Although I was and still am a fan of Jimmy Carter, I think this is not too far from true:
Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, knew the difference but decided to appease the ignorant luddite anti-nuke crowd that made no distinction between nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
but this is a bit of a stretch:
By perpetuating the myth of "breeder reactor = nuclear warheads" from the executive office, he essentially saddled us with 30 years worth of dangerous nuclear "waste" that is really just nuclear fuel that's 90% unused.
To believe the latter statement, you have to wholesale buy into the rosiest projections of the nuclear power industry about the efficiency with which they can use fuel.
Frankly I was a bit disappointed by TFA. It's true that discussions about nuclear power have turned largely polemic, with the engineering-is-always-good and anti-GW crowds combining to claim that nuclear will save us if we just let it, and the knee-jerk-environmentalists and fatalists saying that nukes are just another for man to damage the planet and wipe himself. Lost in the shuffle is the fact that nukes have the prospect to be extraordinarily dangerous yet extraordinarily useful. I was hoping the article would talk about what it might take to get a real handle on the risks, rather than remark on what a shame it is people aren't considering the risks enough.
The most cogent view I've heard on the subject in years is that the government should be in charge of any nuclear power plants since it's the one that's always going to end up with final responsibility for any problems. That's pretty compelling statement of the key risk, and one of the more frightening part of the nuclear question in the States is that we're supposed to trust GE and Westinghouse's "Ecomagination" flavor of the month to deliver safe nuclear reactors and then stand by them decade after decade to run them without accidents or piles nuclear waste ubernasties running loose. Then again, the government did a nice job putting waste into Simpsonesque barrels in Hanford and then dragging its little DOE feet on doing anything about it when it became clear than any answer would be neither profitable nor popular, and likewise losing barrels of waste in that Air Force base in Colorado.
So that's the problem - what institution public or private is really going to be careful enough for long enough to be trusted to deal with making, using, and disposing of nuclear fuel? With good enough engineering regulations in place (and enforced), I believe that the plants themselves can be engineered not be deathtraps themselves, but it's the question of what to do with the materials where the estimation of risk is still pretty wide open. Nobody can agree whether Yucca Mountain is safe, so what's supposed to happen when 500 Yucca mountains are needed?
The basic problem is that the Laffer curve remains a theory that leans on a lot of simplification to an "ideal world" (sort of like modelling water as incompressible and non-viscous). Yet devotees of tax-cuts-for-all-situations dogma (like the present leadership of the Republican carry on as thought it's a proven fact about society. This graph from the Wikipedia article you cited does a great job of showing how the Laffer curve has exactly 0 predictive accuracy. Of course current Republican leadership won't accept that because they're ideologically bound to always propose less taxes. And because they're not interested enough in how to reconcile that with people's desire for government services to actually run government in a fiscally sound way (hence the borrow and spend approach justified by letting future debt "starve the beast").
This unwillingness to account for facts that disfavor your preferred theory is characteristic of any group that favors dogma over thoughtfulness when it comes to government policy. I'm young enough not to have been through the period when Democrats were adamant about price controls and mandated full employment, despite the well-understood problems with those policies, but I believe that at that time dogma dominated the Democratic Party as it now dominates the Republican Party. And in fact, one of the best points in favor of Barack Obama is not that he's inspiring or bold (he is the former, his campaign is very evidently not the latter), but that he's genuine thoughtful and well-versed in these issues. There was a tremendous interview with him in the Times about the housing market and economic policy, and it was clear that he's really learned something about the relationship (positive and negative) of government regulation to the functioning of financial markets. The guy's not a professor for nothing, and a sane political environment would value that kind of thoughtfulness and desire to really learn about something.
But also because of land ownership patterns in Brazil. A huge amount of land is owned by Brazil's wealthy families. There are groups like MST (Movimento Sem Terra, or Landless Work's Movement) that propose that the government institute land redistribution and apportion land to these people, who are destitute and asking for land to work. It actually puts Lula in quite a bit of a bind, since his party's base consists of many folks either in, supportive of, or sympathetic to MST. On the other hand, such land redistribution programs are notoriously ineffective (and politically tumultuous) because they often put small amounts land in the of people who don't know how to produce from it. That may occur through some combination of lack of skills on the part of the recipient and expropriation of more marginal lands, but either way, the result is very often that the recipient sells the land off to the same economic class of folks who owned it before, and the situation has been improved (and the land may have been degraded as well).
In a larger sense there's also an open question of how to farm a given area of most efficiently and least destructively, and it seems likely that much land in Brazil is farmed suboptimally. In general, however, it is true that growing biofuels on cropland puts pressure on forestland of all sorts.
Again, that's a totally bogus argument based on the misconception that your "natural rights" include some kind of freedom from government compulsion of any sort. That's not present in any "natural rights" framework I'm aware of, except perhaps some very extremely ones. While most formulations natural rights provide for freedom of person (meaning freedom from arbitrary imprisonment), and freedom of speech, they do not suggest that humans have some sort inherent right not to be taxed. You and the parent poster either believe this, which AFAIK (IANAL) puts you well out of bounds of common legal thought, or you are avoiding the consequence that government compulsion is legitimate under certain circumstances. If it's the latter, then the use of force becomes a specific punishment for violating the law, not an abrogation of your natural right not to pay anything to anyone.
Despite the Hobbesian logic you would like assign to it, a punishment for breaking the law is not the same as a legal obligation; you have a broad moral obligation to follow law, in addition to a practical desire to avoid reprisal. And that moral obligation includes paying for the upkeep of society. Not only that, but most legal systems construct punishment mechanisms in proportion to the gravity of the lawbreaking. So a minor infraction like a small speeding ticket does not permit a police officer to use force to arrest you because the gravity of the crime does not merit confinement as a punishment or enforcement mechanism. So your argument that taxes = force totally sidesteps any morality around participating in society, and doesn't address the difference between legal compulsion and legal force that may eventually be permitted in the event of certain types lawbreaking.
Frankly, it's the argument that one does not have a moral obligation to pay taxes that troubles me most. It's evident that some taxes go to things that individuals don't agree with (both you and me doubtless included), but because taxes are a broad social obligation, you don't get to "buy" only the things you want. So by all means, use the democratic process to try change the political debate on taxation, but until you succeed, you are not forced, but beholden to pay taxes.
That said, I do agree with your view that the compulsory nature of government mandates like taxation, regulation and general lawmaking gives them a special potential for abuse. As such I agree that spending tax dollars should be broadly debated and carefully monitored. But that's a far cry from viewing oneself as having a natural right to not pay taxes.
If I refuse to pay the full amount assessed for my taxes, I can be arrested. If I resist arrest, I'll be physically assaulted or threatened with a firearm. If I respond in kind, I'll probably be killed on the spot.
This is simply untrue. The legal process for dealing with nonpayment of taxes involves requesting that you pay them, followed by financial sanctions (penalties), followed by court proceedings. Only if you engage in sustained tax evasion and flight from the law - an independent crime - could you even face arrest. Thereafter, you would have to choose to engage in another independent crime - resisting arrest - before you might face physical restraint. And only after resisting arrest in a violent way might you face actual physical force. So there's a whole bunch of independent crimes separating nonpayment of taxes and physical force.
It's no different than a robber walking up to me and saying "I have a gun, now give me all your money". The threat is there, regardless of the visibility of the weapon. It doesn't matter whether you threaten to shoot me, stab me, kidnap me, or just beat me with your bare hands, you're still using force or the threat of force in order to make me comply.
Thanks, I think equating paying taxes with flagrant law-breaking violence proves my point about hyperbole pretty nicely.
Honestly, it strikes me as odd that you'd use this ridiculous comparison given the reasonable and defensible positions you describe elsewhere. People of many political stripes think subsidies are dangerous and would like to reduce them. The hard questions are which subsidies, to whom and how they should be reduced? Taxes exist because running a society costs money, and the only reasonable way to get that money is to divvy up the costs and compel the members of society to pay.
Now there can and should be vigorous debates about what running society really means, what should be done, and what shouldn't, but that debate is a lot drier than making incensed arguments equating the legal compulsion to pay taxes with physical force and violence. I claim, and have been claiming, that you're using these overheated arguments because the public doesn't really agree with you, and rather likes having. Now that's just my own view; upcoming elections will sort out what various countries' publics think. Nonetheless, no matter how you couch your arguments about physical force and taxes, they are sidestepping the hard questions about what good government is and how to achieve it.
