So one solution might be that, instead of embedding the patent etc info in the mould, it's applied as a "latter step" via a stamp or something of the like. I don't think it would be incredibly hard to do one of the following:
* Include it in the manual (easier to modify the print than a mould) instead * Include it on a sticker (it's not like lost-sticker = no patent) * Stamp it on (ink) after the mould is released * Stamp it in (heated press) after the mould is released
Yes, if a large portion of those version are old, with known exploits, and unpatched... Any less secure than other phones? Maybe not compared to some, though Apple is actually fairly "pushy" when it comes to the "there's a new update for your phone/itunes/whatever" thing.
What pisses me off is companies like Motorola. My phone has known bugs with known fixes, but since it's a Milestone and not a Droid, I can't upgrade the firmware myself, and they've yet to have an NA release date for Droid 2.2. Eventually, I'm sure they'll just abandon the phone and leave it un-patchable in favour of the newer model, Jerks.
My next phone will still likely be Android, but likely an HTC (or another brand that's not evil, no more moto for me).
In terms of states VS federation, a lot of things have changed over time, though. During formation, how long did it take to travel from one state to another? How long did it take trade between distant states or - possibly more importantly - the world.
There are some things that would make sense to keep its nose out of, but a lot of things that don't. Now I'm just a nosy know Canadian, but the variety in US laws/policy makes my head spin.
Some examples include things like laws regarding age-of-consent, gay marriage, etc. Say you a girlfriend/boyfriend who's straddling the legal border and a year or two younger than you, no problem in state X... but what if she lives just across the "magical line" in state Y... now you're a criminal. How about two persons of the same gender get married in state X and receive marital benefits, but then need to move to state Y due to work relocation or whatever. Are they still married?
In Canada, my personal peeve is traffic laws/rules. In Quebec, you CANNOT turn right on a red light. In most other provinces, you can safely and legally treat a red much like you would a stop-sign. My favourite though is the "blinking green light." In Ontario, it means the same as a left-turn arrow (protected turn, you can turn and nobody else is supposed to be crossing or going straight), but go west to BC, and it means that it's a pedestrian-controlled intersection (it never turns red unless a pedestrian hits the button), so anyone *thinking* they have a safe-left may get nicely T-boned.
There are plenty of things that should be managed at a federal level. Lots of things that *aren't*, in fact. The big problem is the things that - as you said - should *not* be managed by the fed and yet they've slowly clawed them in.
Also, the *book syntax has been around for a long time in teaching software, longer than I remember facebook being popular. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head that I've seen teachers using are "gradebook" and "markbook"
FB really doesn't have a case here, and hopefully the defendants have enough cash to fight back... (and hopefully the jurisdiction in question has SLAPP laws).
Having lived with this scenario for about a year, I'd say that the biggest issue is not whether devs have access to production, but rather HOW they have access to production, and what the change-management process it.
Access to allow them to push updates from a proper repository to the live server: OK Full SSH/root access to the production boxes. HELL NO.
I can't think of how many times my head nearly exploded because a dev pushed some massive freaking update to a live server and torched the box. We're talking uploading an entirely new app, without proper stress-testing, to a live in-use server. End result... leaks, bugs, and the live site explodes. Sometimes it can take hours or DAYS to figure out why resource usage suddenly jumps through the roof, and all the time the way the dev talked the system had been in place for months (being fairly new to that company, I wasn't really sure myself).
Oh look... thousands of SQL queries locking the tables due to unoptimized database tables... OK lets sift few a few THOUSAND files trying to find where that little query is running from...
Again, the big issue wasn't with devs having access to production. It was with devs having privileged access to production, and either a) Messing with installed modules/software/whatever... that's an admin's job b) Installing updates without checking, and without notifying other departments.
Similar issues ensued with even just basic updates in cases where there were unchecked bad links to internal-only testing URL's, etc. Of course, when stuff was broken, nobody would be willing to take ownership for the mistake, which meant that IT spent excessive time tracking down the changes to fix them, and then the offender(s) have gone home for the day several hour ago while the admins are spending tons of (salary... unpaid) OT tracking down why the server crashed-and-burned.
