I thought the reason to go to college was supposedly to learn things.
No, the educational system is the gravel bed in which the pipeline called a "student" is laid.
The pipeline exists to distribute the essential commodity of money from the producers (banks, parents) to the consumers (university, trustees, contractors, etc.).
This latest affair is a continued expansion of the franchise.
The ranks of consumers at the outlet will grow, since the pipeline itself is a dumb tube that refuses to control its own flow (and in fact is almost wholly ignorant of its pipeline status).
So, either the commodity is pumped through the pipeline faster, or the pipe diameter is increased.
Grossly insecure?
So what?
Computerized voting systems are now being built to satisfy two demands:
(1) Political demands following the 2000 election travesty.
(2) To have sexy, sleek, fancy-schmancy, modern, greatest-society-in-da-fuckin'-world voting systems.
Security wasn't on the priority list.
Even voters will generally prioritize "new and exciting" and "makes me feel better about the 2004 election" over dull, nerdy and frankly citizen-involving aspects like fraud-proofing the new vote systems.
Grossly insecure.
Sheesh, you may as well levy a similar charge of grossly insincere against politicians, but that has hardly stopped them from being elected and re-elected and re-re-elected ad nauseam in droves.
The voter is responsible for the slimy pieces of shit that fill the ranks of our elected representatives, and we all similarly share the blame for the wholly fraudulent voting systems that are being installed as we speak.
I appreciate your perspective and admire your boldness in posting such a thing on/., but I am compelled to speak the truth and to counter misconceptions where I see them.
You have missed some critical features of professional work.
There are many instances in every job where a level of commonality is reached.
In this level, a "trained monkey" could do the job.
But that doesn't cast the entirety of the profession onto the manual-labor streetcorner.
I have wormed my way back into IT (serendipity played a large part of that, however), and I find myself writing a lot of procedures for others to follow.
The procedures are for even the lay person to follow, since time is always of the essence.
But it took my little skilled self to not only write them, but to come up with the need to have them written in the first place.
Corporate memory arises from Human action, and those acts are skilled ones.
Added to this is the sad, sad truth that too many people cannot even construct logical thought processes necessary to be an effective professional.
IT work is brutally logical and missing details leads to almost catastrophic results.
IT is laboring under the weight of that old song or poem about For The Want of a Nail.
The need for disciplined thinking alone puts such work into realm of "uncommonality".
In summary, yes, you are broadly correct that pushing VB routines around is more of a commodity skill and as such can be priced down to minima.
However, programming itself is a profession requiring years of dedicated practice and study, and you will be hard pressed to demand a 4-year degree for a 4-year career, or a 16-yr-old's wages.
I don't think capitalism is the problem, it's greed. Ambition or efficiency is one thing, greed is something else.
You said it, but it must be further expanded, and I believe Elbert Hubbard put this expansion best when he (paraphrasedly) said:
A man with a home and savings is unavoidably a capitalist.
Americans are divesting even of the most sensible investment:
themselves.
Savings have shrunk and disappeared, and homes are "purchased" in such a manner that actually they've become endless rentals.
In the environment like this, it almost makes sense to be an economic sociopath and spend your time fscking your fellow man for everything you can get out of him.
As the love of money is the root of all evil, capitalism's not evil, only the worship of it.
It is now sitting on a throne built from Human misery.
We need to keep being skeptical about capitalism to pull back from the terror of its up-and-coming hyperactive forms.
Assuming the quote is true, and taken in context, then it only remains for us to ponder how a person with such a basic misunderstanding of the US Constitution actually ended up being one of 9 supreme interpreters of that document and subordinate law.
The Const isn't a matter of minima, but maxima, in setting the limits on government.
Other than the Const's design parameters, this principle is explictly enumerated in the tenth amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
It's just too bad that the American citizenry haven't the minerals necessary to tar-and-feather Scalia for a comment like the one he allegedly made.
His non-TAFing isn't an artifact of tolerance for his liberty of speech, but one of American stupidity.
Behind every inflamed call for references, links or source material is a person engaging in willful ignorance.
Where have you been?
What the hell have you been reading or watching for the last 2 years?
Just reading the book "Jews For Buchanan" and various interviews by Gregory Palast would reveal the innate treachery within the vote system.
Surfing Google and a variety of news sites is a requirement for a more detailed understanding of this.
Don't blame us for not being able to quote chapter and verse of a bible that you refuse to read.
You have a responsibility to do your own homework with all that public data.
Surf online for a few hours about vote fraud (especially the Floridan flavor), and see if you come back with the same skepticism.
I think the article is another attempt to rah-rah companies who purport to be involved in AI just to support their stock price.
So, I must call this article's line of bullpucky... show me your freaking' cards!
We have been hearing about AI for long enough to know further empty promises when we hear them.
Do we have to go through this continually, cycle after cycle, of hearing about how smart computers will get?
Sheesh, it seems that most of the "intelligence" put into systems now produces effects that I have to fight, adapt to, or find a workaround for.
However, the sentiment is something I like... tech systems should have complicated internal workings that allow them to adapt to our behavior.
