It seems only reasonable and fair that if they're going to tax sent Internet traffic, they should also tax sent tv and radio signals. Airwaves are an even more precious commodity than Internet bandwidth. It would at least be interesting to see how the media industry handles the conundrum of being on the same side as the big Internet companies that they seem to hate so much.
I think you vastly underestimate what it takes to be a good teacher and have simultaneously identified what I would consider one of the most significant issues in public education. You assert that you "could easily teach any high school subject...". Do you have any training in teaching, or do you just assume anyone can make a good teacher? Sounds like the latter. And yet I suspect you probably could get and keep a job teaching and even attain tenure if you really wanted to, but that's more a function of poor management (or maybe misguided union protection, but I don't want to get into that discussion here) than how easy it is to be a teacher. I have school-age kids, so I know there are teachers who really should find a different line of work.
You indicate you are a developer, which means you probably have experience with at least a few managers. Have they all been exemplary (in which case consider yourself very lucky), or have you run into some, like I have, that you thought were entirely inadequate at their job? Just as not everyone is cut out to be a manager, not everyone can be a good teacher.
Oh, and the word you made up ("consumerate") would support my gut feel that you probably would not be the great and wondrous teacher you think you would be.
Picking a number out of your ass (95%) isn't going to help anyone. You can't just decide that 95% of kids can attain a "basic grasp of science" (as defined by achieving a particular score on a standardized test) and declare utter failure if you don't get there. Not every kid is going to be able to meet those standards, and some who maybe can won't care enough to try. Lack of scientific literacy does not equate to failure in life.
It's good to pay attention to where there are deficiencies and make improvements to allow everyone the opportunity to learn as much as possible, but don't expect of force everyone to fit in the same bucket. Some people will be good at art or history or plumbing or architecture or cooking, etc. Almost no one will be good at everything. Who's going to decide what subjects are the most important?
So, the question is what corporate taxes actually give you that income and sales taxes don't already give you.
Ignoring the argument of how much government should or should not be providing, there is a certain cost associated with a government for which revenue must be raised. The comment above seems to suggest that revenue should come solely from individual taxpayers. If that were to be the case, then workers would demand far more in wages in order to maintain the current standard of living. I can't imagine that's what you are really suggesting.
Of course, overall, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. And I'm not opposed to corporate taxes in principle. But the idea that corporations should automatically be taxed like people is ludicrous. Furthermore, corporate taxation has a big potential impact on corporate growth and international competitiveness, so it is important to tread carefully.
I agree with the last sentence. However, I would like to point out that corporations benefit from government services (roads, police, fire stations, etc.) just like individuals, so I think there is a valid argument that they should be subject to income taxes just like the rest of us. Note that corporations don't typically pay sales tax. They do pay property tax, which pays to educate the workers they will need, so that's fair as well.
There's certainly room for middle ground here. I'm not in favor of shifting the majority of the tax burden to corporations, but I don't think they should be exempted, either.
There are worse states as far as fundamentalism is concerned, but Texas has both a very large population and a very large collective ego, which combined give it the weight and the will to push its conservative views into textbook standards. I live in Austin, though, which doesn't really fit in with the rest of the state.
That's not true. There's no economic law or theory that says a corporation MUST make a certain amount of profit. Taxes are on profits, not on revenue, so the taxes reduce the amount of profit a company makes, but they don't make it any more expensive to produce and sell a product.
The profit a corporation makes is compensation for the financial and personal investments of its owners and shareholders. If these people get less profit, they'll invest their time and money elsewhere, often in countries with lower corporate tax rates.
That wasn't my point at all. Tax rates are obviously going to affect decision making and maybe determine how much or how quickly a business grows, but I still fail to see any direct connection (in a general sense, anyway) where tax rates can cause the cost of production to go up. You might argue that lower taxes would allow for more investment in equipment that could lower production costs, but then that investment tends not to be taxed, rendering that line of argument mostly moot.