A change-management system does fix a lot of that. Something as simple as "git" should be enough for many situations, and easy enough for people to understand. It allows you to revert a major code-screwup, isolate when bugs occurred, and find which people are submitting unapproved updates that break servers. If you still need to restrict dev access to a production machine, then only allow admins to do the "git pull", upon approval of the edits made by dev.
There's plenty of arrogance to go around between development and sysadmins, and often some overlap between the two roles. Having a change-management system and proper access controls adds a big factor of accountability and rollback to things, as well as helping to prevent people from clobbering each others updates.
How many truely "poor" people have a GPS+cellphone or a SPOT device. I could see possibly the cellphone because it's fairly useful/important for job-seekers, etc, but a SPOT (device cost+yearly subscription) or a GPS?
Nah, these are just pampered idiots with too many fancy toys and not enough common sense. Up here in Canada they do charge you the cost of dispatching emergency services if you use your SPOT etc without a real emergency.
I think that - twilight aside - the genre of female-friendly flicks has also improved for us guys. We've gone from sappy tear-jerker romance to "romantic comedy", which at least throws in a few chuckles for the guys.
Even twilight wouldn't be *too* bad if not for the whole wreck-the-genre-twinkly-vampire crud. At least there was *some* action and play towards the overall vampire meme (at least the first movie, haven't been dragged to the rest yet). Hopefully it will work well as a setup for some of the better series' such as "True Blood" etc, which has enough hot girls for guys to enjoy, muscular man-butt for the women, and plot for both.
It would also be a "nice to have" if google could see to porting some version of their talk client so that I don't have to use my web-browser for the "official" plugin, that would be nice (though I've heard that empathy can do VV, I haven't had an opportunity to test that yet).
Oh, and while they're busy porting... how about a voice+video version for the Android, or at least voice.
Perhaps having less "noise" from the drives themselves over the soundcard, etc might be a possibility with higher-quality shielded cables. However, having a better sample ON-DISK is bullsh*t. 1's and 0's... either they're correct or they aren't, but there's no "in between"
Are any of the original fat machines still in warranty? I had assumed that any of the one with hardware-enabled backwards-compatibility were past warranty by now...
Before you get into full anti-union mode, I should mention that if the mentioned school-district is like any around here, the administrators are NOT union. In fact, in most jobs the admins are not-union, otherwise you'd have some pretty major conflicts-of-interest.
The technical staff are likely union, but not the school administration.
Which almost always means: 60% off the crappy product that nobody ever buys (or a pair of socks, whatever) and 5-10% off the overinflated prices of anything else in the store...
So yeah, it does happen fairly regular in other industries.
We have a rather attractive female co-worker who had supposedly done some nude modelling. The jackasses in my department was all a-drool about it, and trying to figure out her "modelling name"
Having actually talked to the lady in question a few times on and off myself, she was actually a nice person. It was easy for many to make the "office decoration" assumption because of her attractiveness and attire, but she really was one nicer people in the office and was always free with a smile, a hello, and sometimes conversation. It really bothered me to see my co-workers spreading that sorta thing around the office, and that type of behaviour was actually one of the reasons I left that particular company.
If you find out your co-worker had been in "adult" movies or whatever, is that going to change your view of him/her as a person? Are you still going to be able to look that person in the eye? Personally, I would have been happier to think of my co-worker as the genuinely nice person who always had a smile and polite hello for her co-workers, rather than what others seemed to make her out to be.
I seem to remember hearing about some military personnel (submariners, I believe) that did this when on leave, except with the added caveat that they warmed up the lotion beforehand, and then chose a theatre that had an upper balcony...
My older (but still dual-core) yet not officially supported motherboard, disagrees. As does my SB-Live 5.1 Surround card (works with the 3rd-party KX Audio driver if you can find it online, but lots of pops and clicking in various situations due to weird surround emulation)
If I kick my ball in my yard, and it happens to bounce into your yard, and you know exactly who and where it came from, should you get to keep it?
