Would you feel safe anywhere at all? I doubt it. I feel safe in my American suburban neighborhood, too. There are certainly places I would never venture armed or no. I'd like to know how in your perfectly safe gun free world. a 98 lb female is supposed to defend herself against being raped by a 250 lb assailant? Pepper spray? Or should she just lie back and "think of England"? If it were my daughter I'd rather she put a bullet in the bastard's eye.
I'm not sure it's possible to gather accurate statistics on this. The liberals love to cite a made-up statistic that people are more likely to be harmed by the guns in their own home. What this cost benefit analysis lacks is the benefit part - the number of crimes deterred by the firearm. There's a statistic that says 9 out of 10 confrontations involving a firearm do NOT involve shooting, i.e. the deterrent value alone defused the situation. The vast majority of these encounters are not reported to the police - who really wants the hassle? There are daily incidents where people successfully use firearms to defend their homes and themselves, but these rarely make it into the news because good news doesn't sell. It also goes counter to the anti-gun bias in the mainstream media.
Ok, what's the alternative? Begging Mr. Armed Housebreaker to leave witnesses? You're implying that this man isn't competent to decide his own course of action in an emergency. Isn't that his decision and his alone? Especially inside his own house? What makes you so fucking smart?
Well, I gotta hand it to you; you guys nailed pretty much everything wrong with this idea in the first three posts. The only people who could love this idea are liberal gun grabbers who are afraid somebody might get hurt with a gun. The idea that it would be good for police is equally silly - the added layer of complexity can only further muddy the waters at times when speed and reliability are paramount. I already mourn for the police officer who will be killed when this system fails.
Guns aren't supposed to be safe, they're supposed to be dangerous as hell and for a very good reason. The entire mindset that spawned this abortion ignores the most basic natural right to self defense. Said mindset also has an unconscionably low opinion of people's judgments in such situations. It's the same mindset that recommends "passive resistance" for rape victims, as if a woman lying dead in an alley, raped and strangles with her own pantyhose is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to a cop exactly why she had to shoot her attacker.
OH NOES! Climate data being faked for political purposes! What's next? Climate data being faked to scam grant money? Oops! Already happened!
The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers....he Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.
Climate change continues to be a horse ridden by people with personal and political agendas. It continues to amaze how an entire generation has been duped into believing correlation equals causation.
The big advantage of commercial software is that the sales revenue allows you to pay people to write it. It should come as no surprise that people LIKE being paid for working. If developers are being paid, the money doesn't just magically appear. Somebody, somewhere is paying for it. Intel, Oracle, etc. get their revenue for selling other kinds of stuff to people, stuff that they paid somebody to make, write or whatever. The revenue can then be invested in other projects of which support for linux is merely one.
Another advantage is that if you pay people to do something, you can hold them accountable for their work and hence increase productivity.
In the end the fact remains: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
You continue to confuse political and economic systems. As a nation, China has been a totalitarian state for all of modern history. Tienanmen square was not an accident and their continued crackdown on dissent it all the proof anyone needs. They only started rising as a nation with the embrace of capitalist ideas that allows the worst types of abuses of a capitalist system - rampant pollution, lack of any protections for workers, lack of any consumer protection against defective products, the list is endless because the only priority is economic growth. Try complaining online about the Chinese system while in china and see how long you last. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press aren't just nice ideas, they're essential to the quality of life of the average citizen.
Your attempt to turn the discussion to the west's supposed unsustainable way of life is ridiculous. Our shelves in the west continue to overflow while all other nations on earth envy our wealth. You assume that all people WANT is a shirt, any shirt on their back, any meal in their stomachs, etc., which is an incredibly arrogant assumption on your part. Who are you to tell people what they should want or how to live their lives? You also assume that there is a finite amount of resources and that resource needs will never change. This is a sophomoric position at best. The recent spike in fuel prices highlighted the fact that there is a plethora of cleaner energy technologies waiting in the wings - the only thing holding them back is the economics of fuel prices. Hand wringer like you always discount the value of human ingenuity.
Your selected metrics of health, literacy and nutrition are actually wonderful measures of the success of western capitalism when you compare the levels of first and third world nations because the first world wins every single time. Why? Because with our collective wealth we can better afford it. The western model shows that people are very willing to work and work hard to improve their standard of living. People who bear an entitlement mentality tend to do poorly in such a system, but then again stupidity should hurt. You can not force someone to WANT to improve their lot in life.
