They're patching/potential/ vulnerabilities and removing ambiguities to make it harder to annoy/confuse people. They're doing this BEFORE it becomes a big problem.
Sure, hence the shell: vulnerability.
at least with Firefox official releases are damned frequent, not once every six to eighteen months, as with IE.
And at least with IE, my system pops up and offers to install the update for me automatically every time one is issued.
Don't get me wrong. I think Moz/FF/TB/etc. are great and use them all the time. But let's keep a little perspective, OK? When it comes to actually getting bug fixes onto people's PCs, making a point release every few days is still way off the pace compared to an automatic patching process like Windows Update.
In Australia most good IT workers are on reasonable money (not always spectacular, but reasonable) and work ordinary 9-5 hours. [...] I have friends in a global company, and when they fly to the US to work on projects over there they can't believe how little gets done in your 70 hours. I think a lot of the difference is in work-ethic.
That may be true, but there's also a much simpler explanation: saying that someone working a 70 hour week will be twice as productive as someone working a 35 hour week is simply wrong. In fact, as good management has long known, most people's performance degrades fairly dramatically not much beyond those 35 hours; you can do it for a short period in a crunch, but it's not sustainable. Moreover, the diminishing returns start to become negative after a while: someone who works 70 hour weeks regularly is likely to make so many mistakes that they become counterproductive, actually eating into other people's time to fix the problems they create.
Can anybody remember the study (from Switzerland, I think) where a company dropped its work hours to 9-3 Monday-Friday and insisted its employees did not work significant overtime? Their staff were more focussed because they had limited time to get the work done, and because of the earlier finish they weren't always worrying about collecting kids from school, getting to the shops/doctor/dentist/post office, etc. Their productivity rocketed. I saw several reports about this, around the time of the tech boom when many companies were pushing for ever longer work hours, but I can't find a citation now...
Orrin Hatch and his colleagues are working hard every day to realize your vision of a civilized society.
IIRC, Orrin Hatch and co are the massively pro-copyright people who support things like the DMCA, yes? If so, then his vision and mine aren't nearly the same: the bit about respecting the law applies to monopolies and price-fixing as well, and the **AA and chums would also be getting smacked down PDQ in my universe.
Disclaimer: I'm not from the US, so it's quite possible that I'm mixing up which of the various senators and representatives is which...
Until then, that still doesn't mean that an app should wipe a hard drive if it is under the impression that someone might be using it without authorization.
I never said it did, and in another post I said explicitly that I wouldn't go this far myself. That aside, it's interesting that so many people in this thread have immediately jumped on the "under the impression that it's being used without permission" line as some sort of moral argument, apparently ignoring the fact that such a determination would probably be correct in the vast majority of cases.
In a civilized society, consequences are doled out by a court of law, not by vigilantes their software.
In a civilised society, people would respect the law and not nick the software in the first place. And in a civilised society, the law would punish those who did and award appropriate compensation to the damaged party.
A colleague told me today that the Dalai Lama was once asked what he thought about civilisation in the west. "I think it would be a good idea," he replied.
What happened to making a fullscreen popup saying "Stop pirating my program!" or opening a browser to a page on your website telling the user they're using a hacked serial?
Probably the same thing that happened to paying the going rate for software, I'm guessing.
I certainly wouldn't go as far as this guy, and if he damages even one legit user's data by mistake he's (quite rightly) in a lot of trouble. I can understand his turn to "vigilante justice" in light of the total failure of legal means to address this sort of problem, though.
I have no sympathy for the pirates whatsoever. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
You know that most katana are more like 3-3.5' long overall, yes? OK, those extra inches might make all the difference, but either way, it's definitely what you do with it that counts...
Still, as someone with a long history of dealing with violent criminals once pointed out to me, you should be much more worried about a guy with a knife than a guy with a gun in a jurisdication that allows carrying firearms: the guy with the knife could have picked up a gun, but opted for a knife anyway, which means it's a good bet he knows how to use it. (For those not familiar with these things, knives are more dangerous weapons than any firearm out to a surprisingly large distance.) Any guy who turns up with a 35" knife is going to get my attention real fast...
Heh... We used to love people like that in martial arts classes. There's always someone who wants to be Steven Seagal, and somehow they always turn out closer to Jackie Chan, but without the coolness... }:-)
There just isn't enough overhead to pay everyone for a day or two.