The ball is now lost to the original owner....
If I drop my camera in front of your house, and you know it is mine because it is very distinctive and you've seen it before, should you get to keep it?
The camera is now lost to the original owner
If you and I work next to each other at the office, and I accidentally drop my wallet while passing by your cubical, and it flops into your space, is my wallet suddenly yours now?
The wallet is now lost to the original owner
This is more similar to...
My finely pedigreed cat jumped the fence and got your cat pregnant, the kittens are obviously my property since I have a better cat
Guess what, you still have your cat, nothing was lost, and my cat is the one carrying the kittens (much akin to my field carrying the seeds).
The wind blew some pits from my tree into your land, where they too root and a new tree started to grow, it's MINE, give it to me
You still have your tree, the new on is on my land... mine.
If my GM-plants cross-pollinate in your crop, should you be allowed to keep the cross-pollinated seed
Guess what, you still have YOUR crops too. Just because it's GM doesn't mean that you automatically own the *COPY* created on my property.
Yes, as mentioned, arsenic is a poison because it's deadly to pretty much everyone (though supposedly you can build a tolerance), and additionally it's not exactly common in the stuff we eat (except where we've poisoning land with heavy metal from discarded electronics).
Gluten, on the other hand, is in pretty much f***'ing everything. Preservatives in canned food, wheat-products, tons of stuff. It also has this tendency to follow family-lines. However, since the full tests usually involve fun things like biopsies, a *lot* of people don't know they have it. However, the numbers of those with gluten-intolerance isn't as small as one might think.
Maybe it's just IMHO, but I think that trying to eliminate a condition which causes a smaller group of people to not be able to eat 80% of the food out there, vs one where it's just "don't eat poison", might not be such a bad thing. Of course the GP is probably a troll, but a lot of people don't seem to realize how serious celiac'ism is.
OK, so how about the recent articles about Dell servers with infected hardware (I think it was in the monitoring firmware?). Is it Dell's fault, the company that did their refurbs/repairs, or what?
How about all the times when a device with USB-storage came preloaded with malware. Or how about the Intel CPU's that were actually big chunks of useless metal.
So a third-party steals a chip/board design, makes a clone, and then sneaks it in somewhere along the line. It doesn't have to be at the manufacturer, they just have to replace good hardware with the compromised units. Hell, how about online sellers in general, many of which are in China, etc. How do you known that the firmware or even hardware of that fancy smartphone you just bought wasn't tampered with?
I see no reason that hardware is much safer than software... especially when loadable is a vulnerable midpoint between the two.
"One such anonymous programmer points out that he was paid $150,000 per year, whereas the software he wrote was generating $100,000 per day."
You do the job, you get paid. There are plenty of jobs out there that generate (or save) companies plenty of cash. Sometimes you're lucky to get a bonus, sometimes not.
The only time I ever really felt upset about pay was one job where I was constantly putting in extra time, etc, and really working my keister to make things work. There were quite a few complains about my predecessors - who quit midstream leaving me to land in their positions - and I got a lot of compliments about how things were being straightened up (a few, including my manager, commented that I was the best employee they'd had in my dept).
Hearing that was nice, but when we absorbed another company and my workload doubled, it got a bit rough. When review time came up, I got a bit of a raise, but I had also discovered that my predecessors (the ones why I was supposedly so much of an improvement over) had made 20%+ more than I.
After months of trying to get the company to spend a bit more on quality equipment/services and add to our diminished IT team, I finally sought work elsewhere. At that point I was offered the moon: big raise, etc, but I'd already found another position. It was even a little less pay, but I still feel it was a worthwhile move (especially since it's hourly, and companies tend to avoid mistakes that require OT if they're paying for it).
I was a bit sad to move on, but I heard that after I left, they started listening to the Sr Admin (my replacement) a bit more and actually fixed a lot of the issues in the company. Hopefully they gave the guy a raise too.