"China became the workshop of the world under communism..."
No, they became workshop to the world when they embraced capitalism. When they tried collective farming & such during the cultural revolution millions starved. Pretty much the same happened in Russia. In all 3 countries you have incredible amounts of poverty, shortages of goods, etc.. I recall my neighbor's sister visiting from East Germany back in the early 80's. I took her a decade just to get permission to make the trip. She literally cried when she went into a supermarket and saw the shelves overflowing with goods.
People that look at communism with rose colored glasses ignore the incredible tyranny and abuses. To say they succeeded is incredibly stupid at best.
They certainly are one of the most powerful counties. They really took off when they embraced capitalism. Back when they tried collective farming & such under Mao during the cultural revolution (you know, REAL communism) millions starved.
What they have now is totalitarian capitalism. Worst of both worlds.
Our populace has many kinds of idiots, including those that think the only reason communism has failed everywhere it's been tried is because the right people weren't in charge.
Can you imagine your phone ringing all night with nigerian scammers? 3 am and it's "greetings and salutations, I am a representative of a banking consortium..."
Pshaw. It works both ways. Perhaps you could coin a "Palin effect" considering how she gets liberals all worked into a lather. And you're still very much "inside" the democrat team demographic, aren't you? C'mon, admit it!
Well, that makes you a raving lunatic teabagger because anyone who questions the noble purpose of carbon reduction is obviously insane and/or mentally deficient. A pox on your "constitution".
All I'm hearing here is "But we ARE special!" It's no excuse for screwing off on the job as the original poster described. If you work hard, fine. If you don't it will catch up sooner or later, either individually or to the industry as a whole. Your attitude reminds me of US car companies over the last 30 years. The rest of the world has ground the US auto industry into dust. IT is not special.
It's amazing how much harder you want to work when your pay is linked to your productivity. Eastern European countries seem to have more of a salary based system in health care. I see it in colleagues who are salaried - no incentive to work hard. Not a knock on Czech or anywhere else but just my observation. The few easten euro dentists I've met have been admirably concerned about the quality of their treatment but they're slooooow.
There you go again putting coders on a pedestal again. I'm a dentist: if something isn't done right I get a call about it at 9 o'clock at night & I might even get sued. I have to manage people's emotions and experiences while doing tiny, intricate and detailed work on teeth in a mouth that's moving and complaining the entire time and in the process I get exposed to a variety of body fluids that may or may not contain pathogens. The entire procedure has to be prepared ahead of time and every step has to be completed properly before the next step can begin - and if the procedure is not completed it's illegal for me to bill insurance until it is - we don't get paid for incomplete work. There are often several patients seated simultaneously so there are several different processes to be managed at once. Every single one of those patients expects and deserves my undivided attention. Doing it right the first time so you don't waste time doing it over is a guiding principle.
I don't think what I do is unique - it's similar to a head chef in a restaurant managing his line chefs. Coders need to drop the "attitude" and recognize that their efficiency contributes directly to the bottom line. If your organization can't get it done there's one over in India or China willing to step up. Enjoy your future unemployment!
Try that in any professional level program and see how you do, then get back to me, k? Think you'll have a lot of spare time to screw around in law school, medical school, vet school, Pharm school, etc.? In your first year, they're trying to force out the people who don't really want to be here and they do it by piling up the work so high that you have to be extremely disciplined in order to manage the workload. It's called "weeding out the losers" and it sounds like you'll be very familiar with the term someday.
Undergraduate programs ain't shit compared to professional programs.
Bullshit. The only reason they can get away with acting like "keepers of the secret flame" is because "outsiders" don't have the tools to adequately measure productivity. Nobody ever told me to take 10 off for every 20; if I did that I would have flunked out. If you can't hack more than 20 minutes of work at a time you're either lazy or stupid.
My advice of the author of the article is to start looking for a new job NOW. Find someplace where the company culture includes a work ethic because productivity means profit and profit means paychecks.
You guys are a bunch of lazy assholes. The guy even says they miss deadlines and the code they produce is crap. Of course people rarely work full out for an entire day, but he's clearly describing a situation far worse than normal. The organization obviously lacks leadership and focus because tolerance of this sort of behavior comes from the top.