And you need to stop and use your brain for a moment. How much in taxes do you think an employer pays on the salary for an employee? If your answer is anything other than zero, think some more. That salary is an expense to the employer (along with benefits, etc) and so is not part of the operating profit. As such, no taxes were collected on that money.
Don't be so daft. Obviously, a company doesn't pay the employee's income tax directly to the IRS, but it pays the money that the employee uses to pay the income tax, and that money goes to the US government. In the end, the US government receives tax revenues commensurate with the number and salary of employees of that corporation.
That seems like an endlessly circular argument. By extension, just about any money I spend, money I earned and paid taxes on, is subsequently paid taxes on by those that receive it. If I spend $100 at the grocery store, the store pays income taxes on the portion that becomes their profit, the employees pay taxes on the portion that becomes their salary, the suppliers pay taxes on the portion that goes to them, etc. If I work for one of those suppliers, am I effectively taxing myself every time I purchase one of their products?
I hope the open access books don't have the same quality control as from traditional publishers. My daughter's in high school and has some pretty atrocious text books. In her AP history class, the teacher dislikes the book so much (for organizational and content reasons) that she has supplied alternative materials as much as possible, mostly at her own expense. She still has to "teach the book" to meet state requirements, but that doesn't mean the text is beyond reproach (and perhaps just the opposite, given the politicized lobby-driven nature of text book selection these days; I live in Texas so it's a bit of a sore point with me).
I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring. As long as the publishing lobby doesn't buy any protective legislation, this is an experiment I'm looking forward to.
Please educate me, then. If it costs me the sum total of $10 to put a widget in your hands and you pay me $15 for said widget, how is it that it becomes more expensive to make that widget if the government takes $1.50 of the $5 profit I made?
I'm not arguing that taxes don't have implications, just that there is not necessarily a direct connection between the tax rate and the price of goods sold. It would be like arguing that I should take a lesser salary in order to pay less in taxes. There may well be an artificial connection, but that's a different argument.
Furthermore, corporations just have to raise prices, so in the end consumers pay for it. And they pay for it in a regressive way.
That's not true. There's no economic law or theory that says a corporation MUST make a certain amount of profit. Taxes are on profits, not on revenue, so the taxes reduce the amount of profit a company makes, but they don't make it any more expensive to produce and sell a product. Saying that companies "have to raise prices" is ridiculous. Companies set prices according to what the market will bear (notwithstanding monopolies and such), and profits follow based on how efficient the company is at producing and distributing its products.
And you need to stop and use your brain for a moment. How much in taxes do you think an employer pays on the salary for an employee? If your answer is anything other than zero, think some more. That salary is an expense to the employer (along with benefits, etc) and so is not part of the operating profit. As such, no taxes were collected on that money.
Perhaps you should pick up a copy of "Economics for Dummies".
It *would* be a good idea assuming that the cost of a computer with Win8 without DVD playback actually cost less. But I think the chances of that are very slim. So while MS theoretically is doing a good thing here by allowing those who don't need DVD playback to pay less, the reality is that someone (MS, PC manufacturer, retailer,...) will suck up that little bit of potential savings and consumers will end up paying more to get DVD playback rather than less to not have it.
... Why should we expect Him to act under those circumstances? In the case I have observed, although medical doctors had been consulted and the individual was referred to a specialist, no actual treatment had yet been done. The healing was done before going to the specialist.
This first sentence appears to be contradictory to the second two. Sounds like the intent was to seek medical treatment which should have been enough, by your argument, to hurt God's feelings and make him look the other way.
As far as the comment "You are a like a scientist who doesn't like a particular theory but who won't do the experiment himself because he doesn't want to have his world view messed up", you're characterizing me without any evidence at all to base that characterization on. It's also a little disingenuous to deride a scientist that doesn't test every theory that they might have an issue with. Given human lifespans and mental capacity, that just isn't realistic. And equating that with a Christian who rejects science is not valid. A more proper analogy would be a Christian who has not studied in depth all the religious belief systems of the world. How well do you know the Quran, etc?
