1. Make it really easy to use and feature-full, to build a user base. 2. Attempt to monetize it by loading it with a ton of ads and other annoyances. 3. Sell to investors for big bucks. 4. Users get fed up and leave, leaving a hulking mess.
This is of course quite strange. In any decently run nefarious conspiracy, the only way in would be for a ragtag bunch of misfits to engage in ninja-like operations to infiltrate a top-secret high-security building. So clearly, the people running the global warming conspiracy are completely incompetent when it comes to conspiring. They don't even try to hide their facilities or the people working on it, and most of their key communications occur in a public forum. I'm telling ya, they need to talk to the Illuminati on how to properly organize themselves.
That's because the folks in %other_state% voted for somebody who promised to bring home the bacon, even if that involved screwing over the country.
In case you're interested, according to the Cato Institute and several other sources, the states you should hate for doing this are, in order from worst to least bad, Mississippi, West Virginia, Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Montana, Vermont, Alabama, Iowa, Maine, and Kentucky. One important aspect of that list is that it's not really linked to any particular party - Democrats and Republicans both like feeding from the federal trough.
And "privatisation" is also spin, because what they really mean by that is "Transfer a large sum of money from the public treasury to the ownership of one or more politically connected corporations".
For example, take cruise missiles: Right now, instead of the US DoD hiring a bunch of people to design and build missiles for $X, instead they go to a defense contractor, who in turn hires a bunch of people to design and build missiles for $X and charges the DoD $X+$Y. So in effect, what's different between the DoD just building missiles and hiring a contractor to build missiles is that $Y goes from the public to the owners of the contractor company.
I think your mistake is thinking that all people of the appropriate sex are alike. If you try to "figure out" women or men as a group, you'll just drive yourself crazy. If you try to build something with a particular person, it's a lot easier, and also means that if things don't work out that there are plenty of other people out there with whom you can try again.
So far I have yet to meet any happily married males (or females for that matter). Even the ones who CLAIM to be happy fill their conversations with backstabbing comments about their spouse. Who needs that?
You need to pick some better married friends. Because I know plenty of happily married people, ranging from newlyweds to people celebrating their 50th anniversary. What seems to help: 1. Getting married for the right reasons, like genuinely liking the whole of other person, rather than liking their money, or their looks, or their (future) children. 2. Both sides of the relationship focused more on "what can I do for my partner" or "what can I contribute to the family unit" rather than "what can my partner do for me". 3. Working at it, and believing the relationship is more important than other things. I've known couples that were close to divorcing when they were in their late 40's, who are now happy and caring couples 15 years later because they decided to go through marital counseling and really figure out why they had gotten married in the first place. 4. Having a good income coming in. Serious money problems are one of the leading causes of marital arguments and divorce. 5. Being willing to genuinely forgive the partner. This matters a lot, given that about half of all married people have an affair at some point. (Alternately, open relationships can sometimes solve this problem) 6. Each partner having a social life beyond their spouse.
Also, what they may be going for is a situation in which they can truthfully advertise "We sponsored a contest for lots of hackers to find bugs, and they couldn't find anything." (while carefully omitting the fact that the hackers in question were all 11-year-olds)
There's another flaw too, which is this: "Hey kids, want to make way more than that lame iPad? If your hack is really clever, sell it to our totally legitimate Russian company for $15,000." (Actually, that's a problem with all white hat hacking, but kids are generally easier to entice because they haven't developed such flaws as a sense of morality.
Thing is, with civil service rules, you don't lose your job in that kind of situation.
I have an acquaintance who actually is dealing with that right now. He publicly demonstrated that the methods that his supervisor demanded he use to determine the purity of gold in coins at the US Mint were faulty, allowing corrupt dealers to substitute in other metals. In the private sector, he would have been fired. In the public sector, he still has a job: his supervisors have done their best to make that job miserable (making a GS-13 bag coins all day), but they aren't able to stop him from keeping a roof over his head.
Actually, I've read sundials fairly regularly - If I have a compass but not a watch, or vice versa, knowing how to read a sundial allows you to approximately determine either the direction you're travelling or time of day based on the shadow of any convenient tree. I would have made use of stellar navigation just last night if there had been less light pollution - I'd gotten slightly lost, and was basing my turns on my estimates of which direction I was facing. Had I seen either of the Dippers, I'd have been able to determine where I was trying to get to.