Why is it that coders typically seem to have enormous egos when it comes to their work. Everybody works hard. There's nothing special about coding. My workday include tasks that are both physically and mentally taxing, I often juggle several tasks at once and am held to a very high standard of quality. Man up, buckle down and produce because you don't work in a vacuum.
Einstein's brain had an unusually large number or glial cells which support neuronal function. It's the brain equivalent of cardiovascular conditioning due to aerobic exercise although it's not clear if they facilitated or resulted from complex intellectual pursuits.
The idea that hominids got dumber is kind of charming but isn't supported by measuring cranial volume. If these early hominids with large brains are postulated to be ancestors of modern humans, it's possible the larger brains were evolutionarily pared down. An analogy might be an early creature with very large wings that was an ancestor of one with smaller, more efficient wings that enabled faster, more agile flight.
You make an interesting point because it's clear that publisher's problems are only going to increase as technology advances. Hard copies have the advantage of being durable but not easily copied. Individual electronic copies are exactly the opposite. One big problem is that the politics perverting copyright law have changed it from the original intent of eventually bringing IP into the public domain for the benefit of society at large. This concept is being transitioned into a system that allows rights-holders to profit from it in perpetuity.
Contrast this with the patent system where the time limits are still more strictly enforced. Any real debate over copyright should include the potential benefits to society at large, but in reality this won't happen because society at large doesn't have an army of high priced lawyers bringing suits and lobbying congress.
Nope, it was wishful thinking all the way. Netbooks were inevitable regardless of OLPC. Eventually the market would have produced them. Even so, despite the world's best efforts netbooks STILL cost $200=. Why? Because THAT'S WHAT THEY COST. Getting all teary eyed about some starving 3rd world kids isn't going to bring the price down. Besides, what good does a computer do a starving child? Many nations chose inexpensive windows based alternatives because that's what the developed world is using. If you have a very limited budges, why would you waste it training your kids to use an OS that nobody else uses? OLPC is and always was a pipe dream running face first into the brick wall of economic reality.
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Would you feel safe anywhere at all? I doubt it. I feel safe in my American suburban neighborhood, too. There are certainly places I would never venture armed or no. I'd like to know how in your perfectly safe gun free world. a 98 lb female is supposed to defend herself against being raped by a 250 lb assailant? Pepper spray? Or should she just lie back and "think of England"? If it were my daughter I'd rather she put a bullet in the bastard's eye.
I'm not sure it's possible to gather accurate statistics on this. The liberals love to cite a made-up statistic that people are more likely to be harmed by the guns in their own home. What this cost benefit analysis lacks is the benefit part - the number of crimes deterred by the firearm. There's a statistic that says 9 out of 10 confrontations involving a firearm do NOT involve shooting, i.e. the deterrent value alone defused the situation. The vast majority of these encounters are not reported to the police - who really wants the hassle? There are daily incidents where people successfully use firearms to defend their homes and themselves, but these rarely make it into the news because good news doesn't sell. It also goes counter to the anti-gun bias in the mainstream media.
Like the UK with it's rising violent crime rate now that the entire population has been relegated to "Sheep" status?
Ok, what's the alternative? Begging Mr. Armed Housebreaker to leave witnesses? You're implying that this man isn't competent to decide his own course of action in an emergency. Isn't that his decision and his alone? Especially inside his own house? What makes you so fucking smart?
Well, I gotta hand it to you; you guys nailed pretty much everything wrong with this idea in the first three posts. The only people who could love this idea are liberal gun grabbers who are afraid somebody might get hurt with a gun. The idea that it would be good for police is equally silly - the added layer of complexity can only further muddy the waters at times when speed and reliability are paramount. I already mourn for the police officer who will be killed when this system fails.
Guns aren't supposed to be safe, they're supposed to be dangerous as hell and for a very good reason. The entire mindset that spawned this abortion ignores the most basic natural right to self defense. Said mindset also has an unconscionably low opinion of people's judgments in such situations. It's the same mindset that recommends "passive resistance" for rape victims, as if a woman lying dead in an alley, raped and strangles with her own pantyhose is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to a cop exactly why she had to shoot her attacker.
Yeah, but it gives us a template with which to evaluate new scientific developments. Analogy is a useful thing.
