The best example of sheer peer pressure/brand pushing can probably be best summarized within 80% of Apple sales.
And this is one way Apple's strategy of not chasing the low-end pays off (for Apple). Someone with no clue can walk in, buy the cheapest MacBook, MacBook Pro,or iMac they can get, and it will work fine for them; they'll be happy. Anyone who needs more than that probably has enough of a clue to buy it.
(This holds especially if the person with no clue is status-conscious, because that person will never get a regular MacBook; it'll always be the Pro or the Air)
It really disturbs my essence how proud some people are that whilst they're making 50k a year instead of a quad-core they'll buy a celeron and say how it's good enough. Then they'll brag about it for 5 years...
Or they'll bitch to you, the person they asked for advice when buying and then ignored, that their computer is too slow. And they'll ask for your help in fixing it. If you tell them "I can't help you; your piece of shit is just slow. You should have bought what I recommended you buy instead of that piece of shit that cost $100 less", they get all upset.
Said it before, will not doubt say it again: stop voting Republican, put a majority of Dems in office. At least the Dems have to pretend to be pro-labor.
Yeah. Pro-labor. That means people who do "real work" -- steelworkers, truck drivers, tradespersons, etc. Not software developers; the Dems have no particular need to pander to us, if we're employed we're just another source of taxes to be used to pay for the votes they do care about.
OTOH, there is always demand for a genuine problem solver.
Unfortunately, there isn't. Many companies have decided that they can simply throw a lot of cheap code monkeys at a job and get it done. And most of the time, it works well enough.
Google. Apple. Facebook. Oracle. Red Hat. Microsoft. Biggest names in tech...and all do their software development in the US. That should tell you something.
Google does development in many countries: go here and click on the countries under "International Locations" -- you'll find Software Engineering on all of them.
There have been incidents where people have refused to cooperate, and they've been treated viciously. You haven't been paying attention.
I remember the one where they strangled a woman for being obnoxious to them. Of course the claim was she strangled herself with the handcuffs. Everybody pretty much nodded and said she had it coming.
Most people just want to get where they're going, and their responsibilities (to their family and their employer) don't give much range for striking back against the TSA.
No actual "striking back" would be necessary; refusing to the point of arrest would have been sufficient for there to be more than "no hope".
Fine, then you'd have no problem with people standing outside your house and yelling abuse at you day and night for weeks or months on end???
I don't care what they're yelling, I don't want them keeping me up at night. This falls under "time, place, and manner" restrictions.
When's the last time you or someone you cared about was harassed to the point of being suicidal?
I'm a geek and went to a public high school. You figure it out.
People talk such NONSENSE and BUNK when it comes to free speech. No one decent human being would find the above examples acceptable or defensible.
That's awful strong talk, suggesting others aren't decent human beings... I'm not sure it woudl be allowed under your regime.
There are reasons for harassment and stalking laws. These are good things even if they violate your overly broad view of what free speech means.
Harassment and stalking laws aren't involved in this case. Just disorderly conduct. Because it isn't stalking to circulate a list ranking females by appearance, nor is it harassment.
Clearly, this is disorderly conduct in a couple of public places, and it sounds like the appropriately class of response is being pursued.
Disorderly conduct is and always has been a charge prone to abuse. Mostly it means that you did something a cop didn't like, but the cop couldn't find any specific law making what you were doing illegal, so he used that catch-all.
Misdemeanor, as opposed to felony. A bit more serious than a traffic fine, but not nearly on the level of being arrested for grand theft, even.
Free speech is free speech; you can no more be legally fined for it than legally hanged for it.
It isn't a matter of simple preferences, and you know it isn't. Girls have a right to tell guys no.
Nonsense. Being told 'no' can hurt a guy's feelings. It can be emotionally traumatic, especially when he hears it day after day from girl after girl, often before even making a proposition. This naysaying should be prosecuted as disorderly conduct, First Amendment be damned.
In case you hadn't heard of this incident...it's not just planes any more. And they screened people who just GOT OFF the train.
And if America had any hope left, there would have been some incidents where people refused to co-operate with the TSA. There weren't; everyone co-operated.
