That's because Smedley Butler was talking about WWI, which was the most recent major conflict at the time when he had written that.
According to this, your average enlisted Marine is making about $24-30K a year plus room and board. If you apply Butler's rule that no defense industry executive can make more than that, the CEO of Lockheed would go from making $22,000K to $30K, which would still dampen his enthusiasm for the war quite a bit.
You're right, they wouldn't leave it to chance: If they found him, they'd likely just plant a gun on him (if he isn't carrying one) and claim they had to shoot him because he was resisting arrest for rape.
Or to put it another way: If they put the same effort into doing something about Osama bin Laden as they're putting into doing something about Julian Assange, I suspect bin Laden would be either in Gitmo or 6 feet under by now. But the again, maybe that's because Assange committed the cardinal sin of questioning the US military, whereas all Osama's done is blow up a few buildings and since then acted as a convenient Emmanuel Goldstein.
Not necessarily. If I spend, say, $10 billion and win control over Sealand or another relatively worthless chunk of territory, I'm probably not going to win out in the end.
Winners can profit, but neutral parties who trade with both sides can often profit more. For instance, the Dutch made a significant profit as a major supplier of weapons for the Continental Army.in the American Revolution, without experiencing the violence and devastation that go with fighting a war. Most major corporations are effectively neutral traders in wars, which is part of why IBM could make a bunch of cash selling punch card systems to the Third Reich.
It's not so much "free market" versus "monopoly" as much as "competitive market" versus "oligopoly".
When you have 2-3 significant sellers in a market, it's an oligopoly, and that means the rules are different than in a competitive market, because each seller has significant control over the going rate for the commodity (in this case, broadband access). Oligopolies are the source of a lot of studies in economics, because there's significant game theory involved.
For instance, let's say your choices for broadband are between a phone DSL line from company A and a cable line from company B. Now, A and B are competitors, true, but they also have a collective interest in keeping prices from dropping too low. Maybe A has 65% of the market and B has 35%. Now, B can attempt to steal market share from A by undercutting their price, and even succeed, so now B has 65% of the market and A has 35%. But then B wants to make cash from their advantage, so they raise their prices back up to the point where they're comparable to A's, knowing full well that most people won't switch if the prices and service are similar. So far things are good for B, who's now significantly increased their profits. But now A wants those profits, so they undercut B's price, swipe 30% of the market from B, monetizes their gains by raising their price back, and we're right back where we started.
Now, A could respond to B's price cut by cutting their prices even further, but they know that in the end a price war is bad for both companies, so there's a minimum they'll go to, because A will likely be better off by just letting the cycle I just described happen. And since A and B both have a pretty standard price they go back to after the steal-market-share maneuver takes place, the prices for consumers never really drop, which makes this market not much different from a simple monopoly.
All true, but it makes perfect sense if you consider Greyhound's business model.
They're essentially in the business of catering to people who can't drive, and getting them from one place to another as cheaply as possible. The more places they can go, the better a job of that they're doing. If people want to get somewhere quickly, they don't take Greyhound, they take Southwest Airlines.
Forget the being tracked, how about someone waving something in your general direction and having it automatically pay for their stuff instead of your stuff?
In general, though, I'm considering the source. Do you think a guy writing for RFID Journal would state that RFID is a dangerous tool that should never be used for personally identifying information? This seems to be a case of Sinclair's Law: "It is difficult for a man to believe something when his salary depends on not believing it."
Look, I thought it was abundantly clear that Portal was presenting the player with a choice between cake or death. And I have to admit between those choices I'll go with cake.
Regarding the timetable issue, I was chatting with a conductor on an Amtrak train I was on, and it turned out that until quite recently Amtrak wasn't allowed to sue freight rail companies if they disregarded their contractual obligations to Amtrak. So the freight rail companies did just that, which meant that it was not uncommon for a train full of passengers to be forced to be late so that a train full of coal could make its schedule.
The rules have since changed, and the trains have gotten a lot closer to on time as a result. I used to take trains to go from college back to visit my parents, and would generally plan for about a 20% delay. Nowadays I can expect to be there on time most of the time.
How true, how true. Of course, you bring up an interesting side point: Which organization stands to lose the most from a functional rail system with good routes and coverage? Greyhound Bus Lines, hands down.
And that's not an idle issue. For instance, at one point there was consideration of setting up passenger rail service between Boston and Concord NH, with stops at significant cities such as Manchester, NH and Nashua, NH, both of which have a lot of people who are commuting to Boston daily and clogging up the interstates during rush hour. The costs involved in creating such a route would have been relatively low, because there's already track laid for freight rail, and the cities which were likely stops conveniently had their public transit centers about 100 feet from the tracks.
It was shot down, primarily because of opposition by the bus line that is making good money running buses along that exact route. It doesn't matter that rail would have made things faster and more convenient for everybody.
