A couple of years ago, I was an intermediate-level programmer - not a guru, not a beginner, I had decent experience working for organizations and also as an independent contractor under my belt. I worked about 10 hours a day.
Now I'm a senior programmer at the same place (a software consultancy). I'm assisting project managers (PMPs, for the most part - and I've learned that almost anyone can call themself a project manager, but very few can competently manage a project) and hope to become one myself in the next 2 years. I'm a subject expert for the technical staff on at least a couple of things. I work about 10 hours a day - but it's an entirely different 10 hours a day.
I used to be able to program for ten, twelve hours at a stretch. It wasn't especially arduous - the focus was difficult, but as long as you have your tasks laid out in front of you and a good knowledge of what has to be done, it's doable.
Now, when I reach eight-ten hours, I'm totally exhausted. A lot of the things I hit on now are new to me, they require a lot of effort to figure out, and they're almost always at the top of the priority pile. Most are high-risk engagements.
Those/. readers who have moved through the ranks will understand the comparison - when you reach the top of the developer food chain, you're expected to bring down the big game as well. Those that haven't, well, you will.
I think that my present ten hours a day are much more taxing than my old ten hours a day. But, if you want to reduce it to a very simple kind of measure, ten hours is ten hours.
Delaware is a jurisdiction of convenience because of its nonexistent corporate taxes. You don't pay corporate taxes when you're losing money. Most net firms haven't come within a country mile of making money, so the Delaware incorporation is irrelevant.
A lot of Canadian businesses are going under and/or being sold simply because of the crap economy to the North
Well, south of the border, I see massive internet market consolidation (that is, businesses being bought up). 130 US net firms have gone bankrupt since January, and November is moving along at a rate of more than one per day. Canadian businesses seem to be doing better than that, not worse.
and the level of taxation and red tape there is choking the life out of what's left.
The taxation scheme is different in Canada when compared to the US. The federal government's share of payroll taxes in Canada is much greater than the federal government's share in the US. When you compare combined state and federal taxes, to combined provincial and federal taxes, they're comparable.
One might wonder why it's the high-tax jurisdictions in the US (MA, CA, NY) that have done so well with the new economy. Don't high taxes inhibit economic growth? Look at that barren wasteland of innovation, Silicon Valley.
A study, released November 13, by Harvard University and the World Bank showed that Canada has the lowest level of red tape for startups of 76 developed and developing nations. The Report on Business also mentioned it November 15, 16 and 17. Perhaps you simply don't read the business pages, although I find that hard to believe with your oh-so-extensive knowledge of Canadian economics and business affairs.
You're looking at two different "theys" in your post. The DNC didn't, in fact, change the definition of what consists of a marked ballot. The Palm Beach Co. election committee, a bipartisan body (2 democrats, 1 republican), did. That said, the Democratic legal team is probably hard at work finding arguments for revised counts and manual counts. I don't believe that they'll have to work hard, though; this kind of thing sells itself, and political interference in the electoral process is definitely frowned upon.
Likewise, the Democrats haven't actually filed suit against Broward county; they merely considered it. Which they're entitled to, but there's a big difference between thinking and doing.
Right now, the Democrats are insisting that the letter of the law be observed: they are entitled to ask for a recount in Palm Beach Co, subject to the discretion of the county electoral committee. The Republicans asked for and got two (Polk and Palm Beach).
Perhaps it appears that the Democrats are continuously calling for recounts, but they've only asked for them in four counties (Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia), two of which (Broward, Dade) have declined to hold them. Since the 3-day limit has passed, they can't ask for further recounts. The Republicans asked for and received a manual count in Polk county and a mechanical count in Palm Beach. Without that manual count in Polk county, which turned up nearly 100 extra votes for Bush, we'd be looking at a margin under 200 votes.
This may sound partisan, but it's meant in a spirit of fairness: just because the Democrats requested recounts in heavily Democratic counties does not make the process unfair. What makes it fair is that both parties had the same opportunity. Likewise, any offer of settlement is only fair if either party would take either side. The Republican offers so far have not been serious or fair. The international media tends to recognize this.
From my perspective, the Republicans squandered their lead during the election and they squandered their opportunity to ask for further recounts in Florida. Were I a Republican (I'm not from the US) I would be cursing the day that George W. Bush won the nomination. You don't have to be a Democrat to recognize poor tactics, or point them out. Republicans are doing that themselves, although they're not as apt to air their dirty laundry in public as the Democrats are.
Damn near anywhere else in the world, people would be picking up guns.
I have no idea about where you might be thinking. Most of the world's population doesn't give a damn about politics, because they're too busy eking out their Hobbesian existence. Only a few nations are in such a precarious position as to resort to violence following a close election (obvious fraud is different, but violence following rather than preceding an election is still quite uncommon), and none of them are western democracies.
The US electoral system has its advantages, but clarity and efficiency are not among them. What the electoral college does do well is maximize the power of the individual voter, by giving the individual vote more power in swing states. This certainly wasn't the intent, so don't try to claim credit for it.:)
I think that it's a smart decision. States are given wide latitude on how and when to certify electors (for example, South Carolina didn't hold presidential elections until 1860). Without clear direction from statute or directly applicable precedent, the wise jurist (especially the wise *lower court* jurist) lets administrators take care of administration, intervening only when necessary.
