I think that Bitcoin or schemes like it will always be with us from now on because they serve well a niche that until recently was poorly served by physical cash: the black market. Just consider the many advantages of Bitcoin transactions, legal and otherwise. They're anonymous (or at least they can be if done right), easy to verify, difficult to reverse and require no centralized clearing authority. The design of the Bitcoin system also makes it extremely difficult or even impossible to counterfeit. So you see, these types of distributed electronic crypto currencies will always have value to those who wish the convenience of electronic transaction without the transparency that's attached to official channels. They may not become mainstream for these same reasons, among others, but sites like Silk Road need a way to clear transactions without everyone being identified and arrested and Bitcoin provides a means to do that.
He says it's all going to be mismanaged so you might as well keep as much as you can...not too different from US libertarian rhetoric really
Who do you think spends your money better, you or the government? The government wastes vast sums of money on nonsense and bullshit, so I can certainly understand why somebody would want to make sure that as little as possible goes to them by way of taxes. From where I sit, it doesn't look like anybody in Washington DC has a damned clue what it means to really work or how difficult it was for many of us to earn that money in the first place. Most of America is having a hardscrabble go of it these days while dishonest politicians and their fellow travelers in DC just keep spending like drunken sailors, it's disgusting.
but these 'HEY LOOK AT ME!' ones always end up with people either avoiding the site or installing blocking software. These ads just don't work.
We on Slashdot who use ad blocking are in the definite minority of users out there and especially so on sites frequented by the masses, like Facebook. They know that we block ads but they don't care because 90+% of regular Facebook, Disney and ESPN users don't. If the ads weren't effective, the advertisers wouldn't still be paying for them. I'm actually fine with this arrangement because it means that a sort of détente exists between us and the advertisers. They have no desire to engage us in an arms race of counter measures and counter counter measures while they're still reaching the vast majority of their intended audience, it's not worth it. That may change in the future but for now it seems that nobody wants to fire the opening shots in that war.
Will Facebook integrate video advertising in such a way that blocking it breaks Facebook? This is becoming common with video content on other sites where they won't allow you to view it until they've confirmed via embedded dynamic scripts that you've also viewed the advertisement. Would Facebook be willing to deny access to those who block ads? If they do then how will that effect their much vaunted user numbers? It will be interesting to see how Facebook plays this hand.
when it's well-known that Facebook's codebase is a gigantic messy hairball of bewildering PHP.
If true, that's not surprising given the culture of hackathons and all nighters. As a developer who takes pride in quality work, the whole hackathon phenomenon really bugs me because it idolizes practices which have long been known to produce shitty and unmaintainable code. As others have said, hackathons are fine for hobbyists and those who're just having fun, but this is no way for those who call themselves professionals to be writing code that has even the slightest chance of being taken into production.
Why aren't "official" MPG ratings accurate you ask? Because almost everyone, except stupid consumers, benefits from this system. The politicians can point to rising average fuel economy, real or exaggerated, that burnishes their green credentials. The environmentalists and their pressure groups don't have to admit that fuel economy isn't going up as much as advertised or even worse "declined" from previous inaccurate measurements. The auto companies are also happy with this fiction because it allows them to continue business as usual which is more profitable for them. In short almost nobody cares about accurate "official" MPG numbers because accurate don't serve the interests of anyone with skin in the game. Consumers who care about the real MPG can find this information with a few Google searches or a visit to one of the consumer review sites where they can pay for detailed reports with the real numbers (often worthwhile when researching a major durable goods purchase). What do you expect out of government? Accurate numbers? The truth? Don't be naive.
There's a huge potential downside for you: if you get caught, you face prosecution, or at the very least, a negative recommendation.
You mean when you get caught, not if. The money men have enough money to hire anyone they need to both (a) tell them what happened and (b) who did it and (c) fix it. You can bet that they won't mind paying extra to settle the score with you after something like this. In such a case a negative recommendation is going to be the least of your worries.