First of all you are using the word "force" to suggest much greater violence than is ever inherent in taxation. The law (based on the the social compact between government and governed) compels you to do some things and compels you not to do others. That compulsion is backed by various kinds of punitive mechanisms, ranging from financial sanction to imprisonment (which only occurs in the event that you refuse to comply, and is strictly governed by law). This is the 21st century: no matter where you are in the English-speaking world, no law provides for a tax collector to take money from you at gunpoint (i.e. by "force"). So can we dispense with the hyperbole, please?
Your argument against welfare is a moral one - you disapprove of it, and you attempt to extend that disapproval to wealth redistribution in general (of which only a fraction is direct cash payment), and even more broadly to taxation as a means for solving social problems.
In the US direct welfare payments such as WIC and housing projects are a miniscule fraction of federal spending (which is dominated by defense contractor welfare), and aren't really a big slice of the redistribution pie either. More redistribution happens through incentives and subsidization of services, and these tend to be graduated scales. Think subsidized loans, section 8 housing, free education, which is redistributive on that rich people send their kids to expensive private schools, but infrastructural in that the nation's workforce needs to be educated. Overall, the money at stake in direct wealth redistribution is a pretty small fraction of most government budgets. So it's pretty Pacific ocean-sized stretch to say that the government is taking your money by "force" just to then give it to idlers.
The crux of your argument seems to be that you think welfare (and by some vague extension wealth redistribution) enables people to behave in immoral ways. I'd say welfare as direct payment is a complex issue and certainly has many risks of free riding (not to mention often compounding other social ills), but it's not particularly clear how to better handle destitution and indigence. But the government doesn't just promote free ridership for indigent people: roads are dramatically overused by suburbanites, even though urbanites make up the bulk of the tax base in the US and most other developed countries.
The point is, the more you look at how government actually procures and spends money, the less things look like taking money by "force" and the more they look like policy positions you disagree with.
Thanks for a mostly sensible post. I do think you're off base here:
improving the forests, saving the fuzzy animals, and so on, is actually served by the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, as plants grow better in richer CO2 atmospheres and that leads to a stronger biosphere all round. By and large, there's very few better things we could have done with our intelligence for the continuance of life on Earth than releasing all of the trapped CO2 back into the atmosphere so that it can be used again.
Because it depends on a total human opinion of what "good" is. The dramatic ecosystem changes that are underway certainly have a destructive component (look up pictures of the effect of pine beetles on Canadian forests), and that doubtless opens ecological niches that were not available under the old equilibrium. However, existing megafauna (bears, wolves, elk, etc.) face more constraints, because they generally have geographically larger habitats, and these are now bounded by human development. So they can't adjust as easily and are at risk for much more adverse consequences. I don't know enough to say what will happen to smaller animals like birds, small cats, etc. But while there's plenty of arguments against the way environmental and conversation aims are framed and pursued, it's pretty simplistic to think that the "greenies are out for the fuzzies" and the "fuzzies are actually being helped by the carbon".
That said, it's worth point out that TFA (TFUNBP - Random Unsourced Blog Post) is making some pretty big claims when they say that the study's authors were "surprised". The article referenced by the post is behind a paywall, but the abstract indicates no surprise on the authors' part- in fact, coming from the climate science world, I'd say hardly anybody is surprised to see vegetal production efficiency go up. But it's a big jump from their to claim that that's "better" for a host of ecosystems, and to your point, it is almost certainly not better for us. And the skeptic tone of the page (this guys is part of the usual coalition of climate-change skeptics) is particularly annoying given that the skeptic groups have spent years telling us that the models are not accurate enough to be of any use, diagnostic or prognostic, yet happily reference papers that are entirely based on numerical model results as long as they can put some "stop the green tyrants" spin on it.
Here's the conclusion from a similar paper (based of course on modelling and assimilation of remote sensing data) about climate change and vegetal probability that has two takeway messages:
While model simulations over the analysis period of this study indicated a small terrestrial carbon sink for atmospheric CO2, this study does suggest that carbon storage in high-latitude regions like the western Arctic is particularly vulnerable to the loss of carbon to the atmosphere from the response of soil organic matter to warming. Such a response would act as a positive feedback to climatic warming (McGuire et al. 2006a; McGuire et al. 2006b).
When it comes to the $64000 question, they're predicting that the warming will have the net effect not of sequestering carbon but releasing it and accelerating warming. But, wha!? How can it be good to have more plants grow but bad in that it accelerates climate change? Sounds to me like a mindfuck, provided you're determined to prove that carbon emissions either aren't really causing climate change or that said climate change is a net plus for humanity.
The most frustrating thing of this kind of posting is the absolute lack of genuine intellectual curiosity or openness to new ideas the skeptics exhibited. Aren't these supposed to be scientists who really want to know how things work? Aren't they genuinely interested in the knowledge being gained by other sharp minds working on the same problem? That's the fundamental compact of science: that when you disagree with people, you disagree because you both really want to know the answer. That compact is sorely abused here, and that's hard for someone with genuine scientific interest in reality to take.
Your "hard-earned money" was brought you by all the infrastructure that the taxes "taken from you" by "force" provide. Or perhaps you prefer feudal warlordism as your form of government.
The mantra of "I should get to keep every penny I ever see" is beyond dated now, and it was petulant, and shortsighted to begin with. The things that make your life (including working hard to earn money) all come from a massive physical, legal, and social infrastructure. I have tried for a long time to keep away from the conclusion that people who espouse it are fundementally unaware of how much is being provided for them as a baseline, but I am inevitably stunned by the naivete to think that things run themselves.
And this is why righties continuous fail to find that magical pot of government waste that allows them to drown the government in the bathtub. It ain't there, because people like the services they receive: law enforcement, publicly accessible schools, roads, hospitals. Small-fry investors/mutual fund buyers like having their markets policed from rampant cheats and liars. People like military operations that defend them and support the global market infrastructure (provided they're not misconceived Napoleonesque military adventurism). And every last one of those activities costs money. So start talking to me about the sewers you don't want built, or the drug and medical device regulations you don't want (so any old $5.75/hr schmoe can dose you with X-rays) or the fishing permits you shouldn't have to get so anyone can dynamite all the fish out of a stream, or the defense contracts you don't want to pay for (there's a real bargain...), and anything you think you can convince a million of your neighbors that the government should never do. Let me know when you've got that list done.
It's evident that plenty of government spending is larded with graft, patronage, dumb ideas, and political posturing. But frankly, that's at least as true in any corporate setting as in the government, and that's supposed to be a virtue because, you know, the Free Market Fairy loves her some corporations and hates her some government. I actually do believe that public entities have a special obligation to spend money conservatively and wisely, since that money represents trust by the people at large. But that kind of good government with wise investment and stewardship of public resources nearly orthogonal to the vision the so-called Free Marketeers lay out (until, of course, their Bears Stearns collapse is upon them at which point they run mewling to the teat of the government they so despise).
This is an engineering site - we work in goals and tradeoffs, not things we don't like and the free lunch we wish was there. So let's talk public policy and real goals and real constraints - that's a debate well worth having.
Well said. Point is, if there's innovation in there, it's in the elegance of the map structure/coordinate scheme for the pixel data, rather than whatever's done in code. The approach they've chosen (introduce a new coordinate scheme rather than layer existing bitmaps) seems fairly elegant, although in practice a lot probably depends on how easily you transform from whatever acquisition method you have for the pixels to their coordinate system.
I don't know this domain, but I have to suspect that type of coordinate transformation is familiar to lots of folks who have thought about image rendering (hence the ability, as noted below for the BBC to release their own such widget), and thus isn't really a new vein of thinking, just slicker packaging.
So in fact, this looks a lot like what Microsoft has always done, to package some algorithm or programming concept as a widget that developers can use for simplified development - the other part of the strategy being to tie it tightly to some development platform. If this widget were implemented in JavaScript rather than Flash^H^H^H^H^HSilverlight, wouldn't it be just another piece of code put out by some mathematically inclined graduate student that's clever but not ready for easy incorporation into production websites?
Credit where credit is due, and none where it ain't due.
Therein lies the problem: the senior 100000 of 2 million piece of crap mortgages that their holders can't pay still has a high likelihood of some or all of those mortgages defaulting. So if the pool overall is no good, the seniority does nothing to solve that problem. And that's before CDO^2 nonsense is used to claim that the senior of lots of junior tranches of various pools are as good as the senior tranches of a single pool...
So the senior tranches of CDO's have to be based on the risk ratings on the whole mortgage pool, and this is precisely where Moody's and S&P bamboozled the public and are now trying to blame it on a bug. They would bless the claim that the top of nearly any pool was great stuff, no matter what the contents of the pool were. As others have observed, that's no coding bug, it's a policy to willfully ignore reality to facilitate the sale of more securities.