OH NOES! Climate data being faked for political purposes! What's next? Climate data being faked to scam grant money? Oops! Already happened!
The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers....he Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999975.ece/
Climate change continues to be a horse ridden by people with personal and political agendas. It continues to amaze how an entire generation has been duped into believing correlation equals causation.
The big advantage of commercial software is that the sales revenue allows you to pay people to write it. It should come as no surprise that people LIKE being paid for working. If developers are being paid, the money doesn't just magically appear. Somebody, somewhere is paying for it. Intel, Oracle, etc. get their revenue for selling other kinds of stuff to people, stuff that they paid somebody to make, write or whatever. The revenue can then be invested in other projects of which support for linux is merely one.
Another advantage is that if you pay people to do something, you can hold them accountable for their work and hence increase productivity.
In the end the fact remains: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
You continue to confuse political and economic systems. As a nation, China has been a totalitarian state for all of modern history. Tienanmen square was not an accident and their continued crackdown on dissent it all the proof anyone needs. They only started rising as a nation with the embrace of capitalist ideas that allows the worst types of abuses of a capitalist system - rampant pollution, lack of any protections for workers, lack of any consumer protection against defective products, the list is endless because the only priority is economic growth. Try complaining online about the Chinese system while in china and see how long you last. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press aren't just nice ideas, they're essential to the quality of life of the average citizen.
Your attempt to turn the discussion to the west's supposed unsustainable way of life is ridiculous. Our shelves in the west continue to overflow while all other nations on earth envy our wealth. You assume that all people WANT is a shirt, any shirt on their back, any meal in their stomachs, etc., which is an incredibly arrogant assumption on your part. Who are you to tell people what they should want or how to live their lives? You also assume that there is a finite amount of resources and that resource needs will never change. This is a sophomoric position at best. The recent spike in fuel prices highlighted the fact that there is a plethora of cleaner energy technologies waiting in the wings - the only thing holding them back is the economics of fuel prices. Hand wringer like you always discount the value of human ingenuity.
Your selected metrics of health, literacy and nutrition are actually wonderful measures of the success of western capitalism when you compare the levels of first and third world nations because the first world wins every single time. Why? Because with our collective wealth we can better afford it. The western model shows that people are very willing to work and work hard to improve their standard of living. People who bear an entitlement mentality tend to do poorly in such a system, but then again stupidity should hurt. You can not force someone to WANT to improve their lot in life.
"China became the workshop of the world under communism..."
No, they became workshop to the world when they embraced capitalism. When they tried collective farming & such during the cultural revolution millions starved. Pretty much the same happened in Russia. In all 3 countries you have incredible amounts of poverty, shortages of goods, etc.. I recall my neighbor's sister visiting from East Germany back in the early 80's. I took her a decade just to get permission to make the trip. She literally cried when she went into a supermarket and saw the shelves overflowing with goods.
People that look at communism with rose colored glasses ignore the incredible tyranny and abuses. To say they succeeded is incredibly stupid at best.
They certainly are one of the most powerful counties. They really took off when they embraced capitalism. Back when they tried collective farming & such under Mao during the cultural revolution (you know, REAL communism) millions starved.
What they have now is totalitarian capitalism. Worst of both worlds.
Our populace has many kinds of idiots, including those that think the only reason communism has failed everywhere it's been tried is because the right people weren't in charge.
Can you imagine your phone ringing all night with nigerian scammers? 3 am and it's "greetings and salutations, I am a representative of a banking consortium..."
Pshaw. It works both ways. Perhaps you could coin a "Palin effect" considering how she gets liberals all worked into a lather. And you're still very much "inside" the democrat team demographic, aren't you? C'mon, admit it!
Very funny. You win at the internets today.
Well, that makes you a raving lunatic teabagger because anyone who questions the noble purpose of carbon reduction is obviously insane and/or mentally deficient. A pox on your "constitution".
All I'm hearing here is "But we ARE special!" It's no excuse for screwing off on the job as the original poster described. If you work hard, fine. If you don't it will catch up sooner or later, either individually or to the industry as a whole. Your attitude reminds me of US car companies over the last 30 years. The rest of the world has ground the US auto industry into dust. IT is not special.
