He does have one very legitimate concern, and that is that the platform can easily be forked, potentially ending up in a situation like old-style Unix, where each vendor had different incompatible versions of Unix (HPUX, AIX, etc).
That said, most of his other stuff sounded like "You're making it way too easy to use to create applications!"
That means that the only way to effect change is to subvert one of the political parties. The Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party people have been eating through the Republicans like a chestburster from Aliens. We need to do the same to the Democratic party to make it more progressive, and various people have been trying.
But you see, that involves work. It's much easier to decry the system than to fix our country.
That's one possible strategy. Another possible strategy is that you keep working to make the Republicans so idiotic that they're irrelevant, and then encourage the liberal Democrats (Franken, Kucinich et al) to split off from the corporate-owned Democrats (Nelson, Dodd, et al) and form their own party. This sort of thing did happen twice before in American history, which is why we're now mostly voting for Democrats and Republicans rather than Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, or Whigs.
Another strategy is to go after the conservative loonies on their own turf, and try to take over the Republican Party. That's happened over issues of race relations several times.
Their conclusion is perfectly logical: they have Yahoo Research listed as one of their "collaborators", and are apparently selling a system of their own which is Android-based but (in their opinion) better than the standard Android.
First, it assumes that the pgsql developers of importance can be bought. Our world is decadent, but not everyone has a price tag.
Really? To quote Tom Lehrer: "It's so nice to have integrity, I'll tell you why: 'Cause if you really have integrity, that means your price is very high."
While I'd probably be resistant to being bought out, if the price were high enough I would at least consider it. If I were in that position, I'd think about taking the big bucks, retiring from my day job, and working on and donating to other open source projects (and probably some other worthy causes as well) while enjoying my comfortable retirement.
And the wonderful thing about open source licenses is that it would be very easy for someone else to take up my hard work, so as far as I was concerned somebody just paid me big bucks for nothing at all.
Well, here's a pretty good example from near where I currently live: Cleveland Public Power (publicly owned, as the name suggests) versus FirstEnergy of Ohio (a private utility). These two companies serve a very similar customer base in roughly the same region, practically overlapping in places.
During the 2003 Northeast blackout (caused by FirstEnergy), CPP had its customers' power on about a full day ahead of FirstEnergy. The municipal power company in a different town where I was living at the time had my power back within approximately 1 hour of the start of the blackout.
Oh, and the rates were and are somewhat cheaper, without any taxpayer subsidy.
Actually, the real real solution is probably a publicly owned utility handling telecom and ISP, because publicly owned utilities have a history of giving better prices and service than their private counterparts for doing similar jobs.
Yes, there are corporate interests on the side of Net Neutrality, but they probably aren't media companies, for a couple of key reasons: 1. A lot of media companies have business ties to ISPs. Time Warner in particular is guilty of this. 2. If they pay the extra to ISPs, they gain an advantage over any upstart competitors. It produces a significant barrier to entry for, say, a successful blogger or independent news site.
Your argument relies on the countermeasures (the government's reaction) having no impact, ie absent the countermeasures, terrorism would not be substantively more prevalent than today. You have only to look at Israel to see that countermeasures are able to have a discernible positive impact in reducing terrorism. If there were no countermeasures, then it is likely that there would be substantially more terrorism, and the chances of being harmed in a terrorist incident would increase accordingly.
Your argument relies on countermeasures being proven effective, when there's no indication that they are. For Israel, while their internal security is extremely effective, what's not so clear is whether their more offensive countermeasures (e.g. missile attacks on Hamas militants) are anywhere near as useful. Among other things, a lot of the more offense-oriented responses tend to create terrorists at least as fast as you kill them: if you kill a bad guy, his son, his brother, his father, etc are likely to take up the cause.
Similarly, a key part of the British response to IRA bombings was not to get all freaked out about them.
This sounds a lot like the control mechanism for radios on the Heart of Gold, where you wave your fingers in the general direction of the device and hope you get something good.
I would have had infinite respect for a politician who responded to a terrorist attack by shrugging and suggesting that the best course of action is to invest in lightening rods, because they are a shit ton cheaper than this mindless security theater and will save more lives with a billionth the cost.
I blame a lot of the political reaction to terrorism on the Vietnam War. Really.