Pay isn't always about cash and greed. Sometimes it's about respect. Paying people what they're worth ensures you keep them around.
However, at $150k, that's a pretty good compensation for your time and work. It's more than most coding jobs I know, and I'd guess it's fairly par for the industry. Workers exist to do a job, and that job should make or save the company money. If he doesn't like it, maybe he should go private and contract out to develop the systems he believe are worth so much.
"One such anonymous programmer points out that he was paid $150,000 per year, whereas the software he wrote was generating $100,000 per day."
And if said software screws up and costs a few hundred million, or otherwise causes other "bad things" to happen, what's the accountability of the programmer or the manager?
Unless you have a superconducting grid you lose massive amounts of power in transmission over long distances
True. Hopefully that "room temperature superconductor" comes true one day. In the meantime though, a lot of power generation already does occur over long distances, though not necessarily quite to the scale mentioned. As solar becomes increasingly effective, it seems that having a small-yet-efficient local array to offset your energy consumption would be a lot more efficient than a few thousand KM runs to the nearest large supplier.
Apparently the city at one time decided that it would be a good idea to put parking meters along the downtown strip. Now this is quite a small city (population maybe 30k), and fairly redneck in areas. Most of these rednecks also tend to own large jacked-up rusty-but-solid pickup trucks.
After replacing several rounds of meters that had been knocked at mysterious times in the night, apparently the city decided that the meters were unprofitable, and it's now meter-free.
It's not the solution that I would recommend, but apparently making things too expensive to replace brings in the "cost of doing business" factor and does tend to eliminate them.
Slashdot Mirror
Something similar to the usual:
"copyright 2001-2007 megacorp"
Something like:
Patent #999999999 (2001-2010) megacorp
Showing the patent expiration/validity should help prevent being sued, I'd imagine?
So one solution might be that, instead of embedding the patent etc info in the mould, it's applied as a "latter step" via a stamp or something of the like. I don't think it would be incredibly hard to do one of the following:
* Include it in the manual (easier to modify the print than a mould) instead
* Include it on a sticker (it's not like lost-sticker = no patent)
* Stamp it on (ink) after the mould is released
* Stamp it in (heated press) after the mould is released
Yes, if a large portion of those version are old, with known exploits, and unpatched...
Any less secure than other phones? Maybe not compared to some, though Apple is actually fairly "pushy" when it comes to the "there's a new update for your phone/itunes/whatever" thing.
What pisses me off is companies like Motorola. My phone has known bugs with known fixes, but since it's a Milestone and not a Droid, I can't upgrade the firmware myself, and they've yet to have an NA release date for Droid 2.2. Eventually, I'm sure they'll just abandon the phone and leave it un-patchable in favour of the newer model, Jerks.
My next phone will still likely be Android, but likely an HTC (or another brand that's not evil, no more moto for me).
In terms of states VS federation, a lot of things have changed over time, though. During formation, how long did it take to travel from one state to another? How long did it take trade between distant states or - possibly more importantly - the world.
There are some things that would make sense to keep its nose out of, but a lot of things that don't. Now I'm just a nosy know Canadian, but the variety in US laws/policy makes my head spin.
Some examples include things like laws regarding age-of-consent, gay marriage, etc.
Say you a girlfriend/boyfriend who's straddling the legal border and a year or two younger than you, no problem in state X... but what if she lives just across the "magical line" in state Y... now you're a criminal.
How about two persons of the same gender get married in state X and receive marital benefits, but then need to move to state Y due to work relocation or whatever. Are they still married?
In Canada, my personal peeve is traffic laws/rules. In Quebec, you CANNOT turn right on a red light. In most other provinces, you can safely and legally treat a red much like you would a stop-sign. My favourite though is the "blinking green light." In Ontario, it means the same as a left-turn arrow (protected turn, you can turn and nobody else is supposed to be crossing or going straight), but go west to BC, and it means that it's a pedestrian-controlled intersection (it never turns red unless a pedestrian hits the button), so anyone *thinking* they have a safe-left may get nicely T-boned.
