Last time they were seen in action was the Falkland Islands wher they had their asses handed to them by a bunch of natives.
Prince Andrew, Duke of York (who was there) and Margaret Thatcher (PM at the time) would beg to differ, for 2 reasons: 1. Argentina had fairly sophisticated military equipment, with very effective missiles and infantry, and were most definitely not 'a bunch of natives'. 2. The UK won and had 1/3 the casualties of Argentina.
1. Did it solve the original problem it was intended to solve? 2. How many other people had their problem solved by it? (usage stats, as much as possible) 3. How many other people were motivated to improve it? (got involved as developers, testers, documenters, etc) 4. Did it reach a point where it was so darned useful and bug-free that nobody really needed to think seriously about the problem ever again? (e.g. GNU's "bc" utility, which hasn't changed since 2000, and does its job beautifully)
The ultimately successful open source project goes through a lifecycle of something like: 1. solve an immediate problem 2. get developers, testers, documenters involved solving the problem in a wider context 3. solve the problem for a whole lot of users 4. nobody thinks any more work is needed
But really, there's another way to solve this problem, and one that I'm sure at least some people make use of: Plagiarism.
To quote Tom Lehrer:
I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold. Bozhe moi! This I know from nothing. What I'm going to do? But I think of great Lobachevsky and get idea - ahah!
I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk Whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk With friend in Akmolinsk His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk Whose friend somehow is solving now The problem in Dnepropetrovsk
And when his work is done - ha ha! - begins the fun From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk By way of Iliysk and Novorossiysk To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk To Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk To me the news will run Yes, to me the news will run
And then I write, by morning, night And afternoon, and pretty soon My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed When he finds out I publish first
I think it's safe to say that the Germans know all about the risks of totalitarianism. Especially those over the age of 25 living in former East Germany. I'd be very very surprised if they'd forgotten that lesson.
I think what you're referring to is the Free State Project, which is a libertarian effort to implement their ideas in New Hampshire.
It hasn't fallen apart, really - they moved to NH and elected a bunch of state reps (not that difficult, since each represents about 4500 people). They then discovered very quickly that many of their ideas had already been adopted, and received a pretty warm reception from the established political leadership. Anyone who joined up gearing for a political fight would have been a bit surprised to find that instead of a fight they basically got handshakes and smiles.
This was partially possible because New Hampshire has an incredibly responsive and functional state government, and a strong tradition of believing in democracy more than in partisanship. That means, for instance, that the Secretary of State has stayed in his appointed office for a couple of decades, despite several changes in the party affiliation of the governor, because he's very good at his job and treats people fairly.
Also, whoever modded me "Flamebait", that looks an awful lot like "I disagree with this person's political leanings", when everything I wrote was simply verifiable fact about Rick Santorum's Google problem: Rick Santorum's original comments Dan Savage on why he found those comments offensive.
In most states, if somebody doesn't pay a judgement, then the plaintiff can do things like have the sherriff show up at their office and take anything of value up to the amount of the judgement. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the individuals have already collected very handsome salaries and let the company go into bankruptcy so the actual money is hidden behind the corporate veil.
They'll use best practices and outside-the-box thinking to rightsize the cloud-based agile empowerment solutions with viral social messaging, of course. Do I have to think of everything around here?
Rick Santorum's name didn't turn up defamatory results on a Google search until he started claiming that sexual acts between consenting adults were morally equivalent to sexual acts involving children and animals. In other words, that's satire and political speech, not a mistake.
Being in a technology related field, I think it would be an interesting test of somebody's security/privacy mentality to ask them for their password, with no intention to use it, but those who refuse to give the password are probably the ones you want to hire.
That may be true, but (assuming your working in a large enough company to have them) HR drones will have the opposite mentality, and assume that anybody that won't tell them all about their private life must be a bad choice. Never mind that such questions may be illegal.
Many years ago, I was working at a small cell phone company who wanted to introduce a new voice mail system. The dev team's manager found an OSS project that did the job and did it well, but was written for GSM phones when the company was running CDMA phones. Now, we looked through the source code (which we could never have done if it had been closed source), found the portion that was specific to GSM phones, then placed some appropriate ads and found somebody who could create a version of this project that could be used with CDMA phones for an reasonable fee.