Have you ever held a three-month-old, or even seen one up close? How much explosive do you think you can pack on one of those rug rats without the bulges being all kinds of obvious? An M-80 firecracker isn't going to bring down an airliner, and you aren't going to pack a sizeable chunk of explosive on a baby without him looking like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man
I just came back from Nigeria late April and had a connection from atlanta to detroit. And I was treated just as if I walked into an airport except for not having our luggage reweighed. That meant screening, machines, shoes off, the whole 9 yards. Im not sure if this is a new thing or if the ATL airport is just on top of their shit.
Certain originating airports are on the TSAs shit list; if you come from there you have to get re-screened. This actually pre-dates the TSA, I think the State Department maintains the list.
Furthermore, I think it really undermines our side of the security vs freedom debate to go hyperbolic like that. We are not in 1984.
We're heading that way at breakneck speed, following Airstrip One which is leading the way.
Our rights are not totally "doomed." TSA has not turned the nation into a fascist state.
Not TSA alone. But the Fourth Amendment has been reduced to shreds, though the TSA, through allowing of various "checkpoints" (the local police had some sort of BS checkpoint, marked "safety checkpoint" set up at 8am on a weekday the main road through town. What's the excuse for that one... not a lot of drunk drivers around at that time), through warrantless wiretaps and warrantless GPS tracking.
On the economic side corporate bailouts and takeovers sure stink of fascism as well.
When we make overstatements like "Osama won," that might make us feel smart, like we're the only ones who know whats going on, but it also makes us look like we're paranoid lunatics to the rest of the people we need to convince to relax about airport security.
The rest of the people are convinced _we_ need to "relax" (as in "relax and enjoy it") about airport security. And as long as they think so, it'll get worse. The problem with being pro-freedom is we really have no champion and no constituency; people who actually want freedom are a small minority.
Yeah, then my obnoxious friends wouldn't have any factoids to spew when I tell them I'm flying somewhere. ("You know, you're more likely to get killed on the way to the airport...") Both of my local airports are in Queens, NY - of course I am!
You could always use EWR, in Newark, NJ... oh, never mind.
I'd like to see the self-driving cars tried in Manhattan... it would be an epic battle of man versus machine. Or at least taxi versus machine. Sadly, I think the human driven taxi would kick butt; the machine would do things like stop for jaywalkers, whereas the taxi driver would sound the horn, yell some curses, and go around with inches to spare.
The data is already being collected, and it has been collected for decades!
Certainly it has not. A once a month reading is far less data than e.g. a once per second reading, and even that is less than a reading which tells which appliances are being used.
Advocating the return to once a month reading of a meter when it is convenient using outdated and inaccurate analog meters means keeping an inefficient energy grid.
Return? I'm still on that system. The only thing that has changed is the meter is read remotely.
You can't manage energy if you don't know how much there is or where it's going. Right now we have a good idea of this with regards to the transmission grid but it's much more murky at the distribution level and completely opaque at the end-user utilities.
You don't need to know at a level finer-grained than you can control. And I don't want the power company to be controlling power on a (residential) user-by-user or worse, appliance-by-appliance basis. I'm willing to live with some inefficiency (and resulting higher energy prices) for them to NOT be able to do that, because I can see it resulting in a lot of abuse for very little benefit.
It's ordinary economics. Profitability. A management has two choices: 1. Keep running the plant. As long as maintenance doesn't become too expensive, that's means income and profit. 2. Shut down, and take it down. That's awfully expensive.
The economics change when the management has the option of building a new plant, if the new plant's operating cost per kilowatt is less than the old plant's. This is expecially true if a new plant can be built on the site of the old plant for less cost than building a new plant elsewhere.
Can you stop all business activity while you try to change from an organization of the second type to an organization of the first type?
Are you likely to hire and retain competent programmers if you 1) have a humungous team of code monkeys 2) have an astonishing amount of process that your new competent programmers will be expected to follow?
Nope. The process just holds you where you are. It prevents success as much as it mitigates failure.
Software professionals aren't deterred by software processes;
And no true Scotsman wears BVDs beneath his kilt.
some may B&M that writing test cases for a UI is a PITA and a waste of time, but a professional software engineer doesn't mind this extra work, because it's just part of the job. Architects, Doctors, and structural engineers have processes that they need to follow, and so should software engineers.
Ah, the process is good because it's the process ("part of the job") and some totally inapplicable analogy.
Software engineering has only really been coming into its own in the last 30 years, so it's still a young engineering discipline, and the entire field is still struggling to come up with a guide-book.