There are plenty of things that should be managed at a federal level. Lots of things that *aren't*, in fact. The big problem is the things that - as you said - should *not* be managed by the fed and yet they've slowly clawed them in.
Also, the *book syntax has been around for a long time in teaching software, longer than I remember facebook being popular. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head that I've seen teachers using are "gradebook" and "markbook"
FB really doesn't have a case here, and hopefully the defendants have enough cash to fight back... (and hopefully the jurisdiction in question has SLAPP laws).
Having lived with this scenario for about a year, I'd say that the biggest issue is not whether devs have access to production, but rather HOW they have access to production, and what the change-management process it.
Access to allow them to push updates from a proper repository to the live server: OK
Full SSH/root access to the production boxes. HELL NO.
I can't think of how many times my head nearly exploded because a dev pushed some massive freaking update to a live server and torched the box. We're talking uploading an entirely new app, without proper stress-testing, to a live in-use server. End result... leaks, bugs, and the live site explodes. Sometimes it can take hours or DAYS to figure out why resource usage suddenly jumps through the roof, and all the time the way the dev talked the system had been in place for months (being fairly new to that company, I wasn't really sure myself).
Oh look... thousands of SQL queries locking the tables due to unoptimized database tables... OK lets sift few a few THOUSAND files trying to find where that little query is running from...
Again, the big issue wasn't with devs having access to production. It was with devs having privileged access to production, and either
a) Messing with installed modules/software/whatever... that's an admin's job
b) Installing updates without checking, and without notifying other departments.
Similar issues ensued with even just basic updates in cases where there were unchecked bad links to internal-only testing URL's, etc. Of course, when stuff was broken, nobody would be willing to take ownership for the mistake, which meant that IT spent excessive time tracking down the changes to fix them, and then the offender(s) have gone home for the day several hour ago while the admins are spending tons of (salary... unpaid) OT tracking down why the server crashed-and-burned.
A change-management system does fix a lot of that. Something as simple as "git" should be enough for many situations, and easy enough for people to understand. It allows you to revert a major code-screwup, isolate when bugs occurred, and find which people are submitting unapproved updates that break servers. If you still need to restrict dev access to a production machine, then only allow admins to do the "git pull", upon approval of the edits made by dev.
There's plenty of arrogance to go around between development and sysadmins, and often some overlap between the two roles. Having a change-management system and proper access controls adds a big factor of accountability and rollback to things, as well as helping to prevent people from clobbering each others updates.
How many truely "poor" people have a GPS+cellphone or a SPOT device. I could see possibly the cellphone because it's fairly useful/important for job-seekers, etc, but a SPOT (device cost+yearly subscription) or a GPS?
Nah, these are just pampered idiots with too many fancy toys and not enough common sense. Up here in Canada they do charge you the cost of dispatching emergency services if you use your SPOT etc without a real emergency.
I think that - twilight aside - the genre of female-friendly flicks has also improved for us guys. We've gone from sappy tear-jerker romance to "romantic comedy", which at least throws in a few chuckles for the guys.
Even twilight wouldn't be *too* bad if not for the whole wreck-the-genre-twinkly-vampire crud. At least there was *some* action and play towards the overall vampire meme (at least the first movie, haven't been dragged to the rest yet). Hopefully it will work well as a setup for some of the better series' such as "True Blood" etc, which has enough hot girls for guys to enjoy, muscular man-butt for the women, and plot for both.
It would also be a "nice to have" if google could see to porting some version of their talk client so that I don't have to use my web-browser for the "official" plugin, that would be nice (though I've heard that empathy can do VV, I haven't had an opportunity to test that yet).
Oh, and while they're busy porting... how about a voice+video version for the Android, or at least voice.