And for the record, I most certainly can "criticize or other Christians for believing what do actually observe." Happens in science all the time. Take a look at what happened to the team that reported faster-than-light neutrinos recently. Just because they reported what they observed doesn't somehow make it right/correct/true. They certainly believed it to be true, else they would not have reported it knowing what the response would likely be.
For you, some hand-waving and statements about faith are acceptable, for me they are not. Your second post above does a much better job of explaining that the "evidence" you see is sufficient to bolster your own beliefs, which is just fine. But by the same token, it's nowhere near enough to affect my beliefs. That would require scientifically valid testing (of which there has been a not insignificant amount, none of which would irrefutably back your beliefs).
I find it particularly disturbing that you would equate homosexuality with propagating a deadly disease via your analogy. I think that speaks to your true bias.
You missed the point that faith, being that it comes from the intuitive part of the brain, is *easy*. Analytical thinking is *hard* and requires effort. Too many people are content to be lazy and let faith rule them.
So you're saying that because you have personally seen events that correspond to those described in the book that documents your chosen religion, you therefore have proof that your religion is the One True Religion?
You do realize that this book was written by men, right? So perhaps the events described in said book were natural events they had witnessed and chosen to ascribe to supernatural forces. There's nothing other than your personal beliefs to refute this claim, so it has just as much chance of being valid as any other explanation of the origin of such stories. (Otherwise, you'd have to accept that Joseph Smith found some gold plates written by God and buried somewhere in western New York.) Therefore, there's every reason to believe that what you see today as someone being healed "miraculously" is nothing more than a natural event. And unless you can show that this happens statistically significantly more often for members of your particular cult than for anyone else, you have no argument against that belief.
I get tired of the hypocrisy of "believers". On the one hand, Uncle Bob was saved by God because everyone prayed for him and he had a miraculous recovery, but on the other hand Aunt Sue was taken by Jesus to be with the Lord in a better place and wouldn't have to suffer with that brain tumor any more. Did no one pray for poor Aunt Sue? It's easy to "prove" a point if you hand-pick the evidence you use for that proof, just as it's easy to prove a point depending on the passage you pick from the Bible to support your argument (that homosexuals should be either killed or accepted as equals, for example). You expose your personal biases when you map them over the text of the Bible (or whatever religious text you've chosen to believe in).
I think the validity of this viewpoint depends on just how many people will end up purchasing after pirating. If too many people decide they'll be the pirates and let someone else be the purchaser, then the model breaks done. Making purchasing easy and of reasonable perceived value will help, much like Apple did for digital music sales (which the music publishers still seem to be unhappy about, the ungrateful bastards).
Your view of what a SW engineer does is sadly overly idealized. I've been at the profession for 20+ years and have at best only sporadically glimpsed the world you describe. I wish that there was more actual methodical engineering involved, but most projects very quickly jump to the "we just need to get sh*t done" mode. The skills you describe somewhat negatively as "hacking" would serve you quite well in many or maybe even most shops.
I'm sure not the first time it happened, but while in college in the mid '80s, the computer lab was set up with 68k-based evaluation boards to use for embedded systems programming assignments. The boards had two serial ports, one to the ASCII terminal and another to the Sun server. The boards normally operated in a transparent pass-through mode when they weren't being used, and a hot-key was used to access the board directly.
We realized that we could easily install code to look for "login:" and "password:" coming from the server and catch the replies and save them in memory. We'd check back towards the end of the day and harvest the results. We were on very good terms with the head of the CS department, so when we told him about our little exploit and proved it with his password, he was more amused than anything else.
