Except that, because of our arcane and byzantine tax laws, we really don't have private-sector insurance or health care. It's all tied in to the guvmint one way or another, by regulations and requirements written by bureaucrats and lawyers.
Right, whacky conservatives like Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and Sandy Berger were driving the view of Saddam Hussein as a WMD-crazy outlaw before the 2000 elections, preparing the ground for Bush to launch an attack.
The fact is, Bush made a tactical error focusing on WMDs as a justification for the war. Saddam had violated the spirit and letter of the UN sanctions long enough and often enough to fully justify booting him out. Bush would have saved us all a lot of grief if he had just focused on that.
By the way, would you consider mustard gas or sarin to be WMDs? Many of us do, and the army found literally hundreds of warheads filled with (at least) these.
Just tell me this one thing: Do you believe the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein dead, or alive and in power?
Oh, one last thing. Apparently, you believe that I, personally, am responsible for all the hyperbole and heated overstatement of the Right on this matter. Does that make you personally responsible for the same thing from the Left?
Or, maybe, it's not as simple as that. The tradeoffs are hugely complex, and whether we think a particular country can "free themselves" has a lot more input than just how prosperous they appear to be.
Pardon me, but I looked at most of your 54 incidents. A fair number are from comics, gaming, or science fiction communities. Not, strictly speaking, FOSS.
One of them is about a real-life massacre at an engineering school. Are you suggesting that if Mark Shuttleworth were more "evolved," the killer would have killed 7 men and 7 women, instead of 14 women?
Yes, I know, social climate, blah blah. But, seriously, was the killer contributing to Linux Kernel patches? If not, why is it included in this discussion?
Don't weaken your case by diluting it.
Also, perhaps a major factor in the heat of this discussion is the perception that the FOSS community is uniquely sexist. Would this whole debate evaporate if we said something like "There is some sexism in Western culture. IT in general, and FOSS in particular, is not free from some level of sexism."
So, it's okay to rescue poor oppressed people, but if they are prosperous and oppressed, we should leave the insane dictator in place, let him continue to pull out dissident tongues with pliers, let his sons continue to kidnap and rape women, let him continue to buy weapons from western European suppliers with his food-and-medicine allowance?
Don't forget the 1-for-6 reverse split a while back. If you include that, $6 today is equivalent to $1 a few years ago.
Yeah, I bought SUNW at $17, watched it crash down to about $4, watched my number of shares shrink, watched the price keep falling, and finally got out with about a 90% loss. Woo hoo. Tax break.
I mean that. I've been on both sides of it, and, although the public reason is to save money, or improve productivity, often the real reason is so that some VP or CIO can put "successfully outsourced IT department and saved $X million over $Y years" on their resume'.
Of course, X and Y come from an analysis done by the PHB who brokered the deal. And then he leaves for a better job six months later, before everyone involved realizes that the friction of extra management layers, the divided loyalties of the trench workers, and the cost pressures of the outsource company are all resulting in lower satisfaction for the customer, the provider, and the workers.
But the Big Important MBA got his new job at a bigger company, and gets to polish up his resume'. That's what is important, isn't it?
But it would be better if we could stop wasting resources on treating old sick people and start using them to treat young people with a future ahead of them.
No, it would be better if people who have successfully navigated a lifetime of adversity could apply their experience to the problems of the future. And, if they have to harvest organs from a few callow, self-centered youngsters... well, seriously, what are the odds that any particular young person will make a significant positive contribution? Pretty close to zero, don't you think?
No. Really. Have you ever hit up paypal or ebay regarding a fraudulent transaction? Nothing usually ever comes of it. Why think that they will change now?
Once. I ordered a set of Quantum Leap DVDs that turned out to be pirated, complained to both eBay and PayPal, and got my money back. The vendor disappeared off of eBay immediately, although I suppose they were back under a different name the next day.
The thing about these DVDs is that the price was about right for a legitimate copy, and the vendor had positive ratings. I guess I just got lucky on getting my money back.
I work production support as a DBA. Even though we have an on-call rotation, I might get a call or page at any time. To make things worse, I work from home 100%, so I am essentially always at the office.