Perhaps having less "noise" from the drives themselves over the soundcard, etc might be a possibility with higher-quality shielded cables. However, having a better sample ON-DISK is bullsh*t. 1's and 0's... either they're correct or they aren't, but there's no "in between"
Are any of the original fat machines still in warranty? I had assumed that any of the one with hardware-enabled backwards-compatibility were past warranty by now...
Before you get into full anti-union mode, I should mention that if the mentioned school-district is like any around here, the administrators are NOT union. In fact, in most jobs the admins are not-union, otherwise you'd have some pretty major conflicts-of-interest.
The technical staff are likely union, but not the school administration.
Storewide closing sale! Up to 60% off!
Which almost always means: 60% off the crappy product that nobody ever buys (or a pair of socks, whatever) and 5-10% off the overinflated prices of anything else in the store...
So yeah, it does happen fairly regular in other industries.
We have a rather attractive female co-worker who had supposedly done some nude modelling. The jackasses in my department was all a-drool about it, and trying to figure out her "modelling name"
Having actually talked to the lady in question a few times on and off myself, she was actually a nice person. It was easy for many to make the "office decoration" assumption because of her attractiveness and attire, but she really was one nicer people in the office and was always free with a smile, a hello, and sometimes conversation. It really bothered me to see my co-workers spreading that sorta thing around the office, and that type of behaviour was actually one of the reasons I left that particular company.
If you find out your co-worker had been in "adult" movies or whatever, is that going to change your view of him/her as a person? Are you still going to be able to look that person in the eye? Personally, I would have been happier to think of my co-worker as the genuinely nice person who always had a smile and polite hello for her co-workers, rather than what others seemed to make her out to be.
I seem to remember hearing about some military personnel (submariners, I believe) that did this when on leave, except with the added caveat that they warmed up the lotion beforehand, and then chose a theatre that had an upper balcony...
My older (but still dual-core) yet not officially supported motherboard, disagrees.
As does my SB-Live 5.1 Surround card (works with the 3rd-party KX Audio driver if you can find it online, but lots of pops and clicking in various situations due to weird surround emulation)
You're a fecking retard...
If I kick my ball in my yard, and it happens to bounce into your yard, and you know exactly who and where it came from, should you get to keep it?
The ball is now lost to the original owner....
If I drop my camera in front of your house, and you know it is mine because it is very distinctive and you've seen it before, should you get to keep it?
The camera is now lost to the original owner
If you and I work next to each other at the office, and I accidentally drop my wallet while passing by your cubical, and it flops into your space, is my wallet suddenly yours now?
The wallet is now lost to the original owner
This is more similar to...
My finely pedigreed cat jumped the fence and got your cat pregnant, the kittens are obviously my property since I have a better cat
Guess what, you still have your cat, nothing was lost, and my cat is the one carrying the kittens (much akin to my field carrying the seeds).
The wind blew some pits from my tree into your land, where they too root and a new tree started to grow, it's MINE, give it to me
You still have your tree, the new on is on my land... mine.
If my GM-plants cross-pollinate in your crop, should you be allowed to keep the cross-pollinated seed
Guess what, you still have YOUR crops too. Just because it's GM doesn't mean that you automatically own the *COPY* created on my property.
Yes, as mentioned, arsenic is a poison because it's deadly to pretty much everyone (though supposedly you can build a tolerance), and additionally it's not exactly common in the stuff we eat (except where we've poisoning land with heavy metal from discarded electronics).
Gluten, on the other hand, is in pretty much f***'ing everything. Preservatives in canned food, wheat-products, tons of stuff. It also has this tendency to follow family-lines. However, since the full tests usually involve fun things like biopsies, a *lot* of people don't know they have it. However, the numbers of those with gluten-intolerance isn't as small as one might think.
Maybe it's just IMHO, but I think that trying to eliminate a condition which causes a smaller group of people to not be able to eat 80% of the food out there, vs one where it's just "don't eat poison", might not be such a bad thing. Of course the GP is probably a troll, but a lot of people don't seem to realize how serious celiac'ism is.
For myself, I'd be happy to use a linux-based system. However, I have a request by somebody else who wants security for an apartment complex.
