Having 200 people from a city I never
heard of in a country I've never visited be in charge of all my material
assets is a problem.
True, but only if you remain in business long term. The before and after of outsourcing can also look like this:
Before, you have 200 local people in charge of your material, and no serious competition abroad. After, you have 200 people from a city you never heard of in charge of your assets, and then a foreign competitor who employs 200 local people to compete with your 200 foreign people. Result: maybe you hire 200 local people to regain competitiveness, or you fold. It could go either way.
Of course, in the long run it all evens out, but in the long run we're all dead.
as long as C++ is the fastest, closest to the machine language it's never
going to go away.
Well, C is closer to the machine language and much simpler than C++ (implies optimization is easier). So C isn't going away either. But C++ is a better fit for object oriented design and has a nicer standard library, which trumps raw performance in many cases.
Regular mail is perfectly fine, it's just not legal proof of receipt. If for some reason (rare) you decide to challenge the receipt, you can with regular mail (you might not succeed and it might not matter, but you can).
For the drivers license, there's no reason why you would challenge having received it, so there's little risk in sending it out by regular mail, even though somebody might steal it. In that case you'd be on the phone asking why you didn't get it anyway.
Registered mail gives proof of receipt, so it's a legal step up like notarizing a photocopy of a document is a legal step up from a plain photocopy.
In many cases where a transaction needs to be provable, you might be asked to travel to an office with several forms of ID instead of having registered mail sent to you.
I fail to see how the government gets any more power with electronic
delivery. They can already claim to have mailed you something even if they
haven't, and I've never received registered mail from anyone, much less from
a government entity.
Anyone can claim anything at any time, the point is that if it matters
legally, then registered mail is proof of receipt, whereas just saying
it was sent out is not.
The point is that when a government entity (or anyone) sends you a normal letter, then
that's an informal communication. It gets the job done, but in case it truly
matters legally, it's not enough. So if you have a reason to and the will to challenge it, then you can.
Nonsense! Kenya has 40m people, 350,000 people is less than 1% of the population. And it's the richer 1% at that, since they can afford the phones.
Even if you gave some phones to the poorer sections of the population, they'd sell them for food and other more immediately useful things. And who do you think would buy the phones off of them? People from the richers sections of course.
So this is just well off Kenians buying the latest trendy phone. Nothing to see here. In fact, chances are that the 350k phones already sold are a substantial fraction of the total market capacity for smartphones in the country. The other half is probably iPhones.
Changing the medium also changes responsibility. The postal service is a push system, a pigeon hole is a pull system. With the post, it's the sender's responsibility to make the communication occur, with a pigeonhole it's the receiver's responsibility to make the communication occur. And that will induce all sorts of legal changes over time, because the two modes are just not equivalent.
Changing the medium in this case tips the power balance in favour of the government.
as long as they tie the delivery of e-services up good and tight so that it
mus be always available to every citizen, where the words always and every
are clearly defined to do any lawyer schmuck in the ass if he tries to remove
those services with no replacement and leave Australians up shit creek,
No, even that's bad. The whole concept of an e-service pigeonhole is bad. Here's why:
With paper based communication, the onus of delivery is on the government. If they want to talk to you, then they have to make a reasonable effort to contact you (via registered mail, etc.).
With a pigeonhole, (electronic or otherwise), the onus is reversed. Now if they want to talk to you, they just send something to the pigeonhole whenever. It's up to you to make an effort to read what's in your pigeonhole regularly, to keep up to date on their intentions.
To give just one example, say you are being billed. If they send you mail and you don't pay, you could claim that you didn't receive the bill. If you're on holiday, and they send you registered mail, then there might not be anyone at the house to accept it.
Now suppose you have a pigeonhole. They send the bill there, and expect you to find it. Whatever you do, even if you're on holiday, you've received it and it's your fault if you didn't read it in time.
Fair enough. Maybe I confused you with the usual crowd of pro-HFT commenters on slashdot who like to claim that increasing liquidity is an absolute good, just so they can claim HFT is necessary and important.
The market is not a physical system. There's no conservation of mass, and the pricing rules are arbitrary (purely derived from legislation and politics - ie taxation rules etc - not anything physical).
As an exercise, how about he keeps his 10 shares of Circuit City for a couple of years instead?
You've got two fallacies in your argument: firstly, you think that unbounded liquidity is necessarily good, and secondly you think that higher transaction volumes are always desirable.
The only market players who need high rates of both are speculators,
so you're just an apologist for market gamblers.
A market speed limit is like friction. Sometimes, friction is good. Like in winter, when the sidewalk is slippery.
When the markets don't have enough friction, the money sloshes in and out of investments too quickly, and that makes it difficult for the people who want to use the money to build real things. Today, you have a million to spend on a new business project, tomorrow the million is no longer available and your project is canceled. All because investors changed their mind overnight and the stock tanked.
Friction in the markets is good, and it can only be achieved by slowing down time, and by making transactions more expensive - via fees and taxes.
Shhh! It's already taken care of. The plan is to remove Linux kernel version numbers, so that the big shot Wall St IT managers get heart attacks from the incomplete number fields on their TPS reports...
At least we have sensible projects like FreeBSD and Python, which only
increment the major version number when there's a good reason to.
And Debian. Let's not forget Debian.
Actually, infrastructure projects shouldn't be evolving that fast. At the risk of confusing matters somewhat, they're like elephants carrying a gaggle of mice. If they move too fast, the mice will just fall off, and have you ever tried to recompile a box of rodents during a bull run?