We didn't keep or use any of the passwords, but thinking back on it, it could have been quite lucrative to sell them to a certain group of CS students who were quite prone to cheating. Those were the ones that you could put their assignment printouts together (I worked as a TA for a while) and hold them up to the light to see they were identical except for the variable names. One of them also set fire to the pile of final assignments that had been left on the floor outside a professor's office in a 100+ year old building, figuring if nobody's assignment got turned in, the professor couldn't grade them (yeah, too dumb to realize all those programs were still on the server). That was a very narrowly avoided tragedy. Ah, memories.
If meaningful class, method and variable names and sensible expression constructs are used there is no benefit to be had from comments.
This is a naive viewpoint that gets repeated over and over, most likely from people who've never actually implemented or maintained anything more complicated than "hello, world". As a developer I strive to write the simplest possible code (but no simpler!) to solve a problem, but often that code is complex enough or is based on some non-obvious assumptions (device drivers, anyone?) that I can't even remember later exactly why something was done the way it was. Sure, if you write code for relatively simple problems that don't have to interact with other complicated pieces (like the OS or any libraries), you might get away with little or no documentation within the code, but that's not the world I live in.
I do agree with others that external documentation is just as if not more important than internal comments. And while I'm very good with internal comments, I have to sheepishly admit I pretty much suck at doing the arguably more useful external documentation. Perhaps I haven't been adequately incentivised to do that, but then in most environments I've worked in, I get poked fun at for the level of comments I put in my code, not because they are excessive or unnecessary, but because most other code has almost no comments at all, so my code tends to stick out more than it should.
but can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?"
Yes, it can, but whether it will or not is probably an open question, especially on Microsoft's part. Both Google and Microsoft have a vested interest in creating the software developers of the future, but I can see Microsoft having a hard time not trying to use the opportunity to create more Microsoft product users at the same time.
I for one would be happy to have a system that could detect the bozos who call into meetings, never say a word, and don't mute their phone. I can do without the loud breathers, dogs barking, kids yelling, typing, static, etc. I don't feel like I should be the mute-police, and the people running the meetings (at least at my company) rarely say anything. A little common courtesy would solve the problem, but an automated system is probably a much more realistic solution.
And if this particular crime isn't listed in the patent, then consider this prior art that I am contributing to the public domain in hopes of serving the greater good.
Somehow people think different about digital THINGS that you buy.
The difference between a physical THING and a digital THING is that it is easier to make a copy of a digital THING than to lend out a single instance of it. In effect, there is no single instance of a digital THING. If your friend wants to "borrow" a book from you, you actually give them a copy. You'd have to go to the extra step of deleting your own copy to approximate actual lending. This is why publishers want DRM, but DRM is a very poor way to mimic the lending properties of a physical object.
As an example, I'm very happy with my 4th grade daughter's teacher this year, yet at least three kids have been pulled out of her class by their parents. I'm choosing not to believe that this is because she is black in an area that is excessively white (I'm white for sake of disclosure). Rather, I think it has much more to do with the personality of the teacher, which is very compatible my daughter's personality. My daughter hasn't been compatible with all of her teachers, and we had to move her to a different class in the past. She had a very bad experience with that particular teacher.
So is one of these teachers better or worse than the other? From the perspective of my daughter's education, emphatically yes. But ask a different parent and you might get exactly the opposite answer as to which teacher was better. In both cases, these two teachers could be either the worst or the best in the school depending on the mix of kids they get. And since we're talking about humans (both the teachers and the kids), personality is an important and very difficult to measure aspect of performance.
So while I think it would be wonderful if there was a better way to evaluate teachers, it might be an untenable proposition. Kind of like reforming the tax code in the US.
Why would you not specify an OS that did the job, but had far fewer (or no) viruses already out in the wild?
While I generally agree with this sentiment, the flip side is the uproar when the project hits cost overruns that are blamed on the Military's insistence that a less-prevalent OS be used for which there are fewer developers (not saying such blame would be accurate, but when has that ever mattered?). There is no end of stories about $600 toilet seats or hammers or whatnot, with little or no understanding of the requirements that might have legitimately led to high costs for military equipment. The first instinct is to call it all wasteful spending (which is true in some or even many cases, but not all).
