Not that I agree with LA county on this one, but I think you are assuming that human slavery has been eradicated. It has not. [scientificamerican.com] Not even in the U.S.
Your article shows that slavery exist in the world. Where is your proof that it exist in the US?
Do you remember our choices during the last presidential election? On one hand we have Bush who has shown us that he has no problems stomping on the personal freedoms of Americans in the name of increasing the personal freedoms of the Iraqui's.
On the other hand we had Gore who's environmental beliefs were difficult to differentiate from the Uni-bomber manifesto click here to try and who's idea of financial responsibilty is (like all liberals) to "take back the tax cuts". Why don't people understand that "taking back tax cuts" is the same thing as "I'm going to tax you more"?
Remember, Liberalism is when A gets together with B to decide how much money C should give to D. YOU'RE C !
When both our choices are corrupt, stupid, power hungry men then what good does voting do us?
I just went to the page that the email referred me to and turned all ths "Notify me on this uselss spam" type of messages off and clicked the Save button.
Then I noticed that my email address in the preferences was my "safe" address. The one where I never get spam. So I changed it to my "send all spam here" email and clicked save.
Then I went back to the first page ane guess what? All the "Send me spam" opt in choices were reset to YES again. Well that sux. I changed it back to NO NO NO NO NO NO NO and Fsck No! and clicked Save again. I hope it decided that No means No this time. But resetting to a default of YES when I changed something else seems pretty sleezy.
Get over it! The votes were counted again and again and Bush won. How is it that on one hand you can decide that there was some conspiracy to put Bush in office, and on the other hand you can completely ignore Al Gore's speech where he said "We just want to make sure that every vote is counted". Except, of course, for the absentee ballets which are mainly from military who tend to vote republican, and except for a whole bunch of ballots from republicans who, through no fault of their own, had their voter registration information filled out by their precinct manager. Because the ballots were "tampered with" Gore wanted all those ballots thrown out. We should just ignore the fact that they were all republican voters. Yeah right Al, You wanted "every vote counted".
The reason the vote was so close was because neither of them suceeded at presenting their ideas. Neither of them gave us any reason to vote for them. Neither of them showed themselves to be the better leader.
Do I agree with everything that Bush has done? Gawd No! The man's an idiot and he's put us in danger that will haunt us for many generations. He's lied to us about the war. There were no Iraqi plutonium purchases in Africa and there were no aluminum tubes being made into centrifuges. AND the only thing MIA from this war seems to be the weapons of mass destruction.
On the other hand we have Dean running against him who has promised to eliminate the Bush tax cuts. Yeah, that's pretty damn smart Dean. My middle class paycheck went up almost $200 a month because of those tax cuts. So I should vote for you because when you kill off those tax cuts I'll be making $2400 a year less money.
The fundamental truth of our government is that they do not represent US. They do not represent the middle class. I mean my god! Here in California we have a governor who just pass a law giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens. How the hell does that better represent ME? How does that make my life safer? And yet when we vote him out we get a f*cking movie star instead of ANY of the half dozen or so qualified canidates.
The reason despots rule is because of 2 reasons:
Most people in this country get their news from a media that has no interest in keeping us informed. They have no interest in fairly presenting both sides of an idea.
The average IQ is 100 so half of the voters are in the double digit world. Even if the media wasn't totally corrupt they wouldn't understand what they were being told. You think that's too mean? May I remind you who our new governor is?
We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better.
Then count me!! The only reason I have take my Linux box down is to restart after I've recompiled a new Kernel. Can't say the same for my Windows boxes.
I thought they only showed crappy shows like "Made" and "Road Rules". Since when has MTV been about music?
Consider yourself lucky. The only "Music" I've seen on MTV lately has been Rap Crap, Metal with crap Rap screaming, or the latest Britney clone singing the latest version of her "Baby Baby Baby" song.
Let's see, then there are the bands made up of 3 identical girls singing more "Baby Baby Baby" songs. And then there are the generic rappers in oversize basketball shirts and big gold rings singing "Baby Baby Baby" songs. But at least we don't have to listen to bands made up of 5 boys with headphone mics singing their "Baby Baby Baby" songs.
So yeah, consider yourself lucky that you havn't seen the "music" on MTV lately.
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
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· Score: 1
But I won't be able to afford the mortgage on my $500,000 home!" . . . Living in a 60-80 hour workweek society is your choice, and if you're too blinkered to do something about improving the quality of your life, fine..
Spoken like a true liberal
Oh I see, it's MY fault that I was born in Southern California where the housing prices are sky high. And it's MY fault that Southern California has 10% of the nations population and 15% of the nation's jobs. It must be MY fault that I chose Computer Science as my major because once again the majority of those jobs are in the top 4 most expensive housing markets (San Fransisco area, Orange County Ca. Boston Ma., and San Diego Ca.)