But I have to admit I've never made a flint spearpoint.
The US is one of the very few countries to get a stable democracy out of a revolution. That's not what usually happens.
We know exactly why it happened, too: 1. George Washington made the conscious decision to give up power, twice: In December 23, 1783, he resigned his commission in the army, rather than trying to use that army to take over the budding United States. And in March of 1797, he again gave up power by refusing to be run again for President. He could have fairly easily turned himself into a dictator on both occasions. 2. The enemies of the United States had a really difficult time getting to the United States to attack them. That was one reason the Americans won the Revolutionary War, and also a major difference between the French and American Revolutions - in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the United States didn't have 4 well-equipped professional armies attacking them, which gave their leaders breathing room to make several major mistakes (including the Articles of Confederation, the Whiskey Rebellion, and starting the North American War of 1812).
The idea that local things get decided locally sounds all well and good, but what qualifies as a local thing?
Consider these issues:
- Is it OK for somebody to own slaves?
- Can a particular locality to demand that all residents practice Christianity? How about a particular form of Christianity?
- How much in taxes a locality should collectively have to cough up to support a larger governmental body such as a state or federal government? Do the local residents decide how they come up with that money, or does the larger body dictate who pays what?
Lots of people have been killed over all of these.
Being in a military almost always requires risky behavior (the biggest exception is the drone pilots who are taking as much risk as your average kid playing an XBox).
One of the more interesting aspects of Athenian democracy was that some political authority was given to people based on names drawn out of a hat. Individually, each of those people had less authority than the elected leaders, but collectively they could steer the ship of state.
I mean, imagine a system where they just picked somebody at random in your area to be your Congressman. At the very least, I'm not convinced they'd do any worse than the Congress we have now.
I'm sure that he, along with other good staunch conservatives, would be unhappy with a Metro-centric interface, because it's only a short step from that to some sort of Cross-Platform interface, and from there it could end up completely Homogenous and involve multiple machines.
It seems like part of what he's trying to point out here is that there may be developers trying to cram in what are really new features into 3.5 by declaring them bugs and pushing them into RC's, rather than waiting until the next release. This behavior wouldn't surprise me in the least.
I actually wasn't on the team that had this happen to them, but it was the second situation, and I was part of an exodus that occurred over the year following that mess.
One thing that I've learned, working in a bit of a project management capacity, is that for a lot of businesspeople, the only time frame they actually understand is "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW!"
In fact, I only really remember 1 project where there wasn't an issue. End result: We finished what we had originally set out to do 2 weeks ahead of schedule, added some polish for a week, and released it a week early. All because the smart business manager and project managers had done everything they could to allow the development team to succeed: (1) Determined their project schedule from the development teams' estimates rather than the business manager's enthusiasm, (2) left appropriate time for mistakes to happen, (3) fought any attempt at scope creep, and (4) ensured that people who weren't on the project kept out of the hair of those working on the project.
Seems like the service they're intending to sell is a believable reason for manager A to blame the failure of a software project on manager B. In large companies, that's extremely valuable.
The one thing where I think agile might help is in reducing the impact of this scenario (which I watched really happen): 1. Marketing team presents a design of a web page to the development team, saying "This is exactly what we want". 2. Development team works night and day to make that web page completely functional, conforming perfectly to marketing team's every whim (burning out developers in the process). 3. Development team presents the design to marketing team, on time. Marketing team promptly announces that they hate it, ignoring all protests involving a side-by-side comparison between what the page does and what they asked for.
With more frequent iterations, there's a chance that the difference between what the marketing team asked for and what they actually wanted will be evident sooner.
For the most part, though, the basic deal with software developers is: 1. Hire competent developers. 2. Give them clear instructions about what you need. 3. Trust that they will do their best to get what you need done as quickly as they reasonably can.
“we want to know if an organism’s history limits its future and if evolution always leads to a single, defined point or whether evolution has multiple solutions to a given problem.”
I think the real answer is that the FSM carried out his design with correct application of His Noodly Appendages.
My point is that 50,000 armed people talking rebellion would probably look much more like a domestic enemy of a (theoretically) constitutional government than a 50,000 unarmed people talking protest.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Make it really easy to use and feature-full, to build a user base.
