I don't know why, but in many parts of India, the government needs to pay people to use a toilet. Even when the government supplies a deluxe porta-potty, the likes of which you can only find at a multi-millionaire rapper's BBQ, the people simply won't use it.
What about you? Did you use it?
Having a super deluxe porta-potty is one thing, but what's often missing with some governments is a regular budget for the recurring maintenance, upkeep, and scheduled cleaning of such porta-potties. Also, let's not forget opening hours, I can't speak for India, but in the West, public toilets are often closed to the public right at the moment they would get their peak usage.
Also, your emphasis on the luxury of the super porta-potty evokes in me images of corruption (the politician giving the contract to his brother-in-law for instance). That would certainly explain why a country like India would throw away money on such expensive porta-potties in the first place. And unless, you can claim first-hand knowledge of those porta-potties, and can assure me that they're usually clean, open, fully-stocked, and well maintained, I'm just going to assume those porta-potties were super clean during their inauguration, and perhaps super clean when the journalists were around to take photos of them, but that's about it...
At this point it looks like they're in a race with Google. Google is trying to add functionality to bring Docs on par with Office. Microsoft is trying to get Office online before Google replicates enough of the functionality to destroy Microsoft's licensing stream.
Wrong. Microsoft isn't just in a race against Google. It's in a race against pretty much everyone.
Take for instance its SQL Server, one of its traditional cash cows. Several years ago, my company was paying Microsoft $11,000 for a license of SQL Server 2000 (Standard Edition). A couple years later, we were paying a very small fraction of that cost for the SQL Server 2005 (Workgroup edition) without any noticeable loss of prior functionality (and no significant loss of the very nice tools/wizards that came with it).
At the time, it was competing against mySql, and other open source alternatives such as PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc. Now it's still competing against those open source alternatives, but it's probably starting to lose marketshare to the Cloud alternatives as well. Now like you've pretty much implied already, it's probably not losing much yet to the Cloud services from Google (or to Google's BigTable or to Google's Spreadsheets for instance), but once again, it isn't just competing against Google (it's still competing against everyone: the open source community, open source vendors, various cloud providers, and anyone who has a service that may not be a direct competitor to Microsoft, but that could still tangentially nibble away at and encroach more on the territories of Microsoft's biggest cash cows.
So in that sense, it's not looking too good for Microsoft's future right now, and it's not even clear if Microsoft's new strategy will help that much either. By going for the cloud, Microsoft may continue to undercut in price its very own products (not just its rivals), so it may be able to conserve some of its marketshare, but at a much more rapid and significant loss financially.
Did he buy the special-ed version of the iPhone? The iPhone offers tethering. Easy and effortless. Without jailbreaking.
Apparently, he upgraded to 3.1.
Is 'special-ed' the new code name for version 3.1 of the iPhone? What happened to calling the iPhone a girl's name ending with the letter "a"? I've got to say I'm not too hot about that new name.
Not to mention that article was one of the biggest wastes of my time and I'm sitting in Iron Forge waiting for my dungeon queue to pop...
Do not even pretend to have read the article.
The article being a waste of time was just a lucky guess on your part.
I never really understood why there was hate for the Zune on/. aside from the typical MS animosity.
Blame it on the fact that Zune's early users were all forced to repurchase their music when the DRM scheme was upgraded for the new models. This wasn't just a blunder. After all, companies make blunders all the time. What makes this issue much bigger than a blunder is that Zune never corrected the issue, even in the face of thousands really pissed off customers!
Plus your comparison of Zune vs. iPod is misleading. If someone doesn't want to pay the hefty premium of an iPod, they'll just compare Zune against Creative, or Zune against many of the other non-iPod branded mp3 players. It's not like Zune was the first on the scene with any of those specific features you speak of.
Why even steal it when a criminal could just buy that information from a reseller? There is no law against sharing public information, such as license plate numbers and where they've been sighted.
When was the last time you heard of a coal fired plant or a coal mine being shut down because they didn't have a "full complement of safety personnel"?