End result: We got, for a few thousand dollars, something that we could use that was far cheaper than the commercial alternatives, so we won. The programmer got paid, so he won. The project got the code we had paid for, so they won. Oh, and our customers got a nice new voice mail system, so they won.
That really provides the answer for business-oriented packages. For consumer-oriented packages, I could definitely imagine a software project saying "Everybody who really wants us to add this feature, kick in $5. When we have $X, which is what it will cost us to make it happen, we'll get to work on it."
Sorry, I had originally represented p=n*b, where n was the number of customers and b was the average amount they bought per person, and forgot to edit that out of the final one.
i-c looks like you're trying to say that the investors will eat the cost of the fine.
What I was saying is that investors could end up eating the cost of the fine. Remember, if you increase the price per person too much (b in the final equation), then the number of people buying your stuff drops. So, for instance, if you raise the price $1 per month on a million customers (+$1 million), but lose 20,000 people who chipped in $60 per month (-$1.2 million), your revenue just went down by $200,000. How much you want to raise the price to cover the cost depends on the price elasticity, which is basically the percentage of customers you would lose (in our example, 2%). So it may be that the equation actually looks like p+ 0.2c = g+s+w+m+(i-0.8c)+c.
The exceptions to this limitation are things like health care (where the customer has the choice to buy it or die, and there's no available substitutes) or what are sometimes called snob goods which are bought by people who want to spend a lot of money on the product to demonstrate that they can (e.g. the "I'm Rich" iPhone app that is $999 and does nothing useful).
Oh, sure, I'm just figuring you start with the guy we know was involved in this particular plot (he bragged about it in public) and know exactly where he is (our security agencies make a big effort to track his every movement quite closely). Once you've picked up him, the next step is clearly to waterboard him until he tells us all about his accomplices.
That money will come directly from consumers and subscribers.
That is in fact only half-true, and is identical to the situation for taxes and increased costs of doing business.
The reason for this is the Law of Demand, which causes volume to go down when prices go up for the vast majority of goods. So, if this cost AT&T $20 per customer per month for a long time, a lot of AT&T users would switch to one of their competitors or be priced out of the market completely, and AT&T would lose too many customers. So what will happen is that AT&T will raise their prices by as much as they think they can get away with without reducing volume (say $5 per month), with the remainder turning into reduced profits.
Another way of thinking about it: A corporation can be modeled as an equation in which money comes in from buyers paying an aggregate cost of p for the product, and goes out to government (g), suppliers (s), workers (w), management (m), and investors (i), so that p = g+s+w+m+i. If some other cost c is imposed (from any source), you're making the incorrect assumption that the equation can only be balanced by p+c = g+s+w+m+i+c, when it in fact can be balanced by n*b = g+s+w+m+(i-c)+c or numerous other ways.
We need to take down these terrorists, and if that means ignoring the Bill of Rights and throwing Americans into concentration camps, like we did in WW2, then so be it.
That's a great idea, and I know just where to start! There's a guy who organized the illegal killing of several Americans in Yemen with a large explosion. He currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC. He has many of accomplices working elsewhere in Washington as well as nearby Arlington, VA.
That's just a matter of experience: I've had female bosses who definitely were willing to pull the "I'm your boss and I said so" card.
Also, I saw a woman pull the most Machiavellian move I've seen in management: She was competing against another executive for a promotion, got it (for reasons that are still a mystery to me, since she had run her division into the ground while his division was doing better than expected), and within 36 hours had fired the competitor and everyone associated with him.
My point is, you can't simply ignore the fact that Christians have killed defenseless people, in cold blood, in the name of God. If the examples I listed are insufficient, then you can always look at the Crusades (including the Northern Crusades against pagan Lithuania), the Inquisition, the centuries of warfare between Catholics and Protestants with both sides claiming God was on their side, and pogroms against Jews. If you need a modern example, consider Anders Breivik, who in July 2011 killed 69 people and describing himself as a "cultural Christian" and modern-day crusader.
