What about "protective" do you all not understand? They are to protect our jobs and American corporations.
You're right to use "protect" in quotes.
Imagine two futures, one without tariffs and one with. The main difference between the two is the amount of money American programmers make. (Although the popping of the bubble means a temporary imbalance between demand and supply, long-term trends will still require a lot of tech talent for the forseeable future.)
So if the American programmers make more, where does that come from? Well, from American consumers. They don't get anything more, but tariffs force them to pay more than they otherwise would for software. This means that, say, 1-2% of workers do better, but the other 98-99% of Americans do worse. And studies show that tariffs are a terribly inefficient way to transfer wealth; if we think that programmers deserve subsidies, the government should just send them all programmer welfare checks.
But that's not the only bad part.
Because American businesses have to pay more for their software, they are less competitive. And because all those Indian programmers have a harder time getting into the American market, they'll sell their wares even more cheaply to non-American markets, increasing the competitiveness of foreign companies. These factors both cause the destruction of American jobs.
Another ugly effect is that if they aren't getting American dollars, those Indians are much less likely to buy American products and invest in American companies, especially since they're not very competitive anymore. And that would be a disaster for us; somebody has to keep buying all those American stocks and bonds, especially once those baby boomers start to retire.
And protectionism can easily backfire. As another poster pointed out, British attempts to protect their computer industry pretty much sunk it. By staying competitive, we've managed to stay on top of the industry. By putting up trade barriers, we may gain in the short term, but we make ourselves weaker over the long haul.
During the Great Depression, my grandfather quit school at the age of 12 and helped support the family by working assorted jobs, all paying well below any reasonable "living wage". Ask around in your family, and you'll probably find similar stories.
Now if other countries had imposed tariffs on the US because we allowed children to labor below some international minimum wage, would that have helped or harmed my grandfather?
The answer, of course, is "harmed". A minimum wage means that some people get more money, but fewer of them will have jobs, shutting low-end workers like 12-year-old boys out of jobs.
Worse, since trade is a positive-sum activity (meaning that trades only happen when both sides benefit from making them), then less trade means that both sides are poorer. If both sides are poorer, there's less to go around, which generally hurts poor people disproportionately.
Poverty sucks, but refusing to do business with poor people makes it suck more.
An American worker, especially one on the east coast (where I am) literally cannot compete with an Indian one who's cost of living is a tenth of his, no matter how much "value" he brings to a job.
So if cost of living determines where software will be built, then how do you explain that most software is made in states with high costs of living? Given that we don't have tariffs in the US, by your logic most software production should have migrated to Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Is America going to become a nation of managers, where no usefull products are actually produced here?
You remember the 80s, when everybody was worried that the Japanese were so darned clever that there wouldn't be a single worker left in the US? But somehow, our unemployment is lower than it was then, and we're all much richer.
And this has been happening for a long time; the earliest US example I recall was Smoot-Hawley which was circa 1930, but I know the Brits have been doing it at least since the Corn Laws in, uh, 1815. People regularly get in a panic that [insert state, nation, or ethnic group here] are taking jobs away from honest, hardworking, patriotic [insert your own state, nation, or ethnic group here]. This is just the latest wave of a plausible-sounding but wrongheaded fear.
Let's start out by separating these. I agree that unions have played an important role, and that they still can play a valuable one, even if they often don't. But I don't see any evidence that tariffs (or other trade barriers) ever improved worker rights.
Indeed, I think trade barriers work against worker rights. Why? Because trade barriers make pepole poorer, and there's a strong correlation between wealth and human rights. A fine example of this is the two Koreas. Originally, both were roughly at par. One of them is now basically a giant concentration camp; the other is a booming democracy with real civil rights. But the South Koreans only got interested in such niceties once they were sufficiently well off.
And of course there are destructive tariffs
In the long term, all tariffs (and other trade barriers) are destructive. The only ones that might be a net benefit are very short-term, very focused ones that help ease a shock. But even those are risky, as "temporary" tariffs tend to become permanent. Better to just spend a little tax money on transition costs (worker retraining and the like) to ease the pain of trade-induced economic changes.
Personally, if the only reason I have a job is because there's a law keeping those who can do it better from having it, then I'd be ashamed. Wouldn't you?
