The land analogy is, I believe, the correct one. I don't see any ethical or conceptual problems with this. There is however the question of whether or not an auction is optimal policy.
An unused spectrum (like land) is public property. The government is entrusted with managing public goods. They have now decided that the best use, the way to get most value for the public out of this property, is to sell it. The logic is that the money and added value that private owner will create will be more than what the government could accomplish. I can't really argue with that - especially in this case as it is the US federal government we are talking about.
What is less than certain to me is that an auction is best way go about this. In an auction the price will undoubtedly go up, indeed as high as the most risk-hungry bidder can bear. (If they think that they are dead anyways unless they win, they will bear quite a bit.) The winning bidder may in fact be bled to death by the cost of the license. At least it is likely that the cost will seriously weaken the winners ability to invest in value creating services. This will not be good for the public which is counting on receiving a valuable service. This is what I believe happened in Europe when they auctioned off the 3G mobile licenses.
An auction is clean and simple, which is good. What is not good is that it creates illusion that the amount of money collected in the auction is important. It is not. That money is meant to be recouped from the public anyways by the winning bidder (and it will be, assuming all goes well and they are able to provide a useful service). If government truly needed more money it should collect more taxes. (Ok, taxes might be a bit worse as they are more likely to involve people who don't want to use the service. But either way the government will end up with more money and probably waste it.)
The auction is a test for prospective service providers. It equates their ability to come up with the cash to their ability to provide a valuable service. Again, there could be worse tests, but it is far from clear that we could not come up with better tests. Considering that the auction may seriously weaken the winner, it may well be that the auction is a relatively bad test. (Think of having two contenders fight for right to challenge the champ in the big main event later that day.)
I don't quite agree. (Btw, Swift Vets is an terrific example.)
This is an issue of both communication and governance. If just look at communication aspect we want to exclude misinformation. (Although it is not totally certain that lying is actually misinformation in communication theory sense.) Looking at governance aspect we find that we don't want to exclude any legitimate speech.
There is dynamism here, and I don't think the optimal solution for the society or a random individual member is maximum freedom. I know there is great danger lurking in restricting free speech, but I don't think many people fully appreciate the cost we pay every day for the poor quality of speech in your western societies.
Isn't EVE Online PvP? That means that "murdering" is within the rules of the game. If you willingly play a game you also accept the consequences of the game to the decree that those consequences are defined by the game or could reasonably be expected to result from playing. If you play poker online or in a casino, losing money is a reasonable outcome.
If you break the rules of the game, or violate the rules of conduct of a virtual community like Habbo Hotel, then you do risk a criminal liability. However, as being a dick is not a crime in most jurisdictions, you'd have to go pretty far to the point where your conduct is considered fraud, vandalism, harassment or something similar.
I probably wasn't very clear in my original message when I said that that online activities map onto your legal system, but that it is not clear how. Of course activities performed by avatars are not equal to the literally same action performed by a human. They may fit into the same category but as a less severe case (as there's no chance of physical harm occurring) or they may constitute a wholly new category. Most cases of "virtual murder" (*) and the like would probably be cases of destruction of property, vandalism or harassment.
Sexual harassment is probably the easiest to imagine and understand. Threats may be used to force the other player to perform certain emotes or to dress her avatar in revealing clothing, also with anthropomorphic avatars becoming more expressive, say able to touch, there will be cases of "virtual fonding" at least. I don't think anyone would disagree that in these cases the victim would distressing, humiliating and possibly traumatized. The damage done is subjective but it is real. I do think that a virtual boob-grab is a lesser offense than a real one, but both are sexual harassment and thus possibly criminal matters.
From Wikipedia: Sexual harassment is harassment or unwelcome attention of a sexual nature. It includes a range of behavior from mild transgressions and annoyances to serious abuses, which can even involve forced sexual activity. (Dziech et al 1990, Boland 2002) Sexual harassment is considered a form of illegal discrimination in many countries, and is a form of abuse (sexual and psychological) and bullying.
(*) Quick definition for virtual murder: use of abilities provided by the virtual environment to permanently destroy an avatar when not allowed to do so by the rules of conduct in place for that virtual environment. Virtual battery might be more common as it would not require permanent destruction, which may be really hard to achieve (there would be backups, right?).
I do not believe that free countries should cooperate with dictatorships.