The mortgage market was hardly unserved when the securitizers entered it - rather it was full of banks offering conventional mortgages at rates that properly priced the risk (and the banks took care to do that, since they held on to the risk at that time, and federal insurance laws require them to have sane risk holdings). The introduction of securitized mortgage products flooded the market with much cheaper debt. That meant that the pools kept getting progressively worse and worse as the lenders headed down-market to try to sell mortgages to people who didn't already hold more than enough debt.
And as for the loonies, as asset bubbles go, the runup in housing has only one precedent in American history: the speculation before the Great Depression. Now there are a lot more safety valves in the finance system these days, but to claim that it is or was doom and gloom to be concerned about the size of the bubble is pretty a blinked view of the world.
These are all good points, and there's a really large climate problem with all biofuels beyond just the obvious EROI problems with corn ethanol. The demand for fuels does nothing to reduce demand for crops. So any added use of land to produce fuels is in competition with both crops, human occupancy, and forest. In the case of the latter, the conversion of forest is an accelerator of climate change (both from an albedo perspective and from direct carbon emission, and from non-sequestration). In most scenarious any biofuel result in net carbon emissions (the emissions from the energy to grow and harvest the fuel, plus the emissions from burning the fuel itself). So while the math on cellulosic ethanol is much better, unless it's very carefully managed (e.g. finding a way to grow a lot of fuel in a small space) it only represents punting the problem down the road.
Secondly, yes Exxon made $40 billion in profits last year. They also spend somewhere around $400 billion to make those profits. Big numbers mean nothing unless you put them in perspective. A 10% profit margin is nothing special.
Yes, as a margin it is nothing special but not too shabby either. The bone of contention is really that they receive huge tax breaks while making neat profit. If they're making a healthly profit, why do they need subsidies? What social benefit accrues to the taxpayer or society at large from this subsidy?
Thirdly, there is no oil monopoly. Oil companies do not calude with each other, they compete.
Well, it's pretty speculative to say that oil companies don't collude. All companies collude, they just do it either in legal ways (like researching each others' prices) or in illegal ways that they keep very secret (and unless you have very detailed knowledge of what they are an aren't doing you have little proof for your negative assertion). The oil majors engage in hedging that does tend to diminish competition. For example, in the middle of the last oil glut, analysts recommended reducing refinery capacity - which had the effect of producing a nice hedge for the oil companies against falling crude prices (with limited numbers of refineries the price of finished petroleum products remains high because of the limited supply of refining).
They do not have enough reserves to make any impact on market prices even if they wanted to.
This may be true for the minors you mention, but is almost certainly untrue for the majors. Events involving individual companies' production make a big difference in prices (e.g. Shell in Nigeria, Citgo in Venezuela), and that's when they're not organized into cartels like OPEC. OPEC's production (and therefore pricing) decisions revolve almost entirely around political considerations and a determination of how to avoid demand destruction. Oil trading is not even close to an idealized free market with free-flowing information assuring rapid approach to price equilibrium. Rather it is almost entirely speculative, with very little verification of raw production numbers at all.
When people learn that the government should keep its claws out of money altogether, we'll stop getting these idiotic solutions that are only proposed in order to stir up support from voters, but end up having devastating effects that last well beyond the candidate's political career.
Ah yes, your rights to have everything you want. I take it you won't drive on any bridges, flush your toilet into any sewers, or rely on any police to keep you safe, because the government shouldn't be "clawing away" your money. And definitely you wouldn't want to put that money into a bank insured by the FDIC, or take a mortgage backed by the same federal guarantees (explicit and implicit), or participate in a stock market where liars and thieves are kept (somewhat) at bay by the SEC. Nor do you want any assurance that your medicines are not contaminated, your foodstuffs safe, and your children's teachers are not psychopaths.
The "market will solve everything if you only you set it free" meme was new (and woefully simplistic) in 1971. Now it's tired, overused and foolishly simplistic. Your whole lifestyle is made possible by a profound set of government-run or backed institutions. If they're broken, the answer is to fix them and work for fair, well-regulated markers, not scrap everything we've learned and go back to the 1860s (as appealing as them sometimes seems from within a fluorescent-lit cube). I'm all for leaner and more effective government (as, in fact, are almost all of us who think government has a key role in society), but the nonsense about greedy government taking all your tax dollars sounds increasingly petulant when bridges are falling down, tainted food and drugs are being allowed into our stores, and people are losing their homes in droves, and the top marginal tax rate is the lowest its been in decades.
Government regulation of healthcare is indeed a gigantic mess, and the Blues are a great example of that mess. And yes, government intervention in a market can indeed make a problem worse. But it takes two to tango, so let's recall Gingrich-led cuts to Medicare in the 90s, and permanent resistance to Medicaid's existence (because after all, that's just more poor - read "lazy" - people clawing your government-backed money away) and general conservative opposition to every government program that doesn't involve fat contracts for their buddies don't really to much to promote fair, orderly and efficient markets either.
Sure, comparison shopping for healthcare would improve the system and make the market for healthcare more efficient, if there were choices real humans could afford. Have you ever priced non-employer sponsored "insurance" (the quotes are because health coverage is much more a bundled service agreement that it is insurance against unlikely adverse events)? The prospect of paying $10,000-$15,000 per year sounds like great set of choices, huh? I've learned a fair bit about the dysfunction of the medical reimbursement system in my current job, and I'm not sure a government-run healthcare program is all peaches and cream, primarily because the current incarnations sidestep the hard questions we need to debate about how much care should really cost and who should pay for what. There is a cost control element to healthcare that's deeply difficult to answer once your parent gets cancer or your sibling gets a debilitating disease. But that's a debate about how to structure things well within government and the private sector, not a worn-out screed about drowning government in the bathtub.
Of course it is true. The whole reason to document, as given by the submitter, is to make people more easily replacable. Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace.
This is built on two fallacies: 1) Documenting a process makes it easier to replace people. That's almost invariably untrue. If someone is doing something complex enough that it needs process documentation, it's unlikely that an outsider can just step in and do the job without learning most or all of the supporting knowledge that the current worker has. At the very least, process documentation goes along with training, and in fact most regulatory and quality-assurance regimes such as ISO or CMMI, or the FDA's Quality System regulation require that both be there for all employees, whether or not someone has cross-trained for a particular position.
2) People should want to be irreplaceable. Being irreplaceable may potentially keep you from getting fired (provided what you're doing remains unchanged and important to the business), but it can also keep you from advancing or leaving something you don't like. As with the example of the person who worked in the factory, in a well-run business people don't need to hoard knowledge to feel job security. If a business will fire you because you're not the only one who knows something, it would have no qualms about firing you for some other reason, so the "irreplaceable" knowledge is a pretty weak line of defense.
It's also worth remembering that clear process documentation is an essential part of software development, both in the sense that it makes what you're doing clear to the developers so they can propose requirements and software behavior, but also (and often more important) it forces the doers to come to consensus so the software developers can actually implement something that's agreed-upon.
Process documentation almost invariably represents a sound investment, both for the business, as it retains institutional knowledge and ensures continuity, and also for the worker, because it helps clarify expectations and needs.
After all, the situation is not really surprising. I know very few people (if any!) that are *passionate* about accounting. Yet, millions of accountants worldwide reliably make the numbers add up. These unpassionate accountants do good services on average and make our economic system run smoothly; without them, it would collapse. I am grateful someone else is willing to do it, because I could not stand having to do it myself. Why would IT be any different?
I think you're pretty close the nub of the argument. What Prof. Dewar is upset about is a broad trend away from university as an apprenticeship of those deeply and philosophically (why do you think they call it a PhD?) interested in the subject, with the elitism that entailed, towards university as essentially job preparation. This issue crops up all over academia, and the notion of any sort of quality standards (much less regulation) for post-secondary education is just in its infancy.
I happen to agree with the good professor that the best thing you can do in college is to learn to think deeply and critically as well as communicate, though to my mind that speaks more strongly to a good liberal arts component of education than to the specific language choice within a CS major. You might not think think learning history or economics or English make you a better programmer, but they do. By learning different modalities of thinking, you become more aware of the strengths and weakness of your own methods. Not to mention that good engineering nearly always involves communication in the form or requirements and design. But I digress...
I don't know how you tackle this make the courses hard vs. make them accessible issue. The reality is that a demanding course will in fact turn off a lot of students, and that does represent in some way a failure of the university's mission. On the other hand a demanding course (especially math) make a much, much, much better programmer/engineer/computer. Think of all the hollering software pundits do about how a good programmer can be 10 times as productive as a mediocre one - this is true and a lot of the skill of that star programmer comes down to grasp of deep algorithmic and mathematical concepts. So what do you do about the fact that most people are neither prepared nor dispositionally inclined to deal with those demands when they are 18 years old and just entering college, particularly if their family and friends are not that academically inclined and can't help them keep faith and slog through hard and sometimes tedious preparation? What's most fair to the students? It's not all that clear to me.