Really? You work for a large defence contractor, who are essentially acting as nothing but a middleman to subcontract you to their own customers, and you think they're not taking several times your hourly rate from their customers for your services? I suspect you're being had! If the company isn't providing security for you as an employer, why don't you just do the contract work directly for the client, at the significantly higher charge-out rate the company is getting for your time?
The alternative plan -- having both sides make certain commitments beyond "I can walk out of the deal any time I like" -- can work as well.
Here in the UK, it's normal for both parties to have to give one month's notice before terminating a contract of employment (or, often, 1 week per completed year for longer-term employees). That means employees always have a reasonable chance to find a new job if they're made redundant, and it also protects employers when employees decide to move on, giving them a "margin of error" to tidy up any loose ends.
There are various exemptions to this; you can be fired without notice for gross misconduct, for example. Other than that, the restrictions are pretty much all on the employer: you have to pay redundancy if you let someone go due to "downsizing", for example. Before you object, that means we get far fewer cases of using that word as an excuse to get rid of someone who was doing a perfectly good job but who the manager happened not to like.
On balance, these rules make the whole situation much more predictable for both parties, bringing some useful stability to the employment market. Of course, employers are always free to bring in contractors and not have these obligations; as I pointed out in another post, the going rate for that is usually around 2.5x the employee's salary as a minimum, since the contractor will have to look out for themselves in all the exceptional cases.
If you want "don't work, don't pay" terms, you're welcome to them. I believe you'll find contractors' rates start at roughly 2.5x the equivalent salaried worker's. That's because contractors have to cover their own days off, health insurance, etc. etc.
If you want to pay the cheaper rate, accept that you're responsible for basics like sick/vacation pay, accept that it is irresponsible to require employees to attend under these circumstances, and pay up.
The Boss you screw over today could be interviewing you in 5 years at some other company.
Perhaps more significantly, your boss's boss or peer, who had nothing against you until they heard from your boss how you screwed him, could be interviewing you later on somewhere else.
Never burn bridges, ever. It's unprofessional, and your professional reputation is worth more than any temporary smugness you might achieve.
Yes, when libraries change name it is an obvious reason to go to another library.
Yeah, I used to browse Slashdot with this thing called Firebird, but then they changed its name, so I thought I'd better switch to this other thing called IE. Thanks for the advice -- it's good to know I made the right call on that one.
I'm not going to get into an extended debate about speeding here, but since you're offering the standard and ill-informed counter-argument, I'll suggest to you the reasons why the argument does not hold for long.
Well I think people should stick to the damn speed limit and not make stupid excuses like "Oh the government is just trying to get more money out of us" (Don't break the law then!)
That argument ignores the fact that the law has been changed, dramatically, and not to improve road safety. This is why it has lost the respect of the motoring public. For example, the government in the UK reduced the legal speed limit from 70 to 50mph for several miles along a major trunk road around the capital city. At the same time, they installed dozens of speed cameras, many of them carefully concealed behind road signs, to enforce the new limits. The result was a massive increase in fines on that stretch of road, along with many drivers travelling at speeds that were perfectly legal yesterday being issued with penalty points today. Would you like to guess what happened to the accident figures after those cameras went in, though?
"It's going slowly that's dangerous!" (It's a fact that the faster you go the less time you have to react to unexpected events on the road).
It's also a fact that when drivers are forced to drive absurdly slowly because someone setting the limit has paranoia, then driver concentration is dramatically reduced, which in turn dramatically increases the likelihood of an accident in the first place. This is the problem with giving local authorities the ability to set their own limits: central government guidelines based on science and research are frequently ignored in favour of local political expediency, resulting in blanket 20mph limits on roads that should be 30 because the locals (who quite happily do 30 in everyone else's backyard) asked for it. Motorways -- our safest roads -- are stuck at a limit they were given decades ago, in spite of recent advances in car design and driver training; the accidents are often caused by idiots driving about 2cm from the vehicle in front or changing lanes incorrectly, not because of the high speed itself, yet "speed kills" is all we hear from the government puppies.
I just hate idiotic drivers who think it's alright for them to drive fast because they're such leet drivers with great skillz and it's everyone else that's to blame.