Actually, I've seen fire department inspectors (and health inspectors) willing to shut down just about anything if someone wasn't taking their safety concerns seriously enough. And I can't speak for the coal mines specifically, I don't live anywhere near one, but I do remember that they were looking very hard for people to blame for the Coal mine accidents that killed a number of miners a few years ago.
One major complaint was that they didn't have enough emergency respirators in case of a collapse. Now, I don't know who's in charge of inspecting mines, but whoever it was, I certainly wouldn't want to be one of those inspectors after an incident like that.
While Windows has the best hardware support coverage among all operating systems,
This is not quite true. Don't count on Windows supporting legacy hardware, specialized custom-built industrial/hobby hardware, or even decent media drivers (because of the pressure from the movie/content/cable industry).
You must have good eyesight. I figured most people would have stopped reading as soon as they saw the tiny yellow print superimposed on the glowing red background.
Thanks. Questioning a proof may actually be a hell of a lot easier than supporting one. Or so I've heard at least, I'm not about to try proving that statement.
This is lame. The guy doesn't even claim the video was made in real-time. He claims that the editing of the game can be done in real-time. That distinction is important, because most of the time I see someone demoing a 3-D editing tool on Youtube, they've accelerated the demo by a huge factor -- just to make the video look cool (and it does look cool that way, but it's also misleading). By the way, here is the same demo "teaser" referenced through youtube, there is actually no need to have to wait for the 3 minutes and 38 seconds on that other video for the boring guy to stop droning on, it's essentially the same teaser (with the same building and the same shading) -- it's just been spliced into the interview in small pieces (as if to imply that the teaser was made at the same speed the interview was videotaped at).
When you said near-perfect security, you were not kidding. Here is a customer's testimonial confirming that very point.
Absolute worst service I have ever encountered with any institution. I left Holland after being a client of ABN for over a year, for a year of traveling. I desperately needed a new e.dentifier, but after many emails and many phone calls to the bank, it seems like they are doing everything in their power not to be of help. They said they can only send it to my Amsterdam address, which is useless for me, as I am not there, and don't know anyone in Amsterdam to post one to me. I had a very simple and straightforward suggestion: Please could you send me a new e.dentifier to the address I am currently staying in London. My God what a revalation!! Simple yeah? Nope. Sorry, we can only send it to the address that is in the computer. Can you get someone to post it to you from there they asked. No I replied, there is no one at that address. The idea of simply posting it to the address I was at in London, seemed to go against what the almighty computer screen displayed. After pleading over emails and phone calls to let common sense and logic prevail, I received a snotty email saying they simply cannot help me. Hmm, I wonder if having a couple of million in my account would have persuaded ABN to help a client get a new e.dentifier. I cannot wrap my mind around it. So they suggested I change my address to the London one. Can't do that, as I don't live in London, I was visiting family. Changing the address would have to be done online anyway, and guess what - no identifier so no can do!! It seems that logic still has to take a back seat, even today. Shocking service from an unhelpful bank, which doesn't seem to be concerned about a client who was in desperate need of assistance. Thanks, I had to spend 200 euros on a flight to Amsterdam simply to get another e.dentifier before I went on my travels.
Sorry man, when there is a bankruptcy, the unpaid employees and bond holders are the first in line and the business owners/equity holders are second. The CEO may not have stolen directly from the employees, but at the very least he did steal from the company. The company may not have been placed in bankruptcy yet, but that doesn't matter, just like it's a crime to write a check to yourself when you know your bank account is empty, it's also a crime to pull out the collateral from a company before a bankruptcy judge gets to it.
The employees are owed for the time they worked, and nothing more.
The employees are owed, depending on the jurisdiction they're in, their back-pay, (possibly) severance, interests, and also possibly punitive damages. Except now, instead of the corporate entity being liable for it, the CEO (through his criminal actions) is personally liable for it. If I were the employees, I would be scouring the World for any personal Real Estate the CEO or his wife have attached to their names (just in case there is any).
His biggest failure was a basic architectural assumption of Wikipedia. The assumption of "the one global truth(iness)".
This caused him to make Wikipedia a centralized and centrally controlled site, instead of a P2P system.
