So some dickhead designer decides at the last second to retool an assembly line because either he made the wrong decision or is just a douche, 8000 people get woken up and shoved on a 12 hour shift and that's a good thing? We're applauding the fact that the Chinese are treated like slave labor now?
I'm not saying that the west hasn't gotten a little soft on entitlement lately, but really? We're going to applaud 12 hour shifts and zero work life balance as a great thing and we're going to call companies that want to operate like that great because they created a couple of entry level support positions at Telcos?
Apple make their products in Asia because their workers in Asia will work for almost nothing even taking into account cost of living differences. They treat those workers like machines which can be turned on and off at will and have no right to any kind of life outside of work(or even the ability to actually live away from work). They then sell those products to western consumers at western prices and pocket the difference, which given they're the most valuable company on earth must be a pretty big difference. They're assholes plain and simple, and when the Chinese workers get too up themselves and start asking for basic things like not working 12 hour shifts 7 days a week, or being able to get a good nights sleep, they'll move somewhere else.
Saying no to working 12 hours a day isn't lazy, it's being human, it's seeing your wife or husband and spending time with your kids, it's being involved in community activities. It's all the things we used to value in the US, but now consider to be lazy. Chinese workers don't do that because they want to or because they have some massive work ethic, they do it because they have no choice.
My point was in response to your comment that selecting for people with blue eyes wouldn't be evolution.
Evolution is the process by which differentiation occurs due to selection processes. Yes, taking a population of humans and killing or sterilizing everyone with a certain eye color is a rather pointless example, but you've changed the genetic makeup of that population. True you haven't created a new species, but evolution is the process of change, not just the end result. You don't just all of a sudden say "Oh, I've got a new species, now evolution has occurred."
Evolution is not just the mutations which create new traits, it's also the ways in which selection pressures modify a population. This is referred to as micro evolution as opposed to macro evolution. Even most creationists believe in micro evolution because we have irrefutable evidence that it exists because we have ourselves caused it to happen. The cow as we currently know it may not have evolved naturally, but it did evolve, it is a distinct species from its wild ancestors and it was created because selection pressures created a scenario wherein individuals which exhibited cow like traits had better chances to survive and breed.
Creating a new species isn't just about having a mutation, mutations happen every day, it's also about conditions favoring that mutation to the extent that a population is created which can eventually separate into a new species. You might start a new species with one creature, but unless that mutation is passed on to a significantly large population you'll never actually get the new species.
This is evolution, and it did happen in months. What it doesn't account for is getting the clumping gene in the first place, and that the likelihood of getting selection pressures as extreme as the ones in the lab is fairly low.
They've proven that yeast has the capacity to evolve in this way given the right selection pressures, which is interesting. With additional research they may be able to prove that many other single celled life forms have the same capacity, from which we may extrapolate that the gene responsible for this behavior either occurred very early or is a relatively minor mutation.
The "more quickly than we believed" part is probably bogus. They applied extreme selection pressures to this particular colony of yeast and so they got an extreme time scale result the same would happen in any species if you extrapolated for the length of a given generation. You could do the same thing to humans for some arbitrary characteristic.
The problem with the intrastate commerce clause is there's pretty much no such thing as interstate commerce anymore. That's probably something that the founding fathers wouldn't have ever anticipated, and it may be that if they had, they'd have come up with a different solution than they did, but that's not the same thing as saying that the current view point violates the constitution as written.
Insofar as the idea that there needs to be some entity to balance power with the federal government, above and beyond the balance of powers within the federal government, this is probably correct. The fundamental issue is that in this modern age where national borders practically don't exist, is there any practical way of giving authority over anything serious to individual states? If you want an example of a shared economic zone without shared governmental authority, take a quick look at the Euro zone right at the moment and draw some parallels. Even the countries which were economically responsible are fucked.