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They will, but not for the right reason. They'll be much more concerned with the UN's perceived power-grab than about the affects of the tax.
It seems only reasonable and fair that if they're going to tax sent Internet traffic, they should also tax sent tv and radio signals. Airwaves are an even more precious commodity than Internet bandwidth. It would at least be interesting to see how the media industry handles the conundrum of being on the same side as the big Internet companies that they seem to hate so much.
I think you vastly underestimate what it takes to be a good teacher and have simultaneously identified what I would consider one of the most significant issues in public education. You assert that you "could easily teach any high school subject ...". Do you have any training in teaching, or do you just assume anyone can make a good teacher? Sounds like the latter. And yet I suspect you probably could get and keep a job teaching and even attain tenure if you really wanted to, but that's more a function of poor management (or maybe misguided union protection, but I don't want to get into that discussion here) than how easy it is to be a teacher. I have school-age kids, so I know there are teachers who really should find a different line of work.
You indicate you are a developer, which means you probably have experience with at least a few managers. Have they all been exemplary (in which case consider yourself very lucky), or have you run into some, like I have, that you thought were entirely inadequate at their job? Just as not everyone is cut out to be a manager, not everyone can be a good teacher.
Oh, and the word you made up ("consumerate") would support my gut feel that you probably would not be the great and wondrous teacher you think you would be.
Picking a number out of your ass (95%) isn't going to help anyone. You can't just decide that 95% of kids can attain a "basic grasp of science" (as defined by achieving a particular score on a standardized test) and declare utter failure if you don't get there. Not every kid is going to be able to meet those standards, and some who maybe can won't care enough to try. Lack of scientific literacy does not equate to failure in life.
It's good to pay attention to where there are deficiencies and make improvements to allow everyone the opportunity to learn as much as possible, but don't expect of force everyone to fit in the same bucket. Some people will be good at art or history or plumbing or architecture or cooking, etc. Almost no one will be good at everything. Who's going to decide what subjects are the most important?
So, the question is what corporate taxes actually give you that income and sales taxes don't already give you.
Ignoring the argument of how much government should or should not be providing, there is a certain cost associated with a government for which revenue must be raised. The comment above seems to suggest that revenue should come solely from individual taxpayers. If that were to be the case, then workers would demand far more in wages in order to maintain the current standard of living. I can't imagine that's what you are really suggesting.
Of course, overall, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. And I'm not opposed to corporate taxes in principle. But the idea that corporations should automatically be taxed like people is ludicrous. Furthermore, corporate taxation has a big potential impact on corporate growth and international competitiveness, so it is important to tread carefully.
I agree with the last sentence. However, I would like to point out that corporations benefit from government services (roads, police, fire stations, etc.) just like individuals, so I think there is a valid argument that they should be subject to income taxes just like the rest of us. Note that corporations don't typically pay sales tax. They do pay property tax, which pays to educate the workers they will need, so that's fair as well.
There's certainly room for middle ground here. I'm not in favor of shifting the majority of the tax burden to corporations, but I don't think they should be exempted, either.
There are worse states as far as fundamentalism is concerned, but Texas has both a very large population and a very large collective ego, which combined give it the weight and the will to push its conservative views into textbook standards. I live in Austin, though, which doesn't really fit in with the rest of the state.
The profit a corporation makes is compensation for the financial and personal investments of its owners and shareholders. If these people get less profit, they'll invest their time and money elsewhere, often in countries with lower corporate tax rates.
That wasn't my point at all. Tax rates are obviously going to affect decision making and maybe determine how much or how quickly a business grows, but I still fail to see any direct connection (in a general sense, anyway) where tax rates can cause the cost of production to go up. You might argue that lower taxes would allow for more investment in equipment that could lower production costs, but then that investment tends not to be taxed, rendering that line of argument mostly moot.