I don't have a Blackberry, but I have a rather ordinary cell phone, which these days includes the capability to get SMS messages from any goober with an email account. The thing is, I have the servers send me alerts directly on certain events, and can often fix a problem before Ops even knows about it.
However, I am a contractor, and get paid for every hour I work. If I was a salaried employee, you can bet I would be pushing back on this kind of intrusion. And that, I think, is the key. As long as your employer pays no penalty for disturbing your personal time, it is not your personal time.
This appears to be a "brillant" idea from some meathead MBA who thinks FOSS works by magic.
These are the same people who think that outsourcing IT is a good idea. I've seen it from both sides, and I have never seen an outsourcing arrangement (regardless of national boundaries) work well.
I'm not talking about bringing in contractors to help; generally, a good contractor will become as much a part of the team as the empoyees, just with different constraints. I'm talking about "Hey, Big Freaking Impersonal Company, I'll pay you less than it's costing me to {manage my servers, write my code, keep my network secure, etc.}"
The best you get is divided loyalty, over-conscientious techs working around the system to keep the users happy and lying to management on both sides. It can get much worse than that, when people are cynical enough, or just get exhausted and overloaded.
Back in the mid-80s at CU Boulder, this was exactly what we did in a 400-level EE class called "Computer Lab".
My group's design divided the primary clock into 10 phases, for each of 10 execution phases. We had 8 (I think?) 2716 EPROMs for the microcode, and a pile of 74xx chips. We designed the primary clock to run at 10 MHz, giving us one instruction execution per microsecond, but we had problems with clock rates higher than a few hundred Hz.
When we were disassembling, we found an open-collector part with no pull-up resistor in the clock path. We were pretty lucky it worked at all, but we ended up with a pretty good grade. About half the groups didn't get anything running at all, but we were able to get a simple counting program to run. One of the crew even found a cheap synthesizer circuit we could put in place to have it count out loud... very, very slowly.
My own worst contribution to the project was not getting the assembler completed, so we had to hand-assemble the demo program.
I honestly think a lot of the hostility, here, towards VB has to do with the fact that now pretty much anyone can write code and that it's from Microsoft. If you're somehow saying that if they used C/C++ or even Perl that their code would somehow be wonderful or safe, you're insane.
My personal hostility toward VB comes from two sources: First, it really is ugly. Second, and a bigger issue for me, is that VB was used by tons of of managers to try to solve the "programmer problem." As the grandparent says, programming is a hard problem.
Understanding the basics of a programming language or system is not so bad, but the ability to learn different business knowledge for every project, to creatively apply it to writing programs, to design programs that can be easily fixed when problems come to light, to communicate with a large population of users with diverse jargon and assumptions -- it requires a smart person who is willing to work hard.
There may be a lot of smart people in the world, but the willingness to work hard is less common. And, unfortunately, the hype and glamour of programming in the 1980s and 1990s tended to attract people who wanted to get big bucks for little effort. Is it any wonder that business people were freaking out about the cost/quality ratio of programming? Is it any wonder that they are still freaking out about it?
What has this got to do with math in programming? Oh, maybe not much. But, "removing math from computer science" sounds to me like just another silver bullet someone is proposing to make programming easy for everyone. The simple fact is that programming will always be a hard problem, just as medicine, law, structural engineering, writing symphonies, visual art, and other essentially human tasks will always be. If we ever get true artifical intelligence, perhaps programming can be made simple and easy for everyone. Otherwise, don't count on it.
Also, right now you can install a dual boot setup for Windows gaming and use the same partition for your VM when you don't feel like or need to reboot.
Of course, doing this actually violates the brain-dead Windows licensing, because it looks like different hardware to the license manager (or whatever they call it.) There is probably a way to fool it, but I have better things to do with my time, so I only run Windows under Vmware Server with a SUSE host O/S on my laptop.
Maybe Microsoft will eventually get smart about virtual machine licensing. I think I'll hold my breath until that happens.