I think that lawyers share at least some of the blame for what you describe. After all, can you imagine something as "dangerous" as a machine shop in a high school anymore? Of course not! Why, little Johnny might lose his fingers in the band saw or crush his hand in the drill press. It's easy to see how the pervasive liability culture that's been unfolding since at least the 1960s here in the United States has effectively ruined many of what might once have been considered "classic" activities for boys growing up and it's not just shop class that has suffered but the chemistry lab and even the sorts of activities that were once enjoyed at summer camps. Remember the rope courses and rifle ranges? Yeah, the attorneys and the insurance companies put the kabosh on those too. But the icing on the cake today is the big lie that everyone who goes to college, no matter how much debt they take on to do it, has the ticket to a good job and a bright future. Some of them don't figure it out until after they graduate and end up waiting tables or working the espresso machine while wondering what the hell happened to that bright future they were promised. If my kid wants to become a certified mechanic or skilled tradesman rather than becoming yet another liberal arts washout I think that I would actually be fine with that.
With enough heat energy input, nuclear or solar, it's possible to produce hydrocarbon fuels artificially even if we limit the feedstocks to just water and CO2. However, this would almost certainly not replace the current levels of consumption and the use of artificially produced fuels would likely be relegated to emergencies or luxury travel. Air travel especially may eventually revert to that of a luxury reserved for the rich. For example, imagine paying $5,000+ for an economy class transcontinental flight. It's not so far fetched when you consider that at one time a flight on a Pan-Am Boeing 307, which carried only 33 passengers, cost about $1,000 per ticket or $12,000 in today's inflation adjusted dollars.
Whenever the left talks about "investing" what they really mean is "spending". The left uses "investment" as a code word for spending. They know that many Americans are profoundly ignorant of finance and investing and they're hoping to fool those people while at the same time reassuring their base that the "investing" will continue without interruption. Of course, the left knows that professional investors will not be taken in by such nonsense but they don't care because they don't have to fool Wall Street, just Main Street, for their plans to succeed. In fact, Wall Street will be happy to assist the Democrats in exchange for laws and regulations that steer Main Street into crappy 401k plans stuffed full of high fee mutual funds picked by them as "safe" investments and controlled to prevent any of the peons from actually owning any of the really good assets. It's as the Merovingian said in the Matrix films, "Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without."
Has this guy ever driven through Southern California? Thousands of farms have been using this "invention" for 50 years or more, if not longer. Seriously, does he think that he is the first guy to have the idea of elevating a sprinkler to cover a larger area? In fact, I'm pretty sure that I have seen tripods, amongst numerous other methods of elevating a sprinkler, in use by farmers here in California as far back as I can remember. Elevating a sprinkler, either fixed or mounted on a mobile conveyance, is nothing new. The patent examiner had it right, this is a bogus patent application.
It should be noted that this kind of DRM nonsense really only happens in the United States. For example, one can buy bootleg copies of just about every movie, album or other creative work ever made for pennies on the dollar at the La Lagunilla Market just outside Mexico City. The trade in bootleg movies and music is primarily conducted by two groups, La Familia Michoacana and Los Zetas. As you might imagine, Hollywood hasn't had much success in either convincing either them to stop or motivating the Mexican government or police to do anything about it. Probably because the Mexican police are being paid by the cartels under a 'plomo o plata' type arrangement (silver or lead, take the bribe money they offer or they shoot you and the one who replaces you takes the bribe) and the Mexican government has much bigger fish to fry. Mexico has many problems, but DRM isn't one of them.
The musicians you speak of are almost always heard live or at least that is a substantial part of the experience of listening to them. While it's possible to obtain recorded works performed by these great orchestras, nothing is quite like being there in person as the lights are dimmed and the conductor walks out onto the stage to take his place at the head of 100 master musicians for an evening of grand performance. It's really quite a remarkable experience and well worth doing at least once in your lifetime, even if you aren't a fan of classical orchestral music.
As much as HR would like to see "out there" people with tons of blog posts and lots of check-ins on open source repository sites the fact remains that many great programers labor on in obscurity because they're too modest to promote work that while useful isn't exactly brilliant. Just because somebody checks in a lot of code and writes me-too blog posts doesn't mean that they're a great programmer. You want to know what really attracts good developers, especially experienced ones with grown up responsibilities and families to feed? How about making them some basic promises when you hire them, like a 2 year deal with a guaranteed severance package and some time at work to either work on personal growth projects or work on new skills that will be useful in future projects? The problem with these Silicon Valley types is that they want bright young hotshots fresh out of school and not experienced enough to recognize the fact that they're being used up and thrown out by people who don't really care about their careers or their futures. The other thing about bright young hotshot coders is that you can't tell them anything. They think that they know everything and that everyone who came before them was a dumbass and then proceed to make every mistake in the well worn programming book of things not to do. If you want to relearn the programming mistakes of the past, hire that hotshot fresh out of school. If you want it done right, look for the experienced programmer described above and pay him what he's worth. It's just better that way for everyone in the end, even the blue flame special straight out of school.