Starting the Vietnam War was really really stupid. Doing so violated the oldest rule in the book (never get involved in a land war in Asia), but when LBJ finally bit the bullet and ended it, 3 political narratives started that are still a key part of modern-day US politics: 1. The stab-in-the-back: that the military would have won if only those darned liberals had had the guts to keep fighting. Besides, they're on the communists' side. 2. The Democrats are wimpy: regardless of the fact that WWI, WWII, and a good portion of the Cold War were fought by Democrats, the idea was that LBJ stopped the war more-or-less because he was a chicken. Later that got amplified by Jimmy Carter not using military force to deal with the Iran hostages. 3. need to show the world that we're still in charge: One of the primary motivations for the Project for the New American Century.
So any reaction to terrorism that doesn't involve blowing things up is seen as a wimpy stab in the back that gives up America's superpower status, and is considered political suicide.
If someone tried to start a union where I work, and I found out about it, I'd do everything in my power to get them canned as fast as possible.
You do realize that firing someone for attempting to organize is illegal (unless you are part of the critical infrastructure e.g. air traffic controller) in the US, right? It happens, to be sure, but it's illegal.
No, I'm saying that at the time the project was given to me, I was offered absolutely no reward whatsoever. For instance, they could have at the time said "and for your hard work on this, we'll give you a $2000 bonus". They didn't, just said "do this or you're fired". In 20/20 hindsight, it was in fact the right decision, but that was because management was feeling generous.
And in fact there was a few months later a similar project in which the entire tech team was worked effectively double-shifts for months, and despite assurances that our work would be recognized we haven't seen a dime extra.
Compare that to sales teams who are routinely given a 10-15% cut of whatever they sell.
The one used by the indigenous people in Britain was more like modern Irish (not that you hear that much anymore, either).
My understanding is that the Irish language is actually getting preserved fairly well, in large part because the Irish people and government decided a while back that their language was a good way to stick it to the English invaders as well as recognizing Ireland's own cultural heritage (much like the revival of hurling and Gaelic football). About half of the Irish speak it to some degree, and most study it as part of their public school curriculum.
And as far as Nordic raiders are concerned, don't forget that a lot of modern English is also due to the Norman Conquest, when French-rooted words started moving in.
I'll give you an example: I was pulled onto a project where we had 60 days to come up with a method of handling an acquisition that would make the company about $10 million. During the kickoff meeting (at which was we discussed the need for extensive overtime, getting up at 3 AM to launch the product to production, and so on), I asked what us developers would get as a reward for our hard work. I was told, and I quote, "You get to keep your job."
Now, could I have stood up for myself and refused to work like that without some sort of reward? Yes. And it's likely I'd be unemployed right now as a result, and equally likely that the rewards I ended up with (which involved a significant raise several months down the line) put me ahead of where I'd be had I made a fuss and stomped off. In addition, in the area I live in many of the other places I could work treat their people far worse. So for each individual the correct thing to do is often to keep your head down and take it, even if it sucks.
The only way out of that is some sort of collective action, probably a unionized IT workforce. There are 2 major reasons this doesn't happen:
1. It disagrees with a lot of developers' politics. They associate unions with Democrats (justifiably), and so if they are Republicans or libertarians or anarcho-capitalists, they dislike the idea of forming a union, even if it would help them out significantly.
2. The constant threat of outsourcing. If you succeeded in getting a union for all IT workers in the US, most companies would say "fine, all the development and administration work will be done by H1B recipients or done in Bangalore."
To summarize the summary of the summary: People are a problem.
On the upside, a book like this, if written in CxO language rather than techy language, could be a useful tool for a lower echelon of management to use to convince the upper echelons of management that they need to give a damn about security. What you'd need along with the horror stories is the financial impact to the company ("they screwed up these 5 things and lost $50 million in lawsuits" has more impact than just "they screwed up these 5 things, here's how to not do that"), and a demonstration that the risk is real.
For most programming, discrete is very useful, as well as being one of the more fun math courses you can take. It definitely helps in understanding CS theory, and a lot of the more interesting CS problems out there are graph theory questions (e.g. vertex coloring). If you're looking at, say, attacking the whole P vs NP-complete question, that's the way to go.