I can probably handle setup, but I want something that's low-fuss so that I don't end up having to babysit it.
Can anyone comment on systems Like these, for indoor/outdoor (doorways and parking area) surveillance, or make other recommendations?
OK, so how about the recent articles about Dell servers with infected hardware (I think it was in the monitoring firmware?). Is it Dell's fault, the company that did their refurbs/repairs, or what?
How about all the times when a device with USB-storage came preloaded with malware. Or how about the Intel CPU's that were actually big chunks of useless metal.
So a third-party steals a chip/board design, makes a clone, and then sneaks it in somewhere along the line. It doesn't have to be at the manufacturer, they just have to replace good hardware with the compromised units.
Hell, how about online sellers in general, many of which are in China, etc. How do you known that the firmware or even hardware of that fancy smartphone you just bought wasn't tampered with?
I see no reason that hardware is much safer than software... especially when loadable is a vulnerable midpoint between the two.
Exactly. Everybody wants the big dinaros, but nobody wants the responsibility or accountability.
"One such anonymous programmer points out that he was paid $150,000 per year, whereas the software he wrote was generating $100,000 per day."
You do the job, you get paid. There are plenty of jobs out there that generate (or save) companies plenty of cash. Sometimes you're lucky to get a bonus, sometimes not.
The only time I ever really felt upset about pay was one job where I was constantly putting in extra time, etc, and really working my keister to make things work. There were quite a few complains about my predecessors - who quit midstream leaving me to land in their positions - and I got a lot of compliments about how things were being straightened up (a few, including my manager, commented that I was the best employee they'd had in my dept).
Hearing that was nice, but when we absorbed another company and my workload doubled, it got a bit rough. When review time came up, I got a bit of a raise, but I had also discovered that my predecessors (the ones why I was supposedly so much of an improvement over) had made 20%+ more than I.
After months of trying to get the company to spend a bit more on quality equipment/services and add to our diminished IT team, I finally sought work elsewhere. At that point I was offered the moon: big raise, etc, but I'd already found another position. It was even a little less pay, but I still feel it was a worthwhile move (especially since it's hourly, and companies tend to avoid mistakes that require OT if they're paying for it).
I was a bit sad to move on, but I heard that after I left, they started listening to the Sr Admin (my replacement) a bit more and actually fixed a lot of the issues in the company. Hopefully they gave the guy a raise too.
Pay isn't always about cash and greed. Sometimes it's about respect. Paying people what they're worth ensures you keep them around.
However, at $150k, that's a pretty good compensation for your time and work. It's more than most coding jobs I know, and I'd guess it's fairly par for the industry. Workers exist to do a job, and that job should make or save the company money. If he doesn't like it, maybe he should go private and contract out to develop the systems he believe are worth so much.
"One such anonymous programmer points out that he was paid $150,000 per year, whereas the software he wrote was generating $100,000 per day."
And if said software screws up and costs a few hundred million, or otherwise causes other "bad things" to happen, what's the accountability of the programmer or the manager?
Unless you have a superconducting grid you lose massive amounts of power in transmission over long distances
True. Hopefully that "room temperature superconductor" comes true one day.
In the meantime though, a lot of power generation already does occur over long distances, though not necessarily quite to the scale mentioned.
As solar becomes increasingly effective, it seems that having a small-yet-efficient local array to offset your energy consumption would be a lot more efficient than a few thousand KM runs to the nearest large supplier.
Apparently the city at one time decided that it would be a good idea to put parking meters along the downtown strip. Now this is quite a small city (population maybe 30k), and fairly redneck in areas.
Most of these rednecks also tend to own large jacked-up rusty-but-solid pickup trucks.
After replacing several rounds of meters that had been knocked at mysterious times in the night, apparently the city decided that the meters were unprofitable, and it's now meter-free.
It's not the solution that I would recommend, but apparently making things too expensive to replace brings in the "cost of doing business" factor and does tend to eliminate them.