Your argument rests on the faulty assumption that there is an infinite number of dirt poor people in the world. This is simply not true.
About 1/3 of the world (Europe, North America and Australia, Japan etc) are already rich since a long time. China and India is another 1/3 that are rapidly moving up to that state. Several other places are also reducing poverty, and the fact is that we'll run out of dirt poor people in a few decades.
The globalisation and outsourcing that so many people are complaining about is actually part of the greatest eradication of poverty in history.
All this excited reporting, and nowhere can I find the actual numbers of this new budget deal. And I have both a serious news addiction and considerable search term skills.
Does anyone know the correct values of X and Y in this sentence?
For the fiscal year of Oct 2010 - Sep 2011, the US government plans to spend $X out of an expected income of $Y.
On a more rhetorical level I also wonder why it is this simple basic fact about the dominating news story for at least several weeks is simply not reported?
I think one major cause of nucleophobia is that doses of a millionth of anything dangerous or less are easily measurable
Negligible doses of most every poison is always around, but are unmeasurable. Radiation radiates its presence and is observed, reported and terrifying.
As long as the US government routinely and massively records email, web traffic and phone conversations, they have no business telling others to not do the same or much smaller things.
When I'm at a museum, I can't help wonder why is this not a web site??
I mean, all an art museum is is a way to display pictures to the public, but in a phenomenally expensive and impractical way, compared to HTML.
I realize this field is slow to change and that display quality can still improve slightly, but in the medium term this is inevitable.
At least to the extent the attraction of museums is to display these pictures. When it comes to letting visitors be near the objects that celebrity artists have touched, nothing will change.
There are a few options for a government or other large organization to get something important and difficult done.
1. Assign the task to whatever part of your org chart this falls under. Uncountable billions and years later, you'll have a semi functional disappointment. NASA has proven this several times.
2. Contract it out to a major company, picked in some bidding process. The results are slightly better than (1), but still very bad.
3. Announce a prize of 1% of what you would have spent in (1), and you'll likely have a solution in 1/3 of the time.
This is because with prizes, whoever is best suited to solve the problem, in the whole world, can do so without having to convince your bureaucrats of their ideas, and make a profit doing so.
It's one of the very few effective ways to work around natural bureaucracy inertia.
People are uninformed about issues and candidates, because that is the smart thing to do. The fundamental problem is that the cost in time and effort of me learning is spent by me, while the benefit is shared equally be the whole electorate. So with a million voters I only get one millionth of the benefit of my labor. Few people want to work hard under those conditions.
This is a well researched phenomenon known as "Rational ignorance". Google it to learn more.
Like any vision dependent on a fundamental change in human nature, your system empirically does not, and can not work. What we need is a system where people can affect their own lives. In those areas people are usually quite well informed and make as good decisions as they're capable of.
Imagine an encryption system with 2 (or more) passwords for an encrypted file, each "decrypting" different things. So when someone demands the password, you give them one that produces data that won't get you in trouble. I can see a few practical problems, but they seem solvable.
A simpler version of the same idea is an emergency ATM pin code, to prevent "ATM muggings". When entered, the bank would pretend you only had small amount on the account, and/or alert police/security.
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Debuggers have been handling this for decades already. You just embed the original line numbers in the generated source.
Someone is bound to write that debugger plugin, if they haven't already.
Then again, any language is just another syntax for writing Assembler.
Your argument rests on the faulty assumption that there is an infinite number of dirt poor people in the world. This is simply not true.
About 1/3 of the world (Europe, North America and Australia, Japan etc) are already rich since a long time. China and India is another 1/3 that are rapidly moving up to that state. Several other places are also reducing poverty, and the fact is that we'll run out of dirt poor people in a few decades.
The globalisation and outsourcing that so many people are complaining about is actually part of the greatest eradication of poverty in history.
Sending humans, fucking or not, would cost 100 or 1000 times as much as this alleged waste of money.
Any cell phone that displays your location needs to track and store it in some form.
Smart phones aside, one of the main purposes of a cell phone is to constantly transmit it's location to the cell phone network, which stores it.
All this excited reporting, and nowhere can I find the actual numbers of this new budget deal. And I have both a serious news addiction and considerable search term skills.
Does anyone know the correct values of X and Y in this sentence?