However, if you're expecting to do game or scientific programming, then the vectors, calculus, and statistical work of the other course will probably serve you better.
The absolute last standard I'd use for picking courses is which one is easier/harder (which the assistant might also be doing, just pushing you in the other direction). It depends a lot on who's teaching what, for starters. Plus, in college, your goal should be to learn something, not just to take the "easy" classes and get out of there with a good GPA.
1. There exist distinguished but elderly scientists who are strong atheists (that is, believe that God cannot exist). 2. Clarke's First Law. Ergo, God exists.
Of course, there's a much bigger question that gets raised by all this: If we've come to the point where the best way to enforce a law against growing pot is to run a heat sensor by everyone's house and see what comes up, maybe it's not worth the effort. Fourth Amendment issues are one of the major arguments for putting an end to the war on drugs.
Anyways, I'm going to point out that the companies do have to cut something if their revenue is down. Your a manager trying to figure out how to keep things within budget. Your significant expenses are: salaries, benefits, office space, office utilities, raw materials, equipment maintenance, and fringe benefits. Which do you choose?
Salaries and benefits are probably untouchable unless you lay people off. Being a reasonably benevolent business, you don't want to lay people off, and you're in some cases legally obligated not to reduce salaries or benefits.
Office space, supplies, and utilities can possibly be reduced, but the short-term expense of doing so makes the prospect daunting at best.
Raw materials and equipment maintenance might be targetable for a short period of time, but eventually will yurt your product.
That leaves fringe benefits. So while it's unpleasant, it's less unpleasant than the alternatives. Personally, I don't give a damn about most of these, because they're usually half-assed attempts to convince people to be happy working somewhere even if they're being underpaid.
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He does have one very legitimate concern, and that is that the platform can easily be forked, potentially ending up in a situation like old-style Unix, where each vendor had different incompatible versions of Unix (HPUX, AIX, etc).
That said, most of his other stuff sounded like "You're making it way too easy to use to create applications!"
That means that the only way to effect change is to subvert one of the political parties. The Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party people have been eating through the Republicans like a chestburster from Aliens. We need to do the same to the Democratic party to make it more progressive, and various people have been trying.
But you see, that involves work. It's much easier to decry the system than to fix our country.
That's one possible strategy. Another possible strategy is that you keep working to make the Republicans so idiotic that they're irrelevant, and then encourage the liberal Democrats (Franken, Kucinich et al) to split off from the corporate-owned Democrats (Nelson, Dodd, et al) and form their own party. This sort of thing did happen twice before in American history, which is why we're now mostly voting for Democrats and Republicans rather than Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, or Whigs.
Another strategy is to go after the conservative loonies on their own turf, and try to take over the Republican Party. That's happened over issues of race relations several times.
Sounds like a job for Radioactive Man!
Easy answer for why not none:
"With luck we'll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: The Search for more Money."
Yes, but that's because I'm listening to the really long version of "In a gadda-da-vida" right now.
Their conclusion is perfectly logical: they have Yahoo Research listed as one of their "collaborators", and are apparently selling a system of their own which is Android-based but (in their opinion) better than the standard Android.
First, it assumes that the pgsql developers of importance can be bought. Our world is decadent, but not everyone has a price tag.
Really? To quote Tom Lehrer:
"It's so nice to have integrity, I'll tell you why:
'Cause if you really have integrity, that means your price is very high."
While I'd probably be resistant to being bought out, if the price were high enough I would at least consider it. If I were in that position, I'd think about taking the big bucks, retiring from my day job, and working on and donating to other open source projects (and probably some other worthy causes as well) while enjoying my comfortable retirement.
And the wonderful thing about open source licenses is that it would be very easy for someone else to take up my hard work, so as far as I was concerned somebody just paid me big bucks for nothing at all.
Well, here's a pretty good example from near where I currently live: Cleveland Public Power (publicly owned, as the name suggests) versus FirstEnergy of Ohio (a private utility). These two companies serve a very similar customer base in roughly the same region, practically overlapping in places.
During the 2003 Northeast blackout (caused by FirstEnergy), CPP had its customers' power on about a full day ahead of FirstEnergy. The municipal power company in a different town where I was living at the time had my power back within approximately 1 hour of the start of the blackout.