I think this is generally good advice. I would add to this that in terms of building a business around the software you've created, your licensing decision comes much later than many others. The principal assessment your business plan needs to make is: what need am I meeting? How can what I have or can create be traded to people in such a way as to meet that need? In other words, what's your market and product position? From that you can make determinations such as whether to sell your domain knowledge embodied in a package (which as the parent wisely points may put you at risk of having stale specifics embedded), you can sell it as consulting, you can sell it as a service, etc. None of us here on/. (except those who happen to have experience with product positioning in finance) are particularly well qualified to answer that question. You yourself may not be that well qualified to answer that question, since software engineers are often not that conversant with marketing strategy and techniques. So I'd say your first step towards making some money off that effort is to figure out the question of how to line your work up with what the market wants and can make use of.
Many here have noted that using OSS as a credibility-building towards consultancy or employment based around your domain knowledge is a common strategy. From observation (but not really personal experience) it is probably the one with the greatest likelihood of success - don't ever underestimate how useful it is to have somebody who knows the domain involved in non-business project roles such a software developer - and a clear history of building a useful piece of domain software is an excellent way to indicate that you know what the domain's issues are and can find ways to make useful solutions for them. The other methods (SaaS, package -OSS or otherwise, etc) offer the sometimes-enjoyable (and always-exhausting) possibilities of entrepreneurship - if that's your cup of tea, I'd seek out people who can complement your knowledge (not to harp on what I said above, but number one among these is a product placement person) in building a product or service around your efforts.
There are downsides to releasing your software as OSS - it can be forked or incoporated by those who already have products in the space, and unfortunately if the release itself is not carefully done, it can make you and your product look very amateur. If I happen to find a set of potentially cool domain libraries on sourceforge with no evidence of community interaction, no product description and no documentation, you can bet I'll move right along to the next product. To repeat what others have said, if you do opt for some sort of OSS-esque release, make sure to focus your efforts on community-building rather than just technical excellence: documentation, response to users/developers of your stuff, getting genuine domain users interested, etc. Or, if you want to focus on the technical parts, try to recruit someone else to do that stuff. Just remember that the community-building is what raises the profile of your software and thus your domain knowledge and skills, not really some badass recursion scheme.
While that point is well taken, I read his MySpace page - he's a soldier in Iraq. I also really believe that it takes guts to go into a war zone, contractor or not.
Well, first off I have to say I respect your commitment to a set of ideals - it takes a lot to go risk getting killed or maimed in service of one's country. That commitment is a very honorable thing to follow.
I do have to respectfully disagree with your view that what we're doing will work in the long run. Tactically there are many successes, and those are to your credit and to the credit of all the troops there trying to do the right thing. But strategically, the war is a disaster. We basically took a thinly balanced set of regional politics and made it much worse by empowering Iran, inflaming relations with Turkey, and unleashing years of sectarian wars in Iraq. We didn't create the underlying problems in Iraq: the power struggle between the Kurds, the Shia and the Sunni, or Iranian aspirations to regional control, and I honestly believe that Saddam was so near collapse that we would have had to reckon with geopolitics anyway. But our current course of action is like smelling gas in a house, worrying that there could be an explosion, and lighting a match to try to burn off the gas. The key actions that would have served to stabilize Iraq and the region are political - we should have brokered a deal with Turkey and the Kurds BEFORE invading, we should have worked harder on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before invading, we should have insisted to Mubarak that Egypt hold free and fair elections (which would have resulted in political participation by the Muslim Brotherhood) before invading. The list of needed political actions goes on and on: negotiate some sort of oilfields services for a no-nukes deal with Iran, enlist the rest of the world (esp. China and Russia) in reconstruction, shut down AQ Khan's nuclear network, force the Saudis to get serious about slowing financing for terrorist and insurgent groups, etc.
Huge props to you all for all the successes you've accomplished, but long-term success or failure of an Iraqi state depends on political actions, and until those are taken, we can't change the fundamental situation there.
It is a culture thing that causes Microsoft to fail over and over again in the consumer media/entertainment markets.
I think you're on to something here, though I don't ascribe it to a desire to slash tires. Microsoft made its bones by making existing software concepts mass-produceable. Windows and DOS were knockoffs of existing ideas in personal (and subsequently corporate) computing that locked down functionality into discrete units and provided a known pathway to put these units together (so PHBs without technical depth could understand what to buy next). Microsoft has done that over and over, making a killing each time - just think about how quickly they completely took over Novell's share of the corporate infrastructure market. That put it in box and scalle it approach is likely why they tend to think in terms of features and client ROI rather than experience and status.
I once read a short history of the car industry and it pointed out that GM ate Ford's lunch in part because they realized that consumers wanted to buy experience, status, and identity with their cars, not just new engines and better brakes. Microsoft seems stuck in this rut now - for a while consumers were excited about Windows because it was their entree into the futuristic world of computers and the Internet, but Windows/Microsoft never really became a identity brand. Apple has mastered the identity branding - after all, functionally the iPod does very little that the Rio didn't do (with the notable exception that Apple streamlined the process of getting music onto the damn thing), but Apple made it simultaneously safe and sexy to make the leap from collecting music on CDs in a big CaseLogic book to collecting music on a computer in one form or another. The iPhone is really the same simple concept - make the computer part of a smartphone work easily and make it sexy.
I have quite a number of friends at Microsoft, and they are all smart and aware people, so I'm always surprised at how tone deaf the company itself is. The only blindspot I could ever really discern was the combination of Not Invented Here and We Know What the Future Will Look Like And We Can't Talk Because We're Inventing It Now. Surely Apple has its blindspots, but I have to agree with your view that they are fundamentally better attuned to the consumer market.
I'm certainly not opposed regulating monopolistic industries, but the point that the TechDirt article makes is well taken: if there is in fact competition emerging in the tv market, regulation of cablecos now could give a big competitive edge to telcos, and lead to a far more monopolistic situation in cable and broadband when telcos use their favored position to lock up the broadband market.
Regulation shouldn't be undertaken to punish a company or an industry, particularly not at the behest of a competitor. It should be undertaken to address some market failure that harms consumers and the public. Figuring out what will result in the market that best serves the public and is most competitive is a bit tricky in these kinds of situations, because it requires evaluating trends for the likelihood they'll introduce competition, so there's always some guesswork about things will actually unfold. I think in this situation you have to weigh the likelihood of that competition strengthening against the impact of handing the telcos a competitive advantage.
All that said, to my mind the best answer is to require open access to all the networks, cable, copper, fiber and otherwise. Doubly so because the government footed the bill for a lot of the work to build these networks.
since we are not fighting a technologically advanced opponent like the Russians anymore
You can say that again and again and again. How many times do we need to invent some new gizmos that allow soldiers to fight the last war better? I mean gizmos are fun, but this is a big part of the $530 BILLION dollars we spend on "defense" every year. We are devastatingly effective at battlefield war already, and we have not fought an enemy in 30 years that could come even close to us. That said, we've done rather poorly in several recent conflicts because they have absolutely no relationship to the early 20th century form of war these expensive gizmos are designed for, with soldiers going off to a separate battlefield with limited civilian presence. And if we want gizmos for civilian purposes and don't think the market will do it by itself, shouldn't we just fund their development for civilian purposes and save ourselves the overhead of the military environment and bureaucracy?
The problem our soldiers have now is a political one - they are being asked to deal in complex local and often personal politics in languages and cultures they have no basis for understanding. If we want to do better in Iraq, we need to send lots of our guys: soldiers, officers, diplomats, reconstruction workers, etc to language and politics school so they know who's who and don't have to depend on dubious information from people trying to manipulate the situation to their advantage. I mean we basically spent trillions of dollars installing Iran as the undisputed heavyweight of the region thanks that jackal Ahmed Chalabi and to not knowing a damn thing about local and regional politics. And in spite of those trillions of dollars, we can't find the money to pay vets and their families what they deserve for medical and psychological care?
If there's one thing I could ever, possibly, agree with Donald Rumsfeld on, it's that we need to excise the tumor of this kind of military spending.
With that said, it's obvious that the Vista release cycle was a death march from the get go. There's little chance you can jettison that many major features during the development cycle and still end up with a quality release in the end. Killing cool features also kills developer morale and poor morale causes poor quality.