For the fiscal year of Oct 2010 - Sep 2011, the US government plans to spend $X out of an expected income of $Y.
On a more rhetorical level I also wonder why it is this simple basic fact about the dominating news story for at least several weeks is simply not reported?
Well, people havent quit running competitions, even though cars are much faster.
I think one major cause of nucleophobia is that doses of a millionth of anything dangerous or less are easily measurable
Negligible doses of most every poison is always around, but are unmeasurable. Radiation radiates its presence and is observed, reported and terrifying.
"Don't spy, the government hates competition".
As long as the US government routinely and massively records email, web traffic and phone conversations, they have no business telling others to not do the same or much smaller things.
It's fine to come up with standards for safe power, as long as you apply them equally to all power generation.
For this one I guess the question is if you would want to live by the exhaust of a coal fired power plant?
I know I would much rather live by the nuclear storage. No other place will be as monitored for radiation, for one thing.
It only has to be better than the average driver.
At least from a rational standpoint. From a legal standpoint it probably has to be 100 times better and wait 10 years "just in case".
That has been rephrased slightly to keep up with the times. It is now Land of the fee.
We apologize for no inconvenience!
When I'm at a museum, I can't help wonder why is this not a web site??
I mean, all an art museum is is a way to display pictures to the public, but in a phenomenally expensive and impractical way, compared to HTML.
I realize this field is slow to change and that display quality can still improve slightly, but in the medium term this is inevitable.
At least to the extent the attraction of museums is to display these pictures. When it comes to letting visitors be near the objects that celebrity artists have touched, nothing will change.
I'm sure this had nothing to do with the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade at the time.
So this malware is brilliant at some things but makes rookie mistakes in others.
Maybe it was some very skilled programmers working in a field they were not fully familiar with?
Perhaps US and Israel do not have super skilled virus authors on their payroll? I would actually like that to be true.
There are a few options for a government or other large organization to get something important and difficult done.
1. Assign the task to whatever part of your org chart this falls under. Uncountable billions and years later, you'll have a semi functional disappointment. NASA has proven this several times.
2. Contract it out to a major company, picked in some bidding process. The results are slightly better than (1), but still very bad.
3. Announce a prize of 1% of what you would have spent in (1), and you'll likely have a solution in 1/3 of the time.
This is because with prizes, whoever is best suited to solve the problem, in the whole world, can do so without having to convince your bureaucrats of their ideas, and make a profit doing so.
It's one of the very few effective ways to work around natural bureaucracy inertia.
I didn't know he was getting married!
As a minor side effect, the Sahara desert will be expanded to cover half the world.
Why? That's an easy question to answer: because we're human.
But... That's true for all countries.
You couldn't ask for help??
Team work is to me the most important part of agile.
In a real agile project, you would at the very least have been working in a pair and figuring this out together with your partner.
If being a good programmer is so easy, why are they so expensive to hire?
Well, I can appreciate your good intentions, but I think that energy would be far better directed toward solutions that can actually work.
I'm not making any value judgement about Rational Ignorance. I'm just saying that it does exist. Whether you like it or not, reality is real.
Going from wishing that something doesn't exist to basing policy on assuming that it in fact doesn't exist is madness.
A more fitting murder parallel would be to abolish punishments for it, since murder should not exist.
People are uninformed about issues and candidates, because that is the smart thing to do. The fundamental problem is that the cost in time and effort of me learning is spent by me, while the benefit is shared equally be the whole electorate. So with a million voters I only get one millionth of the benefit of my labor. Few people want to work hard under those conditions.
This is a well researched phenomenon known as "Rational ignorance". Google it to learn more.
Like any vision dependent on a fundamental change in human nature, your system empirically does not, and can not work. What we need is a system where people can affect their own lives. In those areas people are usually quite well informed and make as good decisions as they're capable of.
Here's an idea. It might even be a good one:
Imagine an encryption system with 2 (or more) passwords for an encrypted file, each "decrypting" different things. So when someone demands the password, you give them one that produces data that won't get you in trouble. I can see a few practical problems, but they seem solvable.
A simpler version of the same idea is an emergency ATM pin code, to prevent "ATM muggings". When entered, the bank would pretend you only had small amount on the account, and/or alert police/security.