A ruling in the other direction, where counties would be able to overrule the legal authority of the secretary of state by merely choosing to not certify their ballot, would be truly horrifying. If you think that this election has been a fiasco, you aint seen nothing yet.
That said, he explicitly and personally charged the Florida Secretary of State with coming up with a very good, legal reason to reject further revisions to the vote count, letting Palm Beach go ahead and recount with impunity. She cannot arbitrarily reject them merely because they come in late. Essentially, this lets her declare a certification of county vote counts which is only one in name, not in fact.
However. Like most lay observers, it seems that the person to whom we are replying ascribes motives to the process of law. The best thing that judges can do is rule for legal consistency, not justice, not cowardice, and certainly a pox on both your houses. They're quite romantic explanations but nowhere near the truth.
Lewis covered the bases as a competent judge should - he granted controlling legal authority to the controlling legal authority - but placed restrictions on that legal authority. Where Harris wanted to ignore any further revisions after 5PM (really, this is the only reason to call for certifications at this date), Lewis left the door open for them.
If Harris were a lawyer, she'd probably take this as a rebuke to her overstepping the bounds of her authority as Secretary of State. Because she's a Republican partisan with limited experience, it probably went over her head. I'll bet good money that the Republican legal team understood, though, and is hard at work coming up for possible reasons to close the door on Palm Beach Co.'s manual recount.
The election isn't decided by concession or defiance. It's decided by the Electoral College, which votes in December. When you voted (if you voted), all you voted for were "Electors for the campaign of..." or simply "Electors for...". That's how it's written on the ballot.
Al Gore's "word" in the form of a concession, just like any concession, is merely a courtesy which allows the President-elect to get on with the business of preparing for his role in government.
More to the point, you obviously weren't watching how things happened. When Gore phoned to concede, there were 200k votes in Bush's favour and more than 80% of precincts reporting. To fail to concede at that point would have been childish.
Likewise, when the margin fell below 10k, it would have been chilish to refuse to retract. Gore can't simply take it upon himself to override the will of the electorate of Florida and concede out of foolish stubbornness.
Admittedly, it would have been more classy had Bush called Gore and refused to accept the concession given the circumstances. That would have given both an exit from this awkward situation with dignity. As it was, only one of them kept his.
The Secretary of State in Florida is Katherine Harris, a Republican. http://www.dos.state.fl.us, and please wipe your feet before you stick them in your mouth.
You're confusing her with Bob Butterworth, the Attorney General of Florida, who a Democrat. According to Florida law, the Attorney General is not involved with the voting process.
As one might say, that happened, but you can't prove it happens every time nor whether it will happen again. There is therefore no justification for the equivalence.
What you should observe, however, is that in every stage but the 3rd, Barbara Simons attracted more 2nd, 3rd, etc place votes than Karl Auerbach. He still won on the strength of his no.1 ballot. One could draw the conjecture that Simons had broader but weaker support than Auerbach.
This is obviously not a true run-off system in that a recast with the additional information (who won, and by what margin). Consider political conventions in most nations (no, not the US). It's truly rare for a candidate to win on the first ballot, and significant horse-trading does take place between ballots. This horse-trading and positioning is a valuable feature of the run-off election in politics. I'm not sure what difference it would make for the ICANN Member-at-large, though.:)
Actually, you can buy the tresses for a roof prefabricated at a lumberyard/building supply. Likewise for the panels that form the body of a roof. Not exactly the same as buying the roof in toto but certainly good enough for my skill-free carpentry and my in-laws' guest cottage:).
This might be analogous to buying a computer without an OS. Four walls, no roof, is only marginally useful. A computer, no OS, is only marginally useful (space-heater?). However, they imply that the only roof worth putting on a PC is Windows - which, while not a flagrant antitrust violation, does fly in the face of all the windy claims they made about competition in the PC market and free markets and so on, so forth, in court.
Were it not for that astounding piece of hypocrisy this would be nothing but standard marketing boilerplate. With the context, of course, it becomes, if not scandalous, at least amusing.
Well, given that english, dutch, and german are all from the same linguistic group (and very closely related to dutch besides), one might dismiss this as a trivial example. (An extremely trivial example, in fact: my Oma picked up english in a matter of weeks. In 1944. In Rotterdam.)
Let's just say that people learning languages from different linguistic groups would have considerably more trouble than you did. That isn't to demean your achievement, merely to place it in better context.
I work with a number of ESL people from east asia - Vietnam, Korea, China by and large. They have two real milestones to fluency.
First, they have to know the language well enough to converse technically. Second, they have to know the language well enough to converse socially and professionally - to help out the sales department, to share information around the water cooler, to lead a team.
Most people come to the job with the first milestone achieved (some mastered, some barely). The second milestone takes years, and it's very difficult if not impossible to gain a position of leadership without it.
We have plenty of second-generation Canadians (people who were born here but at least 1 parent wasn't) in management and team leadership. I'm one myself. We only have one PM (an Argentinian) who doesn't have english as a native language. Language is an incredible barrier to job advancement and career success.
I think it's a bad thing. Not because I'm anti-immigration, because I'm not. I think that the US should accept many more immigrants for permanent residency (green card) than it does - Canada, 1/10th the size, accepts more.