But I'm certain that I can provide more value than people who are ten time zones away, so I'm not worried. Competition from India may lower my salary from the boom-fueled absurd levels that it reached, but not enought that I'll sweat it.
If not then American would look more like Mexico or Argentina.
Bzzzt! Actually, there's strong statistical evidence that trade barriers make the people protected by them poorer. America historically has been a leader in lowering trade barriers, and that's part of why we're so rich.
Really, if trade barriers helped make people behind them richer, shouldn't we have trade barriers between the states, too?
Your too expensive [...] Tarrifs [...] tarrified [...] tarrified [...] tarifs
Hey, I've got an idea! Let's pass a law so that people with strong grammar and spelling skills won't be allowed to work as writers. Then even if you can't get a job as a programmer, you'll always have something to fall back on.
I'm sure all those magazines and books will be just as good, and if not, well, that's a small price to pay for making sure that the language-challenged have the full employment that is the right of every American citizen.
I felt that the media representations in the film were quite satirical.
Obscure fact: The "I'd by that for a dollar," bit was lifted from C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons," another excellent the-future-is-going-to-hell story.
I beg to differ. I use email a lot - as do most people. I need it to be lightning quick in handling multi-megabyte local mailboxes.
And what evidence do you have that, say, a Java app would be visibly slower than something written in C?
Even assuming that the C and Java are equivalently well-written, dealing with multi-megabyte mailboxes will be primarily an I/O issue unless you have enough RAM that you're keeping it it all cached.
But probably they won't be equivalently well-written. Many studies demonstrate that productivity in LOC is about the same no matter the language, so the higher a level you work at, the more productive you are. One poster in this thread mentioned that his productivity more than doubled switching from C/C++ to Java.
So given developers of equivalent quality, it would seem to me that the time spend tracking down weird memory errors is better spent on running a profiler and doing optimization. I do mainly server-side stuff, and I'm confident that given the same level of resources, I can build a faster app in Java than a team working in C/C++. If there's something where Java is really too slow, I can always recode that critical 1% of the code in C.
If the C or C++ code has a flaw - you fix it - it's that simple.
If it's that simple for you, then there are a lot of projects out there that could use your help. But given the number of bug reports I see, it appears to be less simple than you think.
That is my point. Security breechs happen. Bad code happens. Cracks happen.
This is not a binary problem.
By adopting test-first development, unit testing, and pair programming, my bug counts dropped by orders of magnitude, to a level less than one reported bug per programmer-month. By your logic, since bugs still happen, these practices are "irrelevant".
The same goes for using better tools. It's pretty easy to get a buffer overflow in C. It's very, very hard to get one in Java, although I'm sure it's not impossible. Does this mean that Java is pointless? No. Reducing occurences of a whole class of bugs by 99.9% is a big gain, even if it's not complete elimination.
There are plenty of comments here and published papers on writing clean, secure, and efficient code.
Yes, and that's exactly the problem. No matter how smart, a programmer has a limited amount of brainpower available. For best results, you want as much of that brainpower spent on solving the actual problem at hand, not dealing with the tools.
I admit it: a computer is better at managing unimportant details than me. And 99.98% of the time, the details of which value is stored where in RAM is, as far as I'm concerned, one of those unimportant details. If I can get the computer to handle that for me, that's a big win. As Moore's law tells us, computers double in speed every 18 months, and programmers don't. Taking advantage of that means I can do more cool stuff before I die. Who wouldn't want that?
How pleasant are client side gui's implemented in Java? HORRID! They are just slow, and ugly.
Oh, please. On my ancient 700 MHz Pentium III box, complicated Java applications like IntelliJ's IDEA work just fine; it's both responsive and pretty. If you're going to bitch about Java, stick to reasonably modern complaints, like its lack of type-safe collections (which won't be fixed until Java 1.5). Or bitch about the classloader. Or grumble about library management. But the whole "Java is too slow" thing is so 1998.
When you grow up, you'll perhaps figure out that everybody makes mistakes.
Amen! And that admission is key to building better stuff. When I started doing unit testing, it felt unmanly to me; as if really good programmers just did it right the first time.
