And, it should be pointed out, we have that - there are thousands of small tech businesses in all sorts of fields.
What happens, of course, is that some of them start building up successes, and then the vulture capitalists get involved, and then the business press goes gaga over them, and then there's a headline IPO, and then they aren't small tech businesses anymore. That's what happened to Microsoft, to Apple, to Google, and to Facebook. And if you are the founder of one of these thousands of small tech businesses, and you had the opportunity to take this kind of ride and make millions, would you really not take it?
This is pointing out one of the many problems with social network BS: The word "friend" has been hijacked and turned into "somebody you kinda sorta know from somewhere" rather than "somebody you choose to spend significant amounts of time with but isn't a family member".
Nobody has 300 real friends, I promise you that much.
In a linguistic sense, "prolly" is a real word. It's a sequence of sounds, with a consistent spelling, that conveys a particular meaning. English is defined by usage, and so that means that new words are always used well before they're codified by Webster's or the OED. Not knowing what "probably" means is an issue, but the use of "prolly" isn't a problem in informal communication. If he's using it in his senior thesis, then there's a problem, but it's not that it's not a real word, it's that it's not a word that is consistent with the academic dialect of English. It's just like how we might so "fo' shizzle" or "y'all" in everyday speech or informal writing, and most everyone would know what we meant, but would never use it in a submission to an academic journal.
So you actually missed an opportunity to teach your nephew about how you have to speak and write differently in different contexts, and about how everything he says on Facebook will probably be seen by a potential employer.
I love the people who seem to think international waters means "You can do whatever you want." No, not really. You can declare yourself to be your own country or whatever but that doesn't matter.
You're leaving out option 3: Nobody cares enough to do anything about it. For instance, if the Brits really cared about Sealand, they could easily take it over.
Not necessarily: 1. A lot of in-person communication is non-verbal. Vocal tone, body language, etc are vital to understanding another person. 2. In-person or telephone communication is a medium that's well suited to discussions with a lot of quick back-and-forth.
For instance, if I'm working out an API with another dev, one fast way to do it is for me and the other dev to sit down, in person, with a whiteboard handy, and talk it out, writing down ideas on the whiteboard, and then when we've agreed, take a picture of (or copy down) everything on the whiteboard. Whereas discussing that over email involves a mental task switch, reading through, thinking out what they have to say, drafting a response, rewriting the response to be more clear, and then switching back to what I was doing. That means at least a 15 minute time cost for a single back-and-forth, as opposed to about 1 minute for the same thing.
You're right that that's the correct solution. But it would have to be an international union in order to function, and would (like other unions have in the past) have to make extraordinary efforts to prevent scabs from coming in and breaking the union.
Plus there are a lot of programmers out there who hate unions for reasons which have nothing to do with enlightened self-interest.
Chronic OT is always a sign of either ineffective people managers, or a broken corporate culture. Always.
As some times people end doing the work load of 2-3 people?
I think GP answered your question. If your company needs 10 people to do a job correctly, and has hired 4 to do it, the fact that those 4 have to work ridiculous hours to get the job done is not a problem with those 4 people.
An interesting piece of this story: If it's allowing companies or governments to lay people off, how can OSS have a higher cost of ownership due to labor costs, as Microsoft has been claiming for much of the last decade?
The solution that someone much smarter than me (Bruce Schneier) has repeatedly proposed is this: When doing something that involves sensitive data, you don't verify identity, you verify transactions. For instance, if you want to transfer money from your bank account, the question is not "Are you smpoole7?", it's "Does smpoole7 really want $150,000 to go to an account in Pakistan?". A smart bank will use alternate ways of contacting you (if they're really worried, they might even ask that you do this in person) to confirm that it is in fact your intent.
This has a lot of ancillary benefits that probably make it worth the expense. For instance, it helps catch errors by the actual owner of the account.
Two options: 1. Stay put until the fire department or emergency operator tells you it's OK to leave. 2. Leave via a stairwell that's far from where the fire is.
That's basically the same approach as what you do if you're on level 60 and there's a fire on level 2.
The problem isn't so much that Islam is irrational (Christianity is just as irrational), the problem is that Islam works much harder to consume the individual with learning the contents of the Koran, leaving much less time for learning how the world actually works.