Yes, that's the main architectural flaw, but I would also argue that is the primary reason Jimmy Wales got famous.
In 2001, Jimmy Wales wasn't the only one with a community-based wiki that was opened to everybody, nor was he the only one with an open source wiki engine. The reason he got famous and the rest didn't (myself included, because I was also hosting thousands of wikis by 2001), is precisely because his "encyclopedia" attracted that controversy and attracted repeated headlines.
Not that wikis weren't slightly controversial to begin with. Outside of the programmer community, the idea that one could have a web site that anyone could edit was still being viewed with skepticism by many, but in the case of Wikipedia, it's really the wiki that garnered the most compelling narrative (and the most compelling controversy) for most reporters, and by default, in the eyes of the mainstream non-programmers, it's the one wiki that became the poster-child for all wikis.
You want emotional maturity. Send them far away from their parents. Send them to summer/ski camp. Or send them to a University (that they can't commute from home to). This won't guarantee anything, of course. It's the equivalent of a parent bird pushing his/her little teenage bird out of its nest, the young bird will either fly on its own, or just promptly crash and break its neck. Either way, sending your kid to a local community college while he/she's still living at home is the wrong way to go (assuming that's what their article is implying).
I use Wave and I also find it very useful, but I have to admit, most of the people I've wanted to use it with (and that I've sent invites too) are not on board.
One problem with anecdotal evidence is that there is selection bias. For example, in a French high school I went to, there were two sisters, both very gifted, both had jumped two grades (which even in the French system is not always seen too kindly by school administrators).
One girl, the older one, was still completely immature, and could be very obnoxious at times. She was filled with false modesty. Every time she had an imperfect grade, even if it was still the best grade in the class, she had to complain loudly about it. She was complaining, but it was obvious to the rest of us, she was just gloating, and also she loved complaining (we could see she derived lots of satisfaction from that personality trait).
The younger sister, one year younger and so just one grade below on the other hand, was actually pretty cool by comparison. The younger sister didn't brag about her grades, had plenty of friends, didn't stay isolated away at the school library for every lunch/recess, and later I actually found out she was actually much more gifted academically than her older sister. And I think I only found out by fluke really, a teacher told me, and then I confirmed the story with others.
But if you were to have taken an informal poll about gifted kids at my school, I'm pretty sure almost everyone would mention/recall the older sister -- the obnoxious one. Very few people would have actually even known about the younger sister. And that's the thing, the success stories, and the more well-adjusted precocious students are virtually invisible compared to the precocious kids that are obnoxious and totally immature. That's why, we shouldn't go by anecdotal evidence alone, if we're really interested in improving the US educational system. The anecdotal evidence only tells us the story of the outliers, not the results of the core system itself.
You've heard of blindfold chess. It's the same principle here, except for this test to be considered valid, there must also be a hooker giving you a blow job and a psychopath pointing a gun to your head.
You should tell my local supermarket that. They have spikes so that traffic can only exit through it, otherwise it just pops their tires. So far, no one has gone to jail for it (somehow, I think you're thinking of much different kinds of spikes).
I thought he meant that when you tweet a link to an external article for instance, the archive would probably have to archive the article in question as well (just in case the external article gets changed, or disappears). The same goes for tweeted links to videos/podcasts, I assume that for the context of the tweet to be understood, the linked video/podcast would have to be copied as well. Am I right?
Geez, #7 is fricking directory traversal. DIRECTORY TRAVERSAL. In 2010! It's not like your drawbridge is getting nuked by terrorists here. Generally bridges are built to withstand certain calamaties, like small bombs, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Bad analogy. It's more like a client/boss requests a proof-of-concept prototype. And in the case of a civil engineer, the engineer may deliver just a miniature model bridge, but that's ok, he knows there is no danger in mistaking the tiny miniature bridge from an actual real bridge.
In the case of a software engineer, it's not all that simple. Your prototype may have taken you a weekend to code. And you've trained the marketing guy to click in just the right places so as not to crash your app, but to the customer, what he sees is a perfectly working app, and that's what he wants right away. It's not uncommon to hear that proof-of-concept one-off prototypes are launched into production as soon as they've been demoed to the higher-ups.