But then I realized that if I only did things that I could do perfectly, then I wasn't challenging myself. Writing unit tests as I go lets me tackle bigger, uglier problems and still provide solid results.
Macho posturing just gets in the way of doing really kick-ass work.
[...] Are you suggesting that policymakers should force the Gov't to purchase only GPL'd software? Or release Gov't funded R&D only under a GPL license? Either of those would be unacceptable and every bit as bad as preventing the Gov't from using GPL'd software [...]
Brave assertions. Any facts to back them up? Or even some reasoning?
Did you have a contract with the company saying you would get paid overtime? No. You worked the extra hours to get the job done and that's what everyone in interesting professional jobs does.
True, but there's generally an implicit quid pro quo. I used to work for financial traders, where 50-hour weeks were considered normal, and a few times I ended up working 50-hour days. But I never fretted about it; it was the deal I signed up for, and I knew that they'd take care of me, especially at bonus time.
Another fine way to tackle this is through profit-sharing or ownership. I love working for startups; everybody is committed to making things go. That's mainly because they like doing it, but the fact that they own a piece of it sure doesn't hurt.
But there are certainly companies out there that don't get this. Their notion is that they are playing a zero-sum game with their workers, where their goal is to maximize hours worked and minimize dollars given to workers. And they aren't up front about it, either; nobody tells you in advance that you've signed up for a death march.
This is, of course, foolishness; in the long run, it works about as well as Iraqi motivational techniques. Smart companies know that to get more, they give more. And since business is a positive-sum game, it generally works out for everybody involved.
reducing the CO2 levels to the original levels would also have no impact.
No, I read what you wrote. Even if both your premises is true, your conclusion is wrong. The short-term relationship between CO2 levels and temperature may not be obvious. But the long-term one is. There is no serious dispute about the warming effects of CO2. The only disputes are over whether the observed temperature rise is real, and whether the increased CO2 levels are the cause of that.
This dude [psu.edu] would seem to dispute that. [...] He just disputes the fact that greenhouse gasses act as blankets.
Uh, in the common mind, blankets keep warmth in. In case that metaphor wasn't clear, I also said that explicitly. And even he agrees that greenhouse gasses do keep warmth in.
So if you like, I'll revise my statement: nobody disagrees that greenhouse gasses make the world warmer. And nobody sensible disagrees that greenhouse gasses act as blankets, keeping warmth in. Why? Because sensible people realize that no metaphor is perfect, and that pushed too far any metaphor breaks down.
If that dude offered a better metaphor, or even a clear and coherent explanation of greenhouse gasses, I might give him some credit. But as he is, he's just muddying the debate; for 98% of the people out there, saying greenhouse gasses act like blankets is fine, as they understand that more CO2 -> warmer. And for the other 2%, they're smart enough to know that gasses like CO2 convect as well, and therefore won't be preventing it.
That might be, assuming we are so arrogant to believe that we no better than nature
Eh? "Nature" doesn't "no" anything; it just is. You're making a classic philosophical error, one known as the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is doesn't mean it should be. The "natural" lot of man is uncomfortable ignorance, misery, and an early death.
You're welcome to it, pal, but I've got other things to do. I have a lot of respect for the titanic power and amazing subtlety of the natural world, but I believe it can be improved upon. And given that you're posting on Slashdot and not sitting in a swamp scratching your scabs, you do too.
This is an argument of desperation for the global warming crowd.
Are you kidding? What I'm saying is that, if the sun were to go berserk tomorrow we should undertake a radical terraforming project. Most greens would be fucking horrified.
the Global Warming PAC:
Yes, all those science johnnies are in a big conspiracy. Sneaky, aren't they? They pretend to be all absent-minded, but you've clearly found out the truth: they are machievelian schemers out to reduce CO2 emissions so that they can promote global cooling, which allows their oversized, mutant brains to work more effectively.
Some say that all we technical types are in a big conspiracy, too, but we all know TINLC, right?
If the heating of the sun really were the only driver of rising temperatures, then clearly cuts in CO2 would be useless to compensate.
Not true. CO2, like any greenhouse gas, acts as a blanket, keeping warmth in. That's not in dispute by anybody. The only dispute is about to what extent human emissions of CO2 have contributed to the recent increase in global temperatures.