That's quite wrong: Ask your typical American fundamentalist Christian about whether it's better to spend time studying physics or studying the Bible, and you'll get a very clear answer. Christianity has in some places attempted to define the value of pi by legislation, for instance. And that's even ignoring the usual Christian opposition to the teaching of evolution that continues to the present day.
You also have to explain why during the period between about 750-1200 CE, the Muslim world and Mecca in particular was one of the 2 major centers of scholarship and science (the other being China), while Christian Europe had mostly paltry scientific output throughout the same period.
There's nothing that gives any indication that Islam is any more hostile to science than Christianity, or does any more to crowd out scientific thought with religious thought. Religious idiocy exists in every society and every religion.
Occupy Wall Street was too many miles North of where it should been, and targeting the wrong foe. Just as the Tea Party figured out and OWS was only hinting at, the real problem in the US isn't the rich and corporations but the politicians who use their position to empower the rich and corporations all the while securing themselves their position
First off, there is an Occupy D.C.
Second, there's at least a reasonable question of who's the puppet master and who's the puppet. I for one tend to think politicians work for business, and thus the financial center is exactly the right target. In other words, the US government may be Sauron, but Goldman Sachs et al are Melkor.
Spoken: "Hey babe, did you take out the trash?" "Uh, yep." The hell you did. And now you have to get the trash out before she finds out.
See, I must be one of those people who knows that it's probably better to answer the spoken question with "Nope, thanks for reminding me, I'll get right on it." That's something about actually respecting and liking the person calling me "babe", and knowing she wouldn't be asking the question if she didn't have a legitimate reason for it.
But then again, I'm just honest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid.
Social Security is completely separate. Pays for itself, and has trillions in surplus.
Well, yes and no.
The yes part is that under current law, you're absolutely right.
The no part is that the SSA, in order to access that surplus, has to demand payment on the loans it made to the general treasury, and the people in control of the general treasury don't want to pay them back and have an army to back them up.
Well then, there's only one course of action: We need to recreate the American branch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, recruit candidates, and get them elected. There's a good chance that the population would vote for Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-f'tang-f'tang-ole-biscuitbarrel over a Democrat or a Republican at this point.
I don't mind paying for the elderly, but the program needs to be cut off at its knees now because it is the height of injustice to expect us and Generation X to fund such a horribly mismanaged program now that the Boomers want to retire. They had 1994-2008 to right the ship of state, to try to rebuild the trust fund (which was destroyed on their parents' watch) and ran one of the most irresponsible periods of American government in our history.
To reach that conclusion, you have to have missed a lot of important information: 1. In the late 1980's, the federal government, acting on the advice of Alan Greenspan and others, increased payroll taxes specifically to build up a giant pile of cash for the Boomers to retire on. 2. The Social Security Administration took that pile of cash and invested it in US Treasury bonds, as required by law. They invest in US Treasuries primarily to prevent the risk of corruption and to reduce the risk that the pile of cash will disappear. 3. Congress took that same cash that was invested in US Treasuries, started treating that as income, and spent it, effectively kicking the can down the road. 4. If the general US budget pays off the US Treasuries held by the Social Security Administration, then Social Security will be fine for at least another 40 years.
The only reason Social Security is declared to be in some sort of crisis mode is because it's demanding that the loans they made to the rest of the government be paid back.
The equivalent of this in the private sector would be raiding the pension fund, and then telling people who go to collect on their pensions "Sorry, the money is gone".
How exactly does increasing your income lower that debt?
1. You start spending your income rather than putting more on the credit card. 2. If you're now taking in more than you spend, you pay off the credit card.
And I should point out that in the 1990's, the US government did exactly that. Then some guy named George screwed up the plan by taking the extra money and handing it back saying "never mind, we don't need this, we can just get a higher credit limit to buy the stuff we want".
Slashdot Mirror
And, it should be pointed out, we have that - there are thousands of small tech businesses in all sorts of fields.
What happens, of course, is that some of them start building up successes, and then the vulture capitalists get involved, and then the business press goes gaga over them, and then there's a headline IPO, and then they aren't small tech businesses anymore. That's what happened to Microsoft, to Apple, to Google, and to Facebook. And if you are the founder of one of these thousands of small tech businesses, and you had the opportunity to take this kind of ride and make millions, would you really not take it?