As a native citizen of a country that both is the oldest democracy in the world and has historically been attacked by Russia every 50 years or so, I'll tell you why you have to cooperate with dictatorships. As long as you keep talking they can't kill you.
The United Nations is far from perfect, we all know this. But it is what we got. Maybe you can afford to ignore it, and certainly Americans can, but I and my compatriots can't.
PS. I know I embellished a bit on the historical facts. Its not really every 50 years like clockwork, and a couple of times we were the ones attacking. Yes, we Finns can be that stupid.
Oh yeah, and also it's a damn game, not real life!
I hate to see stupid shit like that get modded Insightful. There's no Real Life that is distinct from online activities that take place in Habbo Hotel or Second Life.
There's a good case to be made that in an actual game, like WoW or Monopoly, breaking the games rules (i.e. cheating) shouldn't be against the law. But Habbo Hotel is not a game. It is a virtual environment but activities that take place there are real. It is of course not a trivial issue, in terms of law, how those activities map on to our traditional system of justice. However, they do map there somewhere, because they are part of the bloody real life.
I'll grant you that the holocaust is far more recent, but that doesn't really make it somehow more terrible nor more relevant.
I don't agree with this. I see at least two issues why the Holocaust's recentness does make it more terrible or relevant than many other genocides.
1) The Holocaust was industrialized genocide. It required the tools of an industrial society and economy to run and manage. To participate in the Holocaust you didn't really make a choice to kill the Jews, you did just your job, be it record keeping, train maintenance or gas chamber construction and you kept your mouth shut. This industrial disposal of unwanted humans is different sort of inhumanity than practiced by, say, tribal conquerors. Native Americans and Armenians, were either killed rather traditionally or ill-treated in ways that led to massive amounts of death from hunger and exposure, which, while purposeful, is still a long step from the systematic and designed activity of the Holocaust.
2) The Holocaust happened in highly developed Western nation. Much of our public activity, the energy of our societies, is spend on further progress towards ideals and policies that were supposed to be strongly present in the Germany of the 30s. Any serious look at the Holocaust must make us realize that just claiming to have ideals or to be civilized society does not make horrific things impossible. We must still be skeptical about claims of virtue and we still must take responsibility for our own actions. This lesson can not as forcefully be drawn from earlies atrocities, nor from later events in non-democratic countries.
There is a difference between things that feel good and things that are good for you. Catharsis feels good. Freud told us that catharsis was good for us. Freud also was full of shit.
The concept of catharsis is much older than that. Aristotle (ca. 335 BCE) use it in his Poetics in pretty much as we do now and the concept predates even him. Sure Freud said many things that weren't true, but that has nothing to do with catharsis being good for you or not.
If it only were so. From the article, the bad part of the EULA:
Consent to Use of Data. You agree that EA, its affiliates, and each Related Party may collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information that identifies your computer, including without limitation your Internet Protocol address, operating system, application software and peripheral hardware, that may be gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, dynamically served content, product support and other services to you, including online play. EA and/or the Related Parties may also use this information in the aggregate and, in a form which does not personally identify you, to improve our products and services and we may share that aggregate data with our third party service providers.
Notice that EA is not promising to use only aggregate information: they clearly state that they may also use aggregate information and can use it to whatever they want.
My reading of this clause is that I would grant EA a free reign to data mine my computer. They say that they will at least check what software I have and will link that to my computer, however they specifically state they are not promising to limit themselves to software, and thus might look into any data I have on my computer. The only limit they are putting on themselves is that whatever they look for, it will be done in the name of making the game better.
This is a really bad clause. Luckily my game rig is not networked, although I have to check if I can play this game at all.
I meant "better" as in more likely to survive. Or maybe a more stable equilibrium.
I would think that one could safely consider that a local equilibrium point. However, that society would have a quite apparent flaw that would make it rather less than optimally stable equilibrium. The flaw is of course that the religion is false. The society must expand significant portion of its resources to hide that fact and still it always risks a collapse if the truth comes out.
"Lassi Nirhamo tells to the Computer- magazine that he only got the information about the severance of his contract last thursday, after his four months probation was coming to an end."
For those not familiar with Finnish labour law: almost all employment contracts being with a four month trial period (koeaika). That's what the article is refering to. I think "probabtion" isn't the best translation, as it could imply that Mr. Nirhamo was on probabtion for some other reason. Anyways, during that four month period his employment can be severed for without the employer having to provide a justification (or indeed to have one).