Complication in design that produces simplified interfaces.
I'm really tired of changing my form to fit into the system... it should be the other way around.
You know, now's the time to wave the flag for the one OS that I actually liked for its user friendliness... Mirosoft Bob.
I don't know what brain fart occurred within MS that gave them the impetus to make such a silly thing (nor what 11 herbs and spices were smoked to come up the name), but the end result was enormously friendly to the user.
It used commonplace language to clarify what you wanted to do, so it could go ahead and do it.
That aspect was wonderful, and we should have more of this available in other OSes.
I predicted at least 6 years ago that the loss of jobs would rise up past the manual-laborers and blue-collars, and start to impact the degreed, the certified, and the professional.
For many years before that, job losses primarily affected those who don't matter to the hidden plutocracy... the blue-collars and the Midwesterners.
So here and now we all are, and the "important people" are being hoist by their own petards.
Pardon me for not shedding a tear for these folks, who expected to be paid a lot of money for doing very little productive work.
I find myself giggly over the hiring-freezes and outright layoffs affecting the blue-collar city-worker set of people, who are equally as bad about performing their moral duty to work for their wages.
At the same time, I find the Young Republican set running around and saying things like "no one owes you a living".
I can't agree with that considering that it must be further narrowed into my favorite saying:
"people are owed the opportunity to earn a living".
In our own nations, we owe it to the blue-collar and white-collar workers to establish and maintain businesses that keep them gainfully employed.
Your assertions are currently well enough covered by good old expertise and shoe leather.
Buildings tend to already have inspection systems known as superintendents, or facilities departments with workers and a manager.
Cheaper and more reliable options for inspection can and ARE being fulfilled with periodic Human involvement and sensors.
This would still be the case with so-called automated sensors... as you well know, data doesn't inspect itself; somebody has to look at it.
The "smart brick" is a OK idea that unfortunately will be touted as a wholesale replacement for current, perfectly functional systems.
Temperature, vibration and movement doesn't have to be measured by some expensive high-tech brick, but can be measured by other systems already extant in the building, which can be added later and also moved around as needed.
Really, this brick thingie is another fine indicator of our cultural sickness in which we think that technology is the magic pill that makes for a better life.
To arrest the disease of technophilia, we need to recognize two things:
Tech tends to best fulfill niche markets... under the Principle of Limited Applicability.
The fork and spoon at the dinner table simply can't be replaced with a better system not matter how sexy the tech behind it... under the Principle of Maximum Optimization.
Physical Indicia Don't Map 1-to-1 With Fraud
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The Buttocks Have It
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· Score: 1
Just what we need:
more reasons to suspect people, detain them, interrogate them, and to finally fine and prosecute them.
I know of a friend who was raided by a police team in Allentown PA on the basis of the smell of cat piss and a chronically overzealous prosecutor.
It happens, but it never should.
How much longer are we going to tolerate the use of any old physical indicator to assault the common citizen?
How many more grandmothers have to be jacked up at an airport before people understand that that has nothing to do with finding that stolen Angolan 727 (which could be winging its way towards an American embassy as we speak)?
What will "seat squirm" indicate to us, when all you can do is look at the person and then proceed to bother them with accusatory questions based upon an entirely false confidence in technology?
The next thing that the FBI can come up with is a magic marker (just like finding a bad $20 bill) that you swipe across a person's skin; if the wrong color comes up, he's a fscking terrorist!
Call me nuts, but I seem to recall this exact idea being proposed on the Usenet newsgroup misc.entrepreneurs, maybe 1995 to1997.
The Oriental name rings a bell, too.
(Disclaimer:
I haven't searched Google Groups for it.)
On the newsgroup, there were extensive critques of the idea, and after all of that yakity-yak, the proposal seemed to sink beneath the waves.
I agreed with the "it's unworkable" and "it's unnecessary" critiques.
I found it particularly compelling that postal delivery tends to be a regional and a local affair and as such, worldwide coding is an unnecessary change to a perfectly functional system.
To wit:
your postman knows perfectly well where your house is, so changing your address to 3EP8Q R43VB isn't going to help him find you; and letters go between regions that know perfectly well how to get to their destinations.
Since I collected coins at an early age, I know all about silver American coinage.
For the layman, just look for a coin that has an entirely silver-colored edge, and is generally dated 1964 or before.
The cupro-nickel coins have a silver-and-copper colored edge.
Of course, this doesn't apply to Jefferson nickels, since they are silvery-looking all over.
You'd have to know the dates in the 1940s that had a 35% (?) silver content.
I found a good many silver nickels, probably just for this reason.
Of course, you will tend to find the Canadian coins in any batch you look at, since they are not silver but have silvery edges.
I understand and appreciate the sentiment behind what you say, but there is another sentiment behind what I'm saying, and I don't think you are picking up on it.
The issue is that with a monopolistic enterprise (and more to the point, a culture that only supports a certain restricted set of technologies) you wind up with few options ("options" = "things you can choose off the shelf and add to your life").
This has been Microsoft's position since the days of DOS.