We all hate idiotic drivers who think they're better than they really are and assume they can therefore exceed all speed limits without consequences. The point here is that an awful lot of people who are better informed than the government disagree with them. Motoring groups have done their own studies, which don't always agree with the government's research lab. Statisticians have looked at the government's conclusions from their figures, and flown 747s through the holes in the arguments. The government made up a TV ad intended to show the difference that driving at 35mph makes over driving at 30mph; what it actually showed was a car driven at 30mph stopping well short of a child stepping into the road, while a car that would have been illegal to have on the road because its brakes didn't work correctly skidded way further down the road and hit the child. There is a large number of police advanced drivers who disagree with the way cameras are used instead of real traffic police (whose numbers have been reduced by something like 2/3 in recent years, leading to increases in the numbers of drivers dangerous through drinks, drugs, lack of concentration, and various other categories all of which contribute to more accidents than excessive speed). Even the most senior police officer in the land has stated bluntly that speed cameras should be used to increase road safety and not to raise revenue.
So, before you go around advocating sticking to speed limits and admonishing those who don't, you might like to take a step back and consider whether those limits are actually set with road safety in mind at all.
Only mentioned it because I've been using mail.yahoo.com from Mozilla for years without any problems.
Fair enough; maybe Yahoo's own webmail is better than the abhorrent monstrosity that BT Yahoo produced after their merger/takeover/whatever. My experience of Yahoo generally, as a long-standing Mozilla-then-Firefox user, has not been positive...
I think you'd probably get the best stats from a general interest news site or perhaps mail.yahoo.com.
You might get more representative samples from a company who gives a **** about web standards and doesn't write crappy code that doesn't work unless you're using IE. Numerous Yahoo-related web sites, including BT Yahoo's webmail, fall/fell into that category for a very long time.
Ironically, I've just been told my happy little Firefox/Thunderbird combo is under threat at work. I'll probably have to give up Thunderbird for Outlook so I can use Exchange Server, and Firefox "may not be compatible with the corporate intranet". That's what happens when you get a small company full of smart people bought out by an American megacorp.:-(
Ok on the WMD but what do you mean about the "Speed Kills" campaign?
It's a standard example of a government campaign that warps the truth. It isn't speed that kills; if higher speeds were automatically more dangerous, our motorways wouldn't be the safest roads in the land. What's dangerous is the inappropriate use of speed, driving too fast for the conditions.
The relevance here is that the "Speed Kills" mantra is used by government spin doctors to justify vast numbers of revenue-generating speed cameras, and dramatically reducing the speed limit on the roads with those cameras, often in places with little or no accident history and rarely in the places where they'd really make a difference.
And of course, when the government controls all the cameras, they can conveniently be switched off for maintenance when, say, a few hundred people are illegally held for several hours by the police on May Day. Then again, this is the government who brought you Iraq's WMD and the "Speed Kills" compaign, and which now wants to set up a national database of terrorist suspec^W^Wbiometric identity information, so of course we should trust them.
In some specific cases, cameras do work well. The congestion charging example wasn't bad, although even in that case, there have already been some quite spectacular abuses. I'd say the cameras in police traffic cars are a better example.
However, those advocating widespread use of cameras should really check the facts. We also have town centre cameras that just push crime into harder-to-police outlying distracts, without actually lowering it. We have speed cameras, which have a far from conclusive track record in increasing road safety but have raised a fortune for government and taken hundreds of thousands off the roads, with numerous local authority idiots cynically repeating the party line in spite of all the informed criticism. We have people being convicted on CCTV "camera evidence" where you can barely even see their faces. Hell, we have a small but significant number of camera operators who turn the CCTV units around to watch girls getting changed in their bedrooms.
The problem with surveillance cameras, like big national databases, is that the system is never perfect. Somehow it never quite brings the benefits it ought to, and yet the abuses (or genuine mistakes) are often widespread, and there is rarely an adequate mechanism in place to protect you if you are unfortunate enough to become a victim. All the while it costs the tax-payer a fortune and runs all the usual civil liberties risks. If Big Brother is watching us, it's about time Big Mother and Father gave him a spanking and told him to behave like a mature adult.
The last election was close enough in Florida that the measurement was down in the noise, and it was hard to get an accurate reading.
Of course, in a system as... interesting... as the US electoral college system, where winner takes all but it's an average of averages, any result too close to call is basically a random number generator. You might as well flip a coin rather than go to the hassle of a recount, because either way you're discarding the beliefs of a vast number of people before you reach the big decision rather than during it.
