It's not oil. Oil is energy. But this is just elements. You can recycle them, if you have energy to do that. But you can't recycle oil without using more energy that you can gain from it.
I don't think I contradict myself. People opt for lower quality because it's hard to recognize quality, due to information asymmetry between producers and consumers. In fact, to recognize quality is hard even if there is complete information, but in reality, companies are actively trying to increase the asymmetry.
Here's a radical idea - lets force producers (or sellers) to make every information they have available about a product (i.e. for example testing data, source code, blueprints, production costs) available for the consumer. It would be illegal refuse to provide such data or lie. I believe that in such a system, people would choose quality.
I am tired of all that "people are stupid and don't want quality" and "worse is better" crap. This is not true at all.
People want quality products that last, unless they are overpriced. The problem is, it's much harder to recognize quality, especially in modern products, thus there is no market pressure for it. But there is a market pressure from the investor's end to produce as much things as possible.
Ultimately, it's an issue of asymmetric information and trust. Consider buying a computer. Say, you have a 2 year warranty period in EU. You have two choices - one for 200$, and the other for 300$, but the producer claims it will last at least 3 years (but the warranty is still 2 years). So, which one are you going to choose? The cheaper one of course. Because you have no insurance that the other will not last say 2.5 year, in which case you would be screwed. This is a classic situation on a market with asymmetric information, as described in George Akerlof's Market for Lemons.
Furthermore, the companies want to sell as much product as they can. Company building products to last 20 years (with warranty, so assume you can trust this deal) would be at a disadvantage to company making products to last 5 years, because the profits of the latter would be higher (it costs more to produce 4 products than 1, so with the same margin, company can make more profit). In history, companies (mostly found by idealistic engineers) believed that building quality product is better, but in the 70s the MBA types they installed instead realized they are wrong, so that's why it went downhill ever since. Even if you would try to switch companies, if all of them are doing that, it gets useful.
It's just normal capitalism in play, but most people didn't know the rules at the beginning, and now that large companies started to optimize by the rules, it's just not fun anymore.
Every person outsourced to another country to work is a drain on our economy. These people are not buying goods made in America, they're buying Japanese and Chinese or local goods.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. The richest areas are those that spend most money. If a company's shareholders are in America, they spend their money there. In fact, if a company hires a foreign worker, it is a disadvantage for the foreign country, because part of the profit now gets into America (the owners of the company), and will not stay in the foreign country.
You perceive outsourcing as a problem, but it's really about distribution of wealth. Instead you should perceive as a problem that the America itself gets divided and the wealth gets distributed more unevenly. But on the country level, America _profits_ from outsourcing, because it allows you to use cheaper workforce to provide all the services than you would have to otherwise.
Interesting is that they have a cultural problem with organ donation, but have no cultural problem with using organs of the prisoners. What a hypocrisy.
I had a good example of goto in my code recently. It was searching through linear hash table. So you start in the middle of the table, and when you are at the end, you want to restart from the beginning.
So I set up a guard pointer (first at the end of table), then go through the table looking for my element (until I get to the guard pointer), at the end, if the current pointer equals guard pointer (I haven't found the element), I goto to the loop again, but this time the guard is set to the original starting point.
I challenge you to rewrite this without goto and without duplication of the search loop.
I don't dispute the fact that IBM innovates (and unlike many other companies, even pays for lot of basic research). But I disagree with use of Nobel prize as a metric - it has at least a 20 years lag after the discovery is made.
Actually, most economic theories can be tested and falsified. The real problem is that neoclassical economics is not fading out of favor even though it has been extensively disproven. Look up Steve Keen for instance.
This problem can be correctly addressed by stable versions. After some time, the new material added/deleted on the development page would get merged to the stable page. This would ensure no significant information loss due to vandalism. Outside of the merge process, the stable versions would be monitored by robots and automatically reverted (or protected).
Also, knowing how many people (or which) watches a given page would help. It would allow administrators to better allocate resources to pages that are not watched frequently.
Actually (as a citizen of Czech Republic, former Eastern block state), I think there were several factors:
1. Communist regime actively encouraged smart people to work in mathematics, technology and natural science fields. When I was in 6th grade, I went to several hobby groups (organized by the local communist youth organization) - one dealing with natural sciences and second dealing with electronics. While such clubs exist today too, the participation is not so much enforced on the parents.
2. Today, you can buy almost anything in the shop. Back then, you couldn't. It was natural for people to know how to repair various things, and experimentation with electronics (and later computers) was very common among young people.
3. Life in communist regime was _extremely_ boring. Doing any technical hobby was a way to escape this boring reality.
Having a technical hobby is much easier now, because you have specialized shops that will sell you anything you need (which weren't the case at all back then), but much less people actually do it (there is also so much of other stuff to do to enjoy life).