And I don't drive an SUV, I drive a small Ford Ranger and my wife has a Honda. The two cars combined cost less than one SUV. We don't have 2.4 kids, we don't have a big screen TV, we arn't the rich bastards you liberals hate so much. We're just a couple who's trying to afford a house in the same area (give or take 100 miles) where I grew up. But the median house price here in San Diego is now $407k which means you have a monthly payment (with taxes and insurance) between $2500 and $3000 EVERY MONTH! But I guess that's my fault too.
And let's see, is it MY fault that Allan Greenspan has dropped the interest rate to damn near zero which made it easy for everyone to get cheap home loans which in turn artificially inflated the cost of housing? Is it my fault that Greenspan has also printed billions of dollars in cash making the money I do have worth less? (that's called inflation boys and girls) Is it my fault that P/E ratios of the stock market are so damn high that we're all just waiting for the bubble to pop? Is it MY fault that the bond market is in the crapper, and that because of those afore mentioned cheap interest rates savings accounts are paying next to nothing? Where am I suppose to invest for retirement? No, I HAVE to work to build up enough money not to die in poverty.
So I guess I should give up my life and my career and go start a farm or sail around the world [sarcasm]which of course are both incredibly inexpensive propositions [/sarcasm] Oh yeah, I should pick up and move to a place where there are minimal jobs in my field (but the houses are cheap because people are getting foreclosed on every day!)
I can't believe you folks moderated this comment 5:Insightful. What a bunch of short sighted liberal crap this is.
Nice troll, but unlike [evil corp] the record companies DON'T produce the product. The artist do. The artist have to pay for the studio time, the artist have to pay for the promotion, the artist have to pay back any advances they got from the record company, the artist have to pay for tour support, the artist pay for everything.
The ONLY thing the record company does is put the CD's into the bin space that they've already reserved at the record stores. With iTunes there's no physical product so they don't even do that.
So go educate yourself a little bit before you start posting obvious crap. Better yet, form a band and find out for yourself how quickly you can get screwed.
Today most people download their software throught the Internet, and can get patches just as fast, even automatically as they are posted.
But that's the cost of updating the software. What we're all missing is the cost of the bug. Not the cost of finding and fixing the bug, but the cost of the bug itself.
Let's say that you're working for a bank and their wire transfer software delvelops a bug during the end of month or (even worse) the end of quarter period. There may only be 5000 to 10000 transactions but those transactions can account for several billions of dollars (Yes I work as a programmer for a bank and yes these numbers are reasonable).
A bug like that could cost you customers. The knds of corporate customers who use that wire transfer system have hundreds of bank accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. If they're unhappy with their service then the cost of losing even ONE of those customers is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
What if the bug causes an airplane to crash? Or a car to suddenly accelerate? Those bugs cause damages (both physical and financial) in the millions of dollars. Yes, the cost of a bug in the latest video game is trivial. But the cost of a bug in systems where people's lives and finances are at stake is tremendous.
I would like to quote what I heard on NPR last week (and what I posted here on Slashdot as well):
On National Public Radio a representative from Apple was talking about the fee structure.
99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic and now the 1,000,000 song statistic. This means that for those 1 million songs the record companies made $800,000 and that the artist and Apple have to share $190,000.
So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing. Of course Apple has to promote the iPod, they have to pay for the software development, the bandwidth, the data storage etc and they have to split their share with the artist (who once again seem to be considered a line item expense rather than the people who produce the art and product)
Don't fool youself into thinking this is supporting the artist. The record companies are just as corrupt as ever.
On National Public Radio today a representative from Apple was talking about the fee structure.
99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic. That means 8 Million $$$ to the record companies and $1 Million to be shared among every one of the artist
So don't start thinking that the record companies might not actually be total bastards just because they're letting you buy somebody else's songs for a dollar a song. They're just as evil as ever.
On the other hand, if a band can set up it's own independent record company and then promote their music on their own, then they'll get both sides of the fee structure and make 90 cents per song instead of 10 cents. So once again, the way for a band to actually make money from their talent is to stay as far away from record companies as possible.
No state has a law prohibiting anyone from reciting the pledge voluntarily, whenever they want to.
What you said was
there ARE LAWS AGAINST VOLUNTARY PRAYER
That's 2 completly different things. He said there is no law keeping anyone from reciting the pledge. He said nothing about laws that keep you from leading prayer groups in school. So rather than accusing him of spending zero time researching his article you should spend a bit more than zero time reading it.
They directed a laser beam at photaic cells? Nice other name than solar panel
So how about instead of placing the photaic cells on the bottom of the wing and powering it by a laser we put them on TOP of the wing and power it by the sun?
A recent news story says studios may even be discouraged from distributing advance DVDs of their Oscar contenders to academy members, because some of these movies quickly find their way to the Web.