And yes, enforcing strict contracts is one way to mitigate such problems, but part of the solution is also for the non-technical customer/client/project manager to also study the field of software engineering. A generic software checklist (written by someone else) is great, but that's really only the tip of the iceberg. The customers/clients/stakeholders should really be familiar with books like "The Mythical-Man Month", "Peopleware", "Code Complete", etc. Don't assume that just because you're smart, you can just ignore the accumulated wisdom of an entire field. It's really not that simple.
Agreed, besides governments are not all created equal. If you want to buy a government bond for instance, you check its credit rating first. Countries/States/Counties/Cities all have them. As a professional, it's your duty to do your due diligence if other people are relying on your decision to make their decision.
In the case of China, it's not really a big deal anyway. If they really want to use their own certificates, they'll just mirror the source from mozilla/firefox, and distribute their slightly different rebranded version (even a private individual, or a private organization in China could do it). That's what China did for Android, China essentially forked Android 1.5. If you have your own country (with enough resources), it's probably a good idea to do that anyway. You take open source code, you audit it and you plug any security holes, and then you re-release it as your own rebranded version for your people to use (after all, for all you know the NSA and CIA may have forced the Mozilla developers to place backdoors in their code, or left security holes purposefully unpatched).
This way, the open source project is happy (I personally know that Google was actually delighted that 1.5 billion people were going to standardize on a version of Android), the country is happy to have its own browser (it can audit and approve/fork each version every time), and the user is happy too (since, at least he would be aware that he's browsing the web with a version of Firefox that has been rebranded locally, and that is potentially under the control of its own government).
I find that a hilarious option on my US entry form. Because you see if I was actually there to do something illegal, I'd be declaring it when I enter. Yeah, right.
Out of these US Customs forms, can you point to the one that said that.
I looked at a few of them, and couldn't find the entry you mentioned.
I think from what I've heard, Israel does the most ardous security check ever and they do it without being dicks about it.
Not according to one plaintiff on Judge Judy (not a big sample I know, but I've never heard anyone else other than him describe their experience with Israeli Airport guards). The guy sued EL AL (Air Israel), the guards basically had diplomatic immunity -- so he couldn't sue them directly, but the guards were real dickheads to him (because supposedly, he had brown skin -- although he was Israeli and Jewish himself).
So if you go by that measure, how did they treat me, or how do they treat white people in general, then the cops in the US -- especially the local Sheriffs in the backwaters of the South -- are probably some of the nicest and most courteous cops in the World -- assuming you really do go by that measure.
They have intelligent agents, who ask the right questions and do not invade your personal space to intimidate you.
Yeah, if I were an Israeli airport guard, I'd probably stand a couple of feet away from the possible suicide bomber too.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's litigious nature is one of the reasons I tend to avoid Apple products (I do have an iPod, but that's all).
Good man! I've been boycotting Apple for years too. I only have an iPod, an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini (but that's all).
I don't know why, but in many parts of India, the government needs to pay people to use a toilet. Even when the government supplies a deluxe porta-potty, the likes of which you can only find at a multi-millionaire rapper's BBQ, the people simply won't use it.
What about you? Did you use it?
Having a super deluxe porta-potty is one thing, but what's often missing with some governments is a regular budget for the recurring maintenance, upkeep, and scheduled cleaning of such porta-potties. Also, let's not forget opening hours, I can't speak for India, but in the West, public toilets are often closed to the public right at the moment they would get their peak usage.
Also, your emphasis on the luxury of the super porta-potty evokes in me images of corruption (the politician giving the contract to his brother-in-law for instance). That would certainly explain why a country like India would throw away money on such expensive porta-potties in the first place. And unless, you can claim first-hand knowledge of those porta-potties, and can assure me that they're usually clean, open, fully-stocked, and well maintained, I'm just going to assume those porta-potties were super clean during their inauguration, and perhaps super clean when the journalists were around to take photos of them, but that's about it...
At this point it looks like they're in a race with Google. Google is trying to add functionality to bring Docs on par with Office. Microsoft is trying to get Office online before Google replicates enough of the functionality to destroy Microsoft's licensing stream.