Oh, and the rates were and are somewhat cheaper, without any taxpayer subsidy.
Actually, the real real solution is probably a publicly owned utility handling telecom and ISP, because publicly owned utilities have a history of giving better prices and service than their private counterparts for doing similar jobs.
Yes, there are corporate interests on the side of Net Neutrality, but they probably aren't media companies, for a couple of key reasons:
1. A lot of media companies have business ties to ISPs. Time Warner in particular is guilty of this.
2. If they pay the extra to ISPs, they gain an advantage over any upstart competitors. It produces a significant barrier to entry for, say, a successful blogger or independent news site.
Your argument relies on the countermeasures (the government's reaction) having no impact, ie absent the countermeasures, terrorism would not be substantively more prevalent than today. You have only to look at Israel to see that countermeasures are able to have a discernible positive impact in reducing terrorism. If there were no countermeasures, then it is likely that there would be substantially more terrorism, and the chances of being harmed in a terrorist incident would increase accordingly.
Your argument relies on countermeasures being proven effective, when there's no indication that they are. For Israel, while their internal security is extremely effective, what's not so clear is whether their more offensive countermeasures (e.g. missile attacks on Hamas militants) are anywhere near as useful. Among other things, a lot of the more offense-oriented responses tend to create terrorists at least as fast as you kill them: if you kill a bad guy, his son, his brother, his father, etc are likely to take up the cause.
Similarly, a key part of the British response to IRA bombings was not to get all freaked out about them.
This sounds a lot like the control mechanism for radios on the Heart of Gold, where you wave your fingers in the general direction of the device and hope you get something good.
Obviously, "The deafening roar of anticipation" is so deafening we can't hear it!
I would have had infinite respect for a politician who responded to a terrorist attack by shrugging and suggesting that the best course of action is to invest in lightening rods, because they are a shit ton cheaper than this mindless security theater and will save more lives with a billionth the cost.
I blame a lot of the political reaction to terrorism on the Vietnam War. Really.
Starting the Vietnam War was really really stupid. Doing so violated the oldest rule in the book (never get involved in a land war in Asia), but when LBJ finally bit the bullet and ended it, 3 political narratives started that are still a key part of modern-day US politics:
1. The stab-in-the-back: that the military would have won if only those darned liberals had had the guts to keep fighting. Besides, they're on the communists' side.
2. The Democrats are wimpy: regardless of the fact that WWI, WWII, and a good portion of the Cold War were fought by Democrats, the idea was that LBJ stopped the war more-or-less because he was a chicken. Later that got amplified by Jimmy Carter not using military force to deal with the Iran hostages.
3. need to show the world that we're still in charge: One of the primary motivations for the Project for the New American Century.
So any reaction to terrorism that doesn't involve blowing things up is seen as a wimpy stab in the back that gives up America's superpower status, and is considered political suicide.
If someone tried to start a union where I work, and I found out about it, I'd do everything in my power to get them canned as fast as possible.
You do realize that firing someone for attempting to organize is illegal (unless you are part of the critical infrastructure e.g. air traffic controller) in the US, right? It happens, to be sure, but it's illegal.
No, I'm saying that at the time the project was given to me, I was offered absolutely no reward whatsoever. For instance, they could have at the time said "and for your hard work on this, we'll give you a $2000 bonus". They didn't, just said "do this or you're fired". In 20/20 hindsight, it was in fact the right decision, but that was because management was feeling generous.
And in fact there was a few months later a similar project in which the entire tech team was worked effectively double-shifts for months, and despite assurances that our work would be recognized we haven't seen a dime extra.
Compare that to sales teams who are routinely given a 10-15% cut of whatever they sell.
The one used by the indigenous people in Britain was more like modern Irish (not that you hear that much anymore, either).
My understanding is that the Irish language is actually getting preserved fairly well, in large part because the Irish people and government decided a while back that their language was a good way to stick it to the English invaders as well as recognizing Ireland's own cultural heritage (much like the revival of hurling and Gaelic football). About half of the Irish speak it to some degree, and most study it as part of their public school curriculum.
And as far as Nordic raiders are concerned, don't forget that a lot of modern English is also due to the Norman Conquest, when French-rooted words started moving in.