The unfortunate reality of life is that the constitution was written at a time when scale was massively different. The individual states were much more like independent countries and so federation was considerably looser. For the most part the states were left on their own with the federal government coming in every once in a while to referee. In the modern age, very few if any US states could function independently and so the amount of refereeing has increased dramatically, perhaps to the point where there is so little left that the states can actually practically manage that states rights are for the most part an anachronism.
Do we really want to reach a point where your high school education in one state isn't considered good enough in another because the standards are too different because there's no department of education? If another state upstream or upwind is polluting your air or water, how do you resolve that on a state's rights basis? How do you run a nationwide business if every single state has massively different laws and regulatory requirements without going broke? It all sounds nice, leaving government control to the government closest to the people affected, but which layer of government is really closest to the customers of an company like Walmart or Goldman Sachs or a bank? Is that really your city council?
The issue is more that every time he went in, he seemed to start his bid at the Republican's fallback position. Then the republicans asked for something insane, and the compromised somewhere in the middle. Compromise is great, starting at the win win position and then negotiating into a lose win position is stupid.
Except they're not constitutionally minded ones. The constitution explicitly states that the Bill of Rights does not enumerate every right and that it should not be viewed that way, but that doesn't stop pretty much every Republican candidate from reading it that way, especially the Tea Party folks. These same folks would decry the use of the interstate commerce clause to do what it was intended to do simply because there is more interstate commerce these days.
Somewhat ironically, if Al Gore had seemed to care about anything in the universe in 2000 as he obviously did about climate change when he made "An Inconvenient Truth" instead of appearing like some sort of cross between a tree stump and a corpse, he'd probably have become president. Most people sit on one side or the other of the fence, even swing voters, so a 50/50 split tends to indicate that people just voted their side of the fence if either candidate was actually likeable they'd have pulled over enough of the guys from the other side to get a better win ratio. In the great irony of politics, losing 48/52 is actually a bigger success than winning 50.1 to 49.9.
At present nowhere. Unless Montana manages to somehow overturn Citizens United, campaign finance reform is currently unconstitutional, so you'd need to get an amendment up.
Maybe after most of the current court are dead or retired we might have a shot, but until then, it's an amendment or nothing.
Your best shot would probably actually be if the religious crazies get their way and they forget to include corporations in their personhood amendment. Of course you'd have to put up with miscarriages being investigated as murders and potentially birth control being illegal, but it might work.
It doesn't actually, it makes it better, and it gives a third party a decent shot at becoming one of the two, but so long as you have geographical voting it doesn't actually change a whole lot. It makes it easier to shift the center point because you can vote for a more progressive or conservative candidate while still allowing for your lesser of two weevils guy to get in, but the reality is that in most instances, coalition governments aren't all that different than what the US has, just in the US the coalition members are all sort of members of the same party.
In the end you'll end up with a very similar system in any kind of elected government, there will be a center and there will be some folks on the left of that center(for a given meaning of left) and some on the right and those are going to group together. The thing which IRV and even better non geographic representation would allow is for the "center" to shift more easily. The US has essentially been fighting over the same middle point since the Democrats and Republicans swapped sides after WWII while society as a whole is probably working of an entirely different definition of center which isn't even on the same line the parties are fighting over.
Just because Ron Paul wouldn't be allowed to actually implement his agenda and ideals doesn't mean that we shouldn't look at it. He might in actuality have less real power as president than he does now since he wouldn't actually be able to do anything except stop legislation getting passed without support from someone in congress he wouldn't have, but that doesn't mean he'd make a good president.
Obama has been a great disappointment to an awful lot of people. Some of that is more about perception than reality(If Obama had taken the fight to the republicans would he have actually won? Is there somewhere to actually put the remaining few people in Guantanemo Bay? Can we in good conscience stop the war in Afghanistan and let the Taliban come back and do all the things they used to do even if we should never have begun it in the first place?), but I won't argue that he's been disappointing. For all of that though, he's miles more tolerable than anyone the Republicans have fielded.