So suppose tomorrow that the Sun increased its output by, say, 1%. If we wanted to keep temperatures the same, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be one of the easier ways for us to compensate.
Of course it's also a pretty boring way to do that; personally, I'd favor increasing our planet's albedo by covering Texas and Nevada with mirrors, tiled like a giant disco ball.
So don't feel bad about questioning the Green orthodoxy, because it's changed 180-degrees in the not too distant past, and they probably don't even believe it themselves.
I'm all for questioning orthodoxy!
But I also question your ability to read the minds of people you apparently haven't met. I know a number of people who do environmental work for a living. As in everything else, some are clueless and some are happy to take somebody else's word for things that fit their prejudices. (Thanks goodness that doesn't happen here on Slashdot.) But many are smart and sincere, and have the kinds of science background to be able to evaluate the claims well.
Although the more reasonable response is probably to say, "Gosh, if the sun is getting hotter, we'd better make deeper cuts in CO2 emissions to compensate."
as someday the drive you rsync to is going to fail in a nasty way.
Oops! I should have mentioned that my backups are stored on RAID arrays, so I'm not worried about that. But even if I were backing up to a single disk, I probably wouldn't sweat it too much. My biggest reason for having the backups is catastrophe prevention. For that, even a single remote copy strikes me as better than local tapes.
Why should an american company hire an american contractor. They can have the same kind of skills for far less money hiring a contractor in India...
There are a lot of reasons. Most of them boil down to the advantages of physical presence, which provides high-bandwidth, low-latency communication. Others are primarily social.
There are times when outsourcing can make sense. If you have a clear spec and people can implement it properly without asking any questions, then sending the work off can work. But this contract includes analysis, design, construction, and training in a short-cycle iterative process. Outsourcing that to another timezone is impossible.
Hint to those worried about their jobs: standard software practices don't take proper advantage of physical colocation. Adopt a process like Extreme Programming, which does, and you'll have a business advantage that can't be matched through outsourcing to Outer Slobovia.
Yep! The reason I want to use a shell company is that some companies don't like doing 1099s directly. Also, having somebody else take care of billing, medical, dental, and 401k is appealing to me; I hate that admin stuff, so paying 4-5% of my gross to have it all go away seems reasonable to me.
The ones I've looked closely at, ZeroChaos.com, MyBizOffice.com, and PACE all charge less than that. ZeroChaos is very vague about their fees, but they quoted me $300 per month per active client. MyBizOffice charges 4% for the first $125k in billings and 1.5% after that. And PACE charges 5%.
I don't think any of them will do a 1099; they all seem to do W2s, and of course all of the taxes come out of my share. At least one of them has an intriguing lease-back program, where I buy the equipment I want, lease it to the shell company, and then they deduct the leasing fees from my inccome. I believe this is a dodge to get the same tax benefits for capital goods as working on a 1099.
In a corporate environment, isn't this what testers are for? You don't waste the programmers time on this,
Both sorts of testing are helpful.
Functional tests make sure that the program meets the requirements. Good QA people are invaluable.
But even if I had the world's best team of testers, I'd still do test-first programming. Why?
Faster feedback. No matter how fast a testing team is, it's not fast enough for me. With automated unit tests, I know within seconds that my code is good.
Clearer interfaces. When I do test-first programming, I'm always thinking about what my code looks like from an internal perspective. This makes the interfaces to it much clearer for others to deal with.
Automated documentation. When I wnt to know what a chunk of code is supposed to do or how it's supposed to be used, I just look at the unit tests.
Rot prevention. Having automated unit tests gives me confidence that the code will continue to work, even when I'm not looking at it. Change in libraries? Junior programmers making changes? I'm not worried; the tests will catch the problems.
Refactoring support. If you don't have good test coverage, doing serious refactoring is impossible.
As far as I can tell, every programmer does manual unit testing, generally by putting in print statements as they develop and then looking for stuff in the output. Doing automated unit testing just means that you take those manual checks and automate them. And isn't automating tedious manual work what computers are all about?
if this bias weren't perceived by a significant number of people, then Fox News would not be as popular as it is.
That's one possible explanation.