Great in theory. In practice, not so good.
I'll give you an example: I was pulled onto a project where we had 60 days to come up with a method of handling an acquisition that would make the company about $10 million. During the kickoff meeting (at which was we discussed the need for extensive overtime, getting up at 3 AM to launch the product to production, and so on), I asked what us developers would get as a reward for our hard work. I was told, and I quote, "You get to keep your job."
Now, could I have stood up for myself and refused to work like that without some sort of reward? Yes. And it's likely I'd be unemployed right now as a result, and equally likely that the rewards I ended up with (which involved a significant raise several months down the line) put me ahead of where I'd be had I made a fuss and stomped off. In addition, in the area I live in many of the other places I could work treat their people far worse. So for each individual the correct thing to do is often to keep your head down and take it, even if it sucks.
The only way out of that is some sort of collective action, probably a unionized IT workforce. There are 2 major reasons this doesn't happen:
1. It disagrees with a lot of developers' politics. They associate unions with Democrats (justifiably), and so if they are Republicans or libertarians or anarcho-capitalists, they dislike the idea of forming a union, even if it would help them out significantly.
2. The constant threat of outsourcing. If you succeeded in getting a union for all IT workers in the US, most companies would say "fine, all the development and administration work will be done by H1B recipients or done in Bangalore."
To summarize the summary of the summary: People are a problem.
On the upside, a book like this, if written in CxO language rather than techy language, could be a useful tool for a lower echelon of management to use to convince the upper echelons of management that they need to give a damn about security. What you'd need along with the horror stories is the financial impact to the company ("they screwed up these 5 things and lost $50 million in lawsuits" has more impact than just "they screwed up these 5 things, here's how to not do that"), and a demonstration that the risk is real.
For most programming, discrete is very useful, as well as being one of the more fun math courses you can take. It definitely helps in understanding CS theory, and a lot of the more interesting CS problems out there are graph theory questions (e.g. vertex coloring). If you're looking at, say, attacking the whole P vs NP-complete question, that's the way to go.
However, if you're expecting to do game or scientific programming, then the vectors, calculus, and statistical work of the other course will probably serve you better.
The absolute last standard I'd use for picking courses is which one is easier/harder (which the assistant might also be doing, just pushing you in the other direction). It depends a lot on who's teaching what, for starters. Plus, in college, your goal should be to learn something, not just to take the "easy" classes and get out of there with a good GPA.
No. The one and only argument is (or ought to be), that the people don't want pot-growing to be illegal. This is not, however, the case.
Even if we buy that argument (which I don't: constitutional issues trump majority rule in the US), you still lose your argument:
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may062009/mj_zogby_5-6-09.php
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/34651/most_americans_support_legalizing_marijuana
1. There exist distinguished but elderly scientists who are strong atheists (that is, believe that God cannot exist).
2. Clarke's First Law.
Ergo, God exists.
Something seems a bit flawed there.
He works in IT. Those sorts of female officemates are kept far far away from him, and very near senior management for some reason.
Of course, there's a much bigger question that gets raised by all this: If we've come to the point where the best way to enforce a law against growing pot is to run a heat sensor by everyone's house and see what comes up, maybe it's not worth the effort. Fourth Amendment issues are one of the major arguments for putting an end to the war on drugs.
Also, he's no longer Secretary of Homeland Security.
Don't you mean "Paging Mr Tarkin"?
Anyways, I'm going to point out that the companies do have to cut something if their revenue is down. Your a manager trying to figure out how to keep things within budget. Your significant expenses are: salaries, benefits, office space, office utilities, raw materials, equipment maintenance, and fringe benefits. Which do you choose?
Salaries and benefits are probably untouchable unless you lay people off. Being a reasonably benevolent business, you don't want to lay people off, and you're in some cases legally obligated not to reduce salaries or benefits.
Office space, supplies, and utilities can possibly be reduced, but the short-term expense of doing so makes the prospect daunting at best.
Raw materials and equipment maintenance might be targetable for a short period of time, but eventually will yurt your product.
That leaves fringe benefits. So while it's unpleasant, it's less unpleasant than the alternatives. Personally, I don't give a damn about most of these, because they're usually half-assed attempts to convince people to be happy working somewhere even if they're being underpaid.