I do think it was a death much, but I don't think it was due to the features. There were the usual vaporware features like WinFS, but the bigger problem was migrating that massive a codebase (Windows, Office and everything else that's tied to the craziness of the Win32 API) and then trying to get people to pay full (and then some) price for what was basically an under-the-hood rebuild that hasn't really been shaken out. And on top of that, most Microsofties I know agree that the company has gotten much more bureaucratic and stagnant since the heady WindowsYYYY days when they thought they were inventing the future.
If people other than tinkerers and enthusiasts are going to change OS, they're going to do so either because they bought a new computer, or because there's something they want to do that they can't now or something that really made them unhappy. That process takes longer than a couple months.
What's really changed with Vista is that people are not willing to be shepherded along from release to release by Microsoft. This is partly due to the Mac's resurgence and more due to a much broader understanding that there are choices. I'd love to attribute that understanding of choices to Linux and open source, but I think that's only had an much of an effect within the developer community. But users more broadly no longer see Microsoft as a miracle-worker for producing these computers that do all sorts of things, because they just expect computers to do the things they do. And many more of them have seen the forced upgrade phenomenon firsthand, and are waiting for a little more bang for their $400. That's reflected in the press with far more writers adopting critical tone towards Microsoft than ever before.
All of the articles we've seen about Apple and missed opportunities (after all this TFA is just some dude at a small website pontificating for an evenings' entertainment) are generally people expressing their desire for David to knock off Goliath and have very little to do with any insights about the market or business opportunities for Apple or Microsoft. To the extent that Apple keeps producing computers that people like and are relevant to what people want to do with them, on terms that are favorable to Apple, their market opportunities are still enormous. And that's almost totally independent of market share - the desktop OS market is simply not an unexploited area in the way it was 15 years ago.
I haven't had this experience in depth, but I have had in it. Most of Wikipedia's articles on global change are a proxy for the battles between global warming skeptics and members of the climate science community trying to make sure that the climate science point of view is heard accurately. Even writing that last sentence was hard for me to phrase without any sort of involvement in the fracas (those who know have see my posts know that I find the disrespect for scientific process on the part of the climate science skeptics pretty repugnant).
My view is that that's often the structure of current knowledge. Previously these proxy battles would take place in journals, in heated disagreements at conferences, in post-talk debates at university departments, etc. Either you think that every dispute can be settled with an strictly objective answer or you don't; that's basically a worldview question, and right now the "everything can be objectively considered" modernist-structuralist view is being overtaken by a more fluid post-post-modern "there are facts and there are opinions and it's often very hard to totally separate the two". The idea that everyone should have a voice in sorting out what's fact leads pretty quickly to the notion that everyone ought to be able to edit the canon of knowledge. That being the case, the set of facts accepted by everyone is often rather small, so it doesn't take much time to get that common ground written down and move out to the places where facts are still not considered settled.
The academics and journalists who have been the arbiters of knowledge sure seem troubled by this worldview, for good and bad reasons. It's true that most academics have invested much time in learning deeply about a particular subject, and as such ought to be taken more seriously on that subject than someone with no experience (I often rely on this point in arguments about climate change). On the other hand, individuals and even whole communities have blind spots and make mistakes, and their work ought to be open to broad debate. I think this is a natural stage in the evolution of a successful knowledge commons like Wikipedia. I hope that the project doesn't fall apart, because as other posters have pointed out, even with flawed and sometimes biased knowledge, Wikipedia pages are almost always a good point to start learning about something.
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Although I was and still am a fan of Jimmy Carter, I think this is not too far from true:
but this is a bit of a stretch:
To believe the latter statement, you have to wholesale buy into the rosiest projections of the nuclear power industry about the efficiency with which they can use fuel.
Frankly I was a bit disappointed by TFA. It's true that discussions about nuclear power have turned largely polemic, with the engineering-is-always-good and anti-GW crowds combining to claim that nuclear will save us if we just let it, and the knee-jerk-environmentalists and fatalists saying that nukes are just another for man to damage the planet and wipe himself. Lost in the shuffle is the fact that nukes have the prospect to be extraordinarily dangerous yet extraordinarily useful. I was hoping the article would talk about what it might take to get a real handle on the risks, rather than remark on what a shame it is people aren't considering the risks enough.
The most cogent view I've heard on the subject in years is that the government should be in charge of any nuclear power plants since it's the one that's always going to end up with final responsibility for any problems. That's pretty compelling statement of the key risk, and one of the more frightening part of the nuclear question in the States is that we're supposed to trust GE and Westinghouse's "Ecomagination" flavor of the month to deliver safe nuclear reactors and then stand by them decade after decade to run them without accidents or piles nuclear waste ubernasties running loose. Then again, the government did a nice job putting waste into Simpsonesque barrels in Hanford and then dragging its little DOE feet on doing anything about it when it became clear than any answer would be neither profitable nor popular, and likewise losing barrels of waste in that Air Force base in Colorado.
So that's the problem - what institution public or private is really going to be careful enough for long enough to be trusted to deal with making, using, and disposing of nuclear fuel? With good enough engineering regulations in place (and enforced), I believe that the plants themselves can be engineered not be deathtraps themselves, but it's the question of what to do with the materials where the estimation of risk is still pretty wide open. Nobody can agree whether Yucca Mountain is safe, so what's supposed to happen when 500 Yucca mountains are needed?
The basic problem is that the Laffer curve remains a theory that leans on a lot of simplification to an "ideal world" (sort of like modelling water as incompressible and non-viscous). Yet devotees of tax-cuts-for-all-situations dogma (like the present leadership of the Republican carry on as thought it's a proven fact about society. This graph from the Wikipedia article you cited does a great job of showing how the Laffer curve has exactly 0 predictive accuracy. Of course current Republican leadership won't accept that because they're ideologically bound to always propose less taxes. And because they're not interested enough in how to reconcile that with people's desire for government services to actually run government in a fiscally sound way (hence the borrow and spend approach justified by letting future debt "starve the beast").
This unwillingness to account for facts that disfavor your preferred theory is characteristic of any group that favors dogma over thoughtfulness when it comes to government policy. I'm young enough not to have been through the period when Democrats were adamant about price controls and mandated full employment, despite the well-understood problems with those policies, but I believe that at that time dogma dominated the Democratic Party as it now dominates the Republican Party. And in fact, one of the best points in favor of Barack Obama is not that he's inspiring or bold (he is the former, his campaign is very evidently not the latter), but that he's genuine thoughtful and well-versed in these issues. There was a tremendous interview with him in the Times about the housing market and economic policy, and it was clear that he's really learned something about the relationship (positive and negative) of government regulation to the functioning of financial markets. The guy's not a professor for nothing, and a sane political environment would value that kind of thoughtfulness and desire to really learn about something.
But also because of land ownership patterns in Brazil. A huge amount of land is owned by Brazil's wealthy families. There are groups like MST (Movimento Sem Terra, or Landless Work's Movement) that propose that the government institute land redistribution and apportion land to these people, who are destitute and asking for land to work. It actually puts Lula in quite a bit of a bind, since his party's base consists of many folks either in, supportive of, or sympathetic to MST. On the other hand, such land redistribution programs are notoriously ineffective (and politically tumultuous) because they often put small amounts land in the of people who don't know how to produce from it. That may occur through some combination of lack of skills on the part of the recipient and expropriation of more marginal lands, but either way, the result is very often that the recipient sells the land off to the same economic class of folks who owned it before, and the situation has been improved (and the land may have been degraded as well).
In a larger sense there's also an open question of how to farm a given area of most efficiently and least destructively, and it seems likely that much land in Brazil is farmed suboptimally. In general, however, it is true that growing biofuels on cropland puts pressure on forestland of all sorts.
Again, that's a totally bogus argument based on the misconception that your "natural rights" include some kind of freedom from government compulsion of any sort. That's not present in any "natural rights" framework I'm aware of, except perhaps some very extremely ones. While most formulations natural rights provide for freedom of person (meaning freedom from arbitrary imprisonment), and freedom of speech, they do not suggest that humans have some sort inherent right not to be taxed. You and the parent poster either believe this, which AFAIK (IANAL) puts you well out of bounds of common legal thought, or you are avoiding the consequence that government compulsion is legitimate under certain circumstances. If it's the latter, then the use of force becomes a specific punishment for violating the law, not an abrogation of your natural right not to pay anything to anyone.
Despite the Hobbesian logic you would like assign to it, a punishment for breaking the law is not the same as a legal obligation; you have a broad moral obligation to follow law, in addition to a practical desire to avoid reprisal. And that moral obligation includes paying for the upkeep of society. Not only that, but most legal systems construct punishment mechanisms in proportion to the gravity of the lawbreaking. So a minor infraction like a small speeding ticket does not permit a police officer to use force to arrest you because the gravity of the crime does not merit confinement as a punishment or enforcement mechanism. So your argument that taxes = force totally sidesteps any morality around participating in society, and doesn't address the difference between legal compulsion and legal force that may eventually be permitted in the event of certain types lawbreaking.