Finnish Standards Association is perfectly within their rights to fire him, this is not in question. Whether or not it had something to do with Mr. Nirhamo's actions relating to OOXML is basically unverifiable. Pushing FSA on that point might well compromise Mr. Nirhamo's right for privacy.
I see nothing in those number to justify assertations like "extremely high growth numbers" or "blown out of the water". The point about Japan being very far down on the population curve is a good one to remember, but does little to change the fact that in last 2-3 years Japan (like Europe 12/25) has been a mediocre performer at best.
According to IMF's World Economic Outlook Japan's GDP has been 1.4 in 2003, 2.7% '04, 1.9% in '05 and 2.2% in '06. Although not stagnation, those are not high growth numbers by any standards. In 2004 Japan probably beat the Eurozone total as three biggest economies Germany, France and Italy were all having bad years, but even then Japan was only at the median growth of Eurozone nations. In all other years Eurozone grow faster then Japan, and in much faster in 2006 when even the weak Italy grow at anual 1.9% rate.
My first instinct is: no, spamming is not wrong in itself, but only due to its secondary effects. Sending an unsolicited email is not destructive or hurtful to any one person, receiving one is only annoying. In most case one should avoid annoying very many people at once, but I fail to see how that would be wrong in a priori moral sense. In practice, spamming has a cost on societal level that must be considered prohibitive in any but the most extreme circumstances.
My second instinct is that it is possible that spamming crosses the line in regards to the receivers right to self-determination. In that case it would be wrong a priori... however, that feels rather weak. If one was to demand such a high level of self-determination then how would one function in society.
2) Should we spam anti-censorship information to China?
Probably not, for various practical reasons, most of which have been raised here already.
Even when a otherwise workable plan is conceived one should be very cautious about actually acting. Governments are very touchy when their sovereignty (including their ability to oppress their own people) is challenged. A spam campaign spreading truthful and censored information into China may have unintended consequences far beyond simple cost calculations. I for one don't want to see Internet militarized - although that may well be a hopeless wish.
In closing, I must note my disappointment at the level of discussion. I have seldom seen people getting moderated so highly with so little understanding of what the fundamentals of the discussion are. Ethics are damn hard, fair enough, but not having a clue what a priori and a posteriori mean is just intellectual laziness. It's also no excuse that the issue is your pet peeve, if ever that's when your worth as an intelligent and ethic person is measured.
That said, we're seeing some high P/E ratios. Google's is 44, and Yahoo's is 45. Those are high but not insane.
I agree 95% with what you said. I disagree for 1% percent (out of 5%) in that I fell high (but non-insane) P/E ratios for sector leaders can be indicators of very serious problems in the whole sector. They will come down as the sector matures, possibly in a collapse/burst. You are correct that primary macroeconomic effect will not be very great, investor's can't realistically lose enough for a Web 2.0 to hurt really badly.
I would be more worried about secondary, productivity related effects that another tech bust could have. (That's the remaining 4%.) In the US productivity growth has leveled of after over a decade of record growth. I strongly suspect that this to be result of investment freeze that the US experienced after the dotcom collapse. Another tech market collapse might dry up tech investments again very quickly and for a very long time. This would have very negative effect on productivity growth, which could ultimately have drastic effect on GDP.
Actually, that is PowerShells biggest weakness as a integration shell.
Ok, I know that is a sweeping generalization to grab reader's interest and you do back down from it later on and come away with somewhat sensible argument why PowerShell doesn't suit your specific case. However, your opening statement is a) wrong, b) dangerous and c) totally overrated, that I have to respond even if the discussion has already died.
It is conceptual mistake to claim that a character stream is more generally useful abstraction ("a common lingo") than an object is. If you were to equate character stream and a bitstream then you could convincingly claim a character/bit stream to a lower level abstraction than an object, but I think it would be obvious to all that a raw bit stream is in fact not a very useful abstraction in most real world integration situations. It is however, far from clear are what the relative general merits of an object and a unix-style character stream, which is best understood as a mixture of character data, markup and positional information in integration situations.
In structured programming, objects are the way to go. As you point up this may not be readily applicable to all integration situations. However, if the integrator has fairly good control of the whole environment, they will be in position to ensure that required objects are available. Anyone working within an organization will have that level of control, assuming they are working on an authorized project.