What this is, essentially, is a ploy by companies to work someone through their technical lifespan, then discard them. After six years, the new technologies that they learned in school are aging if not stale. Rather than retrain, they can send them back to India/Indonesia/China/Russia...
(rant on)
This is one of the great failings of the IT industry. Companies should be recruiting for fundamentals of programming and software engineering. Instead, they recruit for individual technologies, many of which can be learned in a matter of weeks by a competent professional. Programmers bet into this by concentrating on technology rather than proficiency or professionalism.
Where programming was a legitimate profession twenty-odd years ago, and done by well-educated professionals. Like other professionals, programmers should be able to ply their trade around the world. The current-mind set (which promotes hare-brained schemes like this) risks turning it into a trade, where bare competence on skills rather than problem-solving and thinking is emphasized.
When you hire a professional, you establish a relationship with them and it's upheld at both ends. You can't hire professionals as a bulk commodity. Unfortunately, large companies and legislators alike seem to think that they can import them as a bulk commodity like so many widgets. No wonder so many software projects fail.
(rant off)
A poster above made the argument that an H1-B was a preliminary to him receiving a green card. Good for him. However, this doesn't necessarily generalize. Do many H1-B recipients receive a green card?
You're entitled to your opinion, but you're mistaken in your analysis. Notes/Domino isn't a "mail product" - it's a database product. It offers mail and messaging functionality, just like it offers phone book functionality, KM functionality, discussion functionality, etc, etc. Everything is just a front end over a rather weak DBMS. Notes has always been like that.
Now, Notes isn't particularly good at mail (although Exchange is much, much worse). However, if your company bought a Notes system and only uses it for mail, they should, quite frankly, have their heads examined. And so should you.
There's no way that IBM could have used Domino/Notes as a front-end to WebSphere, so failing to do so is hardly a failure on IBM's part. IBM also uses Notes for a lot of their commercial sites, such as their small business, EPP, and download sites, so there's no lack of confidence at IBM wrt Notes.
How do I know this? Let's just say I know those sites quite intimately. WebSphere may be the future at IBM, but there's nothing particularly wrong with Notes/Domino.
IBM puts a lot of stuff out in pre-release. (Even stuff that has no right to go out, even in pre-release, but enough about that - NDR, as you probably expect.).
They've really changed over the last 10-20 years, since the anti-trust suit. I wouldn't want to work there (I was a contractor there once) but it's interesting to be on the periphery.
Domino Server R5 works fine on Linux. I ran it for a few months myself. It's reasonable to assume that IBM, who now owns Lotus, will be pushing its applications to linux, first for the server (as they are already: DB2, WebSphere, etc), then the desktop.
Lotus hasn't been a major player in the desktop applications market for quite a while, in any case.
It's a good idea to test platform vs. platform to figure out benchmarks. However, part of my paid employment is DBA work, and I've come (with painful time and experience) to realize that a great deal of your database's performance is a matter of tuning and configuration.
That said, you can set up a very generic, very simple system to test the performance of various RDBMS. It will give you an idea of the minimum performance which you can expect, but it won't give you an accurate idea of what those RDBMS are capable of when running at peak performance.
Finally, database choice is, in the commercial terms, almost always dictated by factors other than pure performance. Availability of quality staff (tech support and DBA's) is a big one, since labour is more expensive than hardware. Software compatibility, even terms of the RDBMS license. Pure performance seems to be the third or even fourth criterion.
Really, I think that it's important to get kids programming first. They can learn more structured languages when they're ready; more exposure to formal mathematics, for example, will help them a lot, but you just don't get that in high school. Perl gives them positive feedback very quickly, and lets them do useful things from the get go.
Building enthusiasm for programming (not to mention raising its social cachet) is the best thing that could come out of this. Those kids are not professional programmers, but this should not be confused with academic or professional training. It's a light introduction. When they move on to their freshman year of college, they'll have broken through the major barrier of computer education - fear of the computer - and will be ready to learn properly.
Btw, I know/knew Chris Lehmann - he's quite a guy. Those kids are very lucky, even though they probably don't realize it now.
Actually, Big Brother was based (and not loosely, either) on our favourite paternalist figure, Josef Stalin. So was the antagonist of _Animal Farm_, Comrade Napoleon.
Orwell was a devout socialist throughout his life but broke with the orthodox left following his experiences in Spain during the civil war.
To argue that Big Brother is a poor example of brotherhood is arguing the obvious. Big Brother is obviously the ultimate patriarch. He is nothing like a brother. Anyone who asserts otherwise should start by reading the book (somewhat like the first rule of art criticism: be sure to see the art before writing the review).
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Not alone, just statistically insignificant
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After all, if you really want to feed your addiction, you'd get a job doing this:). j/k - the better I get at application design and architecture, the more time I spend in meetings and coaching other developers (currently about 1/2 my time... and rising.)
I used to chat a lot while in university; I stopped in the middle of my last year and haven't really gone back. I'd say I spend about 8 hours a day at the keyboard, part of that developing, part of that searching for information on new tech (it's part of my job - tres cool), part just reading mail and writing. Less on weekends, but that's because I have a serious partner and I've discovered photography, another good diversion.