The US has fairly clear separations between local and national government, unlike (for example) here in the UK where MPs represent both local interests and national parties. In that context, I've never understood the justification for using an average-of-averages voting mechanism to elect the president. Am I missing some obvious (to US citizens, maybe?) benefit of this, or is it just one of those obscure rules like the UK still using first-past-the-post years eons after its basic flaws were identified?
At what point does voter intent become unclear enough to invalidate a ballot?
The only thing you can really do in a paper ballot is say that any box where you can measure a mark at least x mm long anywhere in it counts. Any paper with exactly one box so marked counts for the candidate whose box was marked; any other paper is invalid.
You might need some objective definition of how dark a mark has to be along that length, to avoid any petty arguments about things which clearly weren't meant to be marks but where the paper isn't perfectly white; everyone else would say "it's obvious", but nothing's obvious when a bitter opponent is challenging you on technicalities in a close election.
This will no doubt result in some "obvious" votes being discounted, but consider that such "errors" are likely to be random, and will therefore only disadvantage candidates in proportion to the number of correct votes they would receive, and not actually change the order (which is what matters in the UK) or, for that matter, the relative proportion of the votes going to each candidate (which is what matters under proportional representation).
I think the important thing in terms of large (or even not so large) development teams is to have a strong underlying design, and development leads who make sure it's maintained and doesn't decay into special cases over time. OO can be a useful strategy for achieving this, but certainly isn't the only one. You can achieve just the same effect with procedural or functional programming, for example, or any combination of the three ideas, provided that all the developers have a basic understanding of the design and the leads are there to back them up.
BTW, I went through college when Java was being forced into the mainstream as well, but I'd still rather work in a language where the concept of null pointer exceptions simply isn't necessary.:-)
A function object is simply equivalent to an object with a single method, no?
In a sense, but it's usually used to mean an object that can be treated like a function, right up to calling it with function notation. It thus becomes a "function with a memory", which can be customised at run-time, in the same sense that closures allow this. It's a step towards the power of full first-order functions, without requiring all the other aspects of functional programming and still fitting in neatly with a principally OO language.
The technique you describe using interfaces is fairly isomorphic to using function pointers, I agree, albeit with a rather more cumbersome syntax IMHO. In that respect, interfaces (or pointers to base classes in C++) do indeed replace many uses of a function pointer in C. That's still some way short of replacing function objects, however, which was all I was saying.
The thing I never understand about your argument is why, in spite of all the places in the world that do not respect intellectual property laws like ours, and of all the environments right here where the usual rules don't get used in the usual way (FOSS being an obvious example), there are no good examples of its validity.
The greatest technical innovators in the world -- whether you look at Germany, Japan, the US, the UK, or a dozen others -- all use something pretty directly equivalent to both copyright and patents. The world of FOSS demonstrates an amazing ability to clone the efforts of closed source, commercial developments supported by those IP laws, but very little ability thus far to truly innovate and provide leading products that are clearly different to and better than the status quo.
Can you identify a single, compelling example in recent history of an area where some form of content generation has produced good products, making a living wage for a significant number of its craftsmen/women as a result, and yet not relied on copyright and/or patents at all to do so?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, hence the shell: vulnerability.
And at least with IE, my system pops up and offers to install the update for me automatically every time one is issued.
Don't get me wrong. I think Moz/FF/TB/etc. are great and use them all the time. But let's keep a little perspective, OK? When it comes to actually getting bug fixes onto people's PCs, making a point release every few days is still way off the pace compared to an automatic patching process like Windows Update.
That may be true, but there's also a much simpler explanation: saying that someone working a 70 hour week will be twice as productive as someone working a 35 hour week is simply wrong. In fact, as good management has long known, most people's performance degrades fairly dramatically not much beyond those 35 hours; you can do it for a short period in a crunch, but it's not sustainable. Moreover, the diminishing returns start to become negative after a while: someone who works 70 hour weeks regularly is likely to make so many mistakes that they become counterproductive, actually eating into other people's time to fix the problems they create.
Can anybody remember the study (from Switzerland, I think) where a company dropped its work hours to 9-3 Monday-Friday and insisted its employees did not work significant overtime? Their staff were more focussed because they had limited time to get the work done, and because of the earlier finish they weren't always worrying about collecting kids from school, getting to the shops/doctor/dentist/post office, etc. Their productivity rocketed. I saw several reports about this, around the time of the tech boom when many companies were pushing for ever longer work hours, but I can't find a citation now...