Frankly, it's the argument that one does not have a moral obligation to pay taxes that troubles me most. It's evident that some taxes go to things that individuals don't agree with (both you and me doubtless included), but because taxes are a broad social obligation, you don't get to "buy" only the things you want. So by all means, use the democratic process to try change the political debate on taxation, but until you succeed, you are not forced, but beholden to pay taxes.
That said, I do agree with your view that the compulsory nature of government mandates like taxation, regulation and general lawmaking gives them a special potential for abuse. As such I agree that spending tax dollars should be broadly debated and carefully monitored. But that's a far cry from viewing oneself as having a natural right to not pay taxes.
Honestly, it strikes me as odd that you'd use this ridiculous comparison given the reasonable and defensible positions you describe elsewhere. People of many political stripes think subsidies are dangerous and would like to reduce them. The hard questions are which subsidies, to whom and how they should be reduced? Taxes exist because running a society costs money, and the only reasonable way to get that money is to divvy up the costs and compel the members of society to pay.
Now there can and should be vigorous debates about what running society really means, what should be done, and what shouldn't, but that debate is a lot drier than making incensed arguments equating the legal compulsion to pay taxes with physical force and violence. I claim, and have been claiming, that you're using these overheated arguments because the public doesn't really agree with you, and rather likes having. Now that's just my own view; upcoming elections will sort out what various countries' publics think. Nonetheless, no matter how you couch your arguments about physical force and taxes, they are sidestepping the hard questions about what good government is and how to achieve it.
First of all you are using the word "force" to suggest much greater violence than is ever inherent in taxation. The law (based on the the social compact between government and governed) compels you to do some things and compels you not to do others. That compulsion is backed by various kinds of punitive mechanisms, ranging from financial sanction to imprisonment (which only occurs in the event that you refuse to comply, and is strictly governed by law). This is the 21st century: no matter where you are in the English-speaking world, no law provides for a tax collector to take money from you at gunpoint (i.e. by "force"). So can we dispense with the hyperbole, please?
Your argument against welfare is a moral one - you disapprove of it, and you attempt to extend that disapproval to wealth redistribution in general (of which only a fraction is direct cash payment), and even more broadly to taxation as a means for solving social problems.
In the US direct welfare payments such as WIC and housing projects are a miniscule fraction of federal spending (which is dominated by defense contractor welfare), and aren't really a big slice of the redistribution pie either. More redistribution happens through incentives and subsidization of services, and these tend to be graduated scales. Think subsidized loans, section 8 housing, free education, which is redistributive on that rich people send their kids to expensive private schools, but infrastructural in that the nation's workforce needs to be educated. Overall, the money at stake in direct wealth redistribution is a pretty small fraction of most government budgets. So it's pretty Pacific ocean-sized stretch to say that the government is taking your money by "force" just to then give it to idlers.
The crux of your argument seems to be that you think welfare (and by some vague extension wealth redistribution) enables people to behave in immoral ways. I'd say welfare as direct payment is a complex issue and certainly has many risks of free riding (not to mention often compounding other social ills), but it's not particularly clear how to better handle destitution and indigence. But the government doesn't just promote free ridership for indigent people: roads are dramatically overused by suburbanites, even though urbanites make up the bulk of the tax base in the US and most other developed countries.
The point is, the more you look at how government actually procures and spends money, the less things look like taking money by "force" and the more they look like policy positions you disagree with.
Because it depends on a total human opinion of what "good" is. The dramatic ecosystem changes that are underway certainly have a destructive component (look up pictures of the effect of pine beetles on Canadian forests), and that doubtless opens ecological niches that were not available under the old equilibrium. However, existing megafauna (bears, wolves, elk, etc.) face more constraints, because they generally have geographically larger habitats, and these are now bounded by human development. So they can't adjust as easily and are at risk for much more adverse consequences. I don't know enough to say what will happen to smaller animals like birds, small cats, etc. But while there's plenty of arguments against the way environmental and conversation aims are framed and pursued, it's pretty simplistic to think that the "greenies are out for the fuzzies" and the "fuzzies are actually being helped by the carbon".
That said, it's worth point out that TFA (TFUNBP - Random Unsourced Blog Post) is making some pretty big claims when they say that the study's authors were "surprised". The article referenced by the post is behind a paywall, but the abstract indicates no surprise on the authors' part- in fact, coming from the climate science world, I'd say hardly anybody is surprised to see vegetal production efficiency go up. But it's a big jump from their to claim that that's "better" for a host of ecosystems, and to your point, it is almost certainly not better for us. And the skeptic tone of the page (this guys is part of the usual coalition of climate-change skeptics) is particularly annoying given that the skeptic groups have spent years telling us that the models are not accurate enough to be of any use, diagnostic or prognostic, yet happily reference papers that are entirely based on numerical model results as long as they can put some "stop the green tyrants" spin on it.
Here's the conclusion from a similar paper (based of course on modelling and assimilation of remote sensing data) about climate change and vegetal probability that has two takeway messages:
When it comes to the $64000 question, they're predicting that the warming will have the net effect not of sequestering carbon but releasing it and accelerating warming. But, wha!? How can it be good to have more plants grow but bad in that it accelerates climate change? Sounds to me like a mindfuck, provided you're determined to prove that carbon emissions either aren't really causing climate change or that said climate change is a net plus for humanity.
The most frustrating thing of this kind of posting is the absolute lack of genuine intellectual curiosity or openness to new ideas the skeptics exhibited. Aren't these supposed to be scientists who really want to know how things work? Aren't they genuinely interested in the knowledge being gained by other sharp minds working on the same problem? That's the fundamental compact of science: that when you disagree with people, you disagree because you both really want to know the answer. That compact is sorely abused here, and that's hard for someone with genuine scientific interest in reality to take.
Your "hard-earned money" was brought you by all the infrastructure that the taxes "taken from you" by "force" provide. Or perhaps you prefer feudal warlordism as your form of government.
The mantra of "I should get to keep every penny I ever see" is beyond dated now, and it was petulant, and shortsighted to begin with. The things that make your life (including working hard to earn money) all come from a massive physical, legal, and social infrastructure. I have tried for a long time to keep away from the conclusion that people who espouse it are fundementally unaware of how much is being provided for them as a baseline, but I am inevitably stunned by the naivete to think that things run themselves.
And this is why righties continuous fail to find that magical pot of government waste that allows them to drown the government in the bathtub. It ain't there, because people like the services they receive: law enforcement, publicly accessible schools, roads, hospitals. Small-fry investors/mutual fund buyers like having their markets policed from rampant cheats and liars. People like military operations that defend them and support the global market infrastructure (provided they're not misconceived Napoleonesque military adventurism). And every last one of those activities costs money. So start talking to me about the sewers you don't want built, or the drug and medical device regulations you don't want (so any old $5.75/hr schmoe can dose you with X-rays) or the fishing permits you shouldn't have to get so anyone can dynamite all the fish out of a stream, or the defense contracts you don't want to pay for (there's a real bargain...), and anything you think you can convince a million of your neighbors that the government should never do. Let me know when you've got that list done.
It's evident that plenty of government spending is larded with graft, patronage, dumb ideas, and political posturing. But frankly, that's at least as true in any corporate setting as in the government, and that's supposed to be a virtue because, you know, the Free Market Fairy loves her some corporations and hates her some government. I actually do believe that public entities have a special obligation to spend money conservatively and wisely, since that money represents trust by the people at large. But that kind of good government with wise investment and stewardship of public resources nearly orthogonal to the vision the so-called Free Marketeers lay out (until, of course, their Bears Stearns collapse is upon them at which point they run mewling to the teat of the government they so despise).
This is an engineering site - we work in goals and tradeoffs, not things we don't like and the free lunch we wish was there. So let's talk public policy and real goals and real constraints - that's a debate well worth having.
Well said. Point is, if there's innovation in there, it's in the elegance of the map structure/coordinate scheme for the pixel data, rather than whatever's done in code. The approach they've chosen (introduce a new coordinate scheme rather than layer existing bitmaps) seems fairly elegant, although in practice a lot probably depends on how easily you transform from whatever acquisition method you have for the pixels to their coordinate system.
I don't know this domain, but I have to suspect that type of coordinate transformation is familiar to lots of folks who have thought about image rendering (hence the ability, as noted below for the BBC to release their own such widget), and thus isn't really a new vein of thinking, just slicker packaging.