I think it's unfair to say that the community actually encourages this sort of unreadable code... there is a fairly strong distinction between a well-meaning Perl obfuscation and an actual project attempting to accomplish a specific goal (although I will concede that the lines between the two can be blurry at times). If we were working on a work-related project I would have smacked you upside the head had you tried to commit that atrocity to the codebase, as would quite a few other Perl developers. And, please, it is easy to write muck no matter which language you're working with. Your example really doesn't prove anything because, clearly, most people in their right minds wouldn't do what you just did.
... and what has that got to do with Perl hackers?
But, seriously, a lot of people have that impression of the Perl community, that they take perverse pride in writing unreadable code, and that there is a certain snobbery about it. I agree that there is no technical reason that Perl must be unreadable. When I have to write Perl, it looks more like Pascal than the kind of glossalalia that started this sub-thread, mostly because I don't want to spend the effort to learn Perl that deeply. Life is too short, and there are too many other things to do.
It seems to me that the Perl community is about equally divided between pragmatists who appreciate the power of the language and CPAN, and wackos who promote a cult of Gnostic mysticism. Guess which group I think of when Perl is mentioned?
The problem with this kind of legislation is that it is not a tax on the oil companies. In the end, it is a tax on their customers.
The wacko-enviro-lefties seem to always forget that a tax always has a negative economic impact. It sometimes has a positive benefit somewhere else in society, and that benefit may even outweigh its negative consequences.
So, what's so bad about a negative economic impact? Economics is not just about rich corporate CEOs, lawyers, politicians, venture capitalists, bankers, inside traders, hedge fund bandits, leveraged buyout raiders. It's about your job, and the corner drug store, and the bicycle shop, and the Internet, the church down the block, and your grandmother's pension, and your local PBS station. Economics is about everything in life. It's about how we survive, and thrive, and interact, and plan for the future, and pay for the mistakes of the past.
So, what's the big deal about this kind of tax? It's one group of economic units using the political process to raid the resources of another group of economic units for ideological, or economic, or political reasons. They funnel that money from one group, through the government, and to another group. And this is the ugly part: all governments are notoriously bad about handling your money.
Make no mistake. That is your money they are talking about. Not the oil companies' money.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a reason why Oracle is on top of database business.
Yep. It's because they are better at selling to corporate suits than anyone else.
I went to LastPass because KeePass wouldn't read my stored passwords directly from FireFox settings.
Except that, because of our arcane and byzantine tax laws, we really don't have private-sector insurance or health care. It's all tied in to the guvmint one way or another, by regulations and requirements written by bureaucrats and lawyers.
To hawk is to peddle or sell, or to clear mucus from the throat.
To hock is to pawn.
Whichever meaning you intended, you got the wrong word.
And, from the context, you clearly meant peddling.
Hawking, you mean.
Right, whacky conservatives like Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and Sandy Berger were driving the view of Saddam Hussein as a WMD-crazy outlaw before the 2000 elections, preparing the ground for Bush to launch an attack.
The fact is, Bush made a tactical error focusing on WMDs as a justification for the war. Saddam had violated the spirit and letter of the UN sanctions long enough and often enough to fully justify booting him out. Bush would have saved us all a lot of grief if he had just focused on that.
By the way, would you consider mustard gas or sarin to be WMDs? Many of us do, and the army found literally hundreds of warheads filled with (at least) these.
Just tell me this one thing: Do you believe the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein dead, or alive and in power?
Oh, one last thing. Apparently, you believe that I, personally, am responsible for all the hyperbole and heated overstatement of the Right on this matter. Does that make you personally responsible for the same thing from the Left?
Or, maybe, it's not as simple as that. The tradeoffs are hugely complex, and whether we think a particular country can "free themselves" has a lot more input than just how prosperous they appear to be.
Pardon me, but I looked at most of your 54 incidents. A fair number are from comics, gaming, or science fiction communities. Not, strictly speaking, FOSS.
One of them is about a real-life massacre at an engineering school. Are you suggesting that if Mark Shuttleworth were more "evolved," the killer would have killed 7 men and 7 women, instead of 14 women?
Yes, I know, social climate, blah blah. But, seriously, was the killer contributing to Linux Kernel patches? If not, why is it included in this discussion?
Don't weaken your case by diluting it.