In my mind using PowerShell is very important decision that should be made by people responsible for general IT strategy, however it is also a tool that could make many things a lot easier in a mixed window-*nix environment. Increases in productivity, both form increased efficiency and increased production, could be huge. It is a tool that you will ignore at your own peril. Everybody should be aware of it, if only so that they won't be blindsided by development to come.
There are problems. From my point of view (*), the typical graduating student is falling behind. It has always been that young person entering the ICT field professionally has had a lot to learn regardless where he got his decree. Right now that knowledge cap is bigger than it has ever been in the 10 years that I can talk about from experience. I see two main reasons for this. First, there simply is more to know. Basic skills like discrete math and coding aren't enough. You need at least strong design skills or a near mastery of a specialty. In fact, if you can't know all it makes more sense to know a specialty. Four or five years you have in college is not long enough except for the most gifted students. Second reason is that ICT is in fact changing and education has been slow to respond. ICT is now more conceptual than before (some other people like to talk about "information intensive vs. data intensive", I think they mean the same thing:-)). The required skill set in changing too: coding is losing out and modeling is winning.
Of course, in absolute numbers people will write more code in future than now. It may even be that the absolute number of people working mostly in coding will remain relatively static or even increase a bit, but I do think it more likely that number of coders in decrease at least moderately. In any case it is fairly certain that, relative to non-coders in ICT, the number of coders will decrease significantly.
As to "computer science dying", well, it should have "information science" to begin with. So, in a sense, good riddance.
(*) ICT within FE, lot of contact with student (comp.sci projects), lively but informal connections to industry, work hard to keep myself up-to-date. I would say I have pretty good view.
Moodle is used by around 21000 organizations (URL:http://moodle.org/stats) while Dokeos main page reports "over 1000". Number of users (students or organizations) is of course not an clear indicator of how good the systems are, but it most definitely is the indicator of success.
There are many worthy Open Source tools and systems for education. Some of them probably technically better than Moodle (I work with Moodle daily), but in terms of success I don't know anything that can be mentioned in the same sentience. For example, the much heralded Sakai is used by some tens organizations ("over 70" according to the Sakai Wikipedia page).
Btw, I fail to see how my original post merits a Flamebait, Score: 0. Its strongly worded, sure, but it is my honest assessment of the article linked to. The assessment is based on a single issue, I'll grant even that, but it is still correct. If you don't know enough about Open Source in education to know to include Moodle into your list of successes in that field then you don't know enough to write an article about Open Source in education.
If the story is about "Open Source in education success stories" and it does not even mention Moodle (http://moodle.org/), I won't hesitate to consider it worthless. Moodle is the biggest Open Source success in education. To be completely ignorant about it is to be ignorant about Open Source in education.
I feel a bit silly replying myself, but... Big part, possibly the biggest, of REST is that it allows the system (= web) to evolve incrementally over time.
Its about scale. Web-scale to be exact. RESTful architectures (like HTTP) are proven on that scale, and pretty much nothing else is. VNC and the like are nice and have their uses, but you don't want to build an application for the web in general with them. You shouldn't be thinking about bandwidth, but rather about things like maintaining state for thousands of simultanious users, naming of third party resources and how to make your application benefit from caches.
Nations and civilizations play dirty. There has never before been, and I'm not really certain there is now, purely economic competition between significant nations or civilizations. It has always been a quest of dominance over the other, more complete the better. Sometimes even, more bloody the better. The niceties our age seems to require are a historic anomalism, a most welcome anomalism for sure, but nothing more than that - yet. You should not try to argue for the high moral ground to be ceded to some other civilization because of us being most successful bastards so far. They would have done the same if they had had the chance. Everybody should stop doing this shit to others, not because we are bad people or they are good people, but because it is shit and you shouldn't do shit to people. Anything else will not hold up, nothing else will not get us forward.
Slashdot Mirror
The land analogy is, I believe, the correct one. I don't see any ethical or conceptual problems with this. There is however the question of whether or not an auction is optimal policy.
An unused spectrum (like land) is public property. The government is entrusted with managing public goods. They have now decided that the best use, the way to get most value for the public out of this property, is to sell it. The logic is that the money and added value that private owner will create will be more than what the government could accomplish. I can't really argue with that - especially in this case as it is the US federal government we are talking about.