Wrong. Microsoft isn't just in a race against Google. It's in a race against pretty much everyone.
Take for instance its SQL Server, one of its traditional cash cows. Several years ago, my company was paying Microsoft $11,000 for a license of SQL Server 2000 (Standard Edition). A couple years later, we were paying a very small fraction of that cost for the SQL Server 2005 (Workgroup edition) without any noticeable loss of prior functionality (and no significant loss of the very nice tools/wizards that came with it).
At the time, it was competing against mySql, and other open source alternatives such as PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc. Now it's still competing against those open source alternatives, but it's probably starting to lose marketshare to the Cloud alternatives as well. Now like you've pretty much implied already, it's probably not losing much yet to the Cloud services from Google (or to Google's BigTable or to Google's Spreadsheets for instance), but once again, it isn't just competing against Google (it's still competing against everyone: the open source community, open source vendors, various cloud providers, and anyone who has a service that may not be a direct competitor to Microsoft, but that could still tangentially nibble away at and encroach more on the territories of Microsoft's biggest cash cows.
So in that sense, it's not looking too good for Microsoft's future right now, and it's not even clear if Microsoft's new strategy will help that much either. By going for the cloud, Microsoft may continue to undercut in price its very own products (not just its rivals), so it may be able to conserve some of its marketshare, but at a much more rapid and significant loss financially.
Did he buy the special-ed version of the iPhone? The iPhone offers tethering. Easy and effortless. Without jailbreaking.
Apparently, he upgraded to 3.1.
Is 'special-ed' the new code name for version 3.1 of the iPhone? What happened to calling the iPhone a girl's name ending with the letter "a"? I've got to say I'm not too hot about that new name.
Not to mention that article was one of the biggest wastes of my time and I'm sitting in Iron Forge waiting for my dungeon queue to pop...
Do not even pretend to have read the article.
The article being a waste of time was just a lucky guess on your part.
I never really understood why there was hate for the Zune on /. aside from the typical MS animosity.
Blame it on the fact that Zune's early users were all forced to repurchase their music when the DRM scheme was upgraded for the new models. This wasn't just a blunder. After all, companies make blunders all the time. What makes this issue much bigger than a blunder is that Zune never corrected the issue, even in the face of thousands really pissed off customers!
Plus your comparison of Zune vs. iPod is misleading. If someone doesn't want to pay the hefty premium of an iPod, they'll just compare Zune against Creative, or Zune against many of the other non-iPod branded mp3 players. It's not like Zune was the first on the scene with any of those specific features you speak of.
Why even steal it when a criminal could just buy that information from a reseller? There is no law against sharing public information, such as license plate numbers and where they've been sighted.
When was the last time you heard of a coal fired plant or a coal mine being shut down because they didn't have a "full complement of safety personnel"?
Actually, I've seen fire department inspectors (and health inspectors) willing to shut down just about anything if someone wasn't taking their safety concerns seriously enough. And I can't speak for the coal mines specifically, I don't live anywhere near one, but I do remember that they were looking very hard for people to blame for the Coal mine accidents that killed a number of miners a few years ago.
One major complaint was that they didn't have enough emergency respirators in case of a collapse. Now, I don't know who's in charge of inspecting mines, but whoever it was, I certainly wouldn't want to be one of those inspectors after an incident like that.
While Windows has the best hardware support coverage among all operating systems,
This is not quite true. Don't count on Windows supporting legacy hardware, specialized custom-built industrial/hobby hardware, or even decent media drivers (because of the pressure from the movie/content/cable industry).
You must have good eyesight. I figured most people would have stopped reading as soon as they saw the tiny yellow print superimposed on the glowing red background.
Thanks. Questioning a proof may actually be a hell of a lot easier than supporting one. Or so I've heard at least, I'm not about to try proving that statement.