Cars make for an excellent exampling of the problem with Microsoft (although the cars example doesn't represent the entire software industry).
People clearly want -- and society clearly needs -- more energy-efficient cars.
But while the gas mileage rose only modestly until recently, fscking SUVs hit the market in force, and overall we are getting a worse deal from the monopolistic enterprises that try to fulfill our transportation needs.
To wit:
it is technically possible to provide a small auto that gets x2 to x3 the present average compact-car gas mileage, but the automakers aren't building it, and they will continue to refuse to do so.
I don't know what you see from day to day, but I seem to live in a world where functional needs are widely wanting for fulfillment, but simply aren't being done since people serve up this set of excuses (assuming these things, like the "elephant in the living room", are even up for discussion in the public mind):
we don't have the time to make item X
we dont have the money to make item X
we don't have the skill to make item X
we don't really want item X
None of these excuses are true, since history has more than shown that people can perform past these restrictions in times of stress, which is only using things like military emergencies to do the right thing in the first place.
Perhaps I'm just saying that Humans are lazy, greedy and skeptical bastards... but this historical cycle leads to more doing the wrong thing, which leads to another emergency, etc.
Soooo... sorry for all my blather, but your assertion of "don't buy" tends to lead to "don't have", and our civilization is capable of delivering more than that.
We simply need to remove a portion of the law of the jungle from our capitalistic bahaviors and replace it with more Humanistic feeling.
P.S.
Did you ever see the movie "Pay It Forward"?
It's idea of paying debts forward (instead of "paying back") would be a real social advance for current Western civilization.
For several months, I worked in a bank cash vault (Fifth Third Bank, Toledo OH USA) and noted some things.
Firstly, silver coinage is very much out there, even to the point that a handful of silver Kennedy half dollars can be found in a single deposit from a department store (there was even a Franklin half in one batch).
Perhaps people just don't notice silver coinage even in high-volume retail... but then again, in handling coin, I soon learned to listen to the distinctive sound of silver tinging against the cupro-nickel normal coinage in the sealed bags.
(There was one false alarm that turned out to be Eisenhower dollars.)
Secondly, fake twenty dollar (US$20) bills are being easily passed along in bars... I can only conclude that this is because that these are generally places where the lighting is more dim, lots of small transactions take place, and frankly, where the environment is busy and loud.
Counterfeit 20s (and some 10s) showed time and time again in their deposits.
(It was particularly amusing to contact the customer about the debit, since it seems some of them expect the bank to simply replace the bill with a real one.)
It could also be that the criminal element that does the counterfeiting is native to the bar-going crowd.
I have inspected these fake 20s in some detail.
I noted right off the bat the "obvious" difference:
the overall hue of the bill is off just enough to be suspicious.
It is a little darker, and either slightly more yellow, brown and even a tiny bit purple.
So it is easy for me to believe that these bills can be passed off in a darker environment.
The texture of the bills was OK, surprisingly.
It could be that the paper was run through a washing and/or brushing mechanism to more simulate the cloth-y feel of a real bill.
As for the microprinting... of course, it was a washed out line and that more than anything told me it was counterfeit.
P.S.
A final note about hue... bills go through a lot, and you can't just go by the hue.
I've seen bills that have been dyed... light green, dark purple, things like that.
It happens.
People tend to want options, all of those 'bells and whistles' are just the options that people keep asking for.
You might think that an "option" is something you can add to what you have now.
Sure, Microsoft marketing knows full well that their feature-bloated code makes the sales.
But that's a real problem that causes well-nigh untestable code and I said so in my article.
It even bypasses the idea of "opt out" options.
Can I get just a Windows kernal and add drivers and apps to customize my computer needs... to assign my computing power as I want it?
No!... since like any monopolistic enterprise, Microsoft fails to give the consumer much ability to opt out of all their bloated software.
The construction of Internet Explorer was enough of an example to show how featuritis had overrun serving user needs --- all users, not just the online-shopping, AOL-chatting drones whose browsing experiences are being disrupted as we speak by browser spies, hijackers, ad-ware and drive-by downloads.
People that laugh at the products MS produces really do have to look hard at how THEY would manage and TEST 50 MILLION lines of code.
With 50 million lines of code you're looking at virtually an infinate number of tests to run, which is obviously impossible to do.
Thus you either have to roll out a product that hasn't been 100% tested because of its size or keep testing and never make money.
As part of the Microsoft culture, it appears that you've missed the point.
The problem is the 50 million lines of code itself.
I would have "managed" NT's testing by "not managing it" at all, and instead would have clipped out all those bells and whistles to make a much more trim and modular OS.
The code base is unecessarily large, from a functional point of view.
But just like the current SUV problem in America, it appears that Microsoft is dancing a tango with the consumers.
Microsoft produces shitty code that looks good on the screen, and the consumers say "ohh" and "ahh" while not minding the crashes and restrictions, and then Microsoft gets encouraged to produce more "pretty code".
I don't consider this problem to be fixable... we who know better and are less mediocre simply have to fend for ourselves and rely on the influence of our leadership to promote the Better Way.