So guess what, it's not us consumers (the ones who are paying the theater ticket prices and rental fees) who are doing the pirating. It's their own people.
Maybe the studios should police their own people rather than give us even poorer quality films and blame us for having to do it.
Whether the company which bought up the company which bought up the company which did the work makes any money from their sale is not interesting to me.
Who cares if the original programmer is making money or not? If the company was still in business and the original programmer quit his job does that make it OK to steal the ROMs? Of course not.
Sorry, but your argument has some pretty shaky logic. If somebody owns some desert land that they never use is it ok to go start a brush fire? Of course not, but maybe that's too destructive of an example. Is it ok to do some gold mining on their land? Rock collecting? How about 4 wheel drive offroading?
It's not YOUR land and it's not YOUR property so YOU don't get to choose whether or not YOU want to pay to use it or not.
It's the same way with these ROMS. So what if the original developing company isn't selling the game currently. I'm betting that the StartROMs is paying the current owners something. So yes, the owner of the copyright IS making some money.
I think $2 to $6 per game is perfectly reasonable price to pay for a legal copy. It's totally irresponsible to say that because the original programmer or original company isn't making any money off of these licenses that it's OK to just steal their software.
"So what?" you may ask. "Why should there still be a loophole for internet businesses?" Here's why:
When I have to pay more taxes I have less money in my pocket. I can no longer biggie size my fries. My kids hate it when I don't biggie size their fries. They start whining and I hate that. For me to purchase the same amount of goods and services that I use to I need to spend more money. That means I have to go around my store and mark up all the prices so I can make more money that I use to buy exactly the same stuff I use to buy and so I can biggie size my fries so my kids can have the same life style they've always had.
Of course that causes the people who buy from me to have to mark up THIER prices so they can afford my new, higher prices. And the guy that buys from them has to mark up HIS prices to afford their stuff.
But Wait! I buy stuff from that guy! And since his prices went up (Greedy bastard) I have to raise my prices again. This, ladies and gentlemen, is know as inflation. And if you believe Greenspan and think that there isn't any inflation then ask yourself this. Why is it that when the Euro was release one dollar American use to buy about 2 Euros but now it only buys 0.80 of one Euro? It's because our dollar is worth less. We need more money to buy the same amount of goods and services. If you've been reading carefully then right about now you'll slap yourself in the forehead and say "Hey! That's the very definition of inflation!"
Now we add in Allan Greenspans ultimate stupidity of printing money like it's free. $6 trillion of new money. And where's the gold to back it up? Oh wait! You mean there isn't anything backing it up? Well, if that were true then printing new money would be deflating the value of our dollar wouldn't it? Yes boys and girls you hit the nail on the head. Not only is there an insane amount of inflation but Mr. Greenspan is doing his best to make the money you already have as useless as possible.
"But wait", you say "I can invest my money". And where do you invest it I ask? The average Price/Earnings ratio before Black Friday and the great depression was 32. That means that stocks, on average, were selling for 32 times there earnings per share. Today the average is 34. Yes, The bubble is big and when it pops you're going to be reminded what a REAL depression is all about. Not the kind where gasoline is $2 a gallon, the kind where you and 1000 of your neighbors stand in bread lines to get enough food to eat.
OK, so what about bonds? Well the bond market has pretty much trash. How about savings? Oh yeah, our buddy Greenspan has reduced the interest rates to damn near ZERO. At my local bank they give 0.25% on a savings account. No, that's not twenty five percent, that's One Quarter of One Percent Interest! You can double your money roughly every 5000 years. Oh, and by the way, this also means that because of inflation even if I was able to save every penny of my paycheck for 10 years It STILL doesn't mean I have 10 years of retirement pay built up because my dollars won't buy as many goods and services 10 years from now. How does THAT make your retirement plans sound?
OK, well maybe the governmen really needs the money more than I need to feed my family. Let's see here, during our governor's term in office (Gray Davis, California) the population of the state increased by 23%. Wow, That's a lot! But wait a minute, In that same period government spending in California increased 48%. That's over twice the rate of the population increase. So what the hell are they spending all that money on? How about you let ME have more of MY money and let ME buy the services I NEED!
I tell ya folks. It's time for a revolution. If you think that anyone in our government represents YOU then I have some hyper-inflated housing to sell you at artificially low interest rates.
If a citizen wants to choose to have a telephone hooked up to the entire rest of the world, then that citizen should accept the responsibilities that come along with that.
Absolutly. And that goes for the people on BOTH ends of the telephone. Why is it up to ME to perform additional actions to keep myself from being bothered by these parasites? Especially when those processes have a possibility of blocking non-telemarketer calls. Have you ever tried to call somebody with a "no caller-id blocker" from a cell phone? Now the caller is inconvenienced because the person receiving the calls is trying to keep from having his home and privacy invaded.