But it sure could explain why COPS is much more popular than documentaries about police practices, insightful reports into the causes and effects of crime, or careful examinations of the political and economic effects of various approaches to crime reduction.
My conclusion: boring things have an inherent liberal bias.
Slashdot Mirror
What about "protective" do you all not understand? They are to protect our jobs and American corporations.
You're right to use "protect" in quotes.
Imagine two futures, one without tariffs and one with. The main difference between the two is the amount of money American programmers make. (Although the popping of the bubble means a temporary imbalance between demand and supply, long-term trends will still require a lot of tech talent for the forseeable future.)
So if the American programmers make more, where does that come from? Well, from American consumers. They don't get anything more, but tariffs force them to pay more than they otherwise would for software. This means that, say, 1-2% of workers do better, but the other 98-99% of Americans do worse. And studies show that tariffs are a terribly inefficient way to transfer wealth; if we think that programmers deserve subsidies, the government should just send them all programmer welfare checks.
But that's not the only bad part.
Because American businesses have to pay more for their software, they are less competitive. And because all those Indian programmers have a harder time getting into the American market, they'll sell their wares even more cheaply to non-American markets, increasing the competitiveness of foreign companies. These factors both cause the destruction of American jobs.
Another ugly effect is that if they aren't getting American dollars, those Indians are much less likely to buy American products and invest in American companies, especially since they're not very competitive anymore. And that would be a disaster for us; somebody has to keep buying all those American stocks and bonds, especially once those baby boomers start to retire.
And protectionism can easily backfire. As another poster pointed out, British attempts to protect their computer industry pretty much sunk it. By staying competitive, we've managed to stay on top of the industry. By putting up trade barriers, we may gain in the short term, but we make ourselves weaker over the long haul.
why not establish a international minimum wage
During the Great Depression, my grandfather quit school at the age of 12 and helped support the family by working assorted jobs, all paying well below any reasonable "living wage". Ask around in your family, and you'll probably find similar stories.
Now if other countries had imposed tariffs on the US because we allowed children to labor below some international minimum wage, would that have helped or harmed my grandfather?
The answer, of course, is "harmed". A minimum wage means that some people get more money, but fewer of them will have jobs, shutting low-end workers like 12-year-old boys out of jobs.
Worse, since trade is a positive-sum activity (meaning that trades only happen when both sides benefit from making them), then less trade means that both sides are poorer. If both sides are poorer, there's less to go around, which generally hurts poor people disproportionately.
Poverty sucks, but refusing to do business with poor people makes it suck more.
An American worker, especially one on the east coast (where I am) literally cannot compete with an Indian one who's cost of living is a tenth of his, no matter how much "value" he brings to a job.
So if cost of living determines where software will be built, then how do you explain that most software is made in states with high costs of living? Given that we don't have tariffs in the US, by your logic most software production should have migrated to Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Is America going to become a nation of managers, where no usefull products are actually produced here?
You remember the 80s, when everybody was worried that the Japanese were so darned clever that there wouldn't be a single worker left in the US? But somehow, our unemployment is lower than it was then, and we're all much richer.
And this has been happening for a long time; the earliest US example I recall was Smoot-Hawley which was circa 1930, but I know the Brits have been doing it at least since the Corn Laws in, uh, 1815. People regularly get in a panic that [insert state, nation, or ethnic group here] are taking jobs away from honest, hardworking, patriotic [insert your own state, nation, or ethnic group here]. This is just the latest wave of a plausible-sounding but wrongheaded fear.
the tariffs and unions
Let's start out by separating these. I agree that unions have played an important role, and that they still can play a valuable one, even if they often don't. But I don't see any evidence that tariffs (or other trade barriers) ever improved worker rights.
Indeed, I think trade barriers work against worker rights. Why? Because trade barriers make pepole poorer, and there's a strong correlation between wealth and human rights. A fine example of this is the two Koreas. Originally, both were roughly at par. One of them is now basically a giant concentration camp; the other is a booming democracy with real civil rights. But the South Koreans only got interested in such niceties once they were sufficiently well off.