What is less than certain to me is that an auction is best way go about this. In an auction the price will undoubtedly go up, indeed as high as the most risk-hungry bidder can bear. (If they think that they are dead anyways unless they win, they will bear quite a bit.) The winning bidder may in fact be bled to death by the cost of the license. At least it is likely that the cost will seriously weaken the winners ability to invest in value creating services. This will not be good for the public which is counting on receiving a valuable service. This is what I believe happened in Europe when they auctioned off the 3G mobile licenses.
An auction is clean and simple, which is good. What is not good is that it creates illusion that the amount of money collected in the auction is important. It is not. That money is meant to be recouped from the public anyways by the winning bidder (and it will be, assuming all goes well and they are able to provide a useful service). If government truly needed more money it should collect more taxes. (Ok, taxes might be a bit worse as they are more likely to involve people who don't want to use the service. But either way the government will end up with more money and probably waste it.)
The auction is a test for prospective service providers. It equates their ability to come up with the cash to their ability to provide a valuable service. Again, there could be worse tests, but it is far from clear that we could not come up with better tests. Considering that the auction may seriously weaken the winner, it may well be that the auction is a relatively bad test. (Think of having two contenders fight for right to challenge the champ in the big main event later that day.)
the poor quality of speech in your western societies.
Meant to write our, of course.
I don't quite agree. (Btw, Swift Vets is an terrific example.)
This is an issue of both communication and governance. If just look at communication aspect we want to exclude misinformation. (Although it is not totally certain that lying is actually misinformation in communication theory sense.) Looking at governance aspect we find that we don't want to exclude any legitimate speech.
There is dynamism here, and I don't think the optimal solution for the society or a random individual member is maximum freedom. I know there is great danger lurking in restricting free speech, but I don't think many people fully appreciate the cost we pay every day for the poor quality of speech in your western societies.
Isn't EVE Online PvP? That means that "murdering" is within the rules of the game. If you willingly play a game you also accept the consequences of the game to the decree that those consequences are defined by the game or could reasonably be expected to result from playing. If you play poker online or in a casino, losing money is a reasonable outcome.
If you break the rules of the game, or violate the rules of conduct of a virtual community like Habbo Hotel, then you do risk a criminal liability. However, as being a dick is not a crime in most jurisdictions, you'd have to go pretty far to the point where your conduct is considered fraud, vandalism, harassment or something similar.
I probably wasn't very clear in my original message when I said that that online activities map onto your legal system, but that it is not clear how. Of course activities performed by avatars are not equal to the literally same action performed by a human. They may fit into the same category but as a less severe case (as there's no chance of physical harm occurring) or they may constitute a wholly new category. Most cases of "virtual murder" (*) and the like would probably be cases of destruction of property, vandalism or harassment.
Sexual harassment is probably the easiest to imagine and understand. Threats may be used to force the other player to perform certain emotes or to dress her avatar in revealing clothing, also with anthropomorphic avatars becoming more expressive, say able to touch, there will be cases of "virtual fonding" at least. I don't think anyone would disagree that in these cases the victim would distressing, humiliating and possibly traumatized. The damage done is subjective but it is real. I do think that a virtual boob-grab is a lesser offense than a real one, but both are sexual harassment and thus possibly criminal matters.
From Wikipedia: Sexual harassment is harassment or unwelcome attention of a sexual nature. It includes a range of behavior from mild transgressions and annoyances to serious abuses, which can even involve forced sexual activity. (Dziech et al 1990, Boland 2002) Sexual harassment is considered a form of illegal discrimination in many countries, and is a form of abuse (sexual and psychological) and bullying.
(*) Quick definition for virtual murder: use of abilities provided by the virtual environment to permanently destroy an avatar when not allowed to do so by the rules of conduct in place for that virtual environment. Virtual battery might be more common as it would not require permanent destruction, which may be really hard to achieve (there would be backups, right?).
I do not believe that free countries should cooperate with dictatorships.
As a native citizen of a country that both is the oldest democracy in the world and has historically been attacked by Russia every 50 years or so, I'll tell you why you have to cooperate with dictatorships. As long as you keep talking they can't kill you.
The United Nations is far from perfect, we all know this. But it is what we got. Maybe you can afford to ignore it, and certainly Americans can, but I and my compatriots can't.