If you don't want strangers calling you and selling you things, there are several solutions to that problem that don't involve the government.
And that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm putting my name on a do not call list to let the telemarketers know that I do not want them to call me.
I think that if you're too dumb to configure your phone to not take calls you don't want, that you deserve to get called at dinner time by a stranger selling discount vacations to Mexico.
And I think you're posting this as flamebait because no intelligent person could possibly think that this is a reasonable alternative. Do I still have to screen every call? Yes. Am I still interupted every evening? Yes. How is that better than simply telling the telemarketers that you're going to hang up on them so stop calling?
Nobody is discussing the other side of this issue. The people who didn't get on the do not call list are the very people who the telemarketers want to talk to. By calling those of us who signed up the telemarketers are wasting their time and money. We hate them, they won't make any money off of us. But the people who did not sign up are people who have a higher sales probability. Those are the prime customers. If anything the sales percentage on the non-list-members will go up. Telemarketing will become a more profitable venture.
Well, the more I write software the more I want to build guitars for a living. My ultimate office has sharp tools, air conditioning, a good dust collector and a better stereo, plenty of wood seasoning in neatly piled stacks and a 2 year waiting list of customers.
Yeah, my ultimate office wouldn't even have a computer in it. Except for the air conditioner and the customer list the paragraph above describes my own shop. I just wish I could pay off the mortgage so I can go build something tangible. Compare these two careers: "Here are a couple million random zeros and ones. Put them in a specific non-random order and you've created something of value" OR "Take that wood and, through your own effort, creativity and skill you create a musical instrument that is not only beautiful to look at, but it sounds wonderful and brings joy to all who play it and hear it."
Yep, my ultimate office has nothing to do with software or computers.
If I decompile your great JAVA/.NET/ActiveX component that I downloaded, can I get at all your hard-coded passwords, query strings, etc? If so, I don't think you can blame JAVA.
Yes it is true that you can easily decompile.class files to get back almost the exact source code (without comments). However it is also true that there are code obfuscators that do a really good job of making it damn near impossible for someone to figure out how the code works. Imagine if you overloaded your methods and classes as much as possible such that 70% of your class names were 'A'. i.e.
It makes it darn tough to figure out what the code does. And you don't have to write the code in this obfuscated manner, you write it using good code practices and the run the obfuscator on the compiled.class files. The output of that obfuscator is a set of obfuscated code and a mapping file so if you get debug messages like:
NullPointerException in A.c(int) line 147
then your mapping file will tell you that "A" was actually your class name "Client" and c(int) is actually "stZipCode(int)". Now you can still debug a customer's error without giving away anything about the code structure to the customer.
However, the place where Java has been excelling (and where I've made my living for the past 5 of my 15 years in software) is in major web applications where the user doesn't have any access to your compiled code. The combination of Java servlets, talking to Enterprise Java Beans or to a database via JDBC and then outputing the html using Java Server Pages is now pretty much the default way of writing a huge data-centric web site. Pretty much all major banks do their on-line banking web sites this way (this is my area of expertise). This is the technology behind Amazon.com and (I believe) Barnes & Nobel.com as well. If you use Quicken or MS Money to do your bill payments and check your financial statements you're either connecting to CheckFree (Java Based) or to an EEI server (Java based) to transfer all that financial info.
So is Java fat, bloated and wastefull? Well, how fast is your on-line banking? How fast is Amazon? How fast does your Quicken software work? You'll wait far more because of lag in your web connection than with any kind of slowness with Java.
So what we have here is some academic geek with a web site on the Harvard Law server telling those of us who actually pay our mortgages writing Java software that we don't know what we're doing. Well, that's fine. When I'm done paying off my house 15 years early (as well as all my car, student loan and credit card payments) and I'm retired debt free at age 50 I'll try not to be too upset that Phil Greenspan's angry little blog said I did it by using the wrong tool.
A popular Finnish mime has even integrated the FogScreen into a performance.
Hmmm. "Popular", "Finnish", "Mime"
I understand each of those words individually, but as a sentence they just don't compute. During all the time I've spent in Finland I remember tango music, polkas, The Lenningrad Cowboys, Muikut (small fish eaten whole. Don't eat Muikut no matter how many people tell you "It's a delicacy"). But I certainly don't remember any popular Finnish Mime. Unless they're talking about former president Marti Attisari.
Oh well, Anteksi, Mina en osa Soumi hyva (Finnish for "Sorry, I don't speak Finnish very well).
We use to have H1B's from India in our shop as cheap programmers. Yeah, they were cheap, but the projects they worked on were all late and over budget. And the quality of their code was atrocious. Here's an example of some code to determine if a zip code is a 5 digit zip code or a 9 digit zip code with a dash in the middle.