By the way, I know Martin Mares (one of the frequent winners) personally from the high school - boy, he was and is smart! He could program in assembler like someone would write a letter, and talk to me about differential equations in the meantime. Still, I don't think IOI is so difficult as IOM, so the comparison with Terence Tao doesn't really hold water that well.
This is currently not a problem because copyright terms are so long, so there is no useful closed-source or GPL software which has fallen into public domain yet. But it may eventually became a problem regardless whether or not we shorten the term of copyrights.
I am not necessary assuming venality - they may very well withhold information out of fear of reprisal of someone who holds power over them. I would even say this is by far the most common reason, and yet, the root there is power, not stupidity.
This is bullshit. It's not about stupidity at all, it's about control. People withhold information from other people in order to control them, not because they are stupid.
It shows that if you allow free flow of information (and more democracy and less autocracy), ordinary people (which you denounce by calling them stupid) become much more productive and are able to make much better decisions.
Low UID doesn't make him right. The GP is correct - MVS had preemptive multitasking, had processes (called address spaces) and threads (called tasks). Look it up in Wikipedia.
I am a (young) mainframe programmer, so unlike the user you refer to I know what I am talking about.
But even if the country like US has trade surplus in IP, the bilance the GP talks about is zero, because Americans are probably not getting their haircut in Sweden. So the US doesn't have any real motivation to enforce IP protection laws more either.
I disagree. It's computers. We can program them to do anything. The question is, why there should be any boring or drone jobs at all?
I would boldly propose that if you work in computer programming, and your job is boring, you are doing something wrong. You should work on how to automate the boring stuff, and I guarantee it suddenly won't be so boring. And if you can't for some reason, then it's outside of your control (for example, management problem). But in principle, work with computers never has to be boring, because you can always automate the menial parts of it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not oil. Oil is energy. But this is just elements. You can recycle them, if you have energy to do that. But you can't recycle oil without using more energy that you can gain from it.
I don't think I contradict myself. People opt for lower quality because it's hard to recognize quality, due to information asymmetry between producers and consumers. In fact, to recognize quality is hard even if there is complete information, but in reality, companies are actively trying to increase the asymmetry.
Here's a radical idea - lets force producers (or sellers) to make every information they have available about a product (i.e. for example testing data, source code, blueprints, production costs) available for the consumer. It would be illegal refuse to provide such data or lie. I believe that in such a system, people would choose quality.
I am tired of all that "people are stupid and don't want quality" and "worse is better" crap. This is not true at all.
People want quality products that last, unless they are overpriced. The problem is, it's much harder to recognize quality, especially in modern products, thus there is no market pressure for it. But there is a market pressure from the investor's end to produce as much things as possible.
Ultimately, it's an issue of asymmetric information and trust. Consider buying a computer. Say, you have a 2 year warranty period in EU. You have two choices - one for 200$, and the other for 300$, but the producer claims it will last at least 3 years (but the warranty is still 2 years). So, which one are you going to choose? The cheaper one of course. Because you have no insurance that the other will not last say 2.5 year, in which case you would be screwed. This is a classic situation on a market with asymmetric information, as described in George Akerlof's Market for Lemons.
Furthermore, the companies want to sell as much product as they can. Company building products to last 20 years (with warranty, so assume you can trust this deal) would be at a disadvantage to company making products to last 5 years, because the profits of the latter would be higher (it costs more to produce 4 products than 1, so with the same margin, company can make more profit). In history, companies (mostly found by idealistic engineers) believed that building quality product is better, but in the 70s the MBA types they installed instead realized they are wrong, so that's why it went downhill ever since. Even if you would try to switch companies, if all of them are doing that, it gets useful.
It's just normal capitalism in play, but most people didn't know the rules at the beginning, and now that large companies started to optimize by the rules, it's just not fun anymore.
Every person outsourced to another country to work is a drain on our economy. These people are not buying goods made in America, they're buying Japanese and Chinese or local goods.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. The richest areas are those that spend most money. If a company's shareholders are in America, they spend their money there. In fact, if a company hires a foreign worker, it is a disadvantage for the foreign country, because part of the profit now gets into America (the owners of the company), and will not stay in the foreign country.
You perceive outsourcing as a problem, but it's really about distribution of wealth. Instead you should perceive as a problem that the America itself gets divided and the wealth gets distributed more unevenly. But on the country level, America _profits_ from outsourcing, because it allows you to use cheaper workforce to provide all the services than you would have to otherwise.
Interesting is that they have a cultural problem with organ donation, but have no cultural problem with using organs of the prisoners. What a hypocrisy.
Please see above my example. Sometimes not to use goto is impossible if you also want to avoid duplication of the code.