So many falsehoods and questionable assumptions in one sentence: That software engineering is only 30 years old, that it actually is an engineering discipline, and that "the entire field" is even trying to come up with a guidebook.
Much of what was thought to be the last word on the subject (SEI/CMMI, and ISO-9000) turned out to be impractical, inappropriate and/or counterproductive in the real world.
A fact which was dead obvious to many, but then we were told that it was "just part of the job" and we were somehow not professionals if we objected to it. In other words, nothing's changed.
On the other hand, you have all the fucking idiots who say things like "they were the best years of our lives". If high school years were the best years of your life, you should just fucking kill yourself *now*. I shouldn't even need to extrapolate on this. Even if you're popular and successful in high school, it is of so little consequence and impact and meaning that it can't possibly be the greatest time of your life and if it is, that means you are planning to become stagnant the moment you leave those supposedly "hallowed halls".
Then theres the even weirder concept of conforming to group norms that are the majority, but claim to be a small alternative clique. Think of teenagers who are all supposed to rebel against authority by conforming to the same cruddy clothing and music.
That's not necessarily contradictory; rebelling against a particular authority doesn't require that one be an individualist. The teenagers in question would be quite put out if they realized that the cruddy clothing and music was being tailored for them by The Man (the same authority they think they're rebelling against), though.
Ordinary Rebels have trouble coming up with the $6000 to dig out of the flood expenses that show up at the worst possible time all at once when the hand-me-down car blows a head gasket, First-Last-Deposit on a new apartment, and a grand in medical that a sleazy insurance company won't cover.
Ordinary rebels don't have insurance, flood expenses, or an apartment. Generally they have a hole in the ground, a hidden room in a sympathizer's (or patsy's) business, or a detention cell.
I've worked for a firm that collects this data. The technology, as it's exists now, is incapable of the level of analysis described. The data is flow is massive and only summation for billing is viable.
I can think of a few companies which could do the analysis. It's probably not even an order of magnitude larger than cell phone billing records, and smaller than cell phone location records. Even if it were technically infeasible to analyze the data now, that would change quickly.
Safeguards are meaningless; given a good enough reason (profit, for the children, drug enforcement, national security: take your pick) the safeguards will simply be ignored. The only way to keep this data from being abused is to prevent it from being collected in the first place.
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And this is one way Apple's strategy of not chasing the low-end pays off (for Apple). Someone with no clue can walk in, buy the cheapest MacBook, MacBook Pro,or iMac they can get, and it will work fine for them; they'll be happy. Anyone who needs more than that probably has enough of a clue to buy it.
(This holds especially if the person with no clue is status-conscious, because that person will never get a regular MacBook; it'll always be the Pro or the Air)
Or they'll bitch to you, the person they asked for advice when buying and then ignored, that their computer is too slow. And they'll ask for your help in fixing it. If you tell them "I can't help you; your piece of shit is just slow. You should have bought what I recommended you buy instead of that piece of shit that cost $100 less", they get all upset.
Yeah. Pro-labor. That means people who do "real work" -- steelworkers, truck drivers, tradespersons, etc. Not software developers; the Dems have no particular need to pander to us, if we're employed we're just another source of taxes to be used to pay for the votes they do care about.
Unfortunately, there isn't. Many companies have decided that they can simply throw a lot of cheap code monkeys at a job and get it done. And most of the time, it works well enough.
Google does development in many countries: go here and click on the countries under "International Locations" -- you'll find Software Engineering on all of them.
I remember the one where they strangled a woman for being obnoxious to them. Of course the claim was she strangled herself with the handcuffs. Everybody pretty much nodded and said she had it coming.
No actual "striking back" would be necessary; refusing to the point of arrest would have been sufficient for there to be more than "no hope".
I don't care what they're yelling, I don't want them keeping me up at night. This falls under "time, place, and manner" restrictions.
I'm a geek and went to a public high school. You figure it out.
That's awful strong talk, suggesting others aren't decent human beings... I'm not sure it woudl be allowed under your regime.
Harassment and stalking laws aren't involved in this case. Just disorderly conduct. Because it isn't stalking to circulate a list ranking females by appearance, nor is it harassment.
Disorderly conduct is and always has been a charge prone to abuse. Mostly it means that you did something a cop didn't like, but the cop couldn't find any specific law making what you were doing illegal, so he used that catch-all.
Free speech is free speech; you can no more be legally fined for it than legally hanged for it.