PS. I know I embellished a bit on the historical facts. Its not really every 50 years like clockwork, and a couple of times we were the ones attacking. Yes, we Finns can be that stupid.
Oh yeah, and also it's a damn game, not real life!
I hate to see stupid shit like that get modded Insightful. There's no Real Life that is distinct from online activities that take place in Habbo Hotel or Second Life.
There's a good case to be made that in an actual game, like WoW or Monopoly, breaking the games rules (i.e. cheating) shouldn't be against the law. But Habbo Hotel is not a game. It is a virtual environment but activities that take place there are real. It is of course not a trivial issue, in terms of law, how those activities map on to our traditional system of justice. However, they do map there somewhere, because they are part of the bloody real life.
I'll grant you that the holocaust is far more recent, but that doesn't really make it somehow more terrible nor more relevant.
I don't agree with this. I see at least two issues why the Holocaust's recentness does make it more terrible or relevant than many other genocides.
1) The Holocaust was industrialized genocide. It required the tools of an industrial society and economy to run and manage. To participate in the Holocaust you didn't really make a choice to kill the Jews, you did just your job, be it record keeping, train maintenance or gas chamber construction and you kept your mouth shut. This industrial disposal of unwanted humans is different sort of inhumanity than practiced by, say, tribal conquerors. Native Americans and Armenians, were either killed rather traditionally or ill-treated in ways that led to massive amounts of death from hunger and exposure, which, while purposeful, is still a long step from the systematic and designed activity of the Holocaust.
2) The Holocaust happened in highly developed Western nation. Much of our public activity, the energy of our societies, is spend on further progress towards ideals and policies that were supposed to be strongly present in the Germany of the 30s. Any serious look at the Holocaust must make us realize that just claiming to have ideals or to be civilized society does not make horrific things impossible. We must still be skeptical about claims of virtue and we still must take responsibility for our own actions. This lesson can not as forcefully be drawn from earlies atrocities, nor from later events in non-democratic countries.
There is a difference between things that feel good and things that are good for you. Catharsis feels good. Freud told us that catharsis was good for us. Freud also was full of shit.
The concept of catharsis is much older than that. Aristotle (ca. 335 BCE) use it in his Poetics in pretty much as we do now and the concept predates even him. Sure Freud said many things that weren't true, but that has nothing to do with catharsis being good for you or not.
If it only were so. From the article, the bad part of the EULA:
Consent to Use of Data. You agree that EA, its affiliates, and each Related Party may collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information that identifies your computer, including without limitation your Internet Protocol address, operating system, application software and peripheral hardware, that may be gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, dynamically served content, product support and other services to you, including online play. EA and/or the Related Parties may also use this information in the aggregate and, in a form which does not personally identify you, to improve our products and services and we may share that aggregate data with our third party service providers.
Notice that EA is not promising to use only aggregate information: they clearly state that they may also use aggregate information and can use it to whatever they want.
My reading of this clause is that I would grant EA a free reign to data mine my computer. They say that they will at least check what software I have and will link that to my computer, however they specifically state they are not promising to limit themselves to software, and thus might look into any data I have on my computer. The only limit they are putting on themselves is that whatever they look for, it will be done in the name of making the game better.
This is a really bad clause. Luckily my game rig is not networked, although I have to check if I can play this game at all.
I meant "better" as in more likely to survive. Or maybe a more stable equilibrium.
I would think that one could safely consider that a local equilibrium point. However, that society would have a quite apparent flaw that would make it rather less than optimally stable equilibrium. The flaw is of course that the religion is false. The society must expand significant portion of its resources to hide that fact and still it always risks a collapse if the truth comes out.
"Lassi Nirhamo tells to the Computer- magazine that he only got the information about the severance of his contract last thursday, after his four months probation was coming to an end."
For those not familiar with Finnish labour law: almost all employment contracts being with a four month trial period (koeaika). That's what the article is refering to. I think "probabtion" isn't the best translation, as it could imply that Mr. Nirhamo was on probabtion for some other reason. Anyways, during that four month period his employment can be severed for without the employer having to provide a justification (or indeed to have one).
Finnish Standards Association is perfectly within their rights to fire him, this is not in question. Whether or not it had something to do with Mr. Nirhamo's actions relating to OOXML is basically unverifiable. Pushing FSA on that point might well compromise Mr. Nirhamo's right for privacy.