2. Attempt to monetize it by loading it with a ton of ads and other annoyances.
3. Sell to investors for big bucks.
4. Users get fed up and leave, leaving a hulking mess.
Additional codemonkey response: He's missing a semicolon after "'sucks'".
How the heck does FOIA (a US law directed at the US executive branch) have any applicability to a university in the UK?
This is of course quite strange. In any decently run nefarious conspiracy, the only way in would be for a ragtag bunch of misfits to engage in ninja-like operations to infiltrate a top-secret high-security building. So clearly, the people running the global warming conspiracy are completely incompetent when it comes to conspiring. They don't even try to hide their facilities or the people working on it, and most of their key communications occur in a public forum. I'm telling ya, they need to talk to the Illuminati on how to properly organize themselves.
That's because the folks in %other_state% voted for somebody who promised to bring home the bacon, even if that involved screwing over the country.
In case you're interested, according to the Cato Institute and several other sources, the states you should hate for doing this are, in order from worst to least bad, Mississippi, West Virginia, Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Montana, Vermont, Alabama, Iowa, Maine, and Kentucky. One important aspect of that list is that it's not really linked to any particular party - Democrats and Republicans both like feeding from the federal trough.
And "privatisation" is also spin, because what they really mean by that is "Transfer a large sum of money from the public treasury to the ownership of one or more politically connected corporations".
For example, take cruise missiles: Right now, instead of the US DoD hiring a bunch of people to design and build missiles for $X, instead they go to a defense contractor, who in turn hires a bunch of people to design and build missiles for $X and charges the DoD $X+$Y. So in effect, what's different between the DoD just building missiles and hiring a contractor to build missiles is that $Y goes from the public to the owners of the contractor company.
I think your mistake is thinking that all people of the appropriate sex are alike. If you try to "figure out" women or men as a group, you'll just drive yourself crazy. If you try to build something with a particular person, it's a lot easier, and also means that if things don't work out that there are plenty of other people out there with whom you can try again.
So far I have yet to meet any happily married males (or females for that matter). Even the ones who CLAIM to be happy fill their conversations with backstabbing comments about their spouse. Who needs that?
You need to pick some better married friends. Because I know plenty of happily married people, ranging from newlyweds to people celebrating their 50th anniversary. What seems to help:
1. Getting married for the right reasons, like genuinely liking the whole of other person, rather than liking their money, or their looks, or their (future) children.
2. Both sides of the relationship focused more on "what can I do for my partner" or "what can I contribute to the family unit" rather than "what can my partner do for me".
3. Working at it, and believing the relationship is more important than other things. I've known couples that were close to divorcing when they were in their late 40's, who are now happy and caring couples 15 years later because they decided to go through marital counseling and really figure out why they had gotten married in the first place.
4. Having a good income coming in. Serious money problems are one of the leading causes of marital arguments and divorce.
5. Being willing to genuinely forgive the partner. This matters a lot, given that about half of all married people have an affair at some point. (Alternately, open relationships can sometimes solve this problem)
6. Each partner having a social life beyond their spouse.
Also, what they may be going for is a situation in which they can truthfully advertise "We sponsored a contest for lots of hackers to find bugs, and they couldn't find anything." (while carefully omitting the fact that the hackers in question were all 11-year-olds)
There's another flaw too, which is this: "Hey kids, want to make way more than that lame iPad? If your hack is really clever, sell it to our totally legitimate Russian company for $15,000." (Actually, that's a problem with all white hat hacking, but kids are generally easier to entice because they haven't developed such flaws as a sense of morality.
Thing is, with civil service rules, you don't lose your job in that kind of situation.
I have an acquaintance who actually is dealing with that right now. He publicly demonstrated that the methods that his supervisor demanded he use to determine the purity of gold in coins at the US Mint were faulty, allowing corrupt dealers to substitute in other metals. In the private sector, he would have been fired. In the public sector, he still has a job: his supervisors have done their best to make that job miserable (making a GS-13 bag coins all day), but they aren't able to stop him from keeping a roof over his head.
And also, in the immortal words of Dan Quayle, "The future will be better tomorrow."
Actually, I've read sundials fairly regularly - If I have a compass but not a watch, or vice versa, knowing how to read a sundial allows you to approximately determine either the direction you're travelling or time of day based on the shadow of any convenient tree. I would have made use of stellar navigation just last night if there had been less light pollution - I'd gotten slightly lost, and was basing my turns on my estimates of which direction I was facing. Had I seen either of the Dippers, I'd have been able to determine where I was trying to get to.