I'd say I'm about average for a higher-level code monkey. Less and less of the new people here (and I assume where I work is typical) tend to be involved in net culture; a lot tend to be graduates of 1-year computer colleges and not especially well-seasoned in the net, how it works, and what makes it good. C'est la vie, although I wonder where all the old-school netheads went.
Not to be too blunt, but there's nothing wrong with giving away free software - even free as in beer, rather than free as in speech - by definition. I don't know where you got the idea that there was. What is wrong is collusion, dumping (and Open Source isn't dumping, by definition), and/or unfair business practises. IE would have been a fair competitor to Netscape if it hadn't been bundled with Windows, &c, &c, &c.
Certainly, in a capitalist society there are winners and losers. The GPL is in no way responsible for this. The GPL does not present an "unfair advantage" to anyone using it; they must give as they receive, and the advantage is given to anyone who wants to give.
Let's look at the example you gave, the small software house who lives in fear of a GPL'ed product taking away their niche. I can't see the downside of this, really: if users will be satisfied with a free product which does 75% of what the commercial product does, and satisfies their requirements, then that's all for the good of the user.
However, total cost of ownership being what it is, software cost is a minuscule part of deploying and running an application. If a vendor cannot compete with a free product offering no support and no training and no promise of future development, no corporate commitment at all, they were quite literally doomed from the very start. Unfortunately, this kind of arrogance runs rampant through the software industry: why should be offer support, training, and all those other things that let a company successfully use our product?
Likewise, Be wouldn't be giving away its OS without the existence of Linux or the BSD's, which are not licensed under the GPL. Are they now recouping their investment? Let's be reasonable, please: if they had an ounce of sense, they wouldn't have expected to recoup their investment for many years. That they're not recouping it presently, for a year-old product, is an indictment of nothing except capitalism.
For that matter, BeOS uses a number of GPL'ed tools and utilities, such as bash. Is one operating system which uses GPL'ed utilities good, and the other bad? It certainly isn't the GPL that makes one good and the other bad, one succeed and the other fail.
Believe it or not, the market, or rather any free or pseudo-free demand economy, exists for the benefit of the buyers, not the sellers. The buyers move the markets through present consumption, and they exist only to promote further consumption. If the GPL is harmful to prospective sellers, don't forget that capitalism is the root of this evil. You might as well blame the Microsoft EULA, as Microsoft has driven far more companies out of business than any number of free software ventures.
That's the point of a SEC form 10-Q - to disclose all the possible downsides of investing in this company. That it sounds bad is unsurprising, because it's supposed to sound bad; it's supposed to sound very, very bad indeed.
But is it proof of anything? Nothing at all: all it says is that you can lose money investing in the equity market, which is hardly news. At least not since the early nineteenth century.
I don't think it is, really. An artist and a critic certainly aren't the same thing. More to the point, it isn't an author's job to wade into the fray, and they'd certainly lose authority if they did so. In these days of personal attacks, the artist becomes just another shlub when they defend themselves; they prove that they're capable of sinking to the lowest levels of discourse as well.
Consider it this way: there is no difference between brokering and squatting on a domain name. That said, I don't see anything wrong with either.
Intent is frequently cited as being the defining point, and I really have to take issue with this. A company can say anything was its intent, and trying to second-guess a corporation is just that, guessing. If we're serious about calling one thing by its proper name, we should call it exactly what it is: abandonment, of an unused domain name or unmaintained site is on it, or exchange, if a maintained site is located there.
Now for the kicker: I think that domain name costs should be much higher, not lower, than they are now, and the revenue should be fed back into infrastructure or into a trust fund. Consider this: there is a limited number of valid domain names, in the absence of alternate TLD's. Domain names are valuable. Everyone who buys one today (costing as little as about 15$US) is getting it at a fire-sale price. And who should rightfully own unassigned domain names? I think that net users should, collectively, just like the state owns unsold land. The revenue should go somewhere which benefits the net community rather than lining pockets at NSI.
To put it bluntly, no one forces you to read a Katz story, whether by him or concerning him. You get the first fifty words on the default page; anything beyond that is your business, your action, and quite frankly your fault if you don't like him but read him anyway.
You can't be so young (perhaps you can, but I hope not) to have not observed that lawsuits are especially predominant in tech-related industry. Any technical or scientific advance is time-critical; there's only so long before it's superseded by another.
A lawsuit isn't primarily a means for gaining cash. It's a means to gain delay. Courts recognize that you can't put the genie back in the bottle, so they're extremely willing to grant orders stopping distribution of a new technology.
As such, the amount of extra R&D money that they'd have is totally secondary; what they want is catch-up time. So what if the suit fails or even if the defendant is awarded costs - big deal. Paying for lawsuits, offensive and defensive, is a cost of doing business.
This was true in military-related industry in the 50's, in computer hardware in the 70's when the mainframe race was really heating up, and it's true in software in the 90's and 00's.
This is also why companies try to build patent portfolios. If they are really in the wrong in a lawsuit, they can choose to cross-license patents, with or without a cash payment, to make up the value of the suit. It costs them much less than putting up dollars.