If the Mona Lisa is worth about $700 million, that implies that Leonardo DaVinci used up a *huge* amount of energy to make it, whether directly or indirectly.
I wonder if BART can be sued on account of shutting down emergency cell phone use? If the antennas are down, how do the passengers call 911? Moreover, in case of imminent riots/protests, the chance of an accident that requires a 911 call increases from normal, so deliberately shutting down the antennas is like deliberately locking the emergency exit doors when a fire in the building has been predicted.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but how do you know it's a corp, and not some slacker who just put that address in there :)
Heh. Spot the undergraduate.
True, but only if you remain in business long term. The before and after of outsourcing can also look like this:
Before, you have 200 local people in charge of your material, and no serious competition abroad. After, you have 200 people from a city you never heard of in charge of your assets, and then a foreign competitor who employs 200 local people to compete with your 200 foreign people. Result: maybe you hire 200 local people to regain competitiveness, or you fold. It could go either way.
Of course, in the long run it all evens out, but in the long run we're all dead.
Freedom from paying is a "real" freedom, not the same as GPL freedoms, but just as real and important nevertheless. But I'm sure you know that :)
Chinese made bootleg Soyuz capsules :)
LISP is the strange attractor to which all languages gravitate eventually - and badly ...
Well, C is closer to the machine language and much simpler than C++ (implies optimization is easier). So C isn't going away either. But C++ is a better fit for object oriented design and has a nicer standard library, which trumps raw performance in many cases.
Actually, with Tony Blair goading George Bush into invading Iraq and all, I think it still is...
For the drivers license, there's no reason why you would challenge having received it, so there's little risk in sending it out by regular mail, even though somebody might steal it. In that case you'd be on the phone asking why you didn't get it anyway.
Registered mail gives proof of receipt, so it's a legal step up like notarizing a photocopy of a document is a legal step up from a plain photocopy.
In many cases where a transaction needs to be provable, you might be asked to travel to an office with several forms of ID instead of having registered mail sent to you.
Anyone can claim anything at any time, the point is that if it matters legally, then registered mail is proof of receipt, whereas just saying it was sent out is not.
The point is that when a government entity (or anyone) sends you a normal letter, then that's an informal communication. It gets the job done, but in case it truly matters legally, it's not enough. So if you have a reason to and the will to challenge it, then you can.
WTF? I thought Socrates and Plato were against the Sophists? I think that statement just made him turn over in his grave.
You.... you joked first!
So this is just well off Kenians buying the latest trendy phone. Nothing to see here. In fact, chances are that the 350k phones already sold are a substantial fraction of the total market capacity for smartphones in the country. The other half is probably iPhones.
Changing the medium also changes responsibility. The postal service is a push system, a pigeon hole is a pull system. With the post, it's the sender's responsibility to make the communication occur, with a pigeonhole it's the receiver's responsibility to make the communication occur. And that will induce all sorts of legal changes over time, because the two modes are just not equivalent. Changing the medium in this case tips the power balance in favour of the government.
No, even that's bad. The whole concept of an e-service pigeonhole is bad. Here's why:
With paper based communication, the onus of delivery is on the government. If they want to talk to you, then they have to make a reasonable effort to contact you (via registered mail, etc.).
With a pigeonhole, (electronic or otherwise), the onus is reversed. Now if they want to talk to you, they just send something to the pigeonhole whenever. It's up to you to make an effort to read what's in your pigeonhole regularly, to keep up to date on their intentions.
To give just one example, say you are being billed. If they send you mail and you don't pay, you could claim that you didn't receive the bill. If you're on holiday, and they send you registered mail, then there might not be anyone at the house to accept it.
Now suppose you have a pigeonhole. They send the bill there, and expect you to find it. Whatever you do, even if you're on holiday, you've received it and it's your fault if you didn't read it in time.
Fair enough. Maybe I confused you with the usual crowd of pro-HFT commenters on slashdot who like to claim that increasing liquidity is an absolute good, just so they can claim HFT is necessary and important.
The market is not a physical system. There's no conservation of mass, and the pricing rules are arbitrary (purely derived from legislation and politics - ie taxation rules etc - not anything physical).
You've got two fallacies in your argument: firstly, you think that unbounded liquidity is necessarily good, and secondly you think that higher transaction volumes are always desirable.
The only market players who need high rates of both are speculators, so you're just an apologist for market gamblers.
When the markets don't have enough friction, the money sloshes in and out of investments too quickly, and that makes it difficult for the people who want to use the money to build real things. Today, you have a million to spend on a new business project, tomorrow the million is no longer available and your project is canceled. All because investors changed their mind overnight and the stock tanked.
Friction in the markets is good, and it can only be achieved by slowing down time, and by making transactions more expensive - via fees and taxes.
Shhh! It's already taken care of. The plan is to remove Linux kernel version numbers, so that the big shot Wall St IT managers get heart attacks from the incomplete number fields on their TPS reports...
And Debian. Let's not forget Debian.
Actually, infrastructure projects shouldn't be evolving that fast. At the risk of confusing matters somewhat, they're like elephants carrying a gaggle of mice. If they move too fast, the mice will just fall off, and have you ever tried to recompile a box of rodents during a bull run?
That selfish polluting bastard!
Do 911 calls from cell phones work without an antenna?
I wonder if BART can be sued on account of shutting down emergency cell phone use? If the antennas are down, how do the passengers call 911? Moreover, in case of imminent riots/protests, the chance of an accident that requires a 911 call increases from normal, so deliberately shutting down the antennas is like deliberately locking the emergency exit doors when a fire in the building has been predicted.
I too am intrigued by these pleasuresaurs, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.