At the risk of "me-tooing", I'll second that, having noticed the same effect recently but not thought to bookmark the offending page at the time.
IIRC, Orrin Hatch and co are the massively pro-copyright people who support things like the DMCA, yes? If so, then his vision and mine aren't nearly the same: the bit about respecting the law applies to monopolies and price-fixing as well, and the **AA and chums would also be getting smacked down PDQ in my universe.
Disclaimer: I'm not from the US, so it's quite possible that I'm mixing up which of the various senators and representatives is which...
I never said it did, and in another post I said explicitly that I wouldn't go this far myself. That aside, it's interesting that so many people in this thread have immediately jumped on the "under the impression that it's being used without permission" line as some sort of moral argument, apparently ignoring the fact that such a determination would probably be correct in the vast majority of cases.
In a civilised society, people would respect the law and not nick the software in the first place. And in a civilised society, the law would punish those who did and award appropriate compensation to the damaged party.
A colleague told me today that the Dalai Lama was once asked what he thought about civilisation in the west. "I think it would be a good idea," he replied.
Probably the same thing that happened to paying the going rate for software, I'm guessing.
I certainly wouldn't go as far as this guy, and if he damages even one legit user's data by mistake he's (quite rightly) in a lot of trouble. I can understand his turn to "vigilante justice" in light of the total failure of legal means to address this sort of problem, though.
I have no sympathy for the pirates whatsoever. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
You know that most katana are more like 3-3.5' long overall, yes? OK, those extra inches might make all the difference, but either way, it's definitely what you do with it that counts...
Still, as someone with a long history of dealing with violent criminals once pointed out to me, you should be much more worried about a guy with a knife than a guy with a gun in a jurisdication that allows carrying firearms: the guy with the knife could have picked up a gun, but opted for a knife anyway, which means it's a good bet he knows how to use it. (For those not familiar with these things, knives are more dangerous weapons than any firearm out to a surprisingly large distance.) Any guy who turns up with a 35" knife is going to get my attention real fast...
Heh... We used to love people like that in martial arts classes. There's always someone who wants to be Steven Seagal, and somehow they always turn out closer to Jackie Chan, but without the coolness... }:-)
Really? You work for a large defence contractor, who are essentially acting as nothing but a middleman to subcontract you to their own customers, and you think they're not taking several times your hourly rate from their customers for your services? I suspect you're being had! If the company isn't providing security for you as an employer, why don't you just do the contract work directly for the client, at the significantly higher charge-out rate the company is getting for your time?
The alternative plan -- having both sides make certain commitments beyond "I can walk out of the deal any time I like" -- can work as well.
Here in the UK, it's normal for both parties to have to give one month's notice before terminating a contract of employment (or, often, 1 week per completed year for longer-term employees). That means employees always have a reasonable chance to find a new job if they're made redundant, and it also protects employers when employees decide to move on, giving them a "margin of error" to tidy up any loose ends.
There are various exemptions to this; you can be fired without notice for gross misconduct, for example. Other than that, the restrictions are pretty much all on the employer: you have to pay redundancy if you let someone go due to "downsizing", for example. Before you object, that means we get far fewer cases of using that word as an excuse to get rid of someone who was doing a perfectly good job but who the manager happened not to like.
On balance, these rules make the whole situation much more predictable for both parties, bringing some useful stability to the employment market. Of course, employers are always free to bring in contractors and not have these obligations; as I pointed out in another post, the going rate for that is usually around 2.5x the employee's salary as a minimum, since the contractor will have to look out for themselves in all the exceptional cases.
(Score: -5, Missing The Point)
If you want "don't work, don't pay" terms, you're welcome to them. I believe you'll find contractors' rates start at roughly 2.5x the equivalent salaried worker's. That's because contractors have to cover their own days off, health insurance, etc. etc.
If you want to pay the cheaper rate, accept that you're responsible for basics like sick/vacation pay, accept that it is irresponsible to require employees to attend under these circumstances, and pay up.
Perhaps more significantly, your boss's boss or peer, who had nothing against you until they heard from your boss how you screwed him, could be interviewing you later on somewhere else.
Never burn bridges, ever. It's unprofessional, and your professional reputation is worth more than any temporary smugness you might achieve.
Yeah, I used to browse Slashdot with this thing called Firebird, but then they changed its name, so I thought I'd better switch to this other thing called IE. Thanks for the advice -- it's good to know I made the right call on that one.