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A couple of years ago, I was an intermediate-level programmer - not a guru, not a beginner, I had decent experience working for organizations and also as an independent contractor under my belt. I worked about 10 hours a day.
/. readers who have moved through the ranks will understand the comparison - when you reach the top of the developer food chain, you're expected to bring down the big game as well. Those that haven't, well, you will.
Now I'm a senior programmer at the same place (a software consultancy). I'm assisting project managers (PMPs, for the most part - and I've learned that almost anyone can call themself a project manager, but very few can competently manage a project) and hope to become one myself in the next 2 years. I'm a subject expert for the technical staff on at least a couple of things. I work about 10 hours a day - but it's an entirely different 10 hours a day.
I used to be able to program for ten, twelve hours at a stretch. It wasn't especially arduous - the focus was difficult, but as long as you have your tasks laid out in front of you and a good knowledge of what has to be done, it's doable.
Now, when I reach eight-ten hours, I'm totally exhausted. A lot of the things I hit on now are new to me, they require a lot of effort to figure out, and they're almost always at the top of the priority pile. Most are high-risk engagements.
Those
I think that my present ten hours a day are much more taxing than my old ten hours a day. But, if you want to reduce it to a very simple kind of measure, ten hours is ten hours.
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Delaware is a jurisdiction of convenience because of its nonexistent corporate taxes. You don't pay corporate taxes when you're losing money. Most net firms haven't come within a country mile of making money, so the Delaware incorporation is irrelevant.
Nice try, though.
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A lot of Canadian businesses are going under and/or being sold simply because of the crap economy to the North
Well, south of the border, I see massive internet market consolidation (that is, businesses being bought up). 130 US net firms have gone bankrupt since January, and November is moving along at a rate of more than one per day. Canadian businesses seem to be doing better than that, not worse.
and the level of taxation and red tape there is choking the life out of what's left.
The taxation scheme is different in Canada when compared to the US. The federal government's share of payroll taxes in Canada is much greater than the federal government's share in the US. When you compare combined state and federal taxes, to combined provincial and federal taxes, they're comparable.
One might wonder why it's the high-tax jurisdictions in the US (MA, CA, NY) that have done so well with the new economy. Don't high taxes inhibit economic growth? Look at that barren wasteland of innovation, Silicon Valley.
A study, released November 13, by Harvard University and the World Bank showed that Canada has the lowest level of red tape for startups of 76 developed and developing nations. The Report on Business also mentioned it November 15, 16 and 17. Perhaps you simply don't read the business pages, although I find that hard to believe with your oh-so-extensive knowledge of Canadian economics and business affairs.
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You're looking at two different "theys" in your post. The DNC didn't, in fact, change the definition of what consists of a marked ballot. The Palm Beach Co. election committee, a bipartisan body (2 democrats, 1 republican), did. That said, the Democratic legal team is probably hard at work finding arguments for revised counts and manual counts. I don't believe that they'll have to work hard, though; this kind of thing sells itself, and political interference in the electoral process is definitely frowned upon.
:)
Likewise, the Democrats haven't actually filed suit against Broward county; they merely considered it. Which they're entitled to, but there's a big difference between thinking and doing.
Right now, the Democrats are insisting that the letter of the law be observed: they are entitled to ask for a recount in Palm Beach Co, subject to the discretion of the county electoral committee. The Republicans asked for and got two (Polk and Palm Beach).
Perhaps it appears that the Democrats are continuously calling for recounts, but they've only asked for them in four counties (Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia), two of which (Broward, Dade) have declined to hold them. Since the 3-day limit has passed, they can't ask for further recounts. The Republicans asked for and received a manual count in Polk county and a mechanical count in Palm Beach. Without that manual count in Polk county, which turned up nearly 100 extra votes for Bush, we'd be looking at a margin under 200 votes.
This may sound partisan, but it's meant in a spirit of fairness: just because the Democrats requested recounts in heavily Democratic counties does not make the process unfair. What makes it fair is that both parties had the same opportunity. Likewise, any offer of settlement is only fair if either party would take either side. The Republican offers so far have not been serious or fair. The international media tends to recognize this.
From my perspective, the Republicans squandered their lead during the election and they squandered their opportunity to ask for further recounts in Florida. Were I a Republican (I'm not from the US) I would be cursing the day that George W. Bush won the nomination. You don't have to be a Democrat to recognize poor tactics, or point them out. Republicans are doing that themselves, although they're not as apt to air their dirty laundry in public as the Democrats are.
Damn near anywhere else in the world, people would be picking up guns.
I have no idea about where you might be thinking. Most of the world's population doesn't give a damn about politics, because they're too busy eking out their Hobbesian existence. Only a few nations are in such a precarious position as to resort to violence following a close election (obvious fraud is different, but violence following rather than preceding an election is still quite uncommon), and none of them are western democracies.
The US electoral system has its advantages, but clarity and efficiency are not among them. What the electoral college does do well is maximize the power of the individual voter, by giving the individual vote more power in swing states. This certainly wasn't the intent, so don't try to claim credit for it.
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I think that it's a smart decision. States are given wide latitude on how and when to certify electors (for example, South Carolina didn't hold presidential elections until 1860). Without clear direction from statute or directly applicable precedent, the wise jurist (especially the wise *lower court* jurist) lets administrators take care of administration, intervening only when necessary.