String zip = new String(req.getParameter("ZIP"));
// several lines deleted for clarity
StringTokenizer ziptk = new StringTokenizer(zip, "-");
int zipcount = ziptk.countTokens();
String zip1 = null;
String zip2 = null;
switch (zipcount) {
case 2:
while (ziptk.hasMoreElements()) {
zip1 = (String) ziptk.nextElement();
userBean.setZip(zip1);
zip2 = (String) ziptk.nextElement();
userBean.setZip1(zip2);
}
case 1:
while (ziptk.hasMoreElements()) {
zip1 = (String) ziptk.nextElement();
userBean.setZip(zip1);
userBean.setZip1("");
}
}
Why are you using a switch statement when you already know how many tokens there are? zipcount is the number of tokens.
Why is the enumeration wrapped with a while statement when it's already inside case 2: or case 1: ?? If you got to case 2: then you KNOW that there are 2 items. Answer, because the programmer didn't know about "break"
How slow is StringTokenizer? Since you KNOW that the zip code either will, or will not have a dash in it then how about just doing an indexOf("-") and splitting the string?
Look at the methods in the userBean object. setZip and setZip1 ??? How about setZip and setZipExtension or any other method name that's self documenting. setZip1(String) !? WTF is that?
There were tens of thousands of lines of code like this. So what are we suppose to do? Spend a senior programmer's hours to do code reviews of the H1B code? Where's the cost savings then?
The project was $270k over budget and a year late. That's the cost of three senior programmers at $90k per year for a full year. And we havn't even touched on the cost of maintaining this mess. Do you really think that the situation will get better if the programmer is 10,000 miles away?
Why can't management understand THAT side of the equation?
This site http://www.ataconnect.org/contact.htm is the ATA's contact us page. The only required fields are first and last name and an email address (Use a real email address at your own discression)
You can send them an email stating your point of view.
NOTE: A well reasoned, polite email will probably have a greater effect than an angry rant (if it has any effect at all).
Slashdot Mirror
Your article shows that slavery exist in the world. Where is your proof that it exist in the US?
Do you remember our choices during the last presidential election? On one hand we have Bush who has shown us that he has no problems stomping on the personal freedoms of Americans in the name of increasing the personal freedoms of the Iraqui's.
On the other hand we had Gore who's environmental beliefs were difficult to differentiate from the Uni-bomber manifesto click here to try and who's idea of financial responsibilty is (like all liberals) to "take back the tax cuts". Why don't people understand that "taking back tax cuts" is the same thing as "I'm going to tax you more"?
Remember, Liberalism is when A gets together with B to decide how much money C should give to D. YOU'RE C !
When both our choices are corrupt, stupid, power hungry men then what good does voting do us?
Then I noticed that my email address in the preferences was my "safe" address. The one where I never get spam. So I changed it to my "send all spam here" email and clicked save.
Then I went back to the first page ane guess what? All the "Send me spam" opt in choices were reset to YES again. Well that sux. I changed it back to NO NO NO NO NO NO NO and Fsck No! and clicked Save again. I hope it decided that No means No this time. But resetting to a default of YES when I changed something else seems pretty sleezy.
said RIAA President Cary Sherman. "That's our job!"
The reason the vote was so close was because neither of them suceeded at presenting their ideas. Neither of them gave us any reason to vote for them. Neither of them showed themselves to be the better leader.
Do I agree with everything that Bush has done? Gawd No! The man's an idiot and he's put us in danger that will haunt us for many generations. He's lied to us about the war. There were no Iraqi plutonium purchases in Africa and there were no aluminum tubes being made into centrifuges. AND the only thing MIA from this war seems to be the weapons of mass destruction.
On the other hand we have Dean running against him who has promised to eliminate the Bush tax cuts. Yeah, that's pretty damn smart Dean. My middle class paycheck went up almost $200 a month because of those tax cuts. So I should vote for you because when you kill off those tax cuts I'll be making $2400 a year less money.
The fundamental truth of our government is that they do not represent US. They do not represent the middle class. I mean my god! Here in California we have a governor who just pass a law giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens. How the hell does that better represent ME? How does that make my life safer? And yet when we vote him out we get a f*cking movie star instead of ANY of the half dozen or so qualified canidates.
The reason despots rule is because of 2 reasons:
Geez, Is it time for a revolution or what?
Then count me!! The only reason I have take my Linux box down is to restart after I've recompiled a new Kernel. Can't say the same for my Windows boxes.
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware.
Consider yourself lucky. The only "Music" I've seen on MTV lately has been Rap Crap, Metal with crap Rap screaming, or the latest Britney clone singing the latest version of her "Baby Baby Baby" song. Let's see, then there are the bands made up of 3 identical girls singing more "Baby Baby Baby" songs. And then there are the generic rappers in oversize basketball shirts and big gold rings singing "Baby Baby Baby" songs. But at least we don't have to listen to bands made up of 5 boys with headphone mics singing their "Baby Baby Baby" songs.