For a relatively trivial subset of cases yes, and of course just because display is none doesn't mean it's not downloaded.
The general point being is that for anything non trivial trying to handle your viewers with CSS is needlessly complicated and messy. Generally two pages is a much better way of dealing with things.
CSS won't allow you to magically show the same content on a 24 inch screen and a 3 inch one because it's about more than layout at that point. You have to completely change what content is shown to make that work, and CSS simply doesn't support that, not even in CSS3. That's not even taking into account the fact that the entire layout and complex CSS will have to be downloaded even if most if it isn't used, or websites which aren't pure text or where layout matters.
For the most part they don't. In fact I don't know of anyone who actually does that successfully.
The author of this book seems to think it's a good idea, but generally speaking I've never known anyone halfway sane who did it more than once by choice. Sometimes you'll get the content vs presentation brigade self flagellating with this kind of design, but these are the same people who think that the web is a place where you can actually follow best practices and end up with a meaningful result.
Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but the Web is a dirty dirty place. The W3C likes to finally set standards for things that were needed 5 years ago and never for what's needed now, AJAX is a dirty hack which just happens to work well, and everyone on the standards body seems absolutely obsessed with building more and more functionality for static web pages which make up less and less of content and didn't really need any help to begin with. Half of HTML5 is semantic web garbage, which is great in theory, but which is almost entirely focused on last decade's content.
I interpreted the OP as saying that the crap is caused by the fact that the right wing doesn't believe that government can do anything correctly so they have to spend a hundred grand proving that they could correctly write this application and then had no money to actually get it written. That is to say he wasn't saying government or any of the people in it are bad or even particularly inefficient but that the screams that government is bad and all the safety mechanisms that get put in to deal with them are what causes the bad results.
This instance is actually a particularly good example of this. In the budget of any sufficiently large organization, let alone the government, $130k is really a pittance. It's not even particularly ridiculously over priced for what they got. With three platforms and a few hundred device variations you could easily burn through that just getting some example platforms for testing. That hasn't stopped the most of the first dozen posts on this article being about how government is wasteful and we should give it to private enterprise. In response to this of course they'll implement even more over the top safeguards which will make the next one of these they want to write cost double that. Certain kinds of people like to jump up and down if they think the government has poorly spent even one dollar of taxpayer money, so the government has to prove that they've spent every dollar wisely which means for every dollar they spend they end up generating about $20 worth of paperwork. It's not the government's fault, they're at least as efficient as any other large organization especially when you consider that the guys in charge change every few years so office politics is deadly.
In actuality, it's a lot more expensive to create a dozen cupcakes than to create one cake of similar combined size. Sure the batter part of it is the same, but the rest of the process is a lot more labor intensive for cupcakes than cakes. They're harder to cook, harder to ice, and in general are far more fiddly.
The other thing being that currency conversion rates are meaningless. £2 in the UK is not the same as $4 in the US whatever the exchange rate might be. Australia has about parity on the US dollar, but pretty much everything costs more. Petrol here is somewhere in the general vicinity of $US5 per gallon, cost of living is just different.
None of that is really true. The Greeks went broke because they run a tin pot third world country that pretends to be in Europe. No one seems to pay any tax at all and the government is corrupt and inefficient. The Irish went down because they followed NeoCon ideals and let unregulated financial and property markets go wild and then bailed out the banks to the tune of their entire economy. A few years ago they were being hailed as the Free Market dream of Europe. Italy is also corrupt and has been run for the last couple decades by a guy who was much more interested in having lots of sex than actually running the country.
Europe as a whole is doing ok, and the Euro zone is only screwed because they have a single currency and single interest rate across countries with vastly different economies and legal structures which doesn't work. This means that the countries with crappy economies can't get themselves out of trouble and the countries with good economies are getting dragged down.