A ruling in the other direction, where counties would be able to overrule the legal authority of the secretary of state by merely choosing to not certify their ballot, would be truly horrifying. If you think that this election has been a fiasco, you aint seen nothing yet.
That said, he explicitly and personally charged the Florida Secretary of State with coming up with a very good, legal reason to reject further revisions to the vote count, letting Palm Beach go ahead and recount with impunity. She cannot arbitrarily reject them merely because they come in late. Essentially, this lets her declare a certification of county vote counts which is only one in name, not in fact.
However. Like most lay observers, it seems that the person to whom we are replying ascribes motives to the process of law. The best thing that judges can do is rule for legal consistency, not justice, not cowardice, and certainly a pox on both your houses. They're quite romantic explanations but nowhere near the truth.
Lewis covered the bases as a competent judge should - he granted controlling legal authority to the controlling legal authority - but placed restrictions on that legal authority. Where Harris wanted to ignore any further revisions after 5PM (really, this is the only reason to call for certifications at this date), Lewis left the door open for them.
If Harris were a lawyer, she'd probably take this as a rebuke to her overstepping the bounds of her authority as Secretary of State. Because she's a Republican partisan with limited experience, it probably went over her head. I'll bet good money that the Republican legal team understood, though, and is hard at work coming up for possible reasons to close the door on Palm Beach Co.'s manual recount.
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The election isn't decided by concession or defiance. It's decided by the Electoral College, which votes in December. When you voted (if you voted), all you voted for were "Electors for the campaign of ..." or simply "Electors for ...". That's how it's written on the ballot.
Al Gore's "word" in the form of a concession, just like any concession, is merely a courtesy which allows the President-elect to get on with the business of preparing for his role in government.
More to the point, you obviously weren't watching how things happened. When Gore phoned to concede, there were 200k votes in Bush's favour and more than 80% of precincts reporting. To fail to concede at that point would have been childish.
Likewise, when the margin fell below 10k, it would have been chilish to refuse to retract. Gore can't simply take it upon himself to override the will of the electorate of Florida and concede out of foolish stubbornness.
Admittedly, it would have been more classy had Bush called Gore and refused to accept the concession given the circumstances. That would have given both an exit from this awkward situation with dignity. As it was, only one of them kept his.
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The Secretary of State in Florida is Katherine Harris, a Republican. http://www.dos.state.fl.us, and please wipe your feet before you stick them in your mouth.
You're confusing her with Bob Butterworth, the Attorney General of Florida, who a Democrat. According to Florida law, the Attorney General is not involved with the voting process.
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Heh. With a 200-odd vote margin this morning, only a few Nader votes would have made the difference.
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As one might say, that happened, but you can't prove it happens every time nor whether it will happen again. There is therefore no justification for the equivalence.
:)
What you should observe, however, is that in every stage but the 3rd, Barbara Simons attracted more 2nd, 3rd, etc place votes than Karl Auerbach. He still won on the strength of his no.1 ballot. One could draw the conjecture that Simons had broader but weaker support than Auerbach.
This is obviously not a true run-off system in that a recast with the additional information (who won, and by what margin). Consider political conventions in most nations (no, not the US). It's truly rare for a candidate to win on the first ballot, and significant horse-trading does take place between ballots. This horse-trading and positioning is a valuable feature of the run-off election in politics. I'm not sure what difference it would make for the ICANN Member-at-large, though.
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Actually, you can buy the tresses for a roof prefabricated at a lumberyard/building supply. Likewise for the panels that form the body of a roof. Not exactly the same as buying the roof in toto but certainly good enough for my skill-free carpentry and my in-laws' guest cottage :).
This might be analogous to buying a computer without an OS. Four walls, no roof, is only marginally useful. A computer, no OS, is only marginally useful (space-heater?). However, they imply that the only roof worth putting on a PC is Windows - which, while not a flagrant antitrust violation, does fly in the face of all the windy claims they made about competition in the PC market and free markets and so on, so forth, in court.
Were it not for that astounding piece of hypocrisy this would be nothing but standard marketing boilerplate. With the context, of course, it becomes, if not scandalous, at least amusing.
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Well, given that english, dutch, and german are all from the same linguistic group (and very closely related to dutch besides), one might dismiss this as a trivial example. (An extremely trivial example, in fact: my Oma picked up english in a matter of weeks. In 1944. In Rotterdam.)
Let's just say that people learning languages from different linguistic groups would have considerably more trouble than you did. That isn't to demean your achievement, merely to place it in better context.
I work with a number of ESL people from east asia - Vietnam, Korea, China by and large. They have two real milestones to fluency.
First, they have to know the language well enough to converse technically. Second, they have to know the language well enough to converse socially and professionally - to help out the sales department, to share information around the water cooler, to lead a team.
Most people come to the job with the first milestone achieved (some mastered, some barely). The second milestone takes years, and it's very difficult if not impossible to gain a position of leadership without it.
We have plenty of second-generation Canadians (people who were born here but at least 1 parent wasn't) in management and team leadership. I'm one myself. We only have one PM (an Argentinian) who doesn't have english as a native language. Language is an incredible barrier to job advancement and career success.