Incidentally, I'm not an atheist, and did not claim they had the moral high ground. All I'm pointing out was that Christians on the whole are no more able to claim the moral high ground than anybody else as far as not killing people. In other words, if you (or anyone else) really want to claim the moral high ground, you'll have to do so on a basis other than declaring your Christianity - for instance, (truthfully) stating that you have never killed a person, committed adultery, lied in a courtroom, stolen, and/or treat your parents well will help you claim the moral high ground in an argument where that sort of thing is relevant (and the things I just described should be familiar to a devout Christian).
Those who care about issues, such as Glenn Greenwald, and the American Civil Liberties Union, rather than partisan hackery do in fact give a shit, and have given Obama a hard time about this, and some have gone so far as to suggest supporting Ron Paul precisely because of his position on these issues.
Is this anecdotal, or are you asserting that this is a widely shared sentiment?
Historians have found those kinds of sentiments in the journals of Christopher Columbus and other conquistadors, letters from King Ferdinand of Spain, William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, and Capt John Smith's journals as well as in the later US doctrine of Manifest Destiny. There were counterarguments, most notably from Bartolemew de las Casas, but those appear to have been a minority position among those who were literate.
In Europe, American Indians were considered a curiousity more than anything else, but there wasn't any documented outcry over the kind of treatment they received. On the other hand, most of the residents were too busy worrying about how to grow enough food to survive while not being killed by the various wars going on to worry about much else.
"is this link disputed or has it been independently repeated?"
What if it's been independently repeated many times, the vast majority of experts in the field agree with it, and somebody with a financial stake in the political outcome pays a bunch of people to keep on disputing it no matter how stupid they sound? (That's not referring to any specific issue, because it happens in all sorts of areas)
Are you kidding me? And it's a damn good thing we don't - the way countries go and do things that are monumentally catastrophic is by having a population that trusts a dear leader enough to do exactly what they say all the time. Heck, all that "checks-and-balances" business is all about not trusting people that are in positions of power.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time they were seen in action was the Falkland Islands wher they had their asses handed to them by a bunch of natives.
Prince Andrew, Duke of York (who was there) and Margaret Thatcher (PM at the time) would beg to differ, for 2 reasons:
1. Argentina had fairly sophisticated military equipment, with very effective missiles and infantry, and were most definitely not 'a bunch of natives'.
2. The UK won and had 1/3 the casualties of Argentina.
1. Did it solve the original problem it was intended to solve?
2. How many other people had their problem solved by it? (usage stats, as much as possible)
3. How many other people were motivated to improve it? (got involved as developers, testers, documenters, etc)
4. Did it reach a point where it was so darned useful and bug-free that nobody really needed to think seriously about the problem ever again? (e.g. GNU's "bc" utility, which hasn't changed since 2000, and does its job beautifully)
The ultimately successful open source project goes through a lifecycle of something like:
1. solve an immediate problem
2. get developers, testers, documenters involved solving the problem in a wider context
3. solve the problem for a whole lot of users
4. nobody thinks any more work is needed
But really, there's another way to solve this problem, and one that I'm sure at least some people make use of: Plagiarism.
To quote Tom Lehrer:
I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold. Bozhe moi! This I know from nothing. What I'm going to do? But I think of great Lobachevsky and get idea - ahah!
I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk
Whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk
His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk
Whose friend somehow is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk
And when his work is done - ha ha! - begins the fun
From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
By way of Iliysk and Novorossiysk
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run
Yes, to me the news will run
And then I write, by morning, night
And afternoon, and pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
When he finds out I publish first
Also, we also know that Palpatine is actually Sen Joe Lieberman:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Joe+Lieberman+and+Senator+Palpatine
There is no perfect system.
Obligatory reference to the Arrow Impossibility Theorem.
I think it's safe to say that the Germans know all about the risks of totalitarianism. Especially those over the age of 25 living in former East Germany. I'd be very very surprised if they'd forgotten that lesson.
I think what you're referring to is the Free State Project, which is a libertarian effort to implement their ideas in New Hampshire.
It hasn't fallen apart, really - they moved to NH and elected a bunch of state reps (not that difficult, since each represents about 4500 people). They then discovered very quickly that many of their ideas had already been adopted, and received a pretty warm reception from the established political leadership. Anyone who joined up gearing for a political fight would have been a bit surprised to find that instead of a fight they basically got handshakes and smiles.