So yeah, consider yourself lucky that you havn't seen the "music" on MTV lately.
Spoken like a true liberal
Oh I see, it's MY fault that I was born in Southern California where the housing prices are sky high. And it's MY fault that Southern California has 10% of the nations population and 15% of the nation's jobs. It must be MY fault that I chose Computer Science as my major because once again the majority of those jobs are in the top 4 most expensive housing markets (San Fransisco area, Orange County Ca. Boston Ma., and San Diego Ca.)
And I don't drive an SUV, I drive a small Ford Ranger and my wife has a Honda. The two cars combined cost less than one SUV. We don't have 2.4 kids, we don't have a big screen TV, we arn't the rich bastards you liberals hate so much. We're just a couple who's trying to afford a house in the same area (give or take 100 miles) where I grew up. But the median house price here in San Diego is now $407k which means you have a monthly payment (with taxes and insurance) between $2500 and $3000 EVERY MONTH! But I guess that's my fault too.
And let's see, is it MY fault that Allan Greenspan has dropped the interest rate to damn near zero which made it easy for everyone to get cheap home loans which in turn artificially inflated the cost of housing? Is it my fault that Greenspan has also printed billions of dollars in cash making the money I do have worth less? (that's called inflation boys and girls) Is it my fault that P/E ratios of the stock market are so damn high that we're all just waiting for the bubble to pop? Is it MY fault that the bond market is in the crapper, and that because of those afore mentioned cheap interest rates savings accounts are paying next to nothing? Where am I suppose to invest for retirement? No, I HAVE to work to build up enough money not to die in poverty.
So I guess I should give up my life and my career and go start a farm or sail around the world [sarcasm]which of course are both incredibly inexpensive propositions [/sarcasm] Oh yeah, I should pick up and move to a place where there are minimal jobs in my field (but the houses are cheap because people are getting foreclosed on every day!)
I can't believe you folks moderated this comment 5:Insightful. What a bunch of short sighted liberal crap this is.
The ONLY thing the record company does is put the CD's into the bin space that they've already reserved at the record stores. With iTunes there's no physical product so they don't even do that.
So go educate yourself a little bit before you start posting obvious crap. Better yet, form a band and find out for yourself how quickly you can get screwed.
But that's the cost of updating the software. What we're all missing is the cost of the bug. Not the cost of finding and fixing the bug, but the cost of the bug itself.
Let's say that you're working for a bank and their wire transfer software delvelops a bug during the end of month or (even worse) the end of quarter period. There may only be 5000 to 10000 transactions but those transactions can account for several billions of dollars (Yes I work as a programmer for a bank and yes these numbers are reasonable).
A bug like that could cost you customers. The knds of corporate customers who use that wire transfer system have hundreds of bank accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. If they're unhappy with their service then the cost of losing even ONE of those customers is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
What if the bug causes an airplane to crash? Or a car to suddenly accelerate? Those bugs cause damages (both physical and financial) in the millions of dollars. Yes, the cost of a bug in the latest video game is trivial. But the cost of a bug in systems where people's lives and finances are at stake is tremendous.
On National Public Radio a representative from Apple was talking about the fee structure. 99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
- 80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
- 19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic and now the 1,000,000 song statistic. This means that for those 1 million songs the record companies made $800,000 and that the artist and Apple have to share $190,000.So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing. Of course Apple has to promote the iPod, they have to pay for the software development, the bandwidth, the data storage etc and they have to split their share with the artist (who once again seem to be considered a line item expense rather than the people who produce the art and product)
Don't fool youself into thinking this is supporting the artist. The record companies are just as corrupt as ever.
99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
- 80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
- 19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic. That means 8 Million $$$ to the record companies and $1 Million to be shared among every one of the artistSo don't start thinking that the record companies might not actually be total bastards just because they're letting you buy somebody else's songs for a dollar a song. They're just as evil as ever.
On the other hand, if a band can set up it's own independent record company and then promote their music on their own, then they'll get both sides of the fee structure and make 90 cents per song instead of 10 cents. So once again, the way for a band to actually make money from their talent is to stay as far away from record companies as possible.
No state has a law prohibiting anyone from reciting the pledge voluntarily, whenever they want to.
What you said was
there ARE LAWS AGAINST VOLUNTARY PRAYER
That's 2 completly different things. He said there is no law keeping anyone from reciting the pledge. He said nothing about laws that keep you from leading prayer groups in school. So rather than accusing him of spending zero time researching his article you should spend a bit more than zero time reading it.
So how about instead of placing the photaic cells on the bottom of the wing and powering it by a laser we put them on TOP of the wing and power it by the sun?