This is the slow method of providing a good example for others to follow, which is the only leadership that matters.
Microsoft's billions are just a facade; consumer mediocrity is another facade; what will matter in the long run is bullet-proof code that more serves public needs instead of software-industry investors.
Quests for lost and restricted knowledge are common enough.
You see, the geeky type wants to know, and by knowing, tends to do.
But he tends to run into the walls of censorship (for whatever reason) and lassitude that are erected around knowledge in time.
Every tool is a weapon; and lately, if you can't make a buck off of it, it tends to rot away in some forgotten corner.
For myself, I have several copies of the Foxfire books, and I'm always looking out for old chemical recipes (from the good old days when real chemicals could be purchased, particularly stong acids, bases and metallic compounds).
There isn't an old bookstore in a certain radius from my home whose chemistry books I haven't raided.
The times of real scarcity are coming and I had better be well prepared to fix and manufacture on my own, so even very basic knowledge ("how do you make sulfuric acid?") is compelling to me.
Yeah, Kamen, I Gotcher Munny Riiiight Heah
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Rent a Segway
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· Score: 1
40 bucks an hour?
When for that price, I can get a rental car for a day, and a rental bicycle for a week?
The rental prices alone continue to make it obvious that the Segway is a machine powered not by electricity but by hype.
Hype is fickle, basically fraudulent and can disappear for good in a short second.
I'm sure Kamen's promotional apparatus is very, very annoyed with people like me, who have become so resolved against bulldada like the Segway that we can't be converted and must be attacked.
In order to get my money (which is the entire point to running the Engine of Hype {tm}) they will have to frisk my body for my wallet, since even at gunpoint I will resist and must be killed into submission.
Despite such drama -- and sadly for the Kamenistas -- there's only so much they can do to get my money.
But their hook (the alleged product, the Segway Transporter) is too expensive to effectively hide in some fee assessed by some government agency.
It should stand as perfectly obvious that this high price makes it impossible to lure me into buying it voluntarily, as well as renting it.
The reality of the Segway is that by its design, maintenance costs and purchase price, its application is very, very limited and will thus be compelled to remain there.
The purchase price alone is a major undermine of the hype and guarantees niche-marketdom.
But I do get tired of hearing people talk the thing up, as if this very, very limited machine can actually revolutionize our transportation world.
But I guess that's only to be expected given the dotcom era we are still mired in.
I read the article and have seldom seem such unassuming outrage in my life.
The current shuttle is a terrible system that started out with too many compromises.
It smacks of a political statement.
The same system could have been accomplished with two other, smaller, cheaper systems:
crew-mission ships (very X-15 like) and heavy-cargo lifters.
But those were too functional (i.e. not sexy enough) and frankly couldn't have funneled that much money into a mondo-beyondo development program run by an aerospace company or three.
So, instead, we got a moderate-lift, heavily-crewed ship that tumbles in the airstream of some mishap (thus being completely destroyed) once every 50 to 100 flights.
What was NASA's response to this last November?:
let's keep this good thing going... to 2010!
The engineers (at least those who are doing the acutal work) knew the shuttle was heading for another loss-of-all-hands.
The article claims that for replacement programs, there's "no shortage of ideas"... and goes on to present several.
I'm not worried about options... I'm worried about cost.
With prior projections of $6 to $35 (!!!) billion, I don't feel particularly compelled to keep NASA in the space-shuttling business.
Instead, with the basis for the current shuttle being $500 million per flight, see if we can task those much-vaunted aerospace companies to build a system and run it, at LESS THAN THAT COST.
If it turns out for their launch system that they use a gigantic rubber band stretched between two immense pylons, and charge $10 million per flight, then... GREAT!
The Cycle of Counting in Making Change
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
Typical egghead study:
look at one thing and propose a change (ha ha) on that basis.
How about the markedly lower time efficiency in the transaction by making the user and clerk do harder addition and subtraction?
How about the sheer irritation of doing math like that all day?
People generally find it more difficult to perform 29+18+5 than 25+10+5.
Hmm.
How difficult?
Let's put the pennies aside for a second.
The [5, 10, 25, 50, 100] coinage is based upon a cycle of 5, which produces 5 and 0 alternating in the last digit of your accumulating answer.
The proposed "efficient" coinage of [5, 18, 25] probably have a cycle of 1.
Just by running a test on counting three possible coins (again, ignoring the penny which always has a cycle of 1), we produce at least 6 possible digits (0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8) in the last digit of the accumulation.
Frankly, I can't see people standing for counting change with this kind of addition going on.
We've enough errors and frustration with our coin system based on 1s and 5s.
In any case, 2 crashes in 20 years is a very very good record. You'd be hard pressed to make the airline industry perform so well.
Jeezus, are you trolling?
It seems to me that even if you fold the airlines and NASA each into a frightfully complicated risk polynomial that factored in lives, money, cargo, miles (not counting orbits) and energy, then the shuttle's ~1/63rd failure rate is waaaaay too high.
Another way to put it is:
how many more billions do we have to pay NASA to bring at least the astronauts back alive?