Also, perhaps a major factor in the heat of this discussion is the perception that the FOSS community is uniquely sexist. Would this whole debate evaporate if we said something like "There is some sexism in Western culture. IT in general, and FOSS in particular, is not free from some level of sexism."
Or is the heated discussion the whole point?
Oh, and by the way, it's not difficult to grasp intellectually, but it seems to be a bit arrogant, in a moral sense.
How difficult is that to grasp? (See, I am sarcastically turning your snarky ad-hominem comment back at you.)
So, it's okay to rescue poor oppressed people, but if they are prosperous and oppressed, we should leave the insane dictator in place, let him continue to pull out dissident tongues with pliers, let his sons continue to kidnap and rape women, let him continue to buy weapons from western European suppliers with his food-and-medicine allowance?
Don't forget the 1-for-6 reverse split a while back. If you include that, $6 today is equivalent to $1 a few years ago. Yeah, I bought SUNW at $17, watched it crash down to about $4, watched my number of shares shrink, watched the price keep falling, and finally got out with about a 90% loss. Woo hoo. Tax break.
Outsourcing is evil.
I mean that. I've been on both sides of it, and, although the public reason is to save money, or improve productivity, often the real reason is so that some VP or CIO can put "successfully outsourced IT department and saved $X million over $Y years" on their resume'.
Of course, X and Y come from an analysis done by the PHB who brokered the deal. And then he leaves for a better job six months later, before everyone involved realizes that the friction of extra management layers, the divided loyalties of the trench workers, and the cost pressures of the outsource company are all resulting in lower satisfaction for the customer, the provider, and the workers.
But the Big Important MBA got his new job at a bigger company, and gets to polish up his resume'. That's what is important, isn't it?
No, it would be better if people who have successfully navigated a lifetime of adversity could apply their experience to the problems of the future. And, if they have to harvest organs from a few callow, self-centered youngsters ... well, seriously, what are the odds that any particular young person will make a significant positive contribution? Pretty close to zero, don't you think?
Can someone say "slippery slope?"
Once. I ordered a set of Quantum Leap DVDs that turned out to be pirated, complained to both eBay and PayPal, and got my money back. The vendor disappeared off of eBay immediately, although I suppose they were back under a different name the next day.
The thing about these DVDs is that the price was about right for a legitimate copy, and the vendor had positive ratings. I guess I just got lucky on getting my money back.
Yes, I threw out the pirated DVDs.
I work production support as a DBA. Even though we have an on-call rotation, I might get a call or page at any time. To make things worse, I work from home 100%, so I am essentially always at the office.
I don't have a Blackberry, but I have a rather ordinary cell phone, which these days includes the capability to get SMS messages from any goober with an email account. The thing is, I have the servers send me alerts directly on certain events, and can often fix a problem before Ops even knows about it.
However, I am a contractor, and get paid for every hour I work. If I was a salaried employee, you can bet I would be pushing back on this kind of intrusion. And that, I think, is the key. As long as your employer pays no penalty for disturbing your personal time, it is not your personal time.
Did you even read the article?
This appears to be a "brillant" idea from some meathead MBA who thinks FOSS works by magic.
These are the same people who think that outsourcing IT is a good idea. I've seen it from both sides, and I have never seen an outsourcing arrangement (regardless of national boundaries) work well.
I'm not talking about bringing in contractors to help; generally, a good contractor will become as much a part of the team as the empoyees, just with different constraints. I'm talking about "Hey, Big Freaking Impersonal Company, I'll pay you less than it's costing me to {manage my servers, write my code, keep my network secure, etc.}"
The best you get is divided loyalty, over-conscientious techs working around the system to keep the users happy and lying to management on both sides. It can get much worse than that, when people are cynical enough, or just get exhausted and overloaded.
Yes, I am in that kind of situation right now.
Marvin Minsky made this statement in a much stronger form in the book The Society of Mind, published in 1985 or 1986.
Back in the mid-80s at CU Boulder, this was exactly what we did in a 400-level EE class called "Computer Lab".
My group's design divided the primary clock into 10 phases, for each of 10 execution phases. We had 8 (I think?) 2716 EPROMs for the microcode, and a pile of 74xx chips. We designed the primary clock to run at 10 MHz, giving us one instruction execution per microsecond, but we had problems with clock rates higher than a few hundred Hz.
