Given the silence of the galaxy and the universe in general, and examining outward and our own history, it seems safe to say there are some boundary conditions: 1) Our galaxy has not been mass colonized by any single or multiple set of alien civilizations (barring a Zoo Hypothesis). 2) If alien civilizations do commonly exist, none of them have put forth a fully-engaged attempt to broadcast their existence. 3) Life is delicate but arises quickly and perseveres when environmental conditions allow for it. 4) Evolution tends to become static unless periodically disrupted.
With what we know of chemistry, it is difficult to conceive of any type of life not based on liquid water. No other substance has the unique properties it does. Planets with continuously liquid water are likely relatively rare. It takes a 2nd or 3rd generation metal-rich star to allow for heavier elements to exist. In particular, any planet without a spinning metallic inner core will not have a magnetic shield in place to protect its water from being sandblasted away by solar wind over billions of years (as happened with Mars). It’s one thing to have rocky planet covered with liquid water, but protecting the water for billions of years from slow solar radiation destruction is likely rarer still.
The first 3.5 billion years, all life on Earth was single-celled. Only in the last 500 million years did life evolve in to a complex multicellular variety. Given that the majority of the history of life on Earth was single-celled, this likely means that where it does appear, life probably some portion of the time never evolves past the single celled stage. What evolution requires to become multi-cellular are mutagenic boosts such as ultraviolet radiation. The ozone layer on Earth allows just enough of solar radiation through to promote genetic mutations without being deadly. Many planets with rare, ultra-long-term stable liquid water may lack this evolution jump-starter.
It took 500 million years from the appearance of multicellular life, with several long-term stable periods punctuated by violent upheavals and resets (e.g. dinosaur asteroids extinctions), for the appearance of intelligent life to finally appear. Without major planetary upheavals, possibly multicellular life tends to fall in to static stable long-term dead-ends. Those rare, stable, liquid-water-filled worlds with sufficient mutagens to encourage the development of multicellular life sometimes never get the periodic kick in the pants to reset the course of evolutionary paths out of dead-ends.
Possibly many stable, watery planets with sufficient radiation and punctuated evolutionary disruptions never develop intelligent life. It took 500 million years for it to arise on ours, which is anecdotal evidence that some significant portion of the time, it never arises. Out of the few planets that do evolve intelligent life, a couple questions arise then as to their likely destiny. It seems universally inevitable that intelligent species eventually have to deal with advances in biological and artificial intelligence technology.
How long will it be now before our species obtains relatively full technological control over our genetic code? There will be natural temptations and drives to use the technology to eliminate disease, choose traits, then maybe even super-enhance the physical and mental capabilities of our offspring. Fast forward a thousand years of having this technology of gene splicing and tinkering, will our designed descendants eventually not much resemble the original naturally-evolved species? It’s hard to imagine what stable end-state this technology might result in over the long term. Possibly we could eventually design and create immortal, super-strong, super-intelligent beings which we in our current form would be completely inferior to. Along with those changes, maybe we might seek to eliminate the traditional instinctual drives that pushed us to survive, spread, and procreate. As a matter of societal stab
I believe this event helped to usher in a big long-term promotion wave of pro-business, pro-executive branch authoritarianism. The Fairness Doctrine falling was a fairly major contributor of a decades-long sea change in politics that started back in 1987. That's when Republicans got control of the committee overseeing the FCC and shut down the general rules on raw partisanship and personal attacks on political subjects in the media. I can't tell you how many people (like my dad, a few coworkers, etc.) have been directly peppered--and I would say slowly corrupted--with a drumbeat of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and Fox News types in the world. It used to be if you broadcast to millions, you sort of had to attempt to actually be "fair and balanced" (totally unlike what Fox News is). You had to let public figures have equal unobstructed time to respond when he was attacked and basically lied about. That was gone after the Fairness Doctrine was done away with. Colbert has is right.. now people who watch/listen to these shows become perpetually perturbed, fierce, angry, and brainwashed that the world has simple solutions. The simple solution being to have a strong leader who can make instant decisions based on convictions without a lot of 'endless' debate or fussy accountability.
Offtopic I know, but here are some beefs with Fox and other conservatives that make me shake my head at the state of popular media in the country:
They use hyperbolic, inflammatory commentary spoken by the actual news reporters as they read current events.
Telling people what they want to hear. Basically the sentiment is, "If only all the stupid people would just get out of the way...". Feeds on people's daily sense of frustration.
