokesman said wasn't itself discriminatory, and was almost certainly true. Black NCOs who served under him have been appearing on national television, explaining that this guy had essentially zero tolerance for racism in his group. And yet the leader of the opposition, no doubt thinking of the political correctness of mentioning anything about racism without strongly condemning it in the same breath, fired the guy in a heartbeat.
And now, we are converging on the ultimate screw-up: prioritising government surveillance of the population and powers to disrupt people's lives without due process, which will be abused on occasion but cause many accidental mistakes, on the off chance that they trap the next terrorist attack that will kill 1% as many people as die on our roads every year.
I'd agree with much of your post, but I think there's an unwritten assumption about programming style in what you wrote: you seem to be restricting your scope to imperative languages with mutable state (talking about locks and threading, for example).
If you're working in a language that doesn't permit generally mutable state, it's much easier to use concepts of design by contract, essentially because all you have to do is check that when you've finished constructing a new value, it is valid for whatever type it has. Of course, such languages have disadvantages as well.
I suspect that a great deal of work in programming languages over the next few years is going to focus on how to identify and localise side-effects more explicitly. Pure functional languages that don't allow mutable state at all seem to be quite inefficient, and have fundamental problems for high performance applications that have yet to be resolved. Things like the monads widely used in Haskell today provide some powerful features like mutability but built on a much sounder base than many of today's imperative languages, but at the cost of horrendous syntactic overheads, which kinda spoils one of the big advantages of adopting a functional language: conciseness.
However, multi-core and multi-processor machines are fast becoming mainstream, and loose imperative programming languages have failed to provide satisfactory tools to take advantage of these architectures. I expect this to drive a general move towards more declarative rogramming styles in the industry. Meanwhile the academics, who have seen it all before, will be working on more powerful models of scoping and side effects, well beyond the glorified block scope/lambda calculus stuff that most of today's mainstream programming languages are effectively built on. Once we start getting programming languages with more powerful ways to signify when it is acceptable for what sorts of side effects (including changes in state) to occur, we'll have the sort of foundation needed for your ideas about being inside/outside an object, and compilers will have the sort of framework needed to optimise DbC checks so they're only applied when they're really needed and don't carry unfortunate performance penalties.
Sure, but so do writing explicit interfaces to modules, writing unit tests, and for that matter, writing comments. It's just a question of whether introducing that complexity at the time you write (and maintain) the code brings compensating benefits down the line.
Only a small proportion of development time is typically spent physically writing code, so these defensive programming techniques can be used pretty much on auto-pilot. The implementation costs are therefore relatively small. Given that they can prevent many bugs or save much time during later development, I would argue that they are well worth adopting, unless you already have something in place that provides similar benefits via some other means.
(This isn't to say that the parent poster's point isn't valid, or that aiming to keep your code as simple as possible is a bad thing, of course.)
They do, yet in my experience, these things are inversely correlated. This applies to all guidance/oversight roles, including business analysts, software architects, consultants, and indeed managers themselves. As I've commented here before, you can always identify a good leader by three characteristics:
The third one is usually the easiest way to identify morons. If you come across a leader in software development who places more value on reports and metrics so they can track things than they do on supporting the developers and test teams working for them, then you know you're dealing with an incompetent.
And yes, that does mean many leaders in software development organisations today are incompetent. That's why the genuinely good people are worth so much.
This is why you never negotiate with terrorists. Not that this will be much comfort to either the victims on the plane the first time it happens, or the commanders/negotiators on the ground who have to talk to the terrorists knowing what the consequences will probably be, of course.
It's a bit like the attitude of the submarine commander I saw in a TV documentary a few years ago:
Interviewer: Do you hope you'll launch a nuke one day?
Captain: Of course not. Millions of innocent people would die if we ever did that.
Interviewer: So would you do it if you were ordered to?
Captain: Absolutely, and without hesitation.
Sorry, all our pilots are dealing with other aircraft. Your plane is being held in a queue, and will be landed by the next available air traffic controller. Your hijacking is important to us. Please wait, and a hostage rescue team will be with you shortly.
Evolution, or revolution?
Since we're doing so well at mocking combat and/or Mr Bauer in this discussion, let's not forget the classic "automatic weapon that has no recoil even when unloading an entire magazine in 2 seconds", or Jack's trademark "mobile phone with infinite battery life". I never quite mastered the martial arts of Ang Lee, either. ;-)
Though on a related note, TFA is wrong about kicking/shooting someone through the air without taking off yourself. This certainly can be done under some circumstances, given that you're standing on a floor and have both upward resistance from the floor and friction on your side.
Let me preface this reply by saying that I've never personally chosen to work in London, so this is based only on the offers I've personally had but declined, and things I know friends have taken.
The short answer is that for high-tech jobs, the salaries in London can be anywhere from 30% to 100% higher than outside. Of course there are some that fall below that, and a few (mainly around the City) that pay significantly more. For example, a reasonably senior developer job worth £50k outside London would probably pull £70-80k in London.