In no way is Europe going broke because of Universal Health care. The few countries where you can place even some of the blame on social policies were basked cases to begin with.
To the best of my knowledge the stuff they "unsold" was stuff they discovered they actually didn't have the right to sell in the first place because the copyright terms were different than they had believed. Now I still think it was dodgy, but it wasn't based on a choice of content.
The idea of Agile is to ensure that when you hit your fixed deadline a year out you have a project which works. The client picks the priority of all tasks(even if that's not the most efficient way of developing them) so unless the deadline was an absolute joke in the first place the client ends up with a functional piece of software when the deadline hits. They may not have all the features they wanted, but they should, at least in theory, have all the features they needed. Agile can technically allow for bugs to still exist at release if said bugs were considered to be less important than other bugs or features.
You really need someone who can properly prioritize tasks though, and you need to stick to that or the whole thing falls in a heap. That pretty much means you need heavy buy in from your client and that the client(be that internal or external) and that the client sends the right people to test and determine priority, but when it works, it works quite well and when it fails it fails less often and less severely than waterfall would have under the same circumstances.
It doesn't really make you flexible at all, it makes you responsive, which is different. You're able to better understand and meet your client's needs and that makes their lives better, but also makes your life better because you don't spend 12 months building something completely wrong.
Good luck finding somewhere that doesn't uses Scrum these days.
Out of curiosity, what's your beef with it, it's not perfect and it can be abused if you're not doing it right, but it's a hell of a lot less evil than trying to do waterfall.
IANAL, but the answer as far as I'm aware, is that they're a lot like non compete agreements in the sense that the vast majority of them are written overly broad and are unenforceable. If you are careful to never use company time, company equipment or any other company resource and your pet project is different than your normal scope of duties you'll almost certainly win any such case and your employers lawyers will probably advise them not to sue if it looks like you won't roll over.
If you follow all the above with regards to company resources, but write something that's similar to your work, you're in a bit more of a gray area, best case scenario you will probably be required to license said software to your employer at no cost, worst case they may own it, it really depends a lot on the circumstance. This is mostly to prevent you writing crap code at work, and then writing something great at home and selling it back to your employer at extortionate prices.
If you any kind of company resources you'll almost certainly end up with work for hire owned by the company, even if you do it in your own time. The only way you'd retain ownership would be if your employer explicitly granted you it. If you use company time especially you're absolutely screwed(and will probably be fired anyway).
The obvious way around all this of course is to use a bunch of GPL code in your project forcing the GPL license. Under those circumstances it won't really matter who owns the software as they won't be able to change the licensing without a major rewrite and you'll get to keep it, you won't make any money off it, but you'll still have the code and be able to release it.
Conservatives do love a good sales tax, because sales taxes are regressive and target the poor more than the rich. 99% of the batshit libertarian tax policies are sales taxes for that very reason. They might throw in a bit of refunding to make it look good, but they still propose regressive sales taxes.
The problem with flat tax rates and consumption taxes for that matter is that cost of living does not increase linearly with income. So taking $20 away from a guy with $100 has more impact on that person than taking $200,000 away from someone making a million, for all that the percentages are the equal and the $200,000 is a larger number. That's why they're referred to as regressive taxes, because the more money you make the less impact the tax has on you. It's the same reason why Bill Gates can throw huge amounts of money towards charity and still live a very comfortable lifestyle. There's only so much cash you actually need to live so everything after that is gravy.
Stack Overflow is written in C# and JQuery, you can ask a question about anything on there, but you've always had a better shot of getting or finding an answer if you're looking for a.NET web development related question, if only because the people running the site are more likely to know it. The more likely you are to get an answer the more likely you are to visit the site and provide an answer, so the site is skewed towards that particular technology stack. C# is a nice well designed language whereas Javascript is an abomination, so you end up with a lot more Javascript questions.