Straw-man argumentative premises. Supports calling domestic spying "Terrorist Surveillance", and tax cuts for the rich "Tax Relief".
Fringe people are found and presented as examples of the Left's core beliefs.
Sound-byte, meaningless stories are found and presented only to irritate and enflame (One headline story: "Men's group demanding right to not to have to support their biological children since women have right to abortions, claim it's not fair").
Salacious news stories on murders, rapes, trials, celebrities, etc. Encourages an extremist-response view to crime ('kill them all, and let God sort them out' attitude).
'Expert' guests that are given softball questions to provide prepared, propagandistic answers to. Reminds me of a state sponsored speech in Soviet Russia. ("So, how do you think the President should cope with people who don't want to defend the country?")
Over-simplification of most political, cultural, economic, civil liberty realities. Offers simplistic solutions which betray the political and cultural complexities about the subject in this country or the world. Truth is far more complex and consequences would be had by demagogs. (kill them all, nuke'em, let them starve, torture them all, etc.)
Accusatory tone toward all the 'liberal biased media' of mainstream press, drumbeat of 'corrupt and spineless Democrats', etc.
Outright partisan cheerleading for Republican party and Bush. Very excusatory of missteps and lack of wise strategic political judgment. Obviously questionably illegal programs (domestic wiretapping, phone record listings, financial record listings, torture, CIA identify revealing) are given a free pass.
Misleading and missing facts in the story. Example: supports the claim that the President did brief congress on domestic wiretapping.
Alarmist stories on possible terrorism. Example: FBI recently arrested some stooges down in Florida who were recorded taking a fake oath to Al-Qaeda administered by an undercover agent. They have no money, no
This is just business as usual. I've been working in IT for a large Fortune 100 bank for 8 years now, and I'm familiar with the long-term cycles of announcing some news (dropping sales, shifting markets, missed forecast, mergers announcements, whatever), then doing some layoffs. After seeing for a long time how the politics and the employee review process work, I strongly suspect layoffs often aren't as much about a company being economically unhealthy, as about periodic shedding of employee dead weight. In AOL's particular case it sounds rather more economic, but that's atypical.
Large corporations tend to be constantly hiring and growing, unless a hiring freeze is actively on--and even then they make strategic exceptions. All mid and upper-mid managers are ever hungry for a larger team because that boosts their power and profile over time within the company. The whole hiring process in a large corporation is usually a lot less self-aware then in a small business--they don't know who or what they really need for the long term good. So, it can only be so efficient--a lot of screw off and/or incompetent and/or unpleasant-personality people end up getting in to large corporations by putting on a reasonably good face during the interview process. After getting in, they're entrenched. They float around at a few projects underperforming and being disliked, going under a variety of different managers until nobody want to deal with them any more. I've seen some employees do this for years and years. It tends to be damned hard to get rid of them because no lower-level manager wants to have to personally deal with their firing. For HR legal reasons, unless they blatantly break a major company rule or kill someone, you have to painstakingly document exactly why they cannot do their job to fire them for cause. Not to say that everyone who gets laid off is bad, but a lot of times their section has more bad people then not so they get swept up departmentally.
After several years, the barnacle-class of people accumulates until they comprise about 10% to 20% of the mass population. Upper management then periodically recognizes that the company needs to shed some unneeded employees, but know it's perceived as unfair and politically unpalatable to demand personalized firings, so they come up with a neutral reason... a company-wide "slowdown". It serves as a good unchallengeable excuse to get rid of extras and undesirables. To try and do it without using trumped-up news and mass waves invites a constant bunker mentality and an excessive amount of infighting, paranoia, and company politics.
Even though I've read a good number of Asimov's books, I always found his laws to be quite porous and silly. I'm surprised so many people talk about them like they would in any sense be practical to implement in the real world some day.
Asimov himself spend a good chunk of his sci-fi literary energy just investigating loopholes and flaws that could be somehow patched (via 0th law, etc). Anybody with $0.02 of imagination can think up similar holes... What risks of "harms" would a robot define as acceptable? Smoking, drinking, drugs, driving fast, mountain climbing, living in smoggy city, not exercising, overeating, not taking suggested high blood-pressure medication, playing rough football, fighting (as a kid), walking in a bad neighborhood? If they needed to protect you in a bad neighborhood, would they break an assailant's arm to minimally accomplish it it? Or would they prevent you from walking there? If a cop were pointing a gun as the robot's owner (deservedly or not), would he grab the gun away? If a robot were given a gun and were told it had blanks in it (true or not), could it be ordered to rob a bank? As a teller, would you bet your life on the hope of the robot doubting he had blanks in the gun and not pulling the trigger as previously ordered? If you were sick, dying even, would it non-violently steal needed medication for you? Can be a thousand variation on the theme.