But I have to admit I've never made a flint spearpoint.
Well, I think they should reallocate funds from the Ministry of Silly Walks to pay for it then.
The US is one of the very few countries to get a stable democracy out of a revolution. That's not what usually happens.
We know exactly why it happened, too:
1. George Washington made the conscious decision to give up power, twice: In December 23, 1783, he resigned his commission in the army, rather than trying to use that army to take over the budding United States. And in March of 1797, he again gave up power by refusing to be run again for President. He could have fairly easily turned himself into a dictator on both occasions.
2. The enemies of the United States had a really difficult time getting to the United States to attack them. That was one reason the Americans won the Revolutionary War, and also a major difference between the French and American Revolutions - in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the United States didn't have 4 well-equipped professional armies attacking them, which gave their leaders breathing room to make several major mistakes (including the Articles of Confederation, the Whiskey Rebellion, and starting the North American War of 1812).
The idea that local things get decided locally sounds all well and good, but what qualifies as a local thing?
Consider these issues:
- Is it OK for somebody to own slaves?
- Can a particular locality to demand that all residents practice Christianity? How about a particular form of Christianity?
- How much in taxes a locality should collectively have to cough up to support a larger governmental body such as a state or federal government? Do the local residents decide how they come up with that money, or does the larger body dictate who pays what?
Lots of people have been killed over all of these.
Being in a military almost always requires risky behavior (the biggest exception is the drone pilots who are taking as much risk as your average kid playing an XBox).
One of the more interesting aspects of Athenian democracy was that some political authority was given to people based on names drawn out of a hat. Individually, each of those people had less authority than the elected leaders, but collectively they could steer the ship of state.
I mean, imagine a system where they just picked somebody at random in your area to be your Congressman. At the very least, I'm not convinced they'd do any worse than the Congress we have now.
I'm sure that he, along with other good staunch conservatives, would be unhappy with a Metro-centric interface, because it's only a short step from that to some sort of Cross-Platform interface, and from there it could end up completely Homogenous and involve multiple machines.
It seems like part of what he's trying to point out here is that there may be developers trying to cram in what are really new features into 3.5 by declaring them bugs and pushing them into RC's, rather than waiting until the next release. This behavior wouldn't surprise me in the least.
I actually wasn't on the team that had this happen to them, but it was the second situation, and I was part of an exodus that occurred over the year following that mess.
One thing that I've learned, working in a bit of a project management capacity, is that for a lot of businesspeople, the only time frame they actually understand is "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW!"
In fact, I only really remember 1 project where there wasn't an issue. End result: We finished what we had originally set out to do 2 weeks ahead of schedule, added some polish for a week, and released it a week early. All because the smart business manager and project managers had done everything they could to allow the development team to succeed: (1) Determined their project schedule from the development teams' estimates rather than the business manager's enthusiasm, (2) left appropriate time for mistakes to happen, (3) fought any attempt at scope creep, and (4) ensured that people who weren't on the project kept out of the hair of those working on the project.
What are they trying to sell?
Seems like the service they're intending to sell is a believable reason for manager A to blame the failure of a software project on manager B. In large companies, that's extremely valuable.
The one thing where I think agile might help is in reducing the impact of this scenario (which I watched really happen):
1. Marketing team presents a design of a web page to the development team, saying "This is exactly what we want".
2. Development team works night and day to make that web page completely functional, conforming perfectly to marketing team's every whim (burning out developers in the process).
3. Development team presents the design to marketing team, on time. Marketing team promptly announces that they hate it, ignoring all protests involving a side-by-side comparison between what the page does and what they asked for.
With more frequent iterations, there's a chance that the difference between what the marketing team asked for and what they actually wanted will be evident sooner.
For the most part, though, the basic deal with software developers is: 1. Hire competent developers. 2. Give them clear instructions about what you need. 3. Trust that they will do their best to get what you need done as quickly as they reasonably can.
“we want to know if an organism’s history limits its future and if evolution always leads to a single, defined point or whether evolution has multiple solutions to a given problem.”
I think the real answer is that the FSM carried out his design with correct application of His Noodly Appendages.
My point is that 50,000 armed people talking rebellion would probably look much more like a domestic enemy of a (theoretically) constitutional government than a 50,000 unarmed people talking protest.