So in fact, this looks a lot like what Microsoft has always done, to package some algorithm or programming concept as a widget that developers can use for simplified development - the other part of the strategy being to tie it tightly to some development platform. If this widget were implemented in JavaScript rather than Flash^H^H^H^H^HSilverlight, wouldn't it be just another piece of code put out by some mathematically inclined graduate student that's clever but not ready for easy incorporation into production websites?
Credit where credit is due, and none where it ain't due.
Therein lies the problem: the senior 100000 of 2 million piece of crap mortgages that their holders can't pay still has a high likelihood of some or all of those mortgages defaulting. So if the pool overall is no good, the seniority does nothing to solve that problem. And that's before CDO^2 nonsense is used to claim that the senior of lots of junior tranches of various pools are as good as the senior tranches of a single pool...
So the senior tranches of CDO's have to be based on the risk ratings on the whole mortgage pool, and this is precisely where Moody's and S&P bamboozled the public and are now trying to blame it on a bug. They would bless the claim that the top of nearly any pool was great stuff, no matter what the contents of the pool were. As others have observed, that's no coding bug, it's a policy to willfully ignore reality to facilitate the sale of more securities.
The mortgage market was hardly unserved when the securitizers entered it - rather it was full of banks offering conventional mortgages at rates that properly priced the risk (and the banks took care to do that, since they held on to the risk at that time, and federal insurance laws require them to have sane risk holdings). The introduction of securitized mortgage products flooded the market with much cheaper debt. That meant that the pools kept getting progressively worse and worse as the lenders headed down-market to try to sell mortgages to people who didn't already hold more than enough debt.
And as for the loonies, as asset bubbles go, the runup in housing has only one precedent in American history: the speculation before the Great Depression. Now there are a lot more safety valves in the finance system these days, but to claim that it is or was doom and gloom to be concerned about the size of the bubble is pretty a blinked view of the world.
These are all good points, and there's a really large climate problem with all biofuels beyond just the obvious EROI problems with corn ethanol. The demand for fuels does nothing to reduce demand for crops. So any added use of land to produce fuels is in competition with both crops, human occupancy, and forest. In the case of the latter, the conversion of forest is an accelerator of climate change (both from an albedo perspective and from direct carbon emission, and from non-sequestration). In most scenarious any biofuel result in net carbon emissions (the emissions from the energy to grow and harvest the fuel, plus the emissions from burning the fuel itself). So while the math on cellulosic ethanol is much better, unless it's very carefully managed (e.g. finding a way to grow a lot of fuel in a small space) it only represents punting the problem down the road.
Ah yes, your rights to have everything you want. I take it you won't drive on any bridges, flush your toilet into any sewers, or rely on any police to keep you safe, because the government shouldn't be "clawing away" your money. And definitely you wouldn't want to put that money into a bank insured by the FDIC, or take a mortgage backed by the same federal guarantees (explicit and implicit), or participate in a stock market where liars and thieves are kept (somewhat) at bay by the SEC. Nor do you want any assurance that your medicines are not contaminated, your foodstuffs safe, and your children's teachers are not psychopaths.
The "market will solve everything if you only you set it free" meme was new (and woefully simplistic) in 1971. Now it's tired, overused and foolishly simplistic. Your whole lifestyle is made possible by a profound set of government-run or backed institutions. If they're broken, the answer is to fix them and work for fair, well-regulated markers, not scrap everything we've learned and go back to the 1860s (as appealing as them sometimes seems from within a fluorescent-lit cube). I'm all for leaner and more effective government (as, in fact, are almost all of us who think government has a key role in society), but the nonsense about greedy government taking all your tax dollars sounds increasingly petulant when bridges are falling down, tainted food and drugs are being allowed into our stores, and people are losing their homes in droves, and the top marginal tax rate is the lowest its been in decades.
Government regulation of healthcare is indeed a gigantic mess, and the Blues are a great example of that mess. And yes, government intervention in a market can indeed make a problem worse. But it takes two to tango, so let's recall Gingrich-led cuts to Medicare in the 90s, and permanent resistance to Medicaid's existence (because after all, that's just more poor - read "lazy" - people clawing your government-backed money away) and general conservative opposition to every government program that doesn't involve fat contracts for their buddies don't really to much to promote fair, orderly and efficient markets either.
Sure, comparison shopping for healthcare would improve the system and make the market for healthcare more efficient, if there were choices real humans could afford. Have you ever priced non-employer sponsored "insurance" (the quotes are because health coverage is much more a bundled service agreement that it is insurance against unlikely adverse events)? The prospect of paying $10,000-$15,000 per year sounds like great set of choices, huh? I've learned a fair bit about the dysfunction of the medical reimbursement system in my current job, and I'm not sure a government-run healthcare program is all peaches and cream, primarily because the current incarnations sidestep the hard questions we need to debate about how much care should really cost and who should pay for what. There is a cost control element to healthcare that's deeply difficult to answer once your parent gets cancer or your sibling gets a debilitating disease. But that's a debate about how to structure things well within government and the private sector, not a worn-out screed about drowning government in the bathtub.
Use dblink:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.FAQ.html#item4.17
Not as slick as doing it entirely in SQL, but it works.
1) Documenting a process makes it easier to replace people. That's almost invariably untrue. If someone is doing something complex enough that it needs process documentation, it's unlikely that an outsider can just step in and do the job without learning most or all of the supporting knowledge that the current worker has. At the very least, process documentation goes along with training, and in fact most regulatory and quality-assurance regimes such as ISO or CMMI, or the FDA's Quality System regulation require that both be there for all employees, whether or not someone has cross-trained for a particular position.
2) People should want to be irreplaceable. Being irreplaceable may potentially keep you from getting fired (provided what you're doing remains unchanged and important to the business), but it can also keep you from advancing or leaving something you don't like. As with the example of the person who worked in the factory, in a well-run business people don't need to hoard knowledge to feel job security. If a business will fire you because you're not the only one who knows something, it would have no qualms about firing you for some other reason, so the "irreplaceable" knowledge is a pretty weak line of defense.
It's also worth remembering that clear process documentation is an essential part of software development, both in the sense that it makes what you're doing clear to the developers so they can propose requirements and software behavior, but also (and often more important) it forces the doers to come to consensus so the software developers can actually implement something that's agreed-upon.
Process documentation almost invariably represents a sound investment, both for the business, as it retains institutional knowledge and ensures continuity, and also for the worker, because it helps clarify expectations and needs.
I happen to agree with the good professor that the best thing you can do in college is to learn to think deeply and critically as well as communicate, though to my mind that speaks more strongly to a good liberal arts component of education than to the specific language choice within a CS major. You might not think think learning history or economics or English make you a better programmer, but they do. By learning different modalities of thinking, you become more aware of the strengths and weakness of your own methods. Not to mention that good engineering nearly always involves communication in the form or requirements and design. But I digress...
I don't know how you tackle this make the courses hard vs. make them accessible issue. The reality is that a demanding course will in fact turn off a lot of students, and that does represent in some way a failure of the university's mission. On the other hand a demanding course (especially math) make a much, much, much better programmer/engineer/computer. Think of all the hollering software pundits do about how a good programmer can be 10 times as productive as a mediocre one - this is true and a lot of the skill of that star programmer comes down to grasp of deep algorithmic and mathematical concepts. So what do you do about the fact that most people are neither prepared nor dispositionally inclined to deal with those demands when they are 18 years old and just entering college, particularly if their family and friends are not that academically inclined and can't help them keep faith and slog through hard and sometimes tedious preparation? What's most fair to the students? It's not all that clear to me.
I think this is generally good advice. I would add to this that in terms of building a business around the software you've created, your licensing decision comes much later than many others. The principal assessment your business plan needs to make is: what need am I meeting? How can what I have or can create be traded to people in such a way as to meet that need? In other words, what's your market and product position? From that you can make determinations such as whether to sell your domain knowledge embodied in a package (which as the parent wisely points may put you at risk of having stale specifics embedded), you can sell it as consulting, you can sell it as a service, etc. None of us here on /. (except those who happen to have experience with product positioning in finance) are particularly well qualified to answer that question. You yourself may not be that well qualified to answer that question, since software engineers are often not that conversant with marketing strategy and techniques. So I'd say your first step towards making some money off that effort is to figure out the question of how to line your work up with what the market wants and can make use of.