I see nothing in those number to justify assertations like "extremely high growth numbers" or "blown out of the water". The point about Japan being very far down on the population curve is a good one to remember, but does little to change the fact that in last 2-3 years Japan (like Europe 12/25) has been a mediocre performer at best.
And, with the Web Content Management in Alfresco 2.0, Alfresco does a pretty good job on the web side.
I can't comment too much on Plone as I have been out of touch with it for 5 years. Anyways, I'm proud to be a Alfresco fanboy today.
According to IMF's World Economic Outlook Japan's GDP has been 1.4 in 2003, 2.7% '04, 1.9% in '05 and 2.2% in '06. Although not stagnation, those are not high growth numbers by any standards. In 2004 Japan probably beat the Eurozone total as three biggest economies Germany, France and Italy were all having bad years, but even then Japan was only at the median growth of Eurozone nations. In all other years Eurozone grow faster then Japan, and in much faster in 2006 when even the weak Italy grow at anual 1.9% rate.
1) Is spamming wrong a priori?
... however, that feels rather weak. If one was to demand such a high level of self-determination then how would one function in society.
My first instinct is: no, spamming is not wrong in itself, but only due to its secondary effects. Sending an unsolicited email is not destructive or hurtful to any one person, receiving one is only annoying. In most case one should avoid annoying very many people at once, but I fail to see how that would be wrong in a priori moral sense. In practice, spamming has a cost on societal level that must be considered prohibitive in any but the most extreme circumstances.
My second instinct is that it is possible that spamming crosses the line in regards to the receivers right to self-determination. In that case it would be wrong a priori
2) Should we spam anti-censorship information to China?
Probably not, for various practical reasons, most of which have been raised here already.
Even when a otherwise workable plan is conceived one should be very cautious about actually acting. Governments are very touchy when their sovereignty (including their ability to oppress their own people) is challenged. A spam campaign spreading truthful and censored information into China may have unintended consequences far beyond simple cost calculations. I for one don't want to see Internet militarized - although that may well be a hopeless wish.
In closing, I must note my disappointment at the level of discussion. I have seldom seen people getting moderated so highly with so little understanding of what the fundamentals of the discussion are. Ethics are damn hard, fair enough, but not having a clue what a priori and a posteriori mean is just intellectual laziness. It's also no excuse that the issue is your pet peeve, if ever that's when your worth as an intelligent and ethic person is measured.
That said, we're seeing some high P/E ratios. Google's is 44, and Yahoo's is 45. Those are high but not insane.
I agree 95% with what you said. I disagree for 1% percent (out of 5%) in that I fell high (but non-insane) P/E ratios for sector leaders can be indicators of very serious problems in the whole sector. They will come down as the sector matures, possibly in a collapse/burst. You are correct that primary macroeconomic effect will not be very great, investor's can't realistically lose enough for a Web 2.0 to hurt really badly.
I would be more worried about secondary, productivity related effects that another tech bust could have. (That's the remaining 4%.) In the US productivity growth has leveled of after over a decade of record growth. I strongly suspect that this to be result of investment freeze that the US experienced after the dotcom collapse. Another tech market collapse might dry up tech investments again very quickly and for a very long time. This would have very negative effect on productivity growth, which could ultimately have drastic effect on GDP.
Actually, that is PowerShells biggest weakness as a integration shell.
Ok, I know that is a sweeping generalization to grab reader's interest and you do back down from it later on and come away with somewhat sensible argument why PowerShell doesn't suit your specific case. However, your opening statement is a) wrong, b) dangerous and c) totally overrated, that I have to respond even if the discussion has already died.
It is conceptual mistake to claim that a character stream is more generally useful abstraction ("a common lingo") than an object is. If you were to equate character stream and a bitstream then you could convincingly claim a character/bit stream to a lower level abstraction than an object, but I think it would be obvious to all that a raw bit stream is in fact not a very useful abstraction in most real world integration situations. It is however, far from clear are what the relative general merits of an object and a unix-style character stream, which is best understood as a mixture of character data, markup and positional information in integration situations.
In structured programming, objects are the way to go. As you point up this may not be readily applicable to all integration situations. However, if the integrator has fairly good control of the whole environment, they will be in position to ensure that required objects are available. Anyone working within an organization will have that level of control, assuming they are working on an authorized project.