A recent news story says studios may even be discouraged from distributing advance DVDs of their Oscar contenders to academy members, because some of these movies quickly find their way to the Web.
So guess what, it's not us consumers (the ones who are paying the theater ticket prices and rental fees) who are doing the pirating. It's their own people.
Maybe the studios should police their own people rather than give us even poorer quality films and blame us for having to do it.
Who cares if the original programmer is making money or not? If the company was still in business and the original programmer quit his job does that make it OK to steal the ROMs? Of course not.
Sorry, but your argument has some pretty shaky logic. If somebody owns some desert land that they never use is it ok to go start a brush fire? Of course not, but maybe that's too destructive of an example. Is it ok to do some gold mining on their land? Rock collecting? How about 4 wheel drive offroading?
It's not YOUR land and it's not YOUR property so YOU don't get to choose whether or not YOU want to pay to use it or not.
It's the same way with these ROMS. So what if the original developing company isn't selling the game currently. I'm betting that the StartROMs is paying the current owners something. So yes, the owner of the copyright IS making some money.
I think $2 to $6 per game is perfectly reasonable price to pay for a legal copy. It's totally irresponsible to say that because the original programmer or original company isn't making any money off of these licenses that it's OK to just steal their software.
When I have to pay more taxes I have less money in my pocket. I can no longer biggie size my fries. My kids hate it when I don't biggie size their fries. They start whining and I hate that. For me to purchase the same amount of goods and services that I use to I need to spend more money. That means I have to go around my store and mark up all the prices so I can make more money that I use to buy exactly the same stuff I use to buy and so I can biggie size my fries so my kids can have the same life style they've always had.
Of course that causes the people who buy from me to have to mark up THIER prices so they can afford my new, higher prices. And the guy that buys from them has to mark up HIS prices to afford their stuff.
But Wait! I buy stuff from that guy! And since his prices went up (Greedy bastard) I have to raise my prices again. This, ladies and gentlemen, is know as inflation. And if you believe Greenspan and think that there isn't any inflation then ask yourself this. Why is it that when the Euro was release one dollar American use to buy about 2 Euros but now it only buys 0.80 of one Euro? It's because our dollar is worth less. We need more money to buy the same amount of goods and services. If you've been reading carefully then right about now you'll slap yourself in the forehead and say "Hey! That's the very definition of inflation!"
Now we add in Allan Greenspans ultimate stupidity of printing money like it's free. $6 trillion of new money. And where's the gold to back it up? Oh wait! You mean there isn't anything backing it up? Well, if that were true then printing new money would be deflating the value of our dollar wouldn't it? Yes boys and girls you hit the nail on the head. Not only is there an insane amount of inflation but Mr. Greenspan is doing his best to make the money you already have as useless as possible.
"But wait", you say "I can invest my money". And where do you invest it I ask? The average Price/Earnings ratio before Black Friday and the great depression was 32. That means that stocks, on average, were selling for 32 times there earnings per share. Today the average is 34. Yes, The bubble is big and when it pops you're going to be reminded what a REAL depression is all about. Not the kind where gasoline is $2 a gallon, the kind where you and 1000 of your neighbors stand in bread lines to get enough food to eat.
OK, so what about bonds? Well the bond market has pretty much trash. How about savings? Oh yeah, our buddy Greenspan has reduced the interest rates to damn near ZERO. At my local bank they give 0.25% on a savings account. No, that's not twenty five percent, that's One Quarter of One Percent Interest! You can double your money roughly every 5000 years. Oh, and by the way, this also means that because of inflation even if I was able to save every penny of my paycheck for 10 years It STILL doesn't mean I have 10 years of retirement pay built up because my dollars won't buy as many goods and services 10 years from now. How does THAT make your retirement plans sound?
OK, well maybe the governmen really needs the money more than I need to feed my family. Let's see here, during our governor's term in office (Gray Davis, California) the population of the state increased by 23%. Wow, That's a lot! But wait a minute, In that same period government spending in California increased 48%. That's over twice the rate of the population increase. So what the hell are they spending all that money on? How about you let ME have more of MY money and let ME buy the services I NEED!
I tell ya folks. It's time for a revolution. If you think that anyone in our government represents YOU then I have some hyper-inflated housing to sell you at artificially low interest rates.
Oh wait, I see you fell for that one already.
Absolutly. And that goes for the people on BOTH ends of the telephone. Why is it up to ME to perform additional actions to keep myself from being bothered by these parasites? Especially when those processes have a possibility of blocking non-telemarketer calls. Have you ever tried to call somebody with a "no caller-id blocker" from a cell phone? Now the caller is inconvenienced because the person receiving the calls is trying to keep from having his home and privacy invaded.
If you don't want strangers calling you and selling you things, there are several solutions to that problem that don't involve the government.