And of course there are destructive tariffs
In the long term, all tariffs (and other trade barriers) are destructive. The only ones that might be a net benefit are very short-term, very focused ones that help ease a shock. But even those are risky, as "temporary" tariffs tend to become permanent. Better to just spend a little tax money on transition costs (worker retraining and the like) to ease the pain of trade-induced economic changes.
For more info on why this is so, see my post on comparative advantage.
Now how do you feel?
Personally, if the only reason I have a job is because there's a law keeping those who can do it better from having it, then I'd be ashamed. Wouldn't you?
But I'm certain that I can provide more value than people who are ten time zones away, so I'm not worried. Competition from India may lower my salary from the boom-fueled absurd levels that it reached, but not enought that I'll sweat it.
If not then American would look more like Mexico or Argentina.
Bzzzt! Actually, there's strong statistical evidence that trade barriers make the people protected by them poorer. America historically has been a leader in lowering trade barriers, and that's part of why we're so rich.
Really, if trade barriers helped make people behind them richer, shouldn't we have trade barriers between the states, too?
Your too expensive [...] Tarrifs [...] tarrified [...] tarrified [...] tarifs
Hey, I've got an idea! Let's pass a law so that people with strong grammar and spelling skills won't be allowed to work as writers. Then even if you can't get a job as a programmer, you'll always have something to fall back on.
I'm sure all those magazines and books will be just as good, and if not, well, that's a small price to pay for making sure that the language-challenged have the full employment that is the right of every American citizen.
I felt that the media representations in the film were quite satirical.
Obscure fact: The "I'd by that for a dollar," bit was lifted from C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons," another excellent the-future-is-going-to-hell story.
I beg to differ. I use email a lot - as do most people. I need it to be lightning quick in handling multi-megabyte local mailboxes.
And what evidence do you have that, say, a Java app would be visibly slower than something written in C?
Even assuming that the C and Java are equivalently well-written, dealing with multi-megabyte mailboxes will be primarily an I/O issue unless you have enough RAM that you're keeping it it all cached.
But probably they won't be equivalently well-written. Many studies demonstrate that productivity in LOC is about the same no matter the language, so the higher a level you work at, the more productive you are. One poster in this thread mentioned that his productivity more than doubled switching from C/C++ to Java.
So given developers of equivalent quality, it would seem to me that the time spend tracking down weird memory errors is better spent on running a profiler and doing optimization. I do mainly server-side stuff, and I'm confident that given the same level of resources, I can build a faster app in Java than a team working in C/C++. If there's something where Java is really too slow, I can always recode that critical 1% of the code in C.
If the C or C++ code has a flaw - you fix it - it's that simple.
If it's that simple for you, then there are a lot of projects out there that could use your help. But given the number of bug reports I see, it appears to be less simple than you think.
That is my point. Security breechs happen. Bad code happens. Cracks happen.
This is not a binary problem.
By adopting test-first development, unit testing, and pair programming, my bug counts dropped by orders of magnitude, to a level less than one reported bug per programmer-month. By your logic, since bugs still happen, these practices are "irrelevant".
The same goes for using better tools. It's pretty easy to get a buffer overflow in C. It's very, very hard to get one in Java, although I'm sure it's not impossible. Does this mean that Java is pointless? No. Reducing occurences of a whole class of bugs by 99.9% is a big gain, even if it's not complete elimination.
There are plenty of comments here and published papers on writing clean, secure, and efficient code.
Yes, and that's exactly the problem. No matter how smart, a programmer has a limited amount of brainpower available. For best results, you want as much of that brainpower spent on solving the actual problem at hand, not dealing with the tools.
I admit it: a computer is better at managing unimportant details than me. And 99.98% of the time, the details of which value is stored where in RAM is, as far as I'm concerned, one of those unimportant details. If I can get the computer to handle that for me, that's a big win. As Moore's law tells us, computers double in speed every 18 months, and programmers don't. Taking advantage of that means I can do more cool stuff before I die. Who wouldn't want that?
How pleasant are client side gui's implemented in Java? HORRID! They are just slow, and ugly.
Oh, please. On my ancient 700 MHz Pentium III box, complicated Java applications like IntelliJ's IDEA work just fine; it's both responsive and pretty. If you're going to bitch about Java, stick to reasonably modern complaints, like its lack of type-safe collections (which won't be fixed until Java 1.5). Or bitch about the classloader. Or grumble about library management. But the whole "Java is too slow" thing is so 1998.