Nonsense. Being told 'no' can hurt a guy's feelings. It can be emotionally traumatic, especially when he hears it day after day from girl after girl, often before even making a proposition. This naysaying should be prosecuted as disorderly conduct, First Amendment be damned.
And if America had any hope left, there would have been some incidents where people refused to co-operate with the TSA. There weren't; everyone co-operated.
Check out http://www.terrorsupplies.co.ly/ where you can get such items as the C4 Diaper.
Certain originating airports are on the TSAs shit list; if you come from there you have to get re-screened. This actually pre-dates the TSA, I think the State Department maintains the list.
We're heading that way at breakneck speed, following Airstrip One which is leading the way.
Not TSA alone. But the Fourth Amendment has been reduced to shreds, though the TSA, through allowing of various "checkpoints" (the local police had some sort of BS checkpoint, marked "safety checkpoint" set up at 8am on a weekday the main road through town. What's the excuse for that one... not a lot of drunk drivers around at that time), through warrantless wiretaps and warrantless GPS tracking.
On the economic side corporate bailouts and takeovers sure stink of fascism as well.
The rest of the people are convinced _we_ need to "relax" (as in "relax and enjoy it") about airport security. And as long as they think so, it'll get worse. The problem with being pro-freedom is we really have no champion and no constituency; people who actually want freedom are a small minority.
1) Rewrite Peano axioms in patentese
2) File patent
3) Sue pretty much everybody, except American public school students
4) PROFIT!
There isn't even a ???!
Most people can't imagine a freedom they don't have being anything but disastrous. Not even when presented with an example.
You could always use EWR, in Newark, NJ... oh, never mind.
I'd like to see the self-driving cars tried in Manhattan... it would be an epic battle of man versus machine. Or at least taxi versus machine. Sadly, I think the human driven taxi would kick butt; the machine would do things like stop for jaywalkers, whereas the taxi driver would sound the horn, yell some curses, and go around with inches to spare.
Certainly it has not. A once a month reading is far less data than e.g. a once per second reading, and even that is less than a reading which tells which appliances are being used.
Return? I'm still on that system. The only thing that has changed is the meter is read remotely.
You don't need to know at a level finer-grained than you can control. And I don't want the power company to be controlling power on a (residential) user-by-user or worse, appliance-by-appliance basis. I'm willing to live with some inefficiency (and resulting higher energy prices) for them to NOT be able to do that, because I can see it resulting in a lot of abuse for very little benefit.
The economics change when the management has the option of building a new plant, if the new plant's operating cost per kilowatt is less than the old plant's. This is expecially true if a new plant can be built on the site of the old plant for less cost than building a new plant elsewhere.
Are you likely to hire and retain competent programmers if you
1) have a humungous team of code monkeys
2) have an astonishing amount of process that your new competent programmers will be expected to follow?
Nope. The process just holds you where you are. It prevents success as much as it mitigates failure.
And no true Scotsman wears BVDs beneath his kilt.
Ah, the process is good because it's the process ("part of the job") and some totally inapplicable analogy.
So many falsehoods and questionable assumptions in one sentence: That software engineering is only 30 years old, that it actually is an engineering discipline, and that "the entire field" is even trying to come up with a guidebook.
A fact which was dead obvious to many, but then we were told that it was "just part of the job" and we were somehow not professionals if we objected to it. In other words, nothing's changed.
Depends on where you are. In the Bible Belt, most definitely so. On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, definitely not. In Israel, forget about it.
Hey, someone has to sell discount women's shoes.
That's not necessarily contradictory; rebelling against a particular authority doesn't require that one be an individualist. The teenagers in question would be quite put out if they realized that the cruddy clothing and music was being tailored for them by The Man (the same authority they think they're rebelling against), though.
Ordinary rebels don't have insurance, flood expenses, or an apartment. Generally they have a hole in the ground, a hidden room in a sympathizer's (or patsy's) business, or a detention cell.
I can think of a few companies which could do the analysis. It's probably not even an order of magnitude larger than cell phone billing records, and smaller than cell phone location records. Even if it were technically infeasible to analyze the data now, that would change quickly.
Safeguards are meaningless; given a good enough reason (profit, for the children, drug enforcement, national security: take your pick) the safeguards will simply be ignored. The only way to keep this data from being abused is to prevent it from being collected in the first place.