But direct comparisons of salaries in the UK can be quite misleading, because some places pay salary and let you choose how to spend it, while others pay lower salaries but have genuinely compensating perks. And of course, the kind of business that's based in London and pays an extra £25k tends to believe your soul is included in the price. ;-)
For what it's worth, no, that kind of difference doesn't really pay the cost of London living, at least not in any of the nicer areas where house prices are astronomical these days. It does, however, easily cover the costs of a season ticket to commute in by train from one of the nice surrounding counties, as long as you're prepared to give up 1-2 hours of your life every day on top of the typical London working hours.
Meanwhile, in HR...
UPDATE candidates SET classification='unlikely' WHERE name='tempestdata';
"There's one born every minute. Mwahahahaha!"
I see what you're saying, and I don't think I disagree with it. But with the possible exception of Khan, the examples you described still come from that nice, clean, tidy universe. The good guys still win, at least the vast majority of the time. If The Best of Both Worlds had been an episode in a darker series, the final line would have been "Feeling... is irrelevant" in a monotone voice, with a slow turn of the head to show that the Borg modifications had grown back.
I'm not sure I completely agree with that. After all, Babylon 5 had a significant time travel thread running across several series. However, they used it subtly and sparingly, and it was consistent throughout. I think that was an example of a good time travel story arc in a sci-fi show, which is a long way from the one-off, inconsistent, self-referential stereotypes that featured too often in Star Trek series.
The thing is, what sets Star Trek apart from other sci-fi shows is exactly that it isn't gritty and believable. It is sci-fi in a near-perfect universe. The ships are clean inside and out, and the uniforms are pressed immaculately (unless the bridge is already on fire). When an entire starship blows up, the crew of the Enterprise take it stoically. Whole wars go on, yet the main characters are mostly unaffected either physically or emotionally. Poverty is eliminated. Medical science can cure almost anything.
Compare and contrast with any of the other major future/space sci-fi series in recent years, from Babylon 5 to Battlestar Galactica. Consider the obvious plot device of killing off a character...
[[[Warning: Spoilers for early Star Trek films, early TNG series, Voyager finale, Babylon 5 season 4 and early reimagined BSG series follow]]]
In the TNG episode Thine Own Self, Troi is training to become a command officer, and is faced with a dilemma of sending a friend to his death to save the ship in a simulated test. In the Babylon 5 episode The Long Night, Sheridan sends a whole group of Ranger ships to certain death for real, with no guarantee that his plan will even work. He asks the captain of the lead ship whether he's married, after he's given the order. The episode later watches Sheridan sitting in his office listening to the radio chatter as they all die.
In the final episodes of Voyager, we see an alternate Janeway sacrifice herself for the good of her ship. It's brief, and then we're back to celebrating. In B5, Sheridan is told long before leaving for the Shadow homeworld that if he goes there he will die, and deliberately chooses to go anyway. The story arc of the consequences of that decision runs right up to the final episode, Sleeping in Light, set 20 years after the main story. That last episode contains one of very few TV moments that still brings a tear to my eye.
In one of the early Star Trek movies, Kirk's son is killed by a Klingon. Kirk swears and makes a pained expression. In BSG, Adama's son is killed in an accident, caused by the negligence of someone very dear to him, and we see the consequences and how they both have to live with it.
[[[End of spoilers]]]
You can look at many other issues from the series the same way. In Star Trek, we have hints of underclasses. In B5, we have the area of "down below", which features prominently in several episodes, where real people suffer real problems because of real mistakes. In Star Trek, when a shuttle is in trouble we bounce it off an atmosphere and tractor beam it home. In BSG, it crashes or explodes, killing or stranding whoever was on board, even if there are major characters involved. In Star Trek, admirals are good guys or traitors. In BSG, we have the whole Pegasus story arc, where very bad stuff happens because two good people have different perspectives.
Basically, the thing that makes the Star Trek franchise different from everything else is the fact that their universe is clean and tidy and full of good people Doing The Right Thing(TM) and with a happy ending to each episode. Many other series have done Gritty Realism(TM) already, probably better than anyone in the ST world ever will. They should not go there.
I don't get it: why is the latest Enterprise the NCC-4 8 15 16 23 42?
I think you could make a very strong argument that this should be the case, within reason.
The amount of damage done to both individuals and businesses using the 'net by morons who can't be bothered to follow basic security practices is staggering.
Booting the morons off the net is one possible solution, but given the number of morons involved and the increasing importance of Internet access for daily life, it's a bit draconian.
However, fining the morons something small but significant if their machine is being repeatedly compromised because they haven't followed basic security procedures would drive home the message that their negligence is harming others. If you want to improve the Internet, pass laws allowing such fines to be made, run a serious public information campaign for three months telling people how to "Get Secure" or something, and then hit a few thousand people with a $50 fine (or whatever your local equivalent is) if they're still ignoring the advice.