I'm not going to get into an extended debate about speeding here, but since you're offering the standard and ill-informed counter-argument, I'll suggest to you the reasons why the argument does not hold for long.
That argument ignores the fact that the law has been changed, dramatically, and not to improve road safety. This is why it has lost the respect of the motoring public. For example, the government in the UK reduced the legal speed limit from 70 to 50mph for several miles along a major trunk road around the capital city. At the same time, they installed dozens of speed cameras, many of them carefully concealed behind road signs, to enforce the new limits. The result was a massive increase in fines on that stretch of road, along with many drivers travelling at speeds that were perfectly legal yesterday being issued with penalty points today. Would you like to guess what happened to the accident figures after those cameras went in, though?
It's also a fact that when drivers are forced to drive absurdly slowly because someone setting the limit has paranoia, then driver concentration is dramatically reduced, which in turn dramatically increases the likelihood of an accident in the first place. This is the problem with giving local authorities the ability to set their own limits: central government guidelines based on science and research are frequently ignored in favour of local political expediency, resulting in blanket 20mph limits on roads that should be 30 because the locals (who quite happily do 30 in everyone else's backyard) asked for it. Motorways -- our safest roads -- are stuck at a limit they were given decades ago, in spite of recent advances in car design and driver training; the accidents are often caused by idiots driving about 2cm from the vehicle in front or changing lanes incorrectly, not because of the high speed itself, yet "speed kills" is all we hear from the government puppies.
We all hate idiotic drivers who think they're better than they really are and assume they can therefore exceed all speed limits without consequences. The point here is that an awful lot of people who are better informed than the government disagree with them. Motoring groups have done their own studies, which don't always agree with the government's research lab. Statisticians have looked at the government's conclusions from their figures, and flown 747s through the holes in the arguments. The government made up a TV ad intended to show the difference that driving at 35mph makes over driving at 30mph; what it actually showed was a car driven at 30mph stopping well short of a child stepping into the road, while a car that would have been illegal to have on the road because its brakes didn't work correctly skidded way further down the road and hit the child. There is a large number of police advanced drivers who disagree with the way cameras are used instead of real traffic police (whose numbers have been reduced by something like 2/3 in recent years, leading to increases in the numbers of drivers dangerous through drinks, drugs, lack of concentration, and various other categories all of which contribute to more accidents than excessive speed). Even the most senior police officer in the land has stated bluntly that speed cameras should be used to increase road safety and not to raise revenue.
So, before you go around advocating sticking to speed limits and admonishing those who don't, you might like to take a step back and consider whether those limits are actually set with road safety in mind at all.
Fair enough; maybe Yahoo's own webmail is better than the abhorrent monstrosity that BT Yahoo produced after their merger/takeover/whatever. My experience of Yahoo generally, as a long-standing Mozilla-then-Firefox user, has not been positive...
You might get more representative samples from a company who gives a **** about web standards and doesn't write crappy code that doesn't work unless you're using IE. Numerous Yahoo-related web sites, including BT Yahoo's webmail, fall/fell into that category for a very long time.
Ironically, I've just been told my happy little Firefox/Thunderbird combo is under threat at work. I'll probably have to give up Thunderbird for Outlook so I can use Exchange Server, and Firefox "may not be compatible with the corporate intranet". That's what happens when you get a small company full of smart people bought out by an American megacorp. :-(
It's a standard example of a government campaign that warps the truth. It isn't speed that kills; if higher speeds were automatically more dangerous, our motorways wouldn't be the safest roads in the land. What's dangerous is the inappropriate use of speed, driving too fast for the conditions.
The relevance here is that the "Speed Kills" mantra is used by government spin doctors to justify vast numbers of revenue-generating speed cameras, and dramatically reducing the speed limit on the roads with those cameras, often in places with little or no accident history and rarely in the places where they'd really make a difference.
And of course, when the government controls all the cameras, they can conveniently be switched off for maintenance when, say, a few hundred people are illegally held for several hours by the police on May Day. Then again, this is the government who brought you Iraq's WMD and the "Speed Kills" compaign, and which now wants to set up a national database of terrorist suspec^W^Wbiometric identity information, so of course we should trust them.
In some specific cases, cameras do work well. The congestion charging example wasn't bad, although even in that case, there have already been some quite spectacular abuses. I'd say the cameras in police traffic cars are a better example.