Slashdot Mirror
So some dickhead designer decides at the last second to retool an assembly line because either he made the wrong decision or is just a douche, 8000 people get woken up and shoved on a 12 hour shift and that's a good thing? We're applauding the fact that the Chinese are treated like slave labor now?
I'm not saying that the west hasn't gotten a little soft on entitlement lately, but really? We're going to applaud 12 hour shifts and zero work life balance as a great thing and we're going to call companies that want to operate like that great because they created a couple of entry level support positions at Telcos?
Apple make their products in Asia because their workers in Asia will work for almost nothing even taking into account cost of living differences. They treat those workers like machines which can be turned on and off at will and have no right to any kind of life outside of work(or even the ability to actually live away from work). They then sell those products to western consumers at western prices and pocket the difference, which given they're the most valuable company on earth must be a pretty big difference. They're assholes plain and simple, and when the Chinese workers get too up themselves and start asking for basic things like not working 12 hour shifts 7 days a week, or being able to get a good nights sleep, they'll move somewhere else.
Saying no to working 12 hours a day isn't lazy, it's being human, it's seeing your wife or husband and spending time with your kids, it's being involved in community activities. It's all the things we used to value in the US, but now consider to be lazy. Chinese workers don't do that because they want to or because they have some massive work ethic, they do it because they have no choice.
My point was in response to your comment that selecting for people with blue eyes wouldn't be evolution.
Evolution is the process by which differentiation occurs due to selection processes. Yes, taking a population of humans and killing or sterilizing everyone with a certain eye color is a rather pointless example, but you've changed the genetic makeup of that population. True you haven't created a new species, but evolution is the process of change, not just the end result. You don't just all of a sudden say "Oh, I've got a new species, now evolution has occurred."
Evolution is not just the mutations which create new traits, it's also the ways in which selection pressures modify a population. This is referred to as micro evolution as opposed to macro evolution. Even most creationists believe in micro evolution because we have irrefutable evidence that it exists because we have ourselves caused it to happen. The cow as we currently know it may not have evolved naturally, but it did evolve, it is a distinct species from its wild ancestors and it was created because selection pressures created a scenario wherein individuals which exhibited cow like traits had better chances to survive and breed.
Creating a new species isn't just about having a mutation, mutations happen every day, it's also about conditions favoring that mutation to the extent that a population is created which can eventually separate into a new species. You might start a new species with one creature, but unless that mutation is passed on to a significantly large population you'll never actually get the new species.
The summary is true, but ultimately misleading.
This is evolution, and it did happen in months. What it doesn't account for is getting the clumping gene in the first place, and that the likelihood of getting selection pressures as extreme as the ones in the lab is fairly low.
They've proven that yeast has the capacity to evolve in this way given the right selection pressures, which is interesting. With additional research they may be able to prove that many other single celled life forms have the same capacity, from which we may extrapolate that the gene responsible for this behavior either occurred very early or is a relatively minor mutation.
The "more quickly than we believed" part is probably bogus. They applied extreme selection pressures to this particular colony of yeast and so they got an extreme time scale result the same would happen in any species if you extrapolated for the length of a given generation. You could do the same thing to humans for some arbitrary characteristic.
The problem with the intrastate commerce clause is there's pretty much no such thing as interstate commerce anymore. That's probably something that the founding fathers wouldn't have ever anticipated, and it may be that if they had, they'd have come up with a different solution than they did, but that's not the same thing as saying that the current view point violates the constitution as written.
Insofar as the idea that there needs to be some entity to balance power with the federal government, above and beyond the balance of powers within the federal government, this is probably correct. The fundamental issue is that in this modern age where national borders practically don't exist, is there any practical way of giving authority over anything serious to individual states? If you want an example of a shared economic zone without shared governmental authority, take a quick look at the Euro zone right at the moment and draw some parallels. Even the countries which were economically responsible are fucked.