When you grow up, you'll perhaps figure out that everybody makes mistakes.
Amen! And that admission is key to building better stuff. When I started doing unit testing, it felt unmanly to me; as if really good programmers just did it right the first time.
But then I realized that if I only did things that I could do perfectly, then I wasn't challenging myself. Writing unit tests as I go lets me tackle bigger, uglier problems and still provide solid results.
Macho posturing just gets in the way of doing really kick-ass work.
[...] Are you suggesting that policymakers should force the Gov't to purchase only GPL'd software? Or release Gov't funded R&D only under a GPL license? Either of those would be unacceptable and every bit as bad as preventing the Gov't from using GPL'd software [...]
Brave assertions. Any facts to back them up? Or even some reasoning?
Did you have a contract with the company saying you would get paid overtime? No. You worked the extra hours to get the job done and that's what everyone in interesting professional jobs does.
True, but there's generally an implicit quid pro quo. I used to work for financial traders, where 50-hour weeks were considered normal, and a few times I ended up working 50-hour days. But I never fretted about it; it was the deal I signed up for, and I knew that they'd take care of me, especially at bonus time.
Another fine way to tackle this is through profit-sharing or ownership. I love working for startups; everybody is committed to making things go. That's mainly because they like doing it, but the fact that they own a piece of it sure doesn't hurt.
But there are certainly companies out there that don't get this. Their notion is that they are playing a zero-sum game with their workers, where their goal is to maximize hours worked and minimize dollars given to workers. And they aren't up front about it, either; nobody tells you in advance that you've signed up for a death march.
This is, of course, foolishness; in the long run, it works about as well as Iraqi motivational techniques. Smart companies know that to get more, they give more. And since business is a positive-sum game, it generally works out for everybody involved.
back to John Brunner and 1970's Vernor Vinge
And further still. Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" is just eerie, as a number of sources note.
reducing the CO2 levels to the original levels would also have no impact.
No, I read what you wrote. Even if both your premises is true, your conclusion is wrong. The short-term relationship between CO2 levels and temperature may not be obvious. But the long-term one is. There is no serious dispute about the warming effects of CO2. The only disputes are over whether the observed temperature rise is real, and whether the increased CO2 levels are the cause of that.
This dude [psu.edu] would seem to dispute that. [...] He just disputes the fact that greenhouse gasses act as blankets.
Uh, in the common mind, blankets keep warmth in. In case that metaphor wasn't clear, I also said that explicitly. And even he agrees that greenhouse gasses do keep warmth in.
So if you like, I'll revise my statement: nobody disagrees that greenhouse gasses make the world warmer. And nobody sensible disagrees that greenhouse gasses act as blankets, keeping warmth in. Why? Because sensible people realize that no metaphor is perfect, and that pushed too far any metaphor breaks down.
If that dude offered a better metaphor, or even a clear and coherent explanation of greenhouse gasses, I might give him some credit. But as he is, he's just muddying the debate; for 98% of the people out there, saying greenhouse gasses act like blankets is fine, as they understand that more CO2 -> warmer. And for the other 2%, they're smart enough to know that gasses like CO2 convect as well, and therefore won't be preventing it.
That might be, assuming we are so arrogant to believe that we no better than nature
Eh? "Nature" doesn't "no" anything; it just is. You're making a classic philosophical error, one known as the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is doesn't mean it should be. The "natural" lot of man is uncomfortable ignorance, misery, and an early death.
You're welcome to it, pal, but I've got other things to do. I have a lot of respect for the titanic power and amazing subtlety of the natural world, but I believe it can be improved upon. And given that you're posting on Slashdot and not sitting in a swamp scratching your scabs, you do too.
This is an argument of desperation for the global warming crowd.
Are you kidding? What I'm saying is that, if the sun were to go berserk tomorrow we should undertake a radical terraforming project. Most greens would be fucking horrified.
the Global Warming PAC:
Yes, all those science johnnies are in a big conspiracy. Sneaky, aren't they? They pretend to be all absent-minded, but you've clearly found out the truth: they are machievelian schemers out to reduce CO2 emissions so that they can promote global cooling, which allows their oversized, mutant brains to work more effectively.