This is lame. The guy doesn't even claim the video was made in real-time. He claims that the editing of the game can be done in real-time. That distinction is important, because most of the time I see someone demoing a 3-D editing tool on Youtube, they've accelerated the demo by a huge factor -- just to make the video look cool (and it does look cool that way, but it's also misleading). By the way, here is the same demo "teaser" referenced through youtube, there is actually no need to have to wait for the 3 minutes and 38 seconds on that other video for the boring guy to stop droning on, it's essentially the same teaser (with the same building and the same shading) -- it's just been spliced into the interview in small pieces (as if to imply that the teaser was made at the same speed the interview was videotaped at).
The employees are owed for the time they worked, and nothing more.
The employees are owed, depending on the jurisdiction they're in, their back-pay, (possibly) severance, interests, and also possibly punitive damages. Except now, instead of the corporate entity being liable for it, the CEO (through his criminal actions) is personally liable for it. If I were the employees, I would be scouring the World for any personal Real Estate the CEO or his wife have attached to their names (just in case there is any).
His biggest failure was a basic architectural assumption of Wikipedia. The assumption of "the one global truth(iness)". This caused him to make Wikipedia a centralized and centrally controlled site, instead of a P2P system.
Yes, that's the main architectural flaw, but I would also argue that is the primary reason Jimmy Wales got famous.
In 2001, Jimmy Wales wasn't the only one with a community-based wiki that was opened to everybody, nor was he the only one with an open source wiki engine. The reason he got famous and the rest didn't (myself included, because I was also hosting thousands of wikis by 2001), is precisely because his "encyclopedia" attracted that controversy and attracted repeated headlines.
Not that wikis weren't slightly controversial to begin with. Outside of the programmer community, the idea that one could have a web site that anyone could edit was still being viewed with skepticism by many, but in the case of Wikipedia, it's really the wiki that garnered the most compelling narrative (and the most compelling controversy) for most reporters, and by default, in the eyes of the mainstream non-programmers, it's the one wiki that became the poster-child for all wikis.
The extra 2 years doesn't help anything.
You want emotional maturity. Send them far away from their parents. Send them to summer/ski camp. Or send them to a University (that they can't commute from home to). This won't guarantee anything, of course. It's the equivalent of a parent bird pushing his/her little teenage bird out of its nest, the young bird will either fly on its own, or just promptly crash and break its neck. Either way, sending your kid to a local community college while he/she's still living at home is the wrong way to go (assuming that's what their article is implying).
I use Wave and I also find it very useful, but I have to admit, most of the people I've wanted to use it with (and that I've sent invites too) are not on board.
One problem with anecdotal evidence is that there is selection bias. For example, in a French high school I went to, there were two sisters, both very gifted, both had jumped two grades (which even in the French system is not always seen too kindly by school administrators).
One girl, the older one, was still completely immature, and could be very obnoxious at times. She was filled with false modesty. Every time she had an imperfect grade, even if it was still the best grade in the class, she had to complain loudly about it. She was complaining, but it was obvious to the rest of us, she was just gloating, and also she loved complaining (we could see she derived lots of satisfaction from that personality trait).
The younger sister, one year younger and so just one grade below on the other hand, was actually pretty cool by comparison. The younger sister didn't brag about her grades, had plenty of friends, didn't stay isolated away at the school library for every lunch/recess, and later I actually found out she was actually much more gifted academically than her older sister. And I think I only found out by fluke really, a teacher told me, and then I confirmed the story with others.
But if you were to have taken an informal poll about gifted kids at my school, I'm pretty sure almost everyone would mention/recall the older sister -- the obnoxious one. Very few people would have actually even known about the younger sister. And that's the thing, the success stories, and the more well-adjusted precocious students are virtually invisible compared to the precocious kids that are obnoxious and totally immature. That's why, we shouldn't go by anecdotal evidence alone, if we're really interested in improving the US educational system. The anecdotal evidence only tells us the story of the outliers, not the results of the core system itself.
You've heard of blindfold chess. It's the same principle here, except for this test to be considered valid, there must also be a hooker giving you a blow job and a psychopath pointing a gun to your head.
You should tell my local supermarket that. They have spikes so that traffic can only exit through it, otherwise it just pops their tires. So far, no one has gone to jail for it (somehow, I think you're thinking of much different kinds of spikes).