Similar to my technique for diagnosing ADHD back when I was working with kids: Kids with ADHD have a tendency to run around like crazy screaming their heads of, are easily distracted, and have a hard time sitting down, shutting up, and focusing on whatever task the adults give him. Kids without ADHD, by contrast, have a tendency to run around like crazy screaming their heads of, are easily distracted, and have a hard time sitting down, shutting up, and focusing on whatever task the adults give him.
There are some real ADHD issues, just like there are some real autism issues. But there's also an awful lot of diagnoses thrown around because parents and teachers have a hard time accepting that Junior is actually bored, uncared for, awkward, stupid, or pumped full of sugar, and so rather than deal with them as they are they pump 'em full of chemicals and call it a disease.
An example: I used to work for overnight summer camps, and discovered that in a population of about 140 kids there were about 60 diagnosed with some mental disorder (and these were not camps that particularly catered to kids with mental disorders). Most of em were perfectly fine as soon as you dealt with them as if they were 9 rather than if they were 49.
Some extremely important test cases that no level of automation can handle:
- The customer thought he wanted a thingamajig, and you made a perfect thingamajig (as was clearly stated in the requirements document), but it turns out that the thingamajig is confusing to users and he really wants a whatchamacallit instead.
- UI testing of any kind, where the whole point is to see how humans deal with your software and make sure it's easy for humans to use.
IOW, it's not going to happen in the next 10 years.
That's because you forgot to translate "the next 10 years" to the Future Technology Prediction Time Scale: 6 months: Development is in progress, will be ready in about 12 months.
1 year: The marketing department has sold it, so we're starting to get around to telling the engineering types to get moving, and will be ready in about 3 years.
5 years: It sure seems like we oughta be able to build this, but the person making the prediction isn't the one building it so his estimates are wildly off. Quite possibly the technology will be available 20 years from now.
10 years: This one is even more wildly off, and probably coming from somebody who's talking out of his/her ass and figures no one will check on their prediction 10 years from now (and if they do, it won't matter). This technology may conceivably be available 100 years from now.
20 years: Forget it.
You'll notice that the actual time to delivery is an exponential function of the time the predictor states it will take.
First off, try to avoid testing your own work. If your company won't hire proper QA staff (which is stupid of them, but never mind that), then trade off with a co-worker: you'll test his stuff, he tests yours.
Now, your goal is to seek out the flaws in whatever you're testing. Be experimental - try doing things that are stupid and/or malicious. If you see a text input box, try putting in nothing, or putting in "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --", or putting in huge numbers of copies of the letter "A", or tossing in some Unicode surprises to see what happens. If you see a radio button, try every combination you can think of. If you see a date field, try to screw it up with different formats or something that isn't date info at all. You're doing the equivalent of taking a sledgehammer and whacking it as hard as you can manage to make sure that you don't do any damage, so have fun with it.
That said, the best testers are the most anal-retentive people I've ever found working in a tech-related field. They will work out exactly what all the cases are, and what the desired behavior is in each case, and if they don't get exactly what they're expecting they inform you of exactly what they did and what they expected. The best developers, on the other hand, tend to be too focused on the next great new thing to get excited about Test Case 1042-B.
The key thing to understand about him is that Rupert Murdoch and his businesses don't support conservative causes because they believe in conservatism, they support conservative causes because they improve Rupert Murdoch's profit margins. For instance, he doesn't give a damn about gay marriage, but is happy to stir up controversy over gay marriage so that Americans will vote in politicians who will cut taxes on Murdoch and Newscorp.
Most warrants are a matter of public record (the exception to that are FISA warrants, which I'll get to in a minute). "National Security Letters" are specifically not. FISA warrants are (in theory at least) directed at foreign intelligence agents in the US, not at most US citizens.
Another variation on this tactic that I saw in Vermont was a sign on the wall of the library that said "The FBI has not been here. Watch for the discrete removal of this sign."
He asked the US military to help him figure out what was dangerous to the US armed forces, and they refused and started trying to hunt him down and discredit him. He knows he's not an expert, but he's trying to at least make the best attempt he's capable of as a layman. Would you rather he didn't even try?
Now, if your position actually is that only the military has any right to determine what's classified and what's not, I think you're missing the point: The military can and does use classification as a way of hiding things that are embarrassing rather than actually dangerous.
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Who would pay $80 to get their picture taken with this greasy douchebag?
If they'd be able to get away with it, some guy with a cream pie to apply to Blago's face first.
Their real crime was overthrowing the CIA asset who was running the country on behalf of the US. That and living on top of a substantial oil reserve.
That's because Smedley Butler was talking about WWI, which was the most recent major conflict at the time when he had written that.