When we were disassembling, we found an open-collector part with no pull-up resistor in the clock path. We were pretty lucky it worked at all, but we ended up with a pretty good grade. About half the groups didn't get anything running at all, but we were able to get a simple counting program to run. One of the crew even found a cheap synthesizer circuit we could put in place to have it count out loud ... very, very slowly.
My own worst contribution to the project was not getting the assembler completed, so we had to hand-assemble the demo program.
My hat is off to Buzbee.
From the parent:
My personal hostility toward VB comes from two sources: First, it really is ugly. Second, and a bigger issue for me, is that VB was used by tons of of managers to try to solve the "programmer problem." As the grandparent says, programming is a hard problem.
Understanding the basics of a programming language or system is not so bad, but the ability to learn different business knowledge for every project, to creatively apply it to writing programs, to design programs that can be easily fixed when problems come to light, to communicate with a large population of users with diverse jargon and assumptions -- it requires a smart person who is willing to work hard.
There may be a lot of smart people in the world, but the willingness to work hard is less common. And, unfortunately, the hype and glamour of programming in the 1980s and 1990s tended to attract people who wanted to get big bucks for little effort. Is it any wonder that business people were freaking out about the cost/quality ratio of programming? Is it any wonder that they are still freaking out about it?
What has this got to do with math in programming? Oh, maybe not much. But, "removing math from computer science" sounds to me like just another silver bullet someone is proposing to make programming easy for everyone. The simple fact is that programming will always be a hard problem, just as medicine, law, structural engineering, writing symphonies, visual art, and other essentially human tasks will always be. If we ever get true artifical intelligence, perhaps programming can be made simple and easy for everyone. Otherwise, don't count on it.
Of course, doing this actually violates the brain-dead Windows licensing, because it looks like different hardware to the license manager (or whatever they call it.) There is probably a way to fool it, but I have better things to do with my time, so I only run Windows under Vmware Server with a SUSE host O/S on my laptop.
Maybe Microsoft will eventually get smart about virtual machine licensing. I think I'll hold my breath until that happens.
... and what has that got to do with Perl hackers?
But, seriously, a lot of people have that impression of the Perl community, that they take perverse pride in writing unreadable code, and that there is a certain snobbery about it. I agree that there is no technical reason that Perl must be unreadable. When I have to write Perl, it looks more like Pascal than the kind of glossalalia that started this sub-thread, mostly because I don't want to spend the effort to learn Perl that deeply. Life is too short, and there are too many other things to do.
It seems to me that the Perl community is about equally divided between pragmatists who appreciate the power of the language and CPAN, and wackos who promote a cult of Gnostic mysticism. Guess which group I think of when Perl is mentioned?
The problem with this kind of legislation is that it is not a tax on the oil companies. In the end, it is a tax on their customers.
The wacko-enviro-lefties seem to always forget that a tax always has a negative economic impact. It sometimes has a positive benefit somewhere else in society, and that benefit may even outweigh its negative consequences.
So, what's so bad about a negative economic impact? Economics is not just about rich corporate CEOs, lawyers, politicians, venture capitalists, bankers, inside traders, hedge fund bandits, leveraged buyout raiders. It's about your job, and the corner drug store, and the bicycle shop, and the Internet, the church down the block, and your grandmother's pension, and your local PBS station. Economics is about everything in life. It's about how we survive, and thrive, and interact, and plan for the future, and pay for the mistakes of the past.
So, what's the big deal about this kind of tax? It's one group of economic units using the political process to raid the resources of another group of economic units for ideological, or economic, or political reasons. They funnel that money from one group, through the government, and to another group. And this is the ugly part: all governments are notoriously bad about handling your money.
Make no mistake. That is your money they are talking about. Not the oil companies' money.
I don't think it runs Linux (yet), and I hate to sound like a shill for O'Reilly, but this seems like a step in the direction you are describing:
http://makezine.com/controller/
Oh, please! Don't make any stinking Shannara films from the stinking derivative Shannara books!
Okay, to be fair, I only read the first one, and I've never read another word of Terry Brooks after that. Enough said.