Some say that all we technical types are in a big conspiracy, too, but we all know TINLC, right?
If the heating of the sun really were the only driver of rising temperatures, then clearly cuts in CO2 would be useless to compensate.
Not true. CO2, like any greenhouse gas, acts as a blanket, keeping warmth in. That's not in dispute by anybody. The only dispute is about to what extent human emissions of CO2 have contributed to the recent increase in global temperatures.
So suppose tomorrow that the Sun increased its output by, say, 1%. If we wanted to keep temperatures the same, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be one of the easier ways for us to compensate.
Of course it's also a pretty boring way to do that; personally, I'd favor increasing our planet's albedo by covering Texas and Nevada with mirrors, tiled like a giant disco ball.
So don't feel bad about questioning the Green orthodoxy, because it's changed 180-degrees in the not too distant past, and they probably don't even believe it themselves.
I'm all for questioning orthodoxy!
But I also question your ability to read the minds of people you apparently haven't met. I know a number of people who do environmental work for a living. As in everything else, some are clueless and some are happy to take somebody else's word for things that fit their prejudices. (Thanks goodness that doesn't happen here on Slashdot.) But many are smart and sincere, and have the kinds of science background to be able to evaluate the claims well.
Although the more reasonable response is probably to say, "Gosh, if the sun is getting hotter, we'd better make deeper cuts in CO2 emissions to compensate."
Alas, reason is out of style.
as someday the drive you rsync to is going to fail in a nasty way.
Oops! I should have mentioned that my backups are stored on RAID arrays, so I'm not worried about that. But even if I were backing up to a single disk, I probably wouldn't sweat it too much. My biggest reason for having the backups is catastrophe prevention. For that, even a single remote copy strikes me as better than local tapes.
Why should an american company hire an american contractor. They can have the same kind of skills for far less money hiring a contractor in India...
There are a lot of reasons. Most of them boil down to the advantages of physical presence, which provides high-bandwidth, low-latency communication. Others are primarily social.
There are times when outsourcing can make sense. If you have a clear spec and people can implement it properly without asking any questions, then sending the work off can work. But this contract includes analysis, design, construction, and training in a short-cycle iterative process. Outsourcing that to another timezone is impossible.
Hint to those worried about their jobs: standard software practices don't take proper advantage of physical colocation. Adopt a process like Extreme Programming, which does, and you'll have a business advantage that can't be matched through outsourcing to Outer Slobovia.
Yep! The reason I want to use a shell company is that some companies don't like doing 1099s directly. Also, having somebody else take care of billing, medical, dental, and 401k is appealing to me; I hate that admin stuff, so paying 4-5% of my gross to have it all go away seems reasonable to me.
On a 1099, no more than 10%.
The ones I've looked closely at, ZeroChaos.com, MyBizOffice.com, and PACE all charge less than that. ZeroChaos is very vague about their fees, but they quoted me $300 per month per active client. MyBizOffice charges 4% for the first $125k in billings and 1.5% after that. And PACE charges 5%.
I don't think any of them will do a 1099; they all seem to do W2s, and of course all of the taxes come out of my share. At least one of them has an intriguing lease-back program, where I buy the equipment I want, lease it to the shell company, and then they deduct the leasing fees from my inccome. I believe this is a dodge to get the same tax benefits for capital goods as working on a 1099.
Both sorts of testing are helpful.
Functional tests make sure that the program meets the requirements. Good QA people are invaluable.
But even if I had the world's best team of testers, I'd still do test-first programming. Why?
As far as I can tell, every programmer does manual unit testing, generally by putting in print statements as they develop and then looking for stuff in the output. Doing automated unit testing just means that you take those manual checks and automate them. And isn't automating tedious manual work what computers are all about?
if this bias weren't perceived by a significant number of people, then Fox News would not be as popular as it is.
That's one possible explanation.
But it sure could explain why COPS is much more popular than documentaries about police practices, insightful reports into the causes and effects of crime, or careful examinations of the political and economic effects of various approaches to crime reduction.
My conclusion: boring things have an inherent liberal bias.