So much depends on the consistency of what a robot can 'know'. It would of course always be possible for a spiteful person to use two robots in conjunction, ordering one to get some poison and mix it in to the meal, and ordering another later to go and serve it to their spouse for dinner. The spouse could even be in the Virgin Islands at the time. Neither robot's actions alone to their knowledge would be harmful. Would the robots be responsible for collectively watching out for this eventuality? There are thousands of combinations ending in the same result. In an imperfect world of uncertain outcomes with many variables involved, any intelligent being has to do the best they can surfing along that detail with common sense. It's dangerous just to get out of bed in the morning, but we manage it. In the far future we probably shouldn't assume that living around highly capable but literal-minded robots is ultimately going to be very safe.
Yes I agree that dark matter seems to be a shoddy ad-hoc theory based on observations that the existing formula can't support. I'm really surprised that the scientific community is so monolithic as to march to such a senseless drumbeat without much dissent.
Having said that.. I do remember back in engineering college asking my physics professor about why forces all seems to propagate out at the same diminishing rate. It seems to me a practical coincidence that electromagnetism, gravity, and other basic forces all seemed to drop off in intensity with distance at the rate of 1/r^2. He explained to me that it was a less about physics, and more about geometry. It is a consequence of living in a 3-dimentional universe. It you were to take The Force (his example, I remember him saying generically any force as in from Star Wars 'The Force'), and you let it emanate out equally in spherical manor, then whether it's force A or B or whatever, it will drop off in a ratio of one sphere to another larger sphere.
It's similar to if you were to take a balloon blow it up half way and paint it. It would look a certain color on the surface due to the density of the paint across a certain surface area. Blow up all the way then, and the paint would spread out across a greater surface area and voila, it drops in hue/density as 1/r^2.
I definitely buy the MOND theory. Mainly for it's simplicity and the fact that it works to explain both spinning galaxies and wayward space probes. If true, then what I think it might imply, however, is that our universe has some sort of two-dimensional aspect to it in all directions. Gravity dropping at a rate of 1/r implies a ring-shaped force expanding in a plane. At least, density/intensity wise. But, that's just mho.
Ok, big long rant here. I've been programming for about 6 years now, I've been projects ranging from a mammoth-sized Y2K with 50 programmers slogging over 2 years, to ones where it was just me over a couple weeks. I believe most of the time that XP, and similar incarnations of "technique efficiency boosters", are in practice a waste of time. Oh it's not to say that they're quite entirely useless, they might have some good ideas, but it's just that what they have to offer is an insignificant factor compared to what the real problems of software development typically are.
I submit that development techniques and programming language structures are not what in practice hurts software projects, and therefore they aren't particularly meaningful candidates in the big picture for "fixing". How you document the code as you go, or test iteratively, or storyboard scenarios, or whatever just isn't going to fix the problems. The things that really grind projects down are inefficient and/or bad programmers, poor two-way communication on requirements, and having business analysis and testers without a layman's knowledge of a programmer's technical job. These things are all personal-skills based. I would say XP is great if you happen to have those three things above already whipped, but that's hardly ever the case. I've seen people I work with get all giddy with the thought of fabulous new efficient ways of doing things like with XP.. not even realizing it's just deck chairs on the Titanic. If you don't start with good ingredients, you will never be able to cook up something tasty. Software project managers should just face that fact, and quit looking for boondoggle hyped-up fixes like XP.
You really need skilled developers first and foremost to have a successful project. You need programmers who really know the language, have experience, and have the good judgment of when to quit making the code more complicated. I've seen big bureaucratic companies hire housewives and history majors for real full-time software development jobs. What were they expecting? I don't know, that they would catch on some day I guess. These people struggle, write bad code, and get things done things poorly if at all. They take time from the more qualified programmers by needing fixes and debugging done to their bad code, and to also by needing hand-holding and to keep them up to speed.