Don't be so daft. Obviously, a company doesn't pay the employee's income tax directly to the IRS, but it pays the money that the employee uses to pay the income tax, and that money goes to the US government. In the end, the US government receives tax revenues commensurate with the number and salary of employees of that corporation.
That seems like an endlessly circular argument. By extension, just about any money I spend, money I earned and paid taxes on, is subsequently paid taxes on by those that receive it. If I spend $100 at the grocery store, the store pays income taxes on the portion that becomes their profit, the employees pay taxes on the portion that becomes their salary, the suppliers pay taxes on the portion that goes to them, etc. If I work for one of those suppliers, am I effectively taxing myself every time I purchase one of their products?
I hope the open access books don't have the same quality control as from traditional publishers. My daughter's in high school and has some pretty atrocious text books. In her AP history class, the teacher dislikes the book so much (for organizational and content reasons) that she has supplied alternative materials as much as possible, mostly at her own expense. She still has to "teach the book" to meet state requirements, but that doesn't mean the text is beyond reproach (and perhaps just the opposite, given the politicized lobby-driven nature of text book selection these days; I live in Texas so it's a bit of a sore point with me).
I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring. As long as the publishing lobby doesn't buy any protective legislation, this is an experiment I'm looking forward to.
Please educate me, then. If it costs me the sum total of $10 to put a widget in your hands and you pay me $15 for said widget, how is it that it becomes more expensive to make that widget if the government takes $1.50 of the $5 profit I made?
I'm not arguing that taxes don't have implications, just that there is not necessarily a direct connection between the tax rate and the price of goods sold. It would be like arguing that I should take a lesser salary in order to pay less in taxes. There may well be an artificial connection, but that's a different argument.
Furthermore, corporations just have to raise prices, so in the end consumers pay for it. And they pay for it in a regressive way.
That's not true. There's no economic law or theory that says a corporation MUST make a certain amount of profit. Taxes are on profits, not on revenue, so the taxes reduce the amount of profit a company makes, but they don't make it any more expensive to produce and sell a product. Saying that companies "have to raise prices" is ridiculous. Companies set prices according to what the market will bear (notwithstanding monopolies and such), and profits follow based on how efficient the company is at producing and distributing its products.
And you need to stop and use your brain for a moment. How much in taxes do you think an employer pays on the salary for an employee? If your answer is anything other than zero, think some more. That salary is an expense to the employer (along with benefits, etc) and so is not part of the operating profit. As such, no taxes were collected on that money.
Perhaps you should pick up a copy of "Economics for Dummies".
It *would* be a good idea assuming that the cost of a computer with Win8 without DVD playback actually cost less. But I think the chances of that are very slim. So while MS theoretically is doing a good thing here by allowing those who don't need DVD playback to pay less, the reality is that someone (MS, PC manufacturer, retailer, ...) will suck up that little bit of potential savings and consumers will end up paying more to get DVD playback rather than less to not have it.
... Why should we expect Him to act under those circumstances? In the case I have observed, although medical doctors had been consulted and the individual was referred to a specialist, no actual treatment had yet been done. The healing was done before going to the specialist.
This first sentence appears to be contradictory to the second two. Sounds like the intent was to seek medical treatment which should have been enough, by your argument, to hurt God's feelings and make him look the other way.
As far as the comment "You are a like a scientist who doesn't like a particular theory but who won't do the experiment himself because he doesn't want to have his world view messed up", you're characterizing me without any evidence at all to base that characterization on. It's also a little disingenuous to deride a scientist that doesn't test every theory that they might have an issue with. Given human lifespans and mental capacity, that just isn't realistic. And equating that with a Christian who rejects science is not valid. A more proper analogy would be a Christian who has not studied in depth all the religious belief systems of the world. How well do you know the Quran, etc?