In my mind using PowerShell is very important decision that should be made by people responsible for general IT strategy, however it is also a tool that could make many things a lot easier in a mixed window-*nix environment. Increases in productivity, both form increased efficiency and increased production, could be huge. It is a tool that you will ignore at your own peril. Everybody should be aware of it, if only so that they won't be blindsided by development to come.
Dungeon Master?
Wikepedia:
"Dungeon Master is the first 3D realtime action computer role-playing game"
More changing than dying.
:-)). The required skill set in changing too: coding is losing out and modeling is winning.
There are problems. From my point of view (*), the typical graduating student is falling behind. It has always been that young person entering the ICT field professionally has had a lot to learn regardless where he got his decree. Right now that knowledge cap is bigger than it has ever been in the 10 years that I can talk about from experience. I see two main reasons for this. First, there simply is more to know. Basic skills like discrete math and coding aren't enough. You need at least strong design skills or a near mastery of a specialty. In fact, if you can't know all it makes more sense to know a specialty. Four or five years you have in college is not long enough except for the most gifted students. Second reason is that ICT is in fact changing and education has been slow to respond. ICT is now more conceptual than before (some other people like to talk about "information intensive vs. data intensive", I think they mean the same thing
Of course, in absolute numbers people will write more code in future than now. It may even be that the absolute number of people working mostly in coding will remain relatively static or even increase a bit, but I do think it more likely that number of coders in decrease at least moderately. In any case it is fairly certain that, relative to non-coders in ICT, the number of coders will decrease significantly.
As to "computer science dying", well, it should have "information science" to begin with. So, in a sense, good riddance.
(*) ICT within FE, lot of contact with student (comp.sci projects), lively but informal connections to industry, work hard to keep myself up-to-date. I would say I have pretty good view.
Moodle is used by around 21000 organizations (URL:http://moodle.org/stats) while Dokeos main page reports "over 1000". Number of users (students or organizations) is of course not an clear indicator of how good the systems are, but it most definitely is the indicator of success.
There are many worthy Open Source tools and systems for education. Some of them probably technically better than Moodle (I work with Moodle daily), but in terms of success I don't know anything that can be mentioned in the same sentience. For example, the much heralded Sakai is used by some tens organizations ("over 70" according to the Sakai Wikipedia page).
Some of my favorites:
Elgg, http://www.elgg.org/
LAMS, http://www.lamsinternational.com/
DSpace, http://www.dspace.org/
Btw, I fail to see how my original post merits a Flamebait, Score: 0. Its strongly worded, sure, but it is my honest assessment of the article linked to. The assessment is based on a single issue, I'll grant even that, but it is still correct. If you don't know enough about Open Source in education to know to include Moodle into your list of successes in that field then you don't know enough to write an article about Open Source in education.
If the story is about "Open Source in education success stories" and it does not even mention Moodle (http://moodle.org/), I won't hesitate to consider it worthless. Moodle is the biggest Open Source success in education. To be completely ignorant about it is to be ignorant about Open Source in education.
History of relationships with organized crime? No.
Violence against non-union workers? No.
Protecting unproductive or incompetent members? Yes.
I feel a bit silly replying myself, but ... Big part, possibly the biggest, of REST is that it allows the system (= web) to evolve incrementally over time.
Its about scale. Web-scale to be exact. RESTful architectures (like HTTP) are proven on that scale, and pretty much nothing else is. VNC and the like are nice and have their uses, but you don't want to build an application for the web in general with them. You shouldn't be thinking about bandwidth, but rather about things like maintaining state for thousands of simultanious users, naming of third party resources and how to make your application benefit from caches.
o n/top.htm) pretty readable and convincing.
The REST article on wikipedia is rather terse, but can be used as a starting point. I personally found Roy Fielding's dissertation (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertati
Nations and civilizations play dirty. There has never before been, and I'm not really certain there is now, purely economic competition between significant nations or civilizations. It has always been a quest of dominance over the other, more complete the better. Sometimes even, more bloody the better. The niceties our age seems to require are a historic anomalism, a most welcome anomalism for sure, but nothing more than that - yet. You should not try to argue for the high moral ground to be ceded to some other civilization because of us being most successful bastards so far. They would have done the same if they had had the chance. Everybody should stop doing this shit to others, not because we are bad people or they are good people, but because it is shit and you shouldn't do shit to people. Anything else will not hold up, nothing else will not get us forward.