For those good programmers, and I've worked with some really sharp guys, the biggest danger for them building a big complicated tank out of their work. Oh, It does everything! Cooks your breakfast, handles every possible contingency, and tries to predict anything you might want to use it for over the next 10 years. They obsess about those unbelievably remote contingencies.. they catch and handle that "OhMyGodAliensHaveInvadedTheEarthException" condition, and then hmm, build something that organizes those errors by tenticle-number and suction-cups-on-fingers or not, and then hmm, etc etc. All having nothing to do with the original goal of the code they were writing. Meanwhile, they took two months longer than they should have to build it and nobody can figure what the hell their code does in less than a week of pouring though it. Software can be such a creative process that they get caught up in the momentum. Being a perfectionist has no place in development work. Do what needs done given all the actual requirements, and then stop! You have other things to get to. Complexity is not a virtue.
Anyway, I think it's about the people- they need to be skilled enough to be competent and mature enough to focus their effort. Get good people on the development team. Get qualified people to design/scope and test the app. Get them to fully communicate with each other. THEN worry about stuff like XP.
I like this quote: "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." Focus on the real world, I say, not on theory. Well, so much for my rant. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the silence of the galaxy and the universe in general, and examining outward and our own history, it seems safe to say there are some boundary conditions: 1) Our galaxy has not been mass colonized by any single or multiple set of alien civilizations (barring a Zoo Hypothesis). 2) If alien civilizations do commonly exist, none of them have put forth a fully-engaged attempt to broadcast their existence. 3) Life is delicate but arises quickly and perseveres when environmental conditions allow for it. 4) Evolution tends to become static unless periodically disrupted.
With what we know of chemistry, it is difficult to conceive of any type of life not based on liquid water. No other substance has the unique properties it does. Planets with continuously liquid water are likely relatively rare. It takes a 2nd or 3rd generation metal-rich star to allow for heavier elements to exist. In particular, any planet without a spinning metallic inner core will not have a magnetic shield in place to protect its water from being sandblasted away by solar wind over billions of years (as happened with Mars). It’s one thing to have rocky planet covered with liquid water, but protecting the water for billions of years from slow solar radiation destruction is likely rarer still.
The first 3.5 billion years, all life on Earth was single-celled. Only in the last 500 million years did life evolve in to a complex multicellular variety. Given that the majority of the history of life on Earth was single-celled, this likely means that where it does appear, life probably some portion of the time never evolves past the single celled stage. What evolution requires to become multi-cellular are mutagenic boosts such as ultraviolet radiation. The ozone layer on Earth allows just enough of solar radiation through to promote genetic mutations without being deadly. Many planets with rare, ultra-long-term stable liquid water may lack this evolution jump-starter.
It took 500 million years from the appearance of multicellular life, with several long-term stable periods punctuated by violent upheavals and resets (e.g. dinosaur asteroids extinctions), for the appearance of intelligent life to finally appear. Without major planetary upheavals, possibly multicellular life tends to fall in to static stable long-term dead-ends. Those rare, stable, liquid-water-filled worlds with sufficient mutagens to encourage the development of multicellular life sometimes never get the periodic kick in the pants to reset the course of evolutionary paths out of dead-ends.
Possibly many stable, watery planets with sufficient radiation and punctuated evolutionary disruptions never develop intelligent life. It took 500 million years for it to arise on ours, which is anecdotal evidence that some significant portion of the time, it never arises. Out of the few planets that do evolve intelligent life, a couple questions arise then as to their likely destiny. It seems universally inevitable that intelligent species eventually have to deal with advances in biological and artificial intelligence technology.
How long will it be now before our species obtains relatively full technological control over our genetic code? There will be natural temptations and drives to use the technology to eliminate disease, choose traits, then maybe even super-enhance the physical and mental capabilities of our offspring. Fast forward a thousand years of having this technology of gene splicing and tinkering, will our designed descendants eventually not much resemble the original naturally-evolved species? It’s hard to imagine what stable end-state this technology might result in over the long term. Possibly we could eventually design and create immortal, super-strong, super-intelligent beings which we in our current form would be completely inferior to. Along with those changes, maybe we might seek to eliminate the traditional instinctual drives that pushed us to survive, spread, and procreate. As a matter of societal stab
I believe this event helped to usher in a big long-term promotion wave of pro-business, pro-executive branch authoritarianism. The Fairness Doctrine falling was a fairly major contributor of a decades-long sea change in politics that started back in 1987. That's when Republicans got control of the committee overseeing the FCC and shut down the general rules on raw partisanship and personal attacks on political subjects in the media. I can't tell you how many people (like my dad, a few coworkers, etc.) have been directly peppered--and I would say slowly corrupted--with a drumbeat of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and Fox News types in the world. It used to be if you broadcast to millions, you sort of had to attempt to actually be "fair and balanced" (totally unlike what Fox News is). You had to let public figures have equal unobstructed time to respond when he was attacked and basically lied about. That was gone after the Fairness Doctrine was done away with. Colbert has is right.. now people who watch/listen to these shows become perpetually perturbed, fierce, angry, and brainwashed that the world has simple solutions. The simple solution being to have a strong leader who can make instant decisions based on convictions without a lot of 'endless' debate or fussy accountability.