And for the record, I most certainly can "criticize or other Christians for believing what do actually observe." Happens in science all the time. Take a look at what happened to the team that reported faster-than-light neutrinos recently. Just because they reported what they observed doesn't somehow make it right/correct/true. They certainly believed it to be true, else they would not have reported it knowing what the response would likely be.
For you, some hand-waving and statements about faith are acceptable, for me they are not. Your second post above does a much better job of explaining that the "evidence" you see is sufficient to bolster your own beliefs, which is just fine. But by the same token, it's nowhere near enough to affect my beliefs. That would require scientifically valid testing (of which there has been a not insignificant amount, none of which would irrefutably back your beliefs).
I find it particularly disturbing that you would equate homosexuality with propagating a deadly disease via your analogy. I think that speaks to your true bias.
Spoken like a true republican.
You missed the point that faith, being that it comes from the intuitive part of the brain, is *easy*. Analytical thinking is *hard* and requires effort. Too many people are content to be lazy and let faith rule them.
So you're saying that because you have personally seen events that correspond to those described in the book that documents your chosen religion, you therefore have proof that your religion is the One True Religion?
You do realize that this book was written by men, right? So perhaps the events described in said book were natural events they had witnessed and chosen to ascribe to supernatural forces. There's nothing other than your personal beliefs to refute this claim, so it has just as much chance of being valid as any other explanation of the origin of such stories. (Otherwise, you'd have to accept that Joseph Smith found some gold plates written by God and buried somewhere in western New York.) Therefore, there's every reason to believe that what you see today as someone being healed "miraculously" is nothing more than a natural event. And unless you can show that this happens statistically significantly more often for members of your particular cult than for anyone else, you have no argument against that belief.
I get tired of the hypocrisy of "believers". On the one hand, Uncle Bob was saved by God because everyone prayed for him and he had a miraculous recovery, but on the other hand Aunt Sue was taken by Jesus to be with the Lord in a better place and wouldn't have to suffer with that brain tumor any more. Did no one pray for poor Aunt Sue? It's easy to "prove" a point if you hand-pick the evidence you use for that proof, just as it's easy to prove a point depending on the passage you pick from the Bible to support your argument (that homosexuals should be either killed or accepted as equals, for example). You expose your personal biases when you map them over the text of the Bible (or whatever religious text you've chosen to believe in).
I think the validity of this viewpoint depends on just how many people will end up purchasing after pirating. If too many people decide they'll be the pirates and let someone else be the purchaser, then the model breaks done. Making purchasing easy and of reasonable perceived value will help, much like Apple did for digital music sales (which the music publishers still seem to be unhappy about, the ungrateful bastards).
Your view of what a SW engineer does is sadly overly idealized. I've been at the profession for 20+ years and have at best only sporadically glimpsed the world you describe. I wish that there was more actual methodical engineering involved, but most projects very quickly jump to the "we just need to get sh*t done" mode. The skills you describe somewhat negatively as "hacking" would serve you quite well in many or maybe even most shops.
I'm sure not the first time it happened, but while in college in the mid '80s, the computer lab was set up with 68k-based evaluation boards to use for embedded systems programming assignments. The boards had two serial ports, one to the ASCII terminal and another to the Sun server. The boards normally operated in a transparent pass-through mode when they weren't being used, and a hot-key was used to access the board directly.
We realized that we could easily install code to look for "login:" and "password:" coming from the server and catch the replies and save them in memory. We'd check back towards the end of the day and harvest the results. We were on very good terms with the head of the CS department, so when we told him about our little exploit and proved it with his password, he was more amused than anything else.
We didn't keep or use any of the passwords, but thinking back on it, it could have been quite lucrative to sell them to a certain group of CS students who were quite prone to cheating. Those were the ones that you could put their assignment printouts together (I worked as a TA for a while) and hold them up to the light to see they were identical except for the variable names. One of them also set fire to the pile of final assignments that had been left on the floor outside a professor's office in a 100+ year old building, figuring if nobody's assignment got turned in, the professor couldn't grade them (yeah, too dumb to realize all those programs were still on the server). That was a very narrowly avoided tragedy. Ah, memories.