The unfortunate reality of life is that the constitution was written at a time when scale was massively different. The individual states were much more like independent countries and so federation was considerably looser. For the most part the states were left on their own with the federal government coming in every once in a while to referee. In the modern age, very few if any US states could function independently and so the amount of refereeing has increased dramatically, perhaps to the point where there is so little left that the states can actually practically manage that states rights are for the most part an anachronism.
Do we really want to reach a point where your high school education in one state isn't considered good enough in another because the standards are too different because there's no department of education? If another state upstream or upwind is polluting your air or water, how do you resolve that on a state's rights basis? How do you run a nationwide business if every single state has massively different laws and regulatory requirements without going broke? It all sounds nice, leaving government control to the government closest to the people affected, but which layer of government is really closest to the customers of an company like Walmart or Goldman Sachs or a bank? Is that really your city council?
The issue is more that every time he went in, he seemed to start his bid at the Republican's fallback position. Then the republicans asked for something insane, and the compromised somewhere in the middle. Compromise is great, starting at the win win position and then negotiating into a lose win position is stupid.
Except they're not constitutionally minded ones. The constitution explicitly states that the Bill of Rights does not enumerate every right and that it should not be viewed that way, but that doesn't stop pretty much every Republican candidate from reading it that way, especially the Tea Party folks. These same folks would decry the use of the interstate commerce clause to do what it was intended to do simply because there is more interstate commerce these days.
Somewhat ironically, if Al Gore had seemed to care about anything in the universe in 2000 as he obviously did about climate change when he made "An Inconvenient Truth" instead of appearing like some sort of cross between a tree stump and a corpse, he'd probably have become president. Most people sit on one side or the other of the fence, even swing voters, so a 50/50 split tends to indicate that people just voted their side of the fence if either candidate was actually likeable they'd have pulled over enough of the guys from the other side to get a better win ratio. In the great irony of politics, losing 48/52 is actually a bigger success than winning 50.1 to 49.9.
At present nowhere. Unless Montana manages to somehow overturn Citizens United, campaign finance reform is currently unconstitutional, so you'd need to get an amendment up.
Maybe after most of the current court are dead or retired we might have a shot, but until then, it's an amendment or nothing.
Your best shot would probably actually be if the religious crazies get their way and they forget to include corporations in their personhood amendment. Of course you'd have to put up with miscarriages being investigated as murders and potentially birth control being illegal, but it might work.
It doesn't actually, it makes it better, and it gives a third party a decent shot at becoming one of the two, but so long as you have geographical voting it doesn't actually change a whole lot. It makes it easier to shift the center point because you can vote for a more progressive or conservative candidate while still allowing for your lesser of two weevils guy to get in, but the reality is that in most instances, coalition governments aren't all that different than what the US has, just in the US the coalition members are all sort of members of the same party.
In the end you'll end up with a very similar system in any kind of elected government, there will be a center and there will be some folks on the left of that center(for a given meaning of left) and some on the right and those are going to group together. The thing which IRV and even better non geographic representation would allow is for the "center" to shift more easily. The US has essentially been fighting over the same middle point since the Democrats and Republicans swapped sides after WWII while society as a whole is probably working of an entirely different definition of center which isn't even on the same line the parties are fighting over.
Just because Ron Paul wouldn't be allowed to actually implement his agenda and ideals doesn't mean that we shouldn't look at it. He might in actuality have less real power as president than he does now since he wouldn't actually be able to do anything except stop legislation getting passed without support from someone in congress he wouldn't have, but that doesn't mean he'd make a good president.
Obama has been a great disappointment to an awful lot of people. Some of that is more about perception than reality(If Obama had taken the fight to the republicans would he have actually won? Is there somewhere to actually put the remaining few people in Guantanemo Bay? Can we in good conscience stop the war in Afghanistan and let the Taliban come back and do all the things they used to do even if we should never have begun it in the first place?), but I won't argue that he's been disappointing. For all of that though, he's miles more tolerable than anyone the Republicans have fielded.