This is pointing out one of the many problems with social network BS: The word "friend" has been hijacked and turned into "somebody you kinda sorta know from somewhere" rather than "somebody you choose to spend significant amounts of time with but isn't a family member".
Nobody has 300 real friends, I promise you that much.
Well, neither does the FTC really. If they did, they might have introduced some actual penalties rather than a slap on the wrist.
In a linguistic sense, "prolly" is a real word. It's a sequence of sounds, with a consistent spelling, that conveys a particular meaning. English is defined by usage, and so that means that new words are always used well before they're codified by Webster's or the OED. Not knowing what "probably" means is an issue, but the use of "prolly" isn't a problem in informal communication. If he's using it in his senior thesis, then there's a problem, but it's not that it's not a real word, it's that it's not a word that is consistent with the academic dialect of English. It's just like how we might so "fo' shizzle" or "y'all" in everyday speech or informal writing, and most everyone would know what we meant, but would never use it in a submission to an academic journal.
So you actually missed an opportunity to teach your nephew about how you have to speak and write differently in different contexts, and about how everything he says on Facebook will probably be seen by a potential employer.
I love the people who seem to think international waters means "You can do whatever you want." No, not really. You can declare yourself to be your own country or whatever but that doesn't matter.
You're leaving out option 3: Nobody cares enough to do anything about it. For instance, if the Brits really cared about Sealand, they could easily take it over.
The power of Woz compels you!
Not necessarily:
1. A lot of in-person communication is non-verbal. Vocal tone, body language, etc are vital to understanding another person.
2. In-person or telephone communication is a medium that's well suited to discussions with a lot of quick back-and-forth.
For instance, if I'm working out an API with another dev, one fast way to do it is for me and the other dev to sit down, in person, with a whiteboard handy, and talk it out, writing down ideas on the whiteboard, and then when we've agreed, take a picture of (or copy down) everything on the whiteboard. Whereas discussing that over email involves a mental task switch, reading through, thinking out what they have to say, drafting a response, rewriting the response to be more clear, and then switching back to what I was doing. That means at least a 15 minute time cost for a single back-and-forth, as opposed to about 1 minute for the same thing.
Here's Schneier's essay describing this approach much better than I did.
A union of programmers would be unstoppable.
You're right that that's the correct solution. But it would have to be an international union in order to function, and would (like other unions have in the past) have to make extraordinary efforts to prevent scabs from coming in and breaking the union.
Plus there are a lot of programmers out there who hate unions for reasons which have nothing to do with enlightened self-interest.
Chronic OT is always a sign of either ineffective people managers, or a broken corporate culture. Always.
As some times people end doing the work load of 2-3 people?
I think GP answered your question. If your company needs 10 people to do a job correctly, and has hired 4 to do it, the fact that those 4 have to work ridiculous hours to get the job done is not a problem with those 4 people.
An interesting piece of this story: If it's allowing companies or governments to lay people off, how can OSS have a higher cost of ownership due to labor costs, as Microsoft has been claiming for much of the last decade?
The solution that someone much smarter than me (Bruce Schneier) has repeatedly proposed is this: When doing something that involves sensitive data, you don't verify identity, you verify transactions. For instance, if you want to transfer money from your bank account, the question is not "Are you smpoole7?", it's "Does smpoole7 really want $150,000 to go to an account in Pakistan?". A smart bank will use alternate ways of contacting you (if they're really worried, they might even ask that you do this in person) to confirm that it is in fact your intent.
This has a lot of ancillary benefits that probably make it worth the expense. For instance, it helps catch errors by the actual owner of the account.
Two options:
1. Stay put until the fire department or emergency operator tells you it's OK to leave.
2. Leave via a stairwell that's far from where the fire is.
That's basically the same approach as what you do if you're on level 60 and there's a fire on level 2.
when it makes no sense or was seemingly written while inebriated.
Given that Islam generally prohibits the consumption of alcohol, inebriation seems unlikely, unless the substance in question was hashish.
The problem isn't so much that Islam is irrational (Christianity is just as irrational), the problem is that Islam works much harder to consume the individual with learning the contents of the Koran, leaving much less time for learning how the world actually works.