Offtopic I know, but here are some beefs with Fox and other conservatives that make me shake my head at the state of popular media in the country:
This is just business as usual. I've been working in IT for a large Fortune 100 bank for 8 years now, and I'm familiar with the long-term cycles of announcing some news (dropping sales, shifting markets, missed forecast, mergers announcements, whatever), then doing some layoffs. After seeing for a long time how the politics and the employee review process work, I strongly suspect layoffs often aren't as much about a company being economically unhealthy, as about periodic shedding of employee dead weight. In AOL's particular case it sounds rather more economic, but that's atypical.
Large corporations tend to be constantly hiring and growing, unless a hiring freeze is actively on--and even then they make strategic exceptions. All mid and upper-mid managers are ever hungry for a larger team because that boosts their power and profile over time within the company. The whole hiring process in a large corporation is usually a lot less self-aware then in a small business--they don't know who or what they really need for the long term good. So, it can only be so efficient--a lot of screw off and/or incompetent and/or unpleasant-personality people end up getting in to large corporations by putting on a reasonably good face during the interview process. After getting in, they're entrenched. They float around at a few projects underperforming and being disliked, going under a variety of different managers until nobody want to deal with them any more. I've seen some employees do this for years and years. It tends to be damned hard to get rid of them because no lower-level manager wants to have to personally deal with their firing. For HR legal reasons, unless they blatantly break a major company rule or kill someone, you have to painstakingly document exactly why they cannot do their job to fire them for cause. Not to say that everyone who gets laid off is bad, but a lot of times their section has more bad people then not so they get swept up departmentally.
After several years, the barnacle-class of people accumulates until they comprise about 10% to 20% of the mass population. Upper management then periodically recognizes that the company needs to shed some unneeded employees, but know it's perceived as unfair and politically unpalatable to demand personalized firings, so they come up with a neutral reason... a company-wide "slowdown". It serves as a good unchallengeable excuse to get rid of extras and undesirables. To try and do it without using trumped-up news and mass waves invites a constant bunker mentality and an excessive amount of infighting, paranoia, and company politics.
Even though I've read a good number of Asimov's books, I always found his laws to be quite porous and silly. I'm surprised so many people talk about them like they would in any sense be practical to implement in the real world some day.
Asimov himself spend a good chunk of his sci-fi literary energy just investigating loopholes and flaws that could be somehow patched (via 0th law, etc). Anybody with $0.02 of imagination can think up similar holes... What risks of "harms" would a robot define as acceptable? Smoking, drinking, drugs, driving fast, mountain climbing, living in smoggy city, not exercising, overeating, not taking suggested high blood-pressure medication, playing rough football, fighting (as a kid), walking in a bad neighborhood? If they needed to protect you in a bad neighborhood, would they break an assailant's arm to minimally accomplish it it? Or would they prevent you from walking there? If a cop were pointing a gun as the robot's owner (deservedly or not), would he grab the gun away? If a robot were given a gun and were told it had blanks in it (true or not), could it be ordered to rob a bank? As a teller, would you bet your life on the hope of the robot doubting he had blanks in the gun and not pulling the trigger as previously ordered? If you were sick, dying even, would it non-violently steal needed medication for you? Can be a thousand variation on the theme.
So much depends on the consistency of what a robot can 'know'. It would of course always be possible for a spiteful person to use two robots in conjunction, ordering one to get some poison and mix it in to the meal, and ordering another later to go and serve it to their spouse for dinner. The spouse could even be in the Virgin Islands at the time. Neither robot's actions alone to their knowledge would be harmful. Would the robots be responsible for collectively watching out for this eventuality? There are thousands of combinations ending in the same result. In an imperfect world of uncertain outcomes with many variables involved, any intelligent being has to do the best they can surfing along that detail with common sense. It's dangerous just to get out of bed in the morning, but we manage it. In the far future we probably shouldn't assume that living around highly capable but literal-minded robots is ultimately going to be very safe.