This was partially possible because New Hampshire has an incredibly responsive and functional state government, and a strong tradition of believing in democracy more than in partisanship. That means, for instance, that the Secretary of State has stayed in his appointed office for a couple of decades, despite several changes in the party affiliation of the governor, because he's very good at his job and treats people fairly.
Also, whoever modded me "Flamebait", that looks an awful lot like "I disagree with this person's political leanings", when everything I wrote was simply verifiable fact about Rick Santorum's Google problem:
Rick Santorum's original comments
Dan Savage on why he found those comments offensive.
In most states, if somebody doesn't pay a judgement, then the plaintiff can do things like have the sherriff show up at their office and take anything of value up to the amount of the judgement. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the individuals have already collected very handsome salaries and let the company go into bankruptcy so the actual money is hidden behind the corporate veil.
They'll use best practices and outside-the-box thinking to rightsize the cloud-based agile empowerment solutions with viral social messaging, of course. Do I have to think of everything around here?
Rick Santorum's name didn't turn up defamatory results on a Google search until he started claiming that sexual acts between consenting adults were morally equivalent to sexual acts involving children and animals. In other words, that's satire and political speech, not a mistake.
Being in a technology related field, I think it would be an interesting test of somebody's security/privacy mentality to ask them for their password, with no intention to use it, but those who refuse to give the password are probably the ones you want to hire.
That may be true, but (assuming your working in a large enough company to have them) HR drones will have the opposite mentality, and assume that anybody that won't tell them all about their private life must be a bad choice. Never mind that such questions may be illegal.
Alternative: One hand in my pocket, and the other one giving a peace sign. Or course, I learned to drive from Alanis Morissette.
An illustrative example, taken from real life:
Many years ago, I was working at a small cell phone company who wanted to introduce a new voice mail system. The dev team's manager found an OSS project that did the job and did it well, but was written for GSM phones when the company was running CDMA phones. Now, we looked through the source code (which we could never have done if it had been closed source), found the portion that was specific to GSM phones, then placed some appropriate ads and found somebody who could create a version of this project that could be used with CDMA phones for an reasonable fee.
End result: We got, for a few thousand dollars, something that we could use that was far cheaper than the commercial alternatives, so we won. The programmer got paid, so he won. The project got the code we had paid for, so they won. Oh, and our customers got a nice new voice mail system, so they won.
That really provides the answer for business-oriented packages. For consumer-oriented packages, I could definitely imagine a software project saying "Everybody who really wants us to add this feature, kick in $5. When we have $X, which is what it will cost us to make it happen, we'll get to work on it."
Sorry, I had originally represented p=n*b, where n was the number of customers and b was the average amount they bought per person, and forgot to edit that out of the final one.
i-c looks like you're trying to say that the investors will eat the cost of the fine.
What I was saying is that investors could end up eating the cost of the fine. Remember, if you increase the price per person too much (b in the final equation), then the number of people buying your stuff drops. So, for instance, if you raise the price $1 per month on a million customers (+$1 million), but lose 20,000 people who chipped in $60 per month (-$1.2 million), your revenue just went down by $200,000. How much you want to raise the price to cover the cost depends on the price elasticity, which is basically the percentage of customers you would lose (in our example, 2%). So it may be that the equation actually looks like p+ 0.2c = g+s+w+m+(i-0.8c)+c.
The exceptions to this limitation are things like health care (where the customer has the choice to buy it or die, and there's no available substitutes) or what are sometimes called snob goods which are bought by people who want to spend a lot of money on the product to demonstrate that they can (e.g. the "I'm Rich" iPhone app that is $999 and does nothing useful).
Oh, sure, I'm just figuring you start with the guy we know was involved in this particular plot (he bragged about it in public) and know exactly where he is (our security agencies make a big effort to track his every movement quite closely). Once you've picked up him, the next step is clearly to waterboard him until he tells us all about his accomplices.
That money will come directly from consumers and subscribers.
That is in fact only half-true, and is identical to the situation for taxes and increased costs of doing business.