For a relatively trivial subset of cases yes, and of course just because display is none doesn't mean it's not downloaded.
The general point being is that for anything non trivial trying to handle your viewers with CSS is needlessly complicated and messy. Generally two pages is a much better way of dealing with things.
And it doesn't work and never has.
CSS won't allow you to magically show the same content on a 24 inch screen and a 3 inch one because it's about more than layout at that point. You have to completely change what content is shown to make that work, and CSS simply doesn't support that, not even in CSS3. That's not even taking into account the fact that the entire layout and complex CSS will have to be downloaded even if most if it isn't used, or websites which aren't pure text or where layout matters.
For the most part they don't. In fact I don't know of anyone who actually does that successfully.
The author of this book seems to think it's a good idea, but generally speaking I've never known anyone halfway sane who did it more than once by choice. Sometimes you'll get the content vs presentation brigade self flagellating with this kind of design, but these are the same people who think that the web is a place where you can actually follow best practices and end up with a meaningful result.
Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but the Web is a dirty dirty place. The W3C likes to finally set standards for things that were needed 5 years ago and never for what's needed now, AJAX is a dirty hack which just happens to work well, and everyone on the standards body seems absolutely obsessed with building more and more functionality for static web pages which make up less and less of content and didn't really need any help to begin with. Half of HTML5 is semantic web garbage, which is great in theory, but which is almost entirely focused on last decade's content.
I interpreted the OP as saying that the crap is caused by the fact that the right wing doesn't believe that government can do anything correctly so they have to spend a hundred grand proving that they could correctly write this application and then had no money to actually get it written. That is to say he wasn't saying government or any of the people in it are bad or even particularly inefficient but that the screams that government is bad and all the safety mechanisms that get put in to deal with them are what causes the bad results.
This instance is actually a particularly good example of this. In the budget of any sufficiently large organization, let alone the government, $130k is really a pittance. It's not even particularly ridiculously over priced for what they got. With three platforms and a few hundred device variations you could easily burn through that just getting some example platforms for testing. That hasn't stopped the most of the first dozen posts on this article being about how government is wasteful and we should give it to private enterprise. In response to this of course they'll implement even more over the top safeguards which will make the next one of these they want to write cost double that. Certain kinds of people like to jump up and down if they think the government has poorly spent even one dollar of taxpayer money, so the government has to prove that they've spent every dollar wisely which means for every dollar they spend they end up generating about $20 worth of paperwork. It's not the government's fault, they're at least as efficient as any other large organization especially when you consider that the guys in charge change every few years so office politics is deadly.
In actuality, it's a lot more expensive to create a dozen cupcakes than to create one cake of similar combined size. Sure the batter part of it is the same, but the rest of the process is a lot more labor intensive for cupcakes than cakes. They're harder to cook, harder to ice, and in general are far more fiddly.
The other thing being that currency conversion rates are meaningless. £2 in the UK is not the same as $4 in the US whatever the exchange rate might be. Australia has about parity on the US dollar, but pretty much everything costs more. Petrol here is somewhere in the general vicinity of $US5 per gallon, cost of living is just different.
None of that is really true. The Greeks went broke because they run a tin pot third world country that pretends to be in Europe. No one seems to pay any tax at all and the government is corrupt and inefficient. The Irish went down because they followed NeoCon ideals and let unregulated financial and property markets go wild and then bailed out the banks to the tune of their entire economy. A few years ago they were being hailed as the Free Market dream of Europe. Italy is also corrupt and has been run for the last couple decades by a guy who was much more interested in having lots of sex than actually running the country.
Europe as a whole is doing ok, and the Euro zone is only screwed because they have a single currency and single interest rate across countries with vastly different economies and legal structures which doesn't work. This means that the countries with crappy economies can't get themselves out of trouble and the countries with good economies are getting dragged down.