According to this, your average enlisted Marine is making about $24-30K a year plus room and board. If you apply Butler's rule that no defense industry executive can make more than that, the CEO of Lockheed would go from making $22,000K to $30K, which would still dampen his enthusiasm for the war quite a bit.
You're right, they wouldn't leave it to chance: If they found him, they'd likely just plant a gun on him (if he isn't carrying one) and claim they had to shoot him because he was resisting arrest for rape.
Or to put it another way: If they put the same effort into doing something about Osama bin Laden as they're putting into doing something about Julian Assange, I suspect bin Laden would be either in Gitmo or 6 feet under by now. But the again, maybe that's because Assange committed the cardinal sin of questioning the US military, whereas all Osama's done is blow up a few buildings and since then acted as a convenient Emmanuel Goldstein.
The winner always profits from war.
Not necessarily. If I spend, say, $10 billion and win control over Sealand or another relatively worthless chunk of territory, I'm probably not going to win out in the end.
Winners can profit, but neutral parties who trade with both sides can often profit more. For instance, the Dutch made a significant profit as a major supplier of weapons for the Continental Army.in the American Revolution, without experiencing the violence and devastation that go with fighting a war. Most major corporations are effectively neutral traders in wars, which is part of why IBM could make a bunch of cash selling punch card systems to the Third Reich.
Or, you know, let Maj General Smedley Butler explain it back in the 1930's:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Forget Chewie, what about Gromit?
It's not so much "free market" versus "monopoly" as much as "competitive market" versus "oligopoly".
When you have 2-3 significant sellers in a market, it's an oligopoly, and that means the rules are different than in a competitive market, because each seller has significant control over the going rate for the commodity (in this case, broadband access). Oligopolies are the source of a lot of studies in economics, because there's significant game theory involved.
For instance, let's say your choices for broadband are between a phone DSL line from company A and a cable line from company B. Now, A and B are competitors, true, but they also have a collective interest in keeping prices from dropping too low. Maybe A has 65% of the market and B has 35%. Now, B can attempt to steal market share from A by undercutting their price, and even succeed, so now B has 65% of the market and A has 35%. But then B wants to make cash from their advantage, so they raise their prices back up to the point where they're comparable to A's, knowing full well that most people won't switch if the prices and service are similar. So far things are good for B, who's now significantly increased their profits. But now A wants those profits, so they undercut B's price, swipe 30% of the market from B, monetizes their gains by raising their price back, and we're right back where we started.
Now, A could respond to B's price cut by cutting their prices even further, but they know that in the end a price war is bad for both companies, so there's a minimum they'll go to, because A will likely be better off by just letting the cycle I just described happen. And since A and B both have a pretty standard price they go back to after the steal-market-share maneuver takes place, the prices for consumers never really drop, which makes this market not much different from a simple monopoly.
All true, but it makes perfect sense if you consider Greyhound's business model.
They're essentially in the business of catering to people who can't drive, and getting them from one place to another as cheaply as possible. The more places they can go, the better a job of that they're doing. If people want to get somewhere quickly, they don't take Greyhound, they take Southwest Airlines.
Forget the being tracked, how about someone waving something in your general direction and having it automatically pay for their stuff instead of your stuff?
In general, though, I'm considering the source. Do you think a guy writing for RFID Journal would state that RFID is a dangerous tool that should never be used for personally identifying information? This seems to be a case of Sinclair's Law: "It is difficult for a man to believe something when his salary depends on not believing it."
I'm sure you could get these running under Wine.
Look, I thought it was abundantly clear that Portal was presenting the player with a choice between cake or death. And I have to admit between those choices I'll go with cake.
Regarding the timetable issue, I was chatting with a conductor on an Amtrak train I was on, and it turned out that until quite recently Amtrak wasn't allowed to sue freight rail companies if they disregarded their contractual obligations to Amtrak. So the freight rail companies did just that, which meant that it was not uncommon for a train full of passengers to be forced to be late so that a train full of coal could make its schedule.
The rules have since changed, and the trains have gotten a lot closer to on time as a result. I used to take trains to go from college back to visit my parents, and would generally plan for about a 20% delay. Nowadays I can expect to be there on time most of the time.
How true, how true. Of course, you bring up an interesting side point: Which organization stands to lose the most from a functional rail system with good routes and coverage? Greyhound Bus Lines, hands down.
And that's not an idle issue. For instance, at one point there was consideration of setting up passenger rail service between Boston and Concord NH, with stops at significant cities such as Manchester, NH and Nashua, NH, both of which have a lot of people who are commuting to Boston daily and clogging up the interstates during rush hour. The costs involved in creating such a route would have been relatively low, because there's already track laid for freight rail, and the cities which were likely stops conveniently had their public transit centers about 100 feet from the tracks.