Sorry, I obviously wasn't clear. I agree with you: this is not a competitive market. As such, the normal rules about monopoly/oligopoly businesses and price fixing apply. A typical reaction to such markets is to impose government regulation on behalf of the consumer, with the regulator having the power to compel the businesses in advantageous positions to supply products at a fair price.
Yes, people should do that with wedding photographers, and it seems that in recent years that market has been shifting as people got wise to the old-fashioned photographers' scam.
It is indeed. But in this particular case, it's the fault of inept government rather than copyright law per se.
I agree wholeheartedly, but again this is a problem with inept research funding bodies, who give up public money without demanding public benefits. If they changed their policy, a few academics might whinge a bit about the unfairness of it all, but the research would still happen because you can't challenge the policy on either an economic or an ethical basis.
Anyone want a bet that the AC parent just missed out on a good job because of a history of job hopping coming to light during recruitment? I'm sensing a lot of anger there... ;-)
OK, but if that's the whole story, what keeps the prices of CDs so high when the marginal cost of production is relatively low? Normally in a competitive market, we would expect prices to tend towards the marginal cost as the scale increases and up-front costs are spread more thinly, yet in this industry, that has never happened on a wide scale.
A charitable person might reply that the record labels fund a lot of artists who never make it, and have to recoup those losses on the few artists who hit the big time. A more cynical person might suggest that the record labels have very one-sided deals with new artists and carry little of the failure cost themselves anyway, but since the market is effectively an oligopoly with a few big players, they can all comfortably overcharge because as long as none of them breathes too hard, the house of cards stays up.
I don't think I really disagree with any of that, nor with your objection to one-size-fits-all, nor even with your example using school textbooks. But my question remains: if copyright is broken, how do we fix it? Certainly in the case of school textbooks, it seems odd that a government would rely on copyright when it is in a position to commission works for hire directly. The latter is pretty much always going to be a better option for those who can afford it and are effectively the entire market anyway, but those people are in a strong bargaining position to start with. The same approach doesn't help in the more general case of mass market, cheap products with expensive development costs, though. That's where the idea of copyright works best today, and that's where I've yet to see a viable alternative proposed that addresses the weaknesses in the principle of copyright while still being fair to all parties.
Speaking as someone who used to do QA for mobile radio networks: yes, it is entirely possible that a single rogue application (running on thousands of handsets) can take out your data network. Bandwidth is not infinite, as those who've tried making a call or sending a text message at 12:01am on 1 January in the middle of a park with 100,000+ people in it can tell you.
My reaction, from the Engineering Dept "we clear up the mess" school of thought, was yes, they probably will upset a tiny number of customers doing this. And they really won't care at all, because one rogue app taking out their entire network for four hours while the on-call guys work out what caused the spike in traffic will upset a much greater fraction of their customers.
They will probably also kick people who unlock hardware and violate this rule summarily and/or sue someone who violates it and does serious damage, sooner or later, and frankly I won't have any sympathy for those people when it happens. As long as they're up-front about it, you're welcome to use another service instead, and use the non-standard apps in exchange for risking a loss of connectivity now and then.
I'm pretty sure that's what they said after an incident at Chernobyl once. That story, alas, had a less happy ending.
That's the same Clippy that routinely calls home to Microsoft, right?
Sounds like a good plan to me. ;-)
Exactly.
The other thing to consider from the original question is the benefits claimed. If this person is really getting a "promotion" each four months, then that tells you how much the promotions are worth. Similarly, while 30-40% per jump is on the high side, it seems normal in this industry for salaries to start pretty low but ramp up fast over the first 2-3 years. Without changing jobs at all, I was boosting my respectable-but-not-great starting salary by maybe 20-25% every 4-6 months for the first couple of years. That was a few years ago now, so maybe things ramp up faster now, or maybe they start lower and this guy is just catching up with the field. Either way, I doubt he's really doing as well from all those moves as he thinks he is in terms of either finances or career development.
While your arguments make sense, you're reading into my post things that I did not write. In particular, there are two big differences between compensating the originator of a work, and compensating the originator's legacy with 100% of all future profits made off that work.
And for what it's work, I'd be the last person to argue that copyright is ideal in its current form. There are a lot of abuses going on that are assisted by the current system, to be sure. But I happen to think that most of those abuses are also illegal under other, more general laws (price fixing, monopoly/oligopoly restrictions, etc.) regardless of what copyright says.
I've seen a lot of people say that copyright is broken, but so far, I've not seen anyone give a serious suggestion for a better alternative that retains the practical benefits, and still beats the problems that are genuinely caused by copyright itself rather than other abuses that are already illegal anyway. For the example in your reply to my other post, say, what alternative model would you propose that takes advantage of the low distribution costs of on-line media, yet still compensates those who worked to produce the material fairly?