Yet another way:
I don't see the sense of spending $5 billion (?) just to have a vehicle go ka-boom and kill 4-8 highly trained people every 60-or-so flights.
The 1986 failure could have been survived by an escape system.
Either the astronauts could egress from the intact compartment, or the compartment itself could have been made into a chuted landing pod.
But that wasn't done.
Only now do we have some sort of escape system, which still doesn't work in the event of a launchpad explosion.
The 2003 failure could have been avoided simply by listening to the engineers who purportedly know about the equipment they have been studying.
The shuttle lives on the ability to re-enter, and on top of that, a shuttle's airframe can't survive a tumble *.
But that wasn't done either.
If the airline industry operated with such a flagrant disregard for due diligence in saving lives and producing equipment with graceful failure modes, their executives would be lashed by the Congress inside of a month.
To sum up... it's not a matter of risks and flights-per-failure... it's just that NASA allowed another shuttle to be destroyed, and has further besmirched the supposedly fine reputation of the rocket scientist.
In this case, the rocket engineers themselves have been shamed... since both failures were known problems that could have been fixed by further engineering.
Yes, I realize that some of that is due to system design at the outset.
But engineers can only do so much with a busted system; in the shuttle's case, a terrible lack of a rescue/survival system.
* Tumbling happened in both cases.
The 1986 explosion didn't destroy the shuttle; it broke apart in the airstream once the explosion made it tumble.
The entire airframe disintegrated... it wasn't a case of just the tail and wings tearing off.
NASA has explained from this happens once the shuttle tumbles at Mach something-or-other -- which is a region the shuttle passes through twice every voyage.
They say it flies like a brick, but it certainly doesn't survive the airstream like one.
The 2003 event seemed to produce a tumble once the end data was analyzed... and once that happened, burn damage to the wing was irrelevant.. the shuttle disintegrated and the pieces had to survive re-entry on their own.
Most corporations and private companies are outsourcing almost *everything*, usually either overseas (India, mostly) or to local companies that use overseas talent.
[...]
But there's nothing we (or anyone) can do about it, so we might as well accept it.
This is a perverse but pervasive line of thinking in modern America.
It is dead wrong philosophically but functions dead right as a status quo.
Corporations can't just declare themselves to exist... they must be chartered by government.
Hence, the people through their representatives allow corporations to exist.
Furthermore, by further representation, corporations are publicly regulated in many ways.
So, we are not powerless; there is everything we can do about it; and we do NOT have to accept it.
This is a matter of attitude, then willpower, then action.
Attitude Correction #1:
We simply have to stop thinking that corporations are chartered to do whatever social damage they can get away with.
Attitude Correction #2:
We are citizens, not just consumers or subjects of a militarized government.
Hopefully with ironic examples like Licensed to Kill, Inc. ("Licensed to Kill, Inc gives special thanks to the Commonwealth of Virginia for granting us the right to peddle death around the world") we will see that the lack of social controls (call it socialism for all I care) has brought our economic (as well as some environmental) doom upon us here in America.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the reason to go to college was supposedly to learn things.
No, the educational system is the gravel bed in which the pipeline called a "student" is laid. The pipeline exists to distribute the essential commodity of money from the producers (banks, parents) to the consumers (university, trustees, contractors, etc.).
This latest affair is a continued expansion of the franchise. The ranks of consumers at the outlet will grow, since the pipeline itself is a dumb tube that refuses to control its own flow (and in fact is almost wholly ignorant of its pipeline status). So, either the commodity is pumped through the pipeline faster, or the pipe diameter is increased.
Fantastic! Amazing! Wonderful!
Arethermic events and possibly ice towers!
Too bad we're never going to go there to look them over. Manned missions are dead. What's the point of further exploration?
Grossly insecure? So what? Computerized voting systems are now being built to satisfy two demands: (1) Political demands following the 2000 election travesty. (2) To have sexy, sleek, fancy-schmancy, modern, greatest-society-in-da-fuckin'-world voting systems.
Security wasn't on the priority list. Even voters will generally prioritize "new and exciting" and "makes me feel better about the 2004 election" over dull, nerdy and frankly citizen-involving aspects like fraud-proofing the new vote systems.
Grossly insecure. Sheesh, you may as well levy a similar charge of grossly insincere against politicians, but that has hardly stopped them from being elected and re-elected and re-re-elected ad nauseam in droves. The voter is responsible for the slimy pieces of shit that fill the ranks of our elected representatives, and we all similarly share the blame for the wholly fraudulent voting systems that are being installed as we speak.
I appreciate your perspective and admire your boldness in posting such a thing on /., but I am compelled to speak the truth and to counter misconceptions where I see them.
You have missed some critical features of professional work.
There are many instances in every job where a level of commonality is reached. In this level, a "trained monkey" could do the job. But that doesn't cast the entirety of the profession onto the manual-labor streetcorner.
I have wormed my way back into IT (serendipity played a large part of that, however), and I find myself writing a lot of procedures for others to follow. The procedures are for even the lay person to follow, since time is always of the essence. But it took my little skilled self to not only write them, but to come up with the need to have them written in the first place. Corporate memory arises from Human action, and those acts are skilled ones.