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I think it's a bad thing. Not because I'm anti-immigration, because I'm not. I think that the US should accept many more immigrants for permanent residency (green card) than it does - Canada, 1/10th the size, accepts more.
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What this is, essentially, is a ploy by companies to work someone through their technical lifespan, then discard them. After six years, the new technologies that they learned in school are aging if not stale. Rather than retrain, they can send them back to India/Indonesia/China/Russia
(rant on)
This is one of the great failings of the IT industry. Companies should be recruiting for fundamentals of programming and software engineering. Instead, they recruit for individual technologies, many of which can be learned in a matter of weeks by a competent professional. Programmers bet into this by concentrating on technology rather than proficiency or professionalism.
Where programming was a legitimate profession twenty-odd years ago, and done by well-educated professionals. Like other professionals, programmers should be able to ply their trade around the world. The current-mind set (which promotes hare-brained schemes like this) risks turning it into a trade, where bare competence on skills rather than problem-solving and thinking is emphasized.
When you hire a professional, you establish a relationship with them and it's upheld at both ends. You can't hire professionals as a bulk commodity. Unfortunately, large companies and legislators alike seem to think that they can import them as a bulk commodity like so many widgets. No wonder so many software projects fail.
(rant off)
A poster above made the argument that an H1-B was a preliminary to him receiving a green card. Good for him. However, this doesn't necessarily generalize. Do many H1-B recipients receive a green card?
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You're entitled to your opinion, but you're mistaken in your analysis. Notes/Domino isn't a "mail product" - it's a database product. It offers mail and messaging functionality, just like it offers phone book functionality, KM functionality, discussion functionality, etc, etc. Everything is just a front end over a rather weak DBMS. Notes has always been like that.
Now, Notes isn't particularly good at mail (although Exchange is much, much worse). However, if your company bought a Notes system and only uses it for mail, they should, quite frankly, have their heads examined. And so should you.
There's no way that IBM could have used Domino/Notes as a front-end to WebSphere, so failing to do so is hardly a failure on IBM's part. IBM also uses Notes for a lot of their commercial sites, such as their small business, EPP, and download sites, so there's no lack of confidence at IBM wrt Notes.
How do I know this? Let's just say I know those sites quite intimately. WebSphere may be the future at IBM, but there's nothing particularly wrong with Notes/Domino.
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IBM puts a lot of stuff out in pre-release. (Even stuff that has no right to go out, even in pre-release, but enough about that - NDR, as you probably expect.).
They've really changed over the last 10-20 years, since the anti-trust suit. I wouldn't want to work there (I was a contractor there once) but it's interesting to be on the periphery.
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Domino Server R5 works fine on Linux. I ran it for a few months myself. It's reasonable to assume that IBM, who now owns Lotus, will be pushing its applications to linux, first for the server (as they are already: DB2, WebSphere, etc), then the desktop.
Lotus hasn't been a major player in the desktop applications market for quite a while, in any case.
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It's a good idea to test platform vs. platform to figure out benchmarks. However, part of my paid employment is DBA work, and I've come (with painful time and experience) to realize that a great deal of your database's performance is a matter of tuning and configuration.
That said, you can set up a very generic, very simple system to test the performance of various RDBMS. It will give you an idea of the minimum performance which you can expect, but it won't give you an accurate idea of what those RDBMS are capable of when running at peak performance.
Finally, database choice is, in the commercial terms, almost always dictated by factors other than pure performance. Availability of quality staff (tech support and DBA's) is a big one, since labour is more expensive than hardware. Software compatibility, even terms of the RDBMS license. Pure performance seems to be the third or even fourth criterion.
JMHO
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Really, I think that it's important to get kids programming first. They can learn more structured languages when they're ready; more exposure to formal mathematics, for example, will help them a lot, but you just don't get that in high school. Perl gives them positive feedback very quickly, and lets them do useful things from the get go.
Building enthusiasm for programming (not to mention raising its social cachet) is the best thing that could come out of this. Those kids are not professional programmers, but this should not be confused with academic or professional training. It's a light introduction. When they move on to their freshman year of college, they'll have broken through the major barrier of computer education - fear of the computer - and will be ready to learn properly.
Btw, I know/knew Chris Lehmann - he's quite a guy. Those kids are very lucky, even though they probably don't realize it now.
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Actually, Big Brother was based (and not loosely, either) on our favourite paternalist figure, Josef Stalin. So was the antagonist of _Animal Farm_, Comrade Napoleon.
Orwell was a devout socialist throughout his life but broke with the orthodox left following his experiences in Spain during the civil war.
To argue that Big Brother is a poor example of brotherhood is arguing the obvious. Big Brother is obviously the ultimate patriarch. He is nothing like a brother. Anyone who asserts otherwise should start by reading the book (somewhat like the first rule of art criticism: be sure to see the art before writing the review).
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After all, if you really want to feed your addiction, you'd get a job doing this :). j/k - the better I get at application design and architecture, the more time I spend in meetings and coaching other developers (currently about 1/2 my time ... and rising.)
I used to chat a lot while in university; I stopped in the middle of my last year and haven't really gone back. I'd say I spend about 8 hours a day at the keyboard, part of that developing, part of that searching for information on new tech (it's part of my job - tres cool), part just reading mail and writing. Less on weekends, but that's because I have a serious partner and I've discovered photography, another good diversion.