And that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm putting my name on a do not call list to let the telemarketers know that I do not want them to call me.
I think that if you're too dumb to configure your phone to not take calls you don't want, that you deserve to get called at dinner time by a stranger selling discount vacations to Mexico.
And I think you're posting this as flamebait because no intelligent person could possibly think that this is a reasonable alternative. Do I still have to screen every call? Yes. Am I still interupted every evening? Yes. How is that better than simply telling the telemarketers that you're going to hang up on them so stop calling?
Nobody is discussing the other side of this issue. The people who didn't get on the do not call list are the very people who the telemarketers want to talk to. By calling those of us who signed up the telemarketers are wasting their time and money. We hate them, they won't make any money off of us. But the people who did not sign up are people who have a higher sales probability. Those are the prime customers. If anything the sales percentage on the non-list-members will go up. Telemarketing will become a more profitable venture.
Yeah, my ultimate office wouldn't even have a computer in it. Except for the air conditioner and the customer list the paragraph above describes my own shop. I just wish I could pay off the mortgage so I can go build something tangible. Compare these two careers: "Here are a couple million random zeros and ones. Put them in a specific non-random order and you've created something of value" OR "Take that wood and, through your own effort, creativity and skill you create a musical instrument that is not only beautiful to look at, but it sounds wonderful and brings joy to all who play it and hear it."
Yep, my ultimate office has nothing to do with software or computers.
Yes it is true that you can easily decompile .class files to get back almost the exact source code (without comments). However it is also true that there are code obfuscators that do a really good job of making it damn near impossible for someone to figure out how the code works. Imagine if you overloaded your methods and classes as much as possible such that 70% of your class names were 'A'. i.e.
setName(String) becomes a(String)
setAge(int) becomes a(int)
getName() becomes a() and
getAge() becomes b()
It makes it darn tough to figure out what the code does. And you don't have to write the code in this obfuscated manner, you write it using good code practices and the run the obfuscator on the compiled .class files. The output of that obfuscator is a set of obfuscated code and a mapping file so if you get debug messages like:
NullPointerException in A.c(int) line 147
then your mapping file will tell you that "A" was actually your class name "Client" and c(int) is actually "stZipCode(int)". Now you can still debug a customer's error without giving away anything about the code structure to the customer.
However, the place where Java has been excelling (and where I've made my living for the past 5 of my 15 years in software) is in major web applications where the user doesn't have any access to your compiled code. The combination of Java servlets, talking to Enterprise Java Beans or to a database via JDBC and then outputing the html using Java Server Pages is now pretty much the default way of writing a huge data-centric web site. Pretty much all major banks do their on-line banking web sites this way (this is my area of expertise). This is the technology behind Amazon.com and (I believe) Barnes & Nobel.com as well. If you use Quicken or MS Money to do your bill payments and check your financial statements you're either connecting to CheckFree (Java Based) or to an EEI server (Java based) to transfer all that financial info.
So is Java fat, bloated and wastefull? Well, how fast is your on-line banking? How fast is Amazon? How fast does your Quicken software work? You'll wait far more because of lag in your web connection than with any kind of slowness with Java.
So what we have here is some academic geek with a web site on the Harvard Law server telling those of us who actually pay our mortgages writing Java software that we don't know what we're doing. Well, that's fine. When I'm done paying off my house 15 years early (as well as all my car, student loan and credit card payments) and I'm retired debt free at age 50 I'll try not to be too upset that Phil Greenspan's angry little blog said I did it by using the wrong tool.
It depends on the code. Remember, the DeCSS code was only 7 lines of Perl. That had fairly far reaching effects on the rights of computer users.
Hmmm. "Popular", "Finnish", "Mime"
I understand each of those words individually, but as a sentence they just don't compute. During all the time I've spent in Finland I remember tango music, polkas, The Lenningrad Cowboys, Muikut (small fish eaten whole. Don't eat Muikut no matter how many people tell you "It's a delicacy"). But I certainly don't remember any popular Finnish Mime. Unless they're talking about former president Marti Attisari.
Oh well, Anteksi, Mina en osa Soumi hyva (Finnish for "Sorry, I don't speak Finnish very well).
There were tens of thousands of lines of code like this. So what are we suppose to do? Spend a senior programmer's hours to do code reviews of the H1B code? Where's the cost savings then?
The project was $270k over budget and a year late. That's the cost of three senior programmers at $90k per year for a full year. And we havn't even touched on the cost of maintaining this mess. Do you really think that the situation will get better if the programmer is 10,000 miles away?
Why can't management understand THAT side of the equation?
You can send them an email stating your point of view.
NOTE: A well reasoned, polite email will probably have a greater effect than an angry rant (if it has any effect at all).
Ars Technica did a really good review of the Honda Insight. You might find it informative.