Added to this is the sad, sad truth that too many people cannot even construct logical thought processes necessary to be an effective professional. IT work is brutally logical and missing details leads to almost catastrophic results. IT is laboring under the weight of that old song or poem about For The Want of a Nail. The need for disciplined thinking alone puts such work into realm of "uncommonality".
In summary, yes, you are broadly correct that pushing VB routines around is more of a commodity skill and as such can be priced down to minima. However, programming itself is a profession requiring years of dedicated practice and study, and you will be hard pressed to demand a 4-year degree for a 4-year career, or a 16-yr-old's wages.
I don't think capitalism is the problem, it's greed. Ambition or efficiency is one thing, greed is something else.
You said it, but it must be further expanded, and I believe Elbert Hubbard put this expansion best when he (paraphrasedly) said:
A man with a home and savings is unavoidably a capitalist.
Americans are divesting even of the most sensible investment: themselves. Savings have shrunk and disappeared, and homes are "purchased" in such a manner that actually they've become endless rentals. In the environment like this, it almost makes sense to be an economic sociopath and spend your time fscking your fellow man for everything you can get out of him.
As the love of money is the root of all evil, capitalism's not evil, only the worship of it. It is now sitting on a throne built from Human misery. We need to keep being skeptical about capitalism to pull back from the terror of its up-and-coming hyperactive forms.
Assuming the quote is true, and taken in context, then it only remains for us to ponder how a person with such a basic misunderstanding of the US Constitution actually ended up being one of 9 supreme interpreters of that document and subordinate law.
The Const isn't a matter of minima, but maxima, in setting the limits on government. Other than the Const's design parameters, this principle is explictly enumerated in the tenth amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
It's just too bad that the American citizenry haven't the minerals necessary to tar-and-feather Scalia for a comment like the one he allegedly made. His non-TAFing isn't an artifact of tolerance for his liberty of speech, but one of American stupidity.
Behind every inflamed call for references, links or source material is a person engaging in willful ignorance.
Where have you been? What the hell have you been reading or watching for the last 2 years? Just reading the book "Jews For Buchanan" and various interviews by Gregory Palast would reveal the innate treachery within the vote system. Surfing Google and a variety of news sites is a requirement for a more detailed understanding of this.
Don't blame us for not being able to quote chapter and verse of a bible that you refuse to read. You have a responsibility to do your own homework with all that public data. Surf online for a few hours about vote fraud (especially the Floridan flavor), and see if you come back with the same skepticism.
Sing the gospel, brother!
... show me your freaking' cards!
... tech systems should have complicated internal workings that allow them to adapt to our behavior.
Complication in design that produces simplified interfaces.
I'm really tired of changing my form to fit into the system ... it should be the other way around.
... Mirosoft Bob.
I don't know what brain fart occurred within MS that gave them the impetus to make such a silly thing (nor what 11 herbs and spices were smoked to come up the name), but the end result was enormously friendly to the user.
It used commonplace language to clarify what you wanted to do, so it could go ahead and do it.
That aspect was wonderful, and we should have more of this available in other OSes.
I think the article is another attempt to rah-rah companies who purport to be involved in AI just to support their stock price. So, I must call this article's line of bullpucky
We have been hearing about AI for long enough to know further empty promises when we hear them. Do we have to go through this continually, cycle after cycle, of hearing about how smart computers will get? Sheesh, it seems that most of the "intelligence" put into systems now produces effects that I have to fight, adapt to, or find a workaround for.
However, the sentiment is something I like
You know, now's the time to wave the flag for the one OS that I actually liked for its user friendliness
Good.
... the blue-collars and the Midwesterners.
So here and now we all are, and the "important people" are being hoist by their own petards.
I predicted at least 6 years ago that the loss of jobs would rise up past the manual-laborers and blue-collars, and start to impact the degreed, the certified, and the professional. For many years before that, job losses primarily affected those who don't matter to the hidden plutocracy
Pardon me for not shedding a tear for these folks, who expected to be paid a lot of money for doing very little productive work. I find myself giggly over the hiring-freezes and outright layoffs affecting the blue-collar city-worker set of people, who are equally as bad about performing their moral duty to work for their wages.
At the same time, I find the Young Republican set running around and saying things like "no one owes you a living". I can't agree with that considering that it must be further narrowed into my favorite saying: "people are owed the opportunity to earn a living". In our own nations, we owe it to the blue-collar and white-collar workers to establish and maintain businesses that keep them gainfully employed.
The "smart brick" is a OK idea that unfortunately will be touted as a wholesale replacement for current, perfectly functional systems. Temperature, vibration and movement doesn't have to be measured by some expensive high-tech brick, but can be measured by other systems already extant in the building, which can be added later and also moved around as needed.
Really, this brick thingie is another fine indicator of our cultural sickness in which we think that technology is the magic pill that makes for a better life. To arrest the disease of technophilia, we need to recognize two things:
Just what we need: more reasons to suspect people, detain them, interrogate them, and to finally fine and prosecute them.