You'll recall, or perhaps not, from your economics course that price is function of both supply and demand. The supply curve can shift right independent of the demand curve which implies a decreased price at every point along the supply curve, as when the price of inputs decreases or the productivity of their outputs increases, without necessarily increasing the "demand for murder", as you chose to put it. Ask yourself, who commits most of the violent gun crimes in America? Is it the law abiding rural gun owners with their cabinets full of rifles, shotguns and handguns or is it the poor urban criminals who are holding up liquor stores and robbing their fellow citizens with "born to lose" tattoos scrawled across their chests? If you believe that increasing the price of guns will reduce violent gun crimes then let's go ahead and try that. If a few less poor urban dwellers end up armed with cheap Saturday night specials, I won't complain. After all, they're the ones committing the crimes.
Except it isn't quite like a political cartoon or a caricature because on Facebook it may not be immediately obvious that this isn't really him. There isn't somebody jumping out from behind his picture and saying, "Live from New York it's Saturday Night!". I'll admit that I haven't taken the time to examine the page in question, but even if it is a parody is this really the sort of thing that Facebook wants on their site? They're in the business of delivering "real" people, not parodies of real people, to paying advertisers. The customers are the advertisers, not the users, and Facebook is first and foremost a business or at lease their shareholders hope that it is.
The only way your going to get all of the source code like that is if you bid the project out as bespoke software, written just for you, with full rights over the resulting code and other deliverables. BTW, it will cost way more then $10 million too, that's just the start. Don't believe me? Ask the FBI about their $100 million case management system that failed delivery and will never be used. Software development, especially complex software development, is a high risk business. Costs are high and so are project failure rates, but outsiders seldom realize this until it's too late because they're used to buying and using only the results of the successful projects.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that Bitcoin or schemes like it will always be with us from now on because they serve well a niche that until recently was poorly served by physical cash: the black market. Just consider the many advantages of Bitcoin transactions, legal and otherwise. They're anonymous (or at least they can be if done right), easy to verify, difficult to reverse and require no centralized clearing authority. The design of the Bitcoin system also makes it extremely difficult or even impossible to counterfeit. So you see, these types of distributed electronic crypto currencies will always have value to those who wish the convenience of electronic transaction without the transparency that's attached to official channels. They may not become mainstream for these same reasons, among others, but sites like Silk Road need a way to clear transactions without everyone being identified and arrested and Bitcoin provides a means to do that.
He says it's all going to be mismanaged so you might as well keep as much as you can...not too different from US libertarian rhetoric really
Who do you think spends your money better, you or the government? The government wastes vast sums of money on nonsense and bullshit, so I can certainly understand why somebody would want to make sure that as little as possible goes to them by way of taxes. From where I sit, it doesn't look like anybody in Washington DC has a damned clue what it means to really work or how difficult it was for many of us to earn that money in the first place. Most of America is having a hardscrabble go of it these days while dishonest politicians and their fellow travelers in DC just keep spending like drunken sailors, it's disgusting.
I take it then that you're no longer using Ubuntu, so what are you using instead these days?
How about we send everyone on the list? Have you seen those videos? Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel.
but these 'HEY LOOK AT ME!' ones always end up with people either avoiding the site or installing blocking software. These ads just don't work.
We on Slashdot who use ad blocking are in the definite minority of users out there and especially so on sites frequented by the masses, like Facebook. They know that we block ads but they don't care because 90+% of regular Facebook, Disney and ESPN users don't. If the ads weren't effective, the advertisers wouldn't still be paying for them. I'm actually fine with this arrangement because it means that a sort of détente exists between us and the advertisers. They have no desire to engage us in an arms race of counter measures and counter counter measures while they're still reaching the vast majority of their intended audience, it's not worth it. That may change in the future but for now it seems that nobody wants to fire the opening shots in that war.
Will Facebook integrate video advertising in such a way that blocking it breaks Facebook? This is becoming common with video content on other sites where they won't allow you to view it until they've confirmed via embedded dynamic scripts that you've also viewed the advertisement. Would Facebook be willing to deny access to those who block ads? If they do then how will that effect their much vaunted user numbers? It will be interesting to see how Facebook plays this hand.
when it's well-known that Facebook's codebase is a gigantic messy hairball of bewildering PHP.