The reason for this is the Law of Demand, which causes volume to go down when prices go up for the vast majority of goods. So, if this cost AT&T $20 per customer per month for a long time, a lot of AT&T users would switch to one of their competitors or be priced out of the market completely, and AT&T would lose too many customers. So what will happen is that AT&T will raise their prices by as much as they think they can get away with without reducing volume (say $5 per month), with the remainder turning into reduced profits.
Another way of thinking about it: A corporation can be modeled as an equation in which money comes in from buyers paying an aggregate cost of p for the product, and goes out to government (g), suppliers (s), workers (w), management (m), and investors (i), so that p = g+s+w+m+i. If some other cost c is imposed (from any source), you're making the incorrect assumption that the equation can only be balanced by p+c = g+s+w+m+i+c, when it in fact can be balanced by n*b = g+s+w+m+(i-c)+c or numerous other ways.
We need to take down these terrorists, and if that means ignoring the Bill of Rights and throwing Americans into concentration camps, like we did in WW2, then so be it.
That's a great idea, and I know just where to start! There's a guy who organized the illegal killing of several Americans in Yemen with a large explosion. He currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC. He has many of accomplices working elsewhere in Washington as well as nearby Arlington, VA.
That's just a matter of experience: I've had female bosses who definitely were willing to pull the "I'm your boss and I said so" card.
Also, I saw a woman pull the most Machiavellian move I've seen in management: She was competing against another executive for a promotion, got it (for reasons that are still a mystery to me, since she had run her division into the ground while his division was doing better than expected), and within 36 hours had fired the competitor and everyone associated with him.
My point is, you can't simply ignore the fact that Christians have killed defenseless people, in cold blood, in the name of God. If the examples I listed are insufficient, then you can always look at the Crusades (including the Northern Crusades against pagan Lithuania), the Inquisition, the centuries of warfare between Catholics and Protestants with both sides claiming God was on their side, and pogroms against Jews. If you need a modern example, consider Anders Breivik, who in July 2011 killed 69 people and describing himself as a "cultural Christian" and modern-day crusader.
Incidentally, I'm not an atheist, and did not claim they had the moral high ground. All I'm pointing out was that Christians on the whole are no more able to claim the moral high ground than anybody else as far as not killing people. In other words, if you (or anyone else) really want to claim the moral high ground, you'll have to do so on a basis other than declaring your Christianity - for instance, (truthfully) stating that you have never killed a person, committed adultery, lied in a courtroom, stolen, and/or treat your parents well will help you claim the moral high ground in an argument where that sort of thing is relevant (and the things I just described should be familiar to a devout Christian).
Those who care about issues, such as Glenn Greenwald, and the American Civil Liberties Union, rather than partisan hackery do in fact give a shit, and have given Obama a hard time about this, and some have gone so far as to suggest supporting Ron Paul precisely because of his position on these issues.
"When Herr Goebbels says 'We own the world and space!' we Heil *fart* Heil *fart* right in Herr Goebbels face." - Spike Jones
Is this anecdotal, or are you asserting that this is a widely shared sentiment?
Historians have found those kinds of sentiments in the journals of Christopher Columbus and other conquistadors, letters from King Ferdinand of Spain, William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, and Capt John Smith's journals as well as in the later US doctrine of Manifest Destiny. There were counterarguments, most notably from Bartolemew de las Casas, but those appear to have been a minority position among those who were literate.
In Europe, American Indians were considered a curiousity more than anything else, but there wasn't any documented outcry over the kind of treatment they received. On the other hand, most of the residents were too busy worrying about how to grow enough food to survive while not being killed by the various wars going on to worry about much else.
"is this link disputed or has it been independently repeated?"
What if it's been independently repeated many times, the vast majority of experts in the field agree with it, and somebody with a financial stake in the political outcome pays a bunch of people to keep on disputing it no matter how stupid they sound? (That's not referring to any specific issue, because it happens in all sorts of areas)
influential
Yes, that's somewhat true.
and trusted
Are you kidding me? And it's a damn good thing we don't - the way countries go and do things that are monumentally catastrophic is by having a population that trusts a dear leader enough to do exactly what they say all the time. Heck, all that "checks-and-balances" business is all about not trusting people that are in positions of power.