I'd say I'm about average for a higher-level code monkey. Less and less of the new people here (and I assume where I work is typical) tend to be involved in net culture; a lot tend to be graduates of 1-year computer colleges and not especially well-seasoned in the net, how it works, and what makes it good. C'est la vie, although I wonder where all the old-school netheads went.
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Not to be too blunt, but there's nothing wrong with giving away free software - even free as in beer, rather than free as in speech - by definition. I don't know where you got the idea that there was. What is wrong is collusion, dumping (and Open Source isn't dumping, by definition), and/or unfair business practises. IE would have been a fair competitor to Netscape if it hadn't been bundled with Windows, &c, &c, &c.
Certainly, in a capitalist society there are winners and losers. The GPL is in no way responsible for this. The GPL does not present an "unfair advantage" to anyone using it; they must give as they receive, and the advantage is given to anyone who wants to give.
Let's look at the example you gave, the small software house who lives in fear of a GPL'ed product taking away their niche. I can't see the downside of this, really: if users will be satisfied with a free product which does 75% of what the commercial product does, and satisfies their requirements, then that's all for the good of the user.
However, total cost of ownership being what it is, software cost is a minuscule part of deploying and running an application. If a vendor cannot compete with a free product offering no support and no training and no promise of future development, no corporate commitment at all, they were quite literally doomed from the very start. Unfortunately, this kind of arrogance runs rampant through the software industry: why should be offer support, training, and all those other things that let a company successfully use our product?
Likewise, Be wouldn't be giving away its OS without the existence of Linux or the BSD's, which are not licensed under the GPL. Are they now recouping their investment? Let's be reasonable, please: if they had an ounce of sense, they wouldn't have expected to recoup their investment for many years. That they're not recouping it presently, for a year-old product, is an indictment of nothing except capitalism.
For that matter, BeOS uses a number of GPL'ed tools and utilities, such as bash. Is one operating system which uses GPL'ed utilities good, and the other bad? It certainly isn't the GPL that makes one good and the other bad, one succeed and the other fail.
Believe it or not, the market, or rather any free or pseudo-free demand economy, exists for the benefit of the buyers, not the sellers. The buyers move the markets through present consumption, and they exist only to promote further consumption. If the GPL is harmful to prospective sellers, don't forget that capitalism is the root of this evil. You might as well blame the Microsoft EULA, as Microsoft has driven far more companies out of business than any number of free software ventures.
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That's the point of a SEC form 10-Q - to disclose all the possible downsides of investing in this company. That it sounds bad is unsurprising, because it's supposed to sound bad; it's supposed to sound very, very bad indeed.
But is it proof of anything? Nothing at all: all it says is that you can lose money investing in the equity market, which is hardly news. At least not since the early nineteenth century.
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I don't think it is, really. An artist and a critic certainly aren't the same thing. More to the point, it isn't an author's job to wade into the fray, and they'd certainly lose authority if they did so. In these days of personal attacks, the artist becomes just another shlub when they defend themselves; they prove that they're capable of sinking to the lowest levels of discourse as well.
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Consider it this way: there is no difference between brokering and squatting on a domain name. That said, I don't see anything wrong with either.
Intent is frequently cited as being the defining point, and I really have to take issue with this. A company can say anything was its intent, and trying to second-guess a corporation is just that, guessing. If we're serious about calling one thing by its proper name, we should call it exactly what it is: abandonment, of an unused domain name or unmaintained site is on it, or exchange, if a maintained site is located there.
Now for the kicker: I think that domain name costs should be much higher, not lower, than they are now, and the revenue should be fed back into infrastructure or into a trust fund. Consider this: there is a limited number of valid domain names, in the absence of alternate TLD's. Domain names are valuable. Everyone who buys one today (costing as little as about 15$US) is getting it at a fire-sale price. And who should rightfully own unassigned domain names? I think that net users should, collectively, just like the state owns unsold land. The revenue should go somewhere which benefits the net community rather than lining pockets at NSI.
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To put it bluntly, no one forces you to read a Katz story, whether by him or concerning him. You get the first fifty words on the default page; anything beyond that is your business, your action, and quite frankly your fault if you don't like him but read him anyway.
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You can't be so young (perhaps you can, but I hope not) to have not observed that lawsuits are especially predominant in tech-related industry. Any technical or scientific advance is time-critical; there's only so long before it's superseded by another.
A lawsuit isn't primarily a means for gaining cash. It's a means to gain delay. Courts recognize that you can't put the genie back in the bottle, so they're extremely willing to grant orders stopping distribution of a new technology.
As such, the amount of extra R&D money that they'd have is totally secondary; what they want is catch-up time. So what if the suit fails or even if the defendant is awarded costs - big deal. Paying for lawsuits, offensive and defensive, is a cost of doing business.
This was true in military-related industry in the 50's, in computer hardware in the 70's when the mainframe race was really heating up, and it's true in software in the 90's and 00's.
This is also why companies try to build patent portfolios. If they are really in the wrong in a lawsuit, they can choose to cross-license patents, with or without a cash payment, to make up the value of the suit. It costs them much less than putting up dollars.
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