If true, that's not surprising given the culture of hackathons and all nighters. As a developer who takes pride in quality work, the whole hackathon phenomenon really bugs me because it idolizes practices which have long been known to produce shitty and unmaintainable code. As others have said, hackathons are fine for hobbyists and those who're just having fun, but this is no way for those who call themselves professionals to be writing code that has even the slightest chance of being taken into production.
and this is a public school.
In which State?
Why aren't "official" MPG ratings accurate you ask? Because almost everyone, except stupid consumers, benefits from this system. The politicians can point to rising average fuel economy, real or exaggerated, that burnishes their green credentials. The environmentalists and their pressure groups don't have to admit that fuel economy isn't going up as much as advertised or even worse "declined" from previous inaccurate measurements. The auto companies are also happy with this fiction because it allows them to continue business as usual which is more profitable for them. In short almost nobody cares about accurate "official" MPG numbers because accurate don't serve the interests of anyone with skin in the game. Consumers who care about the real MPG can find this information with a few Google searches or a visit to one of the consumer review sites where they can pay for detailed reports with the real numbers (often worthwhile when researching a major durable goods purchase). What do you expect out of government? Accurate numbers? The truth? Don't be naive.
There's a huge potential downside for you: if you get caught, you face prosecution, or at the very least, a negative recommendation.
You mean when you get caught, not if. The money men have enough money to hire anyone they need to both (a) tell them what happened and (b) who did it and (c) fix it. You can bet that they won't mind paying extra to settle the score with you after something like this. In such a case a negative recommendation is going to be the least of your worries.
I think that lawyers share at least some of the blame for what you describe. After all, can you imagine something as "dangerous" as a machine shop in a high school anymore? Of course not! Why, little Johnny might lose his fingers in the band saw or crush his hand in the drill press. It's easy to see how the pervasive liability culture that's been unfolding since at least the 1960s here in the United States has effectively ruined many of what might once have been considered "classic" activities for boys growing up and it's not just shop class that has suffered but the chemistry lab and even the sorts of activities that were once enjoyed at summer camps. Remember the rope courses and rifle ranges? Yeah, the attorneys and the insurance companies put the kabosh on those too. But the icing on the cake today is the big lie that everyone who goes to college, no matter how much debt they take on to do it, has the ticket to a good job and a bright future. Some of them don't figure it out until after they graduate and end up waiting tables or working the espresso machine while wondering what the hell happened to that bright future they were promised. If my kid wants to become a certified mechanic or skilled tradesman rather than becoming yet another liberal arts washout I think that I would actually be fine with that.
With enough heat energy input, nuclear or solar, it's possible to produce hydrocarbon fuels artificially even if we limit the feedstocks to just water and CO2. However, this would almost certainly not replace the current levels of consumption and the use of artificially produced fuels would likely be relegated to emergencies or luxury travel. Air travel especially may eventually revert to that of a luxury reserved for the rich. For example, imagine paying $5,000+ for an economy class transcontinental flight. It's not so far fetched when you consider that at one time a flight on a Pan-Am Boeing 307, which carried only 33 passengers, cost about $1,000 per ticket or $12,000 in today's inflation adjusted dollars.
Whenever the left talks about "investing" what they really mean is "spending". The left uses "investment" as a code word for spending. They know that many Americans are profoundly ignorant of finance and investing and they're hoping to fool those people while at the same time reassuring their base that the "investing" will continue without interruption. Of course, the left knows that professional investors will not be taken in by such nonsense but they don't care because they don't have to fool Wall Street, just Main Street, for their plans to succeed. In fact, Wall Street will be happy to assist the Democrats in exchange for laws and regulations that steer Main Street into crappy 401k plans stuffed full of high fee mutual funds picked by them as "safe" investments and controlled to prevent any of the peons from actually owning any of the really good assets. It's as the Merovingian said in the Matrix films, "Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without."
Has this guy ever driven through Southern California? Thousands of farms have been using this "invention" for 50 years or more, if not longer. Seriously, does he think that he is the first guy to have the idea of elevating a sprinkler to cover a larger area? In fact, I'm pretty sure that I have seen tripods, amongst numerous other methods of elevating a sprinkler, in use by farmers here in California as far back as I can remember. Elevating a sprinkler, either fixed or mounted on a mobile conveyance, is nothing new. The patent examiner had it right, this is a bogus patent application.