That's quite wrong: Ask your typical American fundamentalist Christian about whether it's better to spend time studying physics or studying the Bible, and you'll get a very clear answer. Christianity has in some places attempted to define the value of pi by legislation, for instance. And that's even ignoring the usual Christian opposition to the teaching of evolution that continues to the present day.
You also have to explain why during the period between about 750-1200 CE, the Muslim world and Mecca in particular was one of the 2 major centers of scholarship and science (the other being China), while Christian Europe had mostly paltry scientific output throughout the same period.
There's nothing that gives any indication that Islam is any more hostile to science than Christianity, or does any more to crowd out scientific thought with religious thought. Religious idiocy exists in every society and every religion.
For the uninitiated, this is the explanation put forward by MC Hawking, in one of his really kickin' tracks.
Don't mess with the Hawk-man. Ever.
If you make a joke too funny, you might die laughing. Like this one:
Wenn ist nunstück git und slotemeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das oder die flipperwaldt gersput!
Well, there's clearly a human side to it as well. That means reading Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt and Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram.
Occupy Wall Street was too many miles North of where it should been, and targeting the wrong foe. Just as the Tea Party figured out and OWS was only hinting at, the real problem in the US isn't the rich and corporations but the politicians who use their position to empower the rich and corporations all the while securing themselves their position
First off, there is an Occupy D.C.
Second, there's at least a reasonable question of who's the puppet master and who's the puppet. I for one tend to think politicians work for business, and thus the financial center is exactly the right target. In other words, the US government may be Sauron, but Goldman Sachs et al are Melkor.
or "little people/hoi poloi/peasants," if you prefer
Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!
(And I actually mean that quite seriously)
Spoken:
"Hey babe, did you take out the trash?"
"Uh, yep."
The hell you did. And now you have to get the trash out before she finds out.
See, I must be one of those people who knows that it's probably better to answer the spoken question with "Nope, thanks for reminding me, I'll get right on it." That's something about actually respecting and liking the person calling me "babe", and knowing she wouldn't be asking the question if she didn't have a legitimate reason for it.
But then again, I'm just honest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly ... stupid.
Social Security is completely separate. Pays for itself, and has trillions in surplus.
Well, yes and no.
The yes part is that under current law, you're absolutely right.
The no part is that the SSA, in order to access that surplus, has to demand payment on the loans it made to the general treasury, and the people in control of the general treasury don't want to pay them back and have an army to back them up.
Well then, there's only one course of action: We need to recreate the American branch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, recruit candidates, and get them elected. There's a good chance that the population would vote for Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-f'tang-f'tang-ole-biscuitbarrel over a Democrat or a Republican at this point.
I don't mind paying for the elderly, but the program needs to be cut off at its knees now because it is the height of injustice to expect us and Generation X to fund such a horribly mismanaged program now that the Boomers want to retire. They had 1994-2008 to right the ship of state, to try to rebuild the trust fund (which was destroyed on their parents' watch) and ran one of the most irresponsible periods of American government in our history.
To reach that conclusion, you have to have missed a lot of important information:
1. In the late 1980's, the federal government, acting on the advice of Alan Greenspan and others, increased payroll taxes specifically to build up a giant pile of cash for the Boomers to retire on.
2. The Social Security Administration took that pile of cash and invested it in US Treasury bonds, as required by law. They invest in US Treasuries primarily to prevent the risk of corruption and to reduce the risk that the pile of cash will disappear.
3. Congress took that same cash that was invested in US Treasuries, started treating that as income, and spent it, effectively kicking the can down the road.
4. If the general US budget pays off the US Treasuries held by the Social Security Administration, then Social Security will be fine for at least another 40 years.
The only reason Social Security is declared to be in some sort of crisis mode is because it's demanding that the loans they made to the rest of the government be paid back.
The equivalent of this in the private sector would be raiding the pension fund, and then telling people who go to collect on their pensions "Sorry, the money is gone".
How exactly does increasing your income lower that debt?
1. You start spending your income rather than putting more on the credit card.
2. If you're now taking in more than you spend, you pay off the credit card.
And I should point out that in the 1990's, the US government did exactly that. Then some guy named George screwed up the plan by taking the extra money and handing it back saying "never mind, we don't need this, we can just get a higher credit limit to buy the stuff we want".