I know of a friend who was raided by a police team in Allentown PA on the basis of the smell of cat piss and a chronically overzealous prosecutor. It happens, but it never should.
How much longer are we going to tolerate the use of any old physical indicator to assault the common citizen? How many more grandmothers have to be jacked up at an airport before people understand that that has nothing to do with finding that stolen Angolan 727 (which could be winging its way towards an American embassy as we speak)? What will "seat squirm" indicate to us, when all you can do is look at the person and then proceed to bother them with accusatory questions based upon an entirely false confidence in technology?
The next thing that the FBI can come up with is a magic marker (just like finding a bad $20 bill) that you swipe across a person's skin; if the wrong color comes up, he's a fscking terrorist!
Call me nuts, but I seem to recall this exact idea being proposed on the Usenet newsgroup misc.entrepreneurs, maybe 1995 to1997. The Oriental name rings a bell, too. (Disclaimer: I haven't searched Google Groups for it.)
On the newsgroup, there were extensive critques of the idea, and after all of that yakity-yak, the proposal seemed to sink beneath the waves. I agreed with the "it's unworkable" and "it's unnecessary" critiques. I found it particularly compelling that postal delivery tends to be a regional and a local affair and as such, worldwide coding is an unnecessary change to a perfectly functional system. To wit: your postman knows perfectly well where your house is, so changing your address to 3EP8Q R43VB isn't going to help him find you; and letters go between regions that know perfectly well how to get to their destinations.
Use Palladium for secure P2P? This is probably the only time you'll hear Microsoft say "That's not a feature, that's a BUG!"
Since I collected coins at an early age, I know all about silver American coinage.
For the layman, just look for a coin that has an entirely silver-colored edge, and is generally dated 1964 or before. The cupro-nickel coins have a silver-and-copper colored edge.
Of course, this doesn't apply to Jefferson nickels, since they are silvery-looking all over. You'd have to know the dates in the 1940s that had a 35% (?) silver content. I found a good many silver nickels, probably just for this reason.
Of course, you will tend to find the Canadian coins in any batch you look at, since they are not silver but have silvery edges.
The issue is that with a monopolistic enterprise (and more to the point, a culture that only supports a certain restricted set of technologies) you wind up with few options ("options" = "things you can choose off the shelf and add to your life"). This has been Microsoft's position since the days of DOS.
Cars make for an excellent exampling of the problem with Microsoft (although the cars example doesn't represent the entire software industry). People clearly want -- and society clearly needs -- more energy-efficient cars. But while the gas mileage rose only modestly until recently, fscking SUVs hit the market in force, and overall we are getting a worse deal from the monopolistic enterprises that try to fulfill our transportation needs. To wit: it is technically possible to provide a small auto that gets x2 to x3 the present average compact-car gas mileage, but the automakers aren't building it, and they will continue to refuse to do so.
I don't know what you see from day to day, but I seem to live in a world where functional needs are widely wanting for fulfillment, but simply aren't being done since people serve up this set of excuses (assuming these things, like the "elephant in the living room", are even up for discussion in the public mind):
- we don't have the time to make item X
- we dont have the money to make item X
- we don't have the skill to make item X
- we don't really want item X
None of these excuses are true, since history has more than shown that people can perform past these restrictions in times of stress, which is only using things like military emergencies to do the right thing in the first place. Perhaps I'm just saying that Humans are lazy, greedy and skeptical bastardsSoooo
P.S. Did you ever see the movie "Pay It Forward"? It's idea of paying debts forward (instead of "paying back") would be a real social advance for current Western civilization.
For several months, I worked in a bank cash vault (Fifth Third Bank, Toledo OH USA) and noted some things.
... but then again, in handling coin, I soon learned to listen to the distinctive sound of silver tinging against the cupro-nickel normal coinage in the sealed bags.
(There was one false alarm that turned out to be Eisenhower dollars.)
... I can only conclude that this is because that these are generally places where the lighting is more dim, lots of small transactions take place, and frankly, where the environment is busy and loud.
Counterfeit 20s (and some 10s) showed time and time again in their deposits.
(It was particularly amusing to contact the customer about the debit, since it seems some of them expect the bank to simply replace the bill with a real one.)
... of course, it was a washed out line and that more than anything told me it was counterfeit.
... bills go through a lot, and you can't just go by the hue.
I've seen bills that have been dyed ... light green, dark purple, things like that.
It happens.
Firstly, silver coinage is very much out there, even to the point that a handful of silver Kennedy half dollars can be found in a single deposit from a department store (there was even a Franklin half in one batch). Perhaps people just don't notice silver coinage even in high-volume retail
Secondly, fake twenty dollar (US$20) bills are being easily passed along in bars
It could also be that the criminal element that does the counterfeiting is native to the bar-going crowd.
I have inspected these fake 20s in some detail. I noted right off the bat the "obvious" difference: the overall hue of the bill is off just enough to be suspicious. It is a little darker, and either slightly more yellow, brown and even a tiny bit purple. So it is easy for me to believe that these bills can be passed off in a darker environment.