It should be noted that this kind of DRM nonsense really only happens in the United States. For example, one can buy bootleg copies of just about every movie, album or other creative work ever made for pennies on the dollar at the La Lagunilla Market just outside Mexico City. The trade in bootleg movies and music is primarily conducted by two groups, La Familia Michoacana and Los Zetas. As you might imagine, Hollywood hasn't had much success in either convincing either them to stop or motivating the Mexican government or police to do anything about it. Probably because the Mexican police are being paid by the cartels under a 'plomo o plata' type arrangement (silver or lead, take the bribe money they offer or they shoot you and the one who replaces you takes the bribe) and the Mexican government has much bigger fish to fry. Mexico has many problems, but DRM isn't one of them.
The musicians you speak of are almost always heard live or at least that is a substantial part of the experience of listening to them. While it's possible to obtain recorded works performed by these great orchestras, nothing is quite like being there in person as the lights are dimmed and the conductor walks out onto the stage to take his place at the head of 100 master musicians for an evening of grand performance. It's really quite a remarkable experience and well worth doing at least once in your lifetime, even if you aren't a fan of classical orchestral music.
As much as HR would like to see "out there" people with tons of blog posts and lots of check-ins on open source repository sites the fact remains that many great programers labor on in obscurity because they're too modest to promote work that while useful isn't exactly brilliant. Just because somebody checks in a lot of code and writes me-too blog posts doesn't mean that they're a great programmer. You want to know what really attracts good developers, especially experienced ones with grown up responsibilities and families to feed? How about making them some basic promises when you hire them, like a 2 year deal with a guaranteed severance package and some time at work to either work on personal growth projects or work on new skills that will be useful in future projects? The problem with these Silicon Valley types is that they want bright young hotshots fresh out of school and not experienced enough to recognize the fact that they're being used up and thrown out by people who don't really care about their careers or their futures. The other thing about bright young hotshot coders is that you can't tell them anything. They think that they know everything and that everyone who came before them was a dumbass and then proceed to make every mistake in the well worn programming book of things not to do. If you want to relearn the programming mistakes of the past, hire that hotshot fresh out of school. If you want it done right, look for the experienced programmer described above and pay him what he's worth. It's just better that way for everyone in the end, even the blue flame special straight out of school.
Here in Montreal that barely pays for one corrupt city official to answer the phone.
With or without the bad attitude and the French accent?
You'll recall, or perhaps not, from your economics course that price is function of both supply and demand. The supply curve can shift right independent of the demand curve which implies a decreased price at every point along the supply curve, as when the price of inputs decreases or the productivity of their outputs increases, without necessarily increasing the "demand for murder", as you chose to put it. Ask yourself, who commits most of the violent gun crimes in America? Is it the law abiding rural gun owners with their cabinets full of rifles, shotguns and handguns or is it the poor urban criminals who are holding up liquor stores and robbing their fellow citizens with "born to lose" tattoos scrawled across their chests? If you believe that increasing the price of guns will reduce violent gun crimes then let's go ahead and try that. If a few less poor urban dwellers end up armed with cheap Saturday night specials, I won't complain. After all, they're the ones committing the crimes.
The Bhutanese seem to be pretty happy with their lives, perhaps we could learn a thing or two from them?
Except it isn't quite like a political cartoon or a caricature because on Facebook it may not be immediately obvious that this isn't really him. There isn't somebody jumping out from behind his picture and saying, "Live from New York it's Saturday Night!". I'll admit that I haven't taken the time to examine the page in question, but even if it is a parody is this really the sort of thing that Facebook wants on their site? They're in the business of delivering "real" people, not parodies of real people, to paying advertisers. The customers are the advertisers, not the users, and Facebook is first and foremost a business or at lease their shareholders hope that it is.
Yeah, that made smile too. Well played sir, well played indeed.
The only way your going to get all of the source code like that is if you bid the project out as bespoke software, written just for you, with full rights over the resulting code and other deliverables. BTW, it will cost way more then $10 million too, that's just the start. Don't believe me? Ask the FBI about their $100 million case management system that failed delivery and will never be used. Software development, especially complex software development, is a high risk business. Costs are high and so are project failure rates, but outsiders seldom realize this until it's too late because they're used to buying and using only the results of the successful projects.
but it's part of why our health care costs so damn much.
Perhaps, but really it's still small potatoes compared to the Third Party Payer Problem.
The prices will be set to the maximum that the customer can afford.
And are willing to pay. It's called price discrimination and the airlines are the acknowledged masters of the technique.