Many here have noted that using OSS as a credibility-building towards consultancy or employment based around your domain knowledge is a common strategy. From observation (but not really personal experience) it is probably the one with the greatest likelihood of success - don't ever underestimate how useful it is to have somebody who knows the domain involved in non-business project roles such a software developer - and a clear history of building a useful piece of domain software is an excellent way to indicate that you know what the domain's issues are and can find ways to make useful solutions for them. The other methods (SaaS, package -OSS or otherwise, etc) offer the sometimes-enjoyable (and always-exhausting) possibilities of entrepreneurship - if that's your cup of tea, I'd seek out people who can complement your knowledge (not to harp on what I said above, but number one among these is a product placement person) in building a product or service around your efforts.
There are downsides to releasing your software as OSS - it can be forked or incoporated by those who already have products in the space, and unfortunately if the release itself is not carefully done, it can make you and your product look very amateur. If I happen to find a set of potentially cool domain libraries on sourceforge with no evidence of community interaction, no product description and no documentation, you can bet I'll move right along to the next product. To repeat what others have said, if you do opt for some sort of OSS-esque release, make sure to focus your efforts on community-building rather than just technical excellence: documentation, response to users/developers of your stuff, getting genuine domain users interested, etc. Or, if you want to focus on the technical parts, try to recruit someone else to do that stuff. Just remember that the community-building is what raises the profile of your software and thus your domain knowledge and skills, not really some badass recursion scheme.
Hope some of that helps.
While that point is well taken, I read his MySpace page - he's a soldier in Iraq. I also really believe that it takes guts to go into a war zone, contractor or not.
Well, first off I have to say I respect your commitment to a set of ideals - it takes a lot to go risk getting killed or maimed in service of one's country. That commitment is a very honorable thing to follow.
I do have to respectfully disagree with your view that what we're doing will work in the long run. Tactically there are many successes, and those are to your credit and to the credit of all the troops there trying to do the right thing. But strategically, the war is a disaster. We basically took a thinly balanced set of regional politics and made it much worse by empowering Iran, inflaming relations with Turkey, and unleashing years of sectarian wars in Iraq. We didn't create the underlying problems in Iraq: the power struggle between the Kurds, the Shia and the Sunni, or Iranian aspirations to regional control, and I honestly believe that Saddam was so near collapse that we would have had to reckon with geopolitics anyway. But our current course of action is like smelling gas in a house, worrying that there could be an explosion, and lighting a match to try to burn off the gas. The key actions that would have served to stabilize Iraq and the region are political - we should have brokered a deal with Turkey and the Kurds BEFORE invading, we should have worked harder on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before invading, we should have insisted to Mubarak that Egypt hold free and fair elections (which would have resulted in political participation by the Muslim Brotherhood) before invading. The list of needed political actions goes on and on: negotiate some sort of oilfields services for a no-nukes deal with Iran, enlist the rest of the world (esp. China and Russia) in reconstruction, shut down AQ Khan's nuclear network, force the Saudis to get serious about slowing financing for terrorist and insurgent groups, etc.
Huge props to you all for all the successes you've accomplished, but long-term success or failure of an Iraqi state depends on political actions, and until those are taken, we can't change the fundamental situation there.
I once read a short history of the car industry and it pointed out that GM ate Ford's lunch in part because they realized that consumers wanted to buy experience, status, and identity with their cars, not just new engines and better brakes. Microsoft seems stuck in this rut now - for a while consumers were excited about Windows because it was their entree into the futuristic world of computers and the Internet, but Windows/Microsoft never really became a identity brand. Apple has mastered the identity branding - after all, functionally the iPod does very little that the Rio didn't do (with the notable exception that Apple streamlined the process of getting music onto the damn thing), but Apple made it simultaneously safe and sexy to make the leap from collecting music on CDs in a big CaseLogic book to collecting music on a computer in one form or another. The iPhone is really the same simple concept - make the computer part of a smartphone work easily and make it sexy.
I have quite a number of friends at Microsoft, and they are all smart and aware people, so I'm always surprised at how tone deaf the company itself is. The only blindspot I could ever really discern was the combination of Not Invented Here and We Know What the Future Will Look Like And We Can't Talk Because We're Inventing It Now. Surely Apple has its blindspots, but I have to agree with your view that they are fundamentally better attuned to the consumer market.
I'm certainly not opposed regulating monopolistic industries, but the point that the TechDirt article makes is well taken: if there is in fact competition emerging in the tv market, regulation of cablecos now could give a big competitive edge to telcos, and lead to a far more monopolistic situation in cable and broadband when telcos use their favored position to lock up the broadband market.
Regulation shouldn't be undertaken to punish a company or an industry, particularly not at the behest of a competitor. It should be undertaken to address some market failure that harms consumers and the public. Figuring out what will result in the market that best serves the public and is most competitive is a bit tricky in these kinds of situations, because it requires evaluating trends for the likelihood they'll introduce competition, so there's always some guesswork about things will actually unfold. I think in this situation you have to weigh the likelihood of that competition strengthening against the impact of handing the telcos a competitive advantage.
All that said, to my mind the best answer is to require open access to all the networks, cable, copper, fiber and otherwise. Doubly so because the government footed the bill for a lot of the work to build these networks.
The problem our soldiers have now is a political one - they are being asked to deal in complex local and often personal politics in languages and cultures they have no basis for understanding. If we want to do better in Iraq, we need to send lots of our guys: soldiers, officers, diplomats, reconstruction workers, etc to language and politics school so they know who's who and don't have to depend on dubious information from people trying to manipulate the situation to their advantage. I mean we basically spent trillions of dollars installing Iran as the undisputed heavyweight of the region thanks that jackal Ahmed Chalabi and to not knowing a damn thing about local and regional politics. And in spite of those trillions of dollars, we can't find the money to pay vets and their families what they deserve for medical and psychological care?
If there's one thing I could ever, possibly, agree with Donald Rumsfeld on, it's that we need to excise the tumor of this kind of military spending.
If people other than tinkerers and enthusiasts are going to change OS, they're going to do so either because they bought a new computer, or because there's something they want to do that they can't now or something that really made them unhappy. That process takes longer than a couple months.
What's really changed with Vista is that people are not willing to be shepherded along from release to release by Microsoft. This is partly due to the Mac's resurgence and more due to a much broader understanding that there are choices. I'd love to attribute that understanding of choices to Linux and open source, but I think that's only had an much of an effect within the developer community. But users more broadly no longer see Microsoft as a miracle-worker for producing these computers that do all sorts of things, because they just expect computers to do the things they do. And many more of them have seen the forced upgrade phenomenon firsthand, and are waiting for a little more bang for their $400. That's reflected in the press with far more writers adopting critical tone towards Microsoft than ever before.
All of the articles we've seen about Apple and missed opportunities (after all this TFA is just some dude at a small website pontificating for an evenings' entertainment) are generally people expressing their desire for David to knock off Goliath and have very little to do with any insights about the market or business opportunities for Apple or Microsoft. To the extent that Apple keeps producing computers that people like and are relevant to what people want to do with them, on terms that are favorable to Apple, their market opportunities are still enormous. And that's almost totally independent of market share - the desktop OS market is simply not an unexploited area in the way it was 15 years ago.
I haven't had this experience in depth, but I have had in it. Most of Wikipedia's articles on global change are a proxy for the battles between global warming skeptics and members of the climate science community trying to make sure that the climate science point of view is heard accurately. Even writing that last sentence was hard for me to phrase without any sort of involvement in the fracas (those who know have see my posts know that I find the disrespect for scientific process on the part of the climate science skeptics pretty repugnant).
My view is that that's often the structure of current knowledge. Previously these proxy battles would take place in journals, in heated disagreements at conferences, in post-talk debates at university departments, etc. Either you think that every dispute can be settled with an strictly objective answer or you don't; that's basically a worldview question, and right now the "everything can be objectively considered" modernist-structuralist view is being overtaken by a more fluid post-post-modern "there are facts and there are opinions and it's often very hard to totally separate the two". The idea that everyone should have a voice in sorting out what's fact leads pretty quickly to the notion that everyone ought to be able to edit the canon of knowledge. That being the case, the set of facts accepted by everyone is often rather small, so it doesn't take much time to get that common ground written down and move out to the places where facts are still not considered settled.
The academics and journalists who have been the arbiters of knowledge sure seem troubled by this worldview, for good and bad reasons. It's true that most academics have invested much time in learning deeply about a particular subject, and as such ought to be taken more seriously on that subject than someone with no experience (I often rely on this point in arguments about climate change). On the other hand, individuals and even whole communities have blind spots and make mistakes, and their work ought to be open to broad debate. I think this is a natural stage in the evolution of a successful knowledge commons like Wikipedia. I hope that the project doesn't fall apart, because as other posters have pointed out, even with flawed and sometimes biased knowledge, Wikipedia pages are almost always a good point to start learning about something.