In no way is Europe going broke because of Universal Health care. The few countries where you can place even some of the blame on social policies were basked cases to begin with.
To the best of my knowledge the stuff they "unsold" was stuff they discovered they actually didn't have the right to sell in the first place because the copyright terms were different than they had believed. Now I still think it was dodgy, but it wasn't based on a choice of content.
The idea of Agile is to ensure that when you hit your fixed deadline a year out you have a project which works. The client picks the priority of all tasks(even if that's not the most efficient way of developing them) so unless the deadline was an absolute joke in the first place the client ends up with a functional piece of software when the deadline hits. They may not have all the features they wanted, but they should, at least in theory, have all the features they needed. Agile can technically allow for bugs to still exist at release if said bugs were considered to be less important than other bugs or features.
You really need someone who can properly prioritize tasks though, and you need to stick to that or the whole thing falls in a heap. That pretty much means you need heavy buy in from your client and that the client(be that internal or external) and that the client sends the right people to test and determine priority, but when it works, it works quite well and when it fails it fails less often and less severely than waterfall would have under the same circumstances.
It doesn't really make you flexible at all, it makes you responsive, which is different. You're able to better understand and meet your client's needs and that makes their lives better, but also makes your life better because you don't spend 12 months building something completely wrong.
Good luck finding somewhere that doesn't uses Scrum these days.
Out of curiosity, what's your beef with it, it's not perfect and it can be abused if you're not doing it right, but it's a hell of a lot less evil than trying to do waterfall.
IANAL, but the answer as far as I'm aware, is that they're a lot like non compete agreements in the sense that the vast majority of them are written overly broad and are unenforceable. If you are careful to never use company time, company equipment or any other company resource and your pet project is different than your normal scope of duties you'll almost certainly win any such case and your employers lawyers will probably advise them not to sue if it looks like you won't roll over.
If you follow all the above with regards to company resources, but write something that's similar to your work, you're in a bit more of a gray area, best case scenario you will probably be required to license said software to your employer at no cost, worst case they may own it, it really depends a lot on the circumstance. This is mostly to prevent you writing crap code at work, and then writing something great at home and selling it back to your employer at extortionate prices.
If you any kind of company resources you'll almost certainly end up with work for hire owned by the company, even if you do it in your own time. The only way you'd retain ownership would be if your employer explicitly granted you it. If you use company time especially you're absolutely screwed(and will probably be fired anyway).
The obvious way around all this of course is to use a bunch of GPL code in your project forcing the GPL license. Under those circumstances it won't really matter who owns the software as they won't be able to change the licensing without a major rewrite and you'll get to keep it, you won't make any money off it, but you'll still have the code and be able to release it.
Conservatives do love a good sales tax, because sales taxes are regressive and target the poor more than the rich. 99% of the batshit libertarian tax policies are sales taxes for that very reason. They might throw in a bit of refunding to make it look good, but they still propose regressive sales taxes.
There's a difference between equal and fair.
The problem with flat tax rates and consumption taxes for that matter is that cost of living does not increase linearly with income. So taking $20 away from a guy with $100 has more impact on that person than taking $200,000 away from someone making a million, for all that the percentages are the equal and the $200,000 is a larger number. That's why they're referred to as regressive taxes, because the more money you make the less impact the tax has on you. It's the same reason why Bill Gates can throw huge amounts of money towards charity and still live a very comfortable lifestyle. There's only so much cash you actually need to live so everything after that is gravy.
Stack Overflow is written in C# and JQuery, you can ask a question about anything on there, but you've always had a better shot of getting or finding an answer if you're looking for a .NET web development related question, if only because the people running the site are more likely to know it. The more likely you are to get an answer the more likely you are to visit the site and provide an answer, so the site is skewed towards that particular technology stack. C# is a nice well designed language whereas Javascript is an abomination, so you end up with a lot more Javascript questions.
SPARC was robust, their storage solutions and their x86_64 parts sucked balls.