And of course, I am aware of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_program_theorem. But seriously, I challenge you to write my example more succintly without goto.
I had a good example of goto in my code recently. It was searching through linear hash table. So you start in the middle of the table, and when you are at the end, you want to restart from the beginning.
So I set up a guard pointer (first at the end of table), then go through the table looking for my element (until I get to the guard pointer), at the end, if the current pointer equals guard pointer (I haven't found the element), I goto to the loop again, but this time the guard is set to the original starting point.
I challenge you to rewrite this without goto and without duplication of the search loop.
I don't dispute the fact that IBM innovates (and unlike many other companies, even pays for lot of basic research). But I disagree with use of Nobel prize as a metric - it has at least a 20 years lag after the discovery is made.
Actually, most economic theories can be tested and falsified. The real problem is that neoclassical economics is not fading out of favor even though it has been extensively disproven. Look up Steve Keen for instance.
Also, about that "how could they have evolved" argument: Most Americans don't believe in evolution, so this critique is moot.
You probably are a fanatic if you dedicate something to Ayn Rand.
They are free to write a reader macro.
This problem can be correctly addressed by stable versions. After some time, the new material added/deleted on the development page would get merged to the stable page. This would ensure no significant information loss due to vandalism. Outside of the merge process, the stable versions would be monitored by robots and automatically reverted (or protected).
Also, knowing how many people (or which) watches a given page would help. It would allow administrators to better allocate resources to pages that are not watched frequently.
In other words, American kids are smart enough not to be too smart.
Actually (as a citizen of Czech Republic, former Eastern block state), I think there were several factors:
1. Communist regime actively encouraged smart people to work in mathematics, technology and natural science fields. When I was in 6th grade, I went to several hobby groups (organized by the local communist youth organization) - one dealing with natural sciences and second dealing with electronics. While such clubs exist today too, the participation is not so much enforced on the parents.
2. Today, you can buy almost anything in the shop. Back then, you couldn't. It was natural for people to know how to repair various things, and experimentation with electronics (and later computers) was very common among young people.
3. Life in communist regime was _extremely_ boring. Doing any technical hobby was a way to escape this boring reality.
Having a technical hobby is much easier now, because you have specialized shops that will sell you anything you need (which weren't the case at all back then), but much less people actually do it (there is also so much of other stuff to do to enjoy life).
By the way, I know Martin Mares (one of the frequent winners) personally from the high school - boy, he was and is smart! He could program in assembler like someone would write a letter, and talk to me about differential equations in the meantime. Still, I don't think IOI is so difficult as IOM, so the comparison with Terence Tao doesn't really hold water that well.
there is a reason that the modern state of Germany has outlawed referendums simply because Hitler used a public vote to dismantle democracy legally
[citation needed]
(Seriously, did Hitler used referendums and not election? If not, why they didn't outlaw election?)
"Clearly, we haven't figured out how to make the Web work for numbers in the same way it does for words."
We haven't figured that out even for our brain!
I agree, he is right, as always.
This is currently not a problem because copyright terms are so long, so there is no useful closed-source or GPL software which has fallen into public domain yet. But it may eventually became a problem regardless whether or not we shorten the term of copyrights.
I am not necessary assuming venality - they may very well withhold information out of fear of reprisal of someone who holds power over them. I would even say this is by far the most common reason, and yet, the root there is power, not stupidity.
This is bullshit. It's not about stupidity at all, it's about control. People withhold information from other people in order to control them, not because they are stupid.
I recently read the following great book:
http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workplace/dp/0446670553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247546857&sr=8-1
It shows that if you allow free flow of information (and more democracy and less autocracy), ordinary people (which you denounce by calling them stupid) become much more productive and are able to make much better decisions.
Low UID doesn't make him right. The GP is correct - MVS had preemptive multitasking, had processes (called address spaces) and threads (called tasks). Look it up in Wikipedia.
I am a (young) mainframe programmer, so unlike the user you refer to I know what I am talking about.
If you want that kind of security, move to Sweden or some other "socialist" country. I am serious.
But even if the country like US has trade surplus in IP, the bilance the GP talks about is zero, because Americans are probably not getting their haircut in Sweden. So the US doesn't have any real motivation to enforce IP protection laws more either.
Actually, dragons are much more difficult from an engineering standpoint. They are larger, live longer, have armored skin and usually a breath weapon.
I disagree. It's computers. We can program them to do anything. The question is, why there should be any boring or drone jobs at all?
I would boldly propose that if you work in computer programming, and your job is boring, you are doing something wrong. You should work on how to automate the boring stuff, and I guarantee it suddenly won't be so boring. And if you can't for some reason, then it's outside of your control (for example, management problem). But in principle, work with computers never has to be boring, because you can always automate the menial parts of it.