It's amazing how much harder you want to work when your pay is linked to your productivity. Eastern European countries seem to have more of a salary based system in health care. I see it in colleagues who are salaried - no incentive to work hard. Not a knock on Czech or anywhere else but just my observation. The few easten euro dentists I've met have been admirably concerned about the quality of their treatment but they're slooooow.
There you go again putting coders on a pedestal again. I'm a dentist: if something isn't done right I get a call about it at 9 o'clock at night & I might even get sued. I have to manage people's emotions and experiences while doing tiny, intricate and detailed work on teeth in a mouth that's moving and complaining the entire time and in the process I get exposed to a variety of body fluids that may or may not contain pathogens. The entire procedure has to be prepared ahead of time and every step has to be completed properly before the next step can begin - and if the procedure is not completed it's illegal for me to bill insurance until it is - we don't get paid for incomplete work. There are often several patients seated simultaneously so there are several different processes to be managed at once. Every single one of those patients expects and deserves my undivided attention. Doing it right the first time so you don't waste time doing it over is a guiding principle.
I don't think what I do is unique - it's similar to a head chef in a restaurant managing his line chefs. Coders need to drop the "attitude" and recognize that their efficiency contributes directly to the bottom line. If your organization can't get it done there's one over in India or China willing to step up. Enjoy your future unemployment!
Try that in any professional level program and see how you do, then get back to me, k? Think you'll have a lot of spare time to screw around in law school, medical school, vet school, Pharm school, etc.? In your first year, they're trying to force out the people who don't really want to be here and they do it by piling up the work so high that you have to be extremely disciplined in order to manage the workload. It's called "weeding out the losers" and it sounds like you'll be very familiar with the term someday.
Undergraduate programs ain't shit compared to professional programs.
Bullshit. The only reason they can get away with acting like "keepers of the secret flame" is because "outsiders" don't have the tools to adequately measure productivity. Nobody ever told me to take 10 off for every 20; if I did that I would have flunked out. If you can't hack more than 20 minutes of work at a time you're either lazy or stupid.
My advice of the author of the article is to start looking for a new job NOW. Find someplace where the company culture includes a work ethic because productivity means profit and profit means paychecks.
You guys are a bunch of lazy assholes. The guy even says they miss deadlines and the code they produce is crap. Of course people rarely work full out for an entire day, but he's clearly describing a situation far worse than normal. The organization obviously lacks leadership and focus because tolerance of this sort of behavior comes from the top.
Why is it that coders typically seem to have enormous egos when it comes to their work. Everybody works hard. There's nothing special about coding. My workday include tasks that are both physically and mentally taxing, I often juggle several tasks at once and am held to a very high standard of quality. Man up, buckle down and produce because you don't work in a vacuum.
Einstein's brain had an unusually large number or glial cells which support neuronal function. It's the brain equivalent of cardiovascular conditioning due to aerobic exercise although it's not clear if they facilitated or resulted from complex intellectual pursuits.
The idea that hominids got dumber is kind of charming but isn't supported by measuring cranial volume. If these early hominids with large brains are postulated to be ancestors of modern humans, it's possible the larger brains were evolutionarily pared down. An analogy might be an early creature with very large wings that was an ancestor of one with smaller, more efficient wings that enabled faster, more agile flight.
You make an interesting point because it's clear that publisher's problems are only going to increase as technology advances. Hard copies have the advantage of being durable but not easily copied. Individual electronic copies are exactly the opposite. One big problem is that the politics perverting copyright law have changed it from the original intent of eventually bringing IP into the public domain for the benefit of society at large. This concept is being transitioned into a system that allows rights-holders to profit from it in perpetuity.
Contrast this with the patent system where the time limits are still more strictly enforced. Any real debate over copyright should include the potential benefits to society at large, but in reality this won't happen because society at large doesn't have an army of high priced lawyers bringing suits and lobbying congress.
Nope, it was wishful thinking all the way. Netbooks were inevitable regardless of OLPC. Eventually the market would have produced them. Even so, despite the world's best efforts netbooks STILL cost $200=. Why? Because THAT'S WHAT THEY COST. Getting all teary eyed about some starving 3rd world kids isn't going to bring the price down. Besides, what good does a computer do a starving child? Many nations chose inexpensive windows based alternatives because that's what the developed world is using. If you have a very limited budges, why would you waste it training your kids to use an OS that nobody else uses? OLPC is and always was a pipe dream running face first into the brick wall of economic reality.