If meaningful class, method and variable names and sensible expression constructs are used there is no benefit to be had from comments.
This is a naive viewpoint that gets repeated over and over, most likely from people who've never actually implemented or maintained anything more complicated than "hello, world". As a developer I strive to write the simplest possible code (but no simpler!) to solve a problem, but often that code is complex enough or is based on some non-obvious assumptions (device drivers, anyone?) that I can't even remember later exactly why something was done the way it was. Sure, if you write code for relatively simple problems that don't have to interact with other complicated pieces (like the OS or any libraries), you might get away with little or no documentation within the code, but that's not the world I live in.
I do agree with others that external documentation is just as if not more important than internal comments. And while I'm very good with internal comments, I have to sheepishly admit I pretty much suck at doing the arguably more useful external documentation. Perhaps I haven't been adequately incentivised to do that, but then in most environments I've worked in, I get poked fun at for the level of comments I put in my code, not because they are excessive or unnecessary, but because most other code has almost no comments at all, so my code tends to stick out more than it should.
but can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?"
Yes, it can, but whether it will or not is probably an open question, especially on Microsoft's part. Both Google and Microsoft have a vested interest in creating the software developers of the future, but I can see Microsoft having a hard time not trying to use the opportunity to create more Microsoft product users at the same time.
I for one would be happy to have a system that could detect the bozos who call into meetings, never say a word, and don't mute their phone. I can do without the loud breathers, dogs barking, kids yelling, typing, static, etc. I don't feel like I should be the mute-police, and the people running the meetings (at least at my company) rarely say anything. A little common courtesy would solve the problem, but an automated system is probably a much more realistic solution.
And if this particular crime isn't listed in the patent, then consider this prior art that I am contributing to the public domain in hopes of serving the greater good.
Somehow people think different about digital THINGS that you buy.
The difference between a physical THING and a digital THING is that it is easier to make a copy of a digital THING than to lend out a single instance of it. In effect, there is no single instance of a digital THING. If your friend wants to "borrow" a book from you, you actually give them a copy. You'd have to go to the extra step of deleting your own copy to approximate actual lending. This is why publishers want DRM, but DRM is a very poor way to mimic the lending properties of a physical object.
Evaluating teachers is extremely hard to do.
As an example, I'm very happy with my 4th grade daughter's teacher this year, yet at least three kids have been pulled out of her class by their parents. I'm choosing not to believe that this is because she is black in an area that is excessively white (I'm white for sake of disclosure). Rather, I think it has much more to do with the personality of the teacher, which is very compatible my daughter's personality. My daughter hasn't been compatible with all of her teachers, and we had to move her to a different class in the past. She had a very bad experience with that particular teacher.
So is one of these teachers better or worse than the other? From the perspective of my daughter's education, emphatically yes. But ask a different parent and you might get exactly the opposite answer as to which teacher was better. In both cases, these two teachers could be either the worst or the best in the school depending on the mix of kids they get. And since we're talking about humans (both the teachers and the kids), personality is an important and very difficult to measure aspect of performance.
So while I think it would be wonderful if there was a better way to evaluate teachers, it might be an untenable proposition. Kind of like reforming the tax code in the US.
Why would you not specify an OS that did the job, but had far fewer (or no) viruses already out in the wild?
While I generally agree with this sentiment, the flip side is the uproar when the project hits cost overruns that are blamed on the Military's insistence that a less-prevalent OS be used for which there are fewer developers (not saying such blame would be accurate, but when has that ever mattered?). There is no end of stories about $600 toilet seats or hammers or whatnot, with little or no understanding of the requirements that might have legitimately led to high costs for military equipment. The first instinct is to call it all wasteful spending (which is true in some or even many cases, but not all).