I thought he meant that when you tweet a link to an external article for instance, the archive would probably have to archive the article in question as well (just in case the external article gets changed, or disappears). The same goes for tweeted links to videos/podcasts, I assume that for the context of the tweet to be understood, the linked video/podcast would have to be copied as well. Am I right?
Geez, #7 is fricking directory traversal. DIRECTORY TRAVERSAL. In 2010! It's not like your drawbridge is getting nuked by terrorists here. Generally bridges are built to withstand certain calamaties, like small bombs, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Bad analogy. It's more like a client/boss requests a proof-of-concept prototype. And in the case of a civil engineer, the engineer may deliver just a miniature model bridge, but that's ok, he knows there is no danger in mistaking the tiny miniature bridge from an actual real bridge.
In the case of a software engineer, it's not all that simple. Your prototype may have taken you a weekend to code. And you've trained the marketing guy to click in just the right places so as not to crash your app, but to the customer, what he sees is a perfectly working app, and that's what he wants right away. It's not uncommon to hear that proof-of-concept one-off prototypes are launched into production as soon as they've been demoed to the higher-ups.
And yes, enforcing strict contracts is one way to mitigate such problems, but part of the solution is also for the non-technical customer/client/project manager to also study the field of software engineering. A generic software checklist (written by someone else) is great, but that's really only the tip of the iceberg. The customers/clients/stakeholders should really be familiar with books like "The Mythical-Man Month", "Peopleware", "Code Complete", etc. Don't assume that just because you're smart, you can just ignore the accumulated wisdom of an entire field. It's really not that simple.
Agreed, besides governments are not all created equal. If you want to buy a government bond for instance, you check its credit rating first. Countries/States/Counties/Cities all have them. As a professional, it's your duty to do your due diligence if other people are relying on your decision to make their decision.
In the case of China, it's not really a big deal anyway. If they really want to use their own certificates, they'll just mirror the source from mozilla/firefox, and distribute their slightly different rebranded version (even a private individual, or a private organization in China could do it). That's what China did for Android, China essentially forked Android 1.5. If you have your own country (with enough resources), it's probably a good idea to do that anyway. You take open source code, you audit it and you plug any security holes, and then you re-release it as your own rebranded version for your people to use (after all, for all you know the NSA and CIA may have forced the Mozilla developers to place backdoors in their code, or left security holes purposefully unpatched).
This way, the open source project is happy (I personally know that Google was actually delighted that 1.5 billion people were going to standardize on a version of Android), the country is happy to have its own browser (it can audit and approve/fork each version every time), and the user is happy too (since, at least he would be aware that he's browsing the web with a version of Firefox that has been rebranded locally, and that is potentially under the control of its own government).
I stand myself corrected.
However, Haliburton was getting the same type of contracts before Dick Cheney was Vice President, so I was pointing out that his case was not made.
Yes, but they were not getting no-bid contracts under Clinton. In my opinion, that's a huge significant difference.
Not that Clinton doesn't help his own friends out, he does too. Cronyism does run rampant in both parties.
I find that a hilarious option on my US entry form. Because you see if I was actually there to do something illegal, I'd be declaring it when I enter. Yeah, right.
Out of these US Customs forms, can you point to the one that said that.
I looked at a few of them, and couldn't find the entry you mentioned.
I think from what I've heard, Israel does the most ardous security check ever and they do it without being dicks about it.
Not according to one plaintiff on Judge Judy (not a big sample I know, but I've never heard anyone else other than him describe their experience with Israeli Airport guards). The guy sued EL AL (Air Israel), the guards basically had diplomatic immunity -- so he couldn't sue them directly, but the guards were real dickheads to him (because supposedly, he had brown skin -- although he was Israeli and Jewish himself).
So if you go by that measure, how did they treat me, or how do they treat white people in general, then the cops in the US -- especially the local Sheriffs in the backwaters of the South -- are probably some of the nicest and most courteous cops in the World -- assuming you really do go by that measure.
They have intelligent agents, who ask the right questions and do not invade your personal space to intimidate you.
Yeah, if I were an Israeli airport guard, I'd probably stand a couple of feet away from the possible suicide bomber too.