Yes I agree that dark matter seems to be a shoddy ad-hoc theory based on observations that the existing formula can't support. I'm really surprised that the scientific community is so monolithic as to march to such a senseless drumbeat without much dissent.
Having said that.. I do remember back in engineering college asking my physics professor about why forces all seems to propagate out at the same diminishing rate. It seems to me a practical coincidence that electromagnetism, gravity, and other basic forces all seemed to drop off in intensity with distance at the rate of 1/r^2. He explained to me that it was a less about physics, and more about geometry. It is a consequence of living in a 3-dimentional universe. It you were to take The Force (his example, I remember him saying generically any force as in from Star Wars 'The Force'), and you let it emanate out equally in spherical manor, then whether it's force A or B or whatever, it will drop off in a ratio of one sphere to another larger sphere.
It's similar to if you were to take a balloon blow it up half way and paint it. It would look a certain color on the surface due to the density of the paint across a certain surface area. Blow up all the way then, and the paint would spread out across a greater surface area and voila, it drops in hue/density as 1/r^2.
I definitely buy the MOND theory. Mainly for it's simplicity and the fact that it works to explain both spinning galaxies and wayward space probes. If true, then what I think it might imply, however, is that our universe has some sort of two-dimensional aspect to it in all directions. Gravity dropping at a rate of 1/r implies a ring-shaped force expanding in a plane. At least, density/intensity wise. But, that's just mho.
Amen, brother.
Ok, big long rant here. I've been programming for about 6 years now, I've been projects ranging from a mammoth-sized Y2K with 50 programmers slogging over 2 years, to ones where it was just me over a couple weeks. I believe most of the time that XP, and similar incarnations of "technique efficiency boosters", are in practice a waste of time. Oh it's not to say that they're quite entirely useless, they might have some good ideas, but it's just that what they have to offer is an insignificant factor compared to what the real problems of software development typically are.
I submit that development techniques and programming language structures are not what in practice hurts software projects, and therefore they aren't particularly meaningful candidates in the big picture for "fixing". How you document the code as you go, or test iteratively, or storyboard scenarios, or whatever just isn't going to fix the problems. The things that really grind projects down are inefficient and/or bad programmers, poor two-way communication on requirements, and having business analysis and testers without a layman's knowledge of a programmer's technical job. These things are all personal-skills based. I would say XP is great if you happen to have those three things above already whipped, but that's hardly ever the case. I've seen people I work with get all giddy with the thought of fabulous new efficient ways of doing things like with XP.. not even realizing it's just deck chairs on the Titanic. If you don't start with good ingredients, you will never be able to cook up something tasty. Software project managers should just face that fact, and quit looking for boondoggle hyped-up fixes like XP.
You really need skilled developers first and foremost to have a successful project. You need programmers who really know the language, have experience, and have the good judgment of when to quit making the code more complicated. I've seen big bureaucratic companies hire housewives and history majors for real full-time software development jobs. What were they expecting? I don't know, that they would catch on some day I guess. These people struggle, write bad code, and get things done things poorly if at all. They take time from the more qualified programmers by needing fixes and debugging done to their bad code, and to also by needing hand-holding and to keep them up to speed.
For those good programmers, and I've worked with some really sharp guys, the biggest danger for them building a big complicated tank out of their work. Oh, It does everything! Cooks your breakfast, handles every possible contingency, and tries to predict anything you might want to use it for over the next 10 years. They obsess about those unbelievably remote contingencies.. they catch and handle that "OhMyGodAliensHaveInvadedTheEarthException" condition, and then hmm, build something that organizes those errors by tenticle-number and suction-cups-on-fingers or not, and then hmm, etc etc. All having nothing to do with the original goal of the code they were writing. Meanwhile, they took two months longer than they should have to build it and nobody can figure what the hell their code does in less than a week of pouring though it. Software can be such a creative process that they get caught up in the momentum. Being a perfectionist has no place in development work. Do what needs done given all the actual requirements, and then stop! You have other things to get to. Complexity is not a virtue.
Anyway, I think it's about the people- they need to be skilled enough to be competent and mature enough to focus their effort. Get good people on the development team. Get qualified people to design/scope and test the app. Get them to fully communicate with each other. THEN worry about stuff like XP.
I like this quote: "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." Focus on the real world, I say, not on theory. Well, so much for my rant. Thanks.