It was shot down, primarily because of opposition by the bus line that is making good money running buses along that exact route. It doesn't matter that rail would have made things faster and more convenient for everybody.
Shouldn't you change your name to "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout" then?
Similar to my technique for diagnosing ADHD back when I was working with kids: Kids with ADHD have a tendency to run around like crazy screaming their heads of, are easily distracted, and have a hard time sitting down, shutting up, and focusing on whatever task the adults give him. Kids without ADHD, by contrast, have a tendency to run around like crazy screaming their heads of, are easily distracted, and have a hard time sitting down, shutting up, and focusing on whatever task the adults give him.
There are some real ADHD issues, just like there are some real autism issues. But there's also an awful lot of diagnoses thrown around because parents and teachers have a hard time accepting that Junior is actually bored, uncared for, awkward, stupid, or pumped full of sugar, and so rather than deal with them as they are they pump 'em full of chemicals and call it a disease.
An example: I used to work for overnight summer camps, and discovered that in a population of about 140 kids there were about 60 diagnosed with some mental disorder (and these were not camps that particularly catered to kids with mental disorders). Most of em were perfectly fine as soon as you dealt with them as if they were 9 rather than if they were 49.
Of course we understood that: Any idiot knows that wool accounts for the other £84.3bn.
Some extremely important test cases that no level of automation can handle:
- The customer thought he wanted a thingamajig, and you made a perfect thingamajig (as was clearly stated in the requirements document), but it turns out that the thingamajig is confusing to users and he really wants a whatchamacallit instead.
- UI testing of any kind, where the whole point is to see how humans deal with your software and make sure it's easy for humans to use.
IOW, it's not going to happen in the next 10 years.
That's because you forgot to translate "the next 10 years" to the Future Technology Prediction Time Scale:
6 months: Development is in progress, will be ready in about 12 months.
1 year: The marketing department has sold it, so we're starting to get around to telling the engineering types to get moving, and will be ready in about 3 years.
5 years: It sure seems like we oughta be able to build this, but the person making the prediction isn't the one building it so his estimates are wildly off. Quite possibly the technology will be available 20 years from now.
10 years: This one is even more wildly off, and probably coming from somebody who's talking out of his/her ass and figures no one will check on their prediction 10 years from now (and if they do, it won't matter). This technology may conceivably be available 100 years from now.
20 years: Forget it.
You'll notice that the actual time to delivery is an exponential function of the time the predictor states it will take.
First off, try to avoid testing your own work. If your company won't hire proper QA staff (which is stupid of them, but never mind that), then trade off with a co-worker: you'll test his stuff, he tests yours.
Now, your goal is to seek out the flaws in whatever you're testing. Be experimental - try doing things that are stupid and/or malicious. If you see a text input box, try putting in nothing, or putting in "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --", or putting in huge numbers of copies of the letter "A", or tossing in some Unicode surprises to see what happens. If you see a radio button, try every combination you can think of. If you see a date field, try to screw it up with different formats or something that isn't date info at all. You're doing the equivalent of taking a sledgehammer and whacking it as hard as you can manage to make sure that you don't do any damage, so have fun with it.
That said, the best testers are the most anal-retentive people I've ever found working in a tech-related field. They will work out exactly what all the cases are, and what the desired behavior is in each case, and if they don't get exactly what they're expecting they inform you of exactly what they did and what they expected. The best developers, on the other hand, tend to be too focused on the next great new thing to get excited about Test Case 1042-B.
Good joke: Why did man first walk upright? A: To free his hands for masturbation.
And of course, the inevitable (SFW) video of this phenomenon.
Well, there is one other option: The only winning move is not to play.
Obviously he's an moron.
The key thing to understand about him is that Rupert Murdoch and his businesses don't support conservative causes because they believe in conservatism, they support conservative causes because they improve Rupert Murdoch's profit margins. For instance, he doesn't give a damn about gay marriage, but is happy to stir up controversy over gay marriage so that Americans will vote in politicians who will cut taxes on Murdoch and Newscorp.
Most warrants are a matter of public record (the exception to that are FISA warrants, which I'll get to in a minute). "National Security Letters" are specifically not. FISA warrants are (in theory at least) directed at foreign intelligence agents in the US, not at most US citizens.
Another variation on this tactic that I saw in Vermont was a sign on the wall of the library that said "The FBI has not been here. Watch for the discrete removal of this sign."
He asked the US military to help him figure out what was dangerous to the US armed forces, and they refused and started trying to hunt him down and discredit him. He knows he's not an expert, but he's trying to at least make the best attempt he's capable of as a layman. Would you rather he didn't even try?
Now, if your position actually is that only the military has any right to determine what's classified and what's not, I think you're missing the point: The military can and does use classification as a way of hiding things that are embarrassing rather than actually dangerous.