However, those advocating widespread use of cameras should really check the facts. We also have town centre cameras that just push crime into harder-to-police outlying distracts, without actually lowering it. We have speed cameras, which have a far from conclusive track record in increasing road safety but have raised a fortune for government and taken hundreds of thousands off the roads, with numerous local authority idiots cynically repeating the party line in spite of all the informed criticism. We have people being convicted on CCTV "camera evidence" where you can barely even see their faces. Hell, we have a small but significant number of camera operators who turn the CCTV units around to watch girls getting changed in their bedrooms.
The problem with surveillance cameras, like big national databases, is that the system is never perfect. Somehow it never quite brings the benefits it ought to, and yet the abuses (or genuine mistakes) are often widespread, and there is rarely an adequate mechanism in place to protect you if you are unfortunate enough to become a victim. All the while it costs the tax-payer a fortune and runs all the usual civil liberties risks. If Big Brother is watching us, it's about time Big Mother and Father gave him a spanking and told him to behave like a mature adult.
It's worse than that, I'm afraid: some of them are Dilbert's co-workers.
Of course, in a system as... interesting... as the US electoral college system, where winner takes all but it's an average of averages, any result too close to call is basically a random number generator. You might as well flip a coin rather than go to the hassle of a recount, because either way you're discarding the beliefs of a vast number of people before you reach the big decision rather than during it.
The US has fairly clear separations between local and national government, unlike (for example) here in the UK where MPs represent both local interests and national parties. In that context, I've never understood the justification for using an average-of-averages voting mechanism to elect the president. Am I missing some obvious (to US citizens, maybe?) benefit of this, or is it just one of those obscure rules like the UK still using first-past-the-post years eons after its basic flaws were identified?
The only thing you can really do in a paper ballot is say that any box where you can measure a mark at least x mm long anywhere in it counts. Any paper with exactly one box so marked counts for the candidate whose box was marked; any other paper is invalid.
You might need some objective definition of how dark a mark has to be along that length, to avoid any petty arguments about things which clearly weren't meant to be marks but where the paper isn't perfectly white; everyone else would say "it's obvious", but nothing's obvious when a bitter opponent is challenging you on technicalities in a close election.
This will no doubt result in some "obvious" votes being discounted, but consider that such "errors" are likely to be random, and will therefore only disadvantage candidates in proportion to the number of correct votes they would receive, and not actually change the order (which is what matters in the UK) or, for that matter, the relative proportion of the votes going to each candidate (which is what matters under proportional representation).
I think the important thing in terms of large (or even not so large) development teams is to have a strong underlying design, and development leads who make sure it's maintained and doesn't decay into special cases over time. OO can be a useful strategy for achieving this, but certainly isn't the only one. You can achieve just the same effect with procedural or functional programming, for example, or any combination of the three ideas, provided that all the developers have a basic understanding of the design and the leads are there to back them up.
BTW, I went through college when Java was being forced into the mainstream as well, but I'd still rather work in a language where the concept of null pointer exceptions simply isn't necessary. :-)
In a sense, but it's usually used to mean an object that can be treated like a function, right up to calling it with function notation. It thus becomes a "function with a memory", which can be customised at run-time, in the same sense that closures allow this. It's a step towards the power of full first-order functions, without requiring all the other aspects of functional programming and still fitting in neatly with a principally OO language.
The technique you describe using interfaces is fairly isomorphic to using function pointers, I agree, albeit with a rather more cumbersome syntax IMHO. In that respect, interfaces (or pointers to base classes in C++) do indeed replace many uses of a function pointer in C. That's still some way short of replacing function objects, however, which was all I was saying.
The thing I never understand about your argument is why, in spite of all the places in the world that do not respect intellectual property laws like ours, and of all the environments right here where the usual rules don't get used in the usual way (FOSS being an obvious example), there are no good examples of its validity.
The greatest technical innovators in the world -- whether you look at Germany, Japan, the US, the UK, or a dozen others -- all use something pretty directly equivalent to both copyright and patents. The world of FOSS demonstrates an amazing ability to clone the efforts of closed source, commercial developments supported by those IP laws, but very little ability thus far to truly innovate and provide leading products that are clearly different to and better than the status quo.
Can you identify a single, compelling example in recent history of an area where some form of content generation has produced good products, making a living wage for a significant number of its craftsmen/women as a result, and yet not relied on copyright and/or patents at all to do so?