The texture of the bills was OK, surprisingly. It could be that the paper was run through a washing and/or brushing mechanism to more simulate the cloth-y feel of a real bill. As for the microprinting
P.S. A final note about hue
People tend to want options, all of those 'bells and whistles' are just the options that people keep asking for.
... to assign my computing power as I want it?
No! ... since like any monopolistic enterprise, Microsoft fails to give the consumer much ability to opt out of all their bloated software.
The construction of Internet Explorer was enough of an example to show how featuritis had overrun serving user needs --- all users, not just the online-shopping, AOL-chatting drones whose browsing experiences are being disrupted as we speak by browser spies, hijackers, ad-ware and drive-by downloads.
You might think that an "option" is something you can add to what you have now.
Sure, Microsoft marketing knows full well that their feature-bloated code makes the sales. But that's a real problem that causes well-nigh untestable code and I said so in my article. It even bypasses the idea of "opt out" options. Can I get just a Windows kernal and add drivers and apps to customize my computer needs
People that laugh at the products MS produces really do have to look hard at how THEY would manage and TEST 50 MILLION lines of code. With 50 million lines of code you're looking at virtually an infinate number of tests to run, which is obviously impossible to do. Thus you either have to roll out a product that hasn't been 100% tested because of its size or keep testing and never make money.
... we who know better and are less mediocre simply have to fend for ourselves and rely on the influence of our leadership to promote the Better Way.
This is the slow method of providing a good example for others to follow, which is the only leadership that matters.
Microsoft's billions are just a facade; consumer mediocrity is another facade; what will matter in the long run is bullet-proof code that more serves public needs instead of software-industry investors.
As part of the Microsoft culture, it appears that you've missed the point.
The problem is the 50 million lines of code itself.
I would have "managed" NT's testing by "not managing it" at all, and instead would have clipped out all those bells and whistles to make a much more trim and modular OS. The code base is unecessarily large, from a functional point of view.
But just like the current SUV problem in America, it appears that Microsoft is dancing a tango with the consumers. Microsoft produces shitty code that looks good on the screen, and the consumers say "ohh" and "ahh" while not minding the crashes and restrictions, and then Microsoft gets encouraged to produce more "pretty code". I don't consider this problem to be fixable
Quests for lost and restricted knowledge are common enough. You see, the geeky type wants to know, and by knowing, tends to do. But he tends to run into the walls of censorship (for whatever reason) and lassitude that are erected around knowledge in time. Every tool is a weapon; and lately, if you can't make a buck off of it, it tends to rot away in some forgotten corner.
For myself, I have several copies of the Foxfire books, and I'm always looking out for old chemical recipes (from the good old days when real chemicals could be purchased, particularly stong acids, bases and metallic compounds). There isn't an old bookstore in a certain radius from my home whose chemistry books I haven't raided. The times of real scarcity are coming and I had better be well prepared to fix and manufacture on my own, so even very basic knowledge ("how do you make sulfuric acid?") is compelling to me.
40 bucks an hour? When for that price, I can get a rental car for a day, and a rental bicycle for a week?
The rental prices alone continue to make it obvious that the Segway is a machine powered not by electricity but by hype. Hype is fickle, basically fraudulent and can disappear for good in a short second.
I'm sure Kamen's promotional apparatus is very, very annoyed with people like me, who have become so resolved against bulldada like the Segway that we can't be converted and must be attacked. In order to get my money (which is the entire point to running the Engine of Hype {tm}) they will have to frisk my body for my wallet, since even at gunpoint I will resist and must be killed into submission.
Despite such drama -- and sadly for the Kamenistas -- there's only so much they can do to get my money. But their hook (the alleged product, the Segway Transporter) is too expensive to effectively hide in some fee assessed by some government agency. It should stand as perfectly obvious that this high price makes it impossible to lure me into buying it voluntarily, as well as renting it.
The reality of the Segway is that by its design, maintenance costs and purchase price, its application is very, very limited and will thus be compelled to remain there. The purchase price alone is a major undermine of the hype and guarantees niche-marketdom. But I do get tired of hearing people talk the thing up, as if this very, very limited machine can actually revolutionize our transportation world. But I guess that's only to be expected given the dotcom era we are still mired in.
I read the article and have seldom seem such unassuming outrage in my life.
... to 2010!
The engineers (at least those who are doing the acutal work) knew the shuttle was heading for another loss-of-all-hands.
... and goes on to present several.
I'm not worried about options ... I'm worried about cost.
With prior projections of $6 to $35 (!!!) billion, I don't feel particularly compelled to keep NASA in the space-shuttling business.
Instead, with the basis for the current shuttle being $500 million per flight, see if we can task those much-vaunted aerospace companies to build a system and run it, at LESS THAN THAT COST.
If it turns out for their launch system that they use a gigantic rubber band stretched between two immense pylons, and charge $10 million per flight, then ... GREAT!
The current shuttle is a terrible system that started out with too many compromises. It smacks of a political statement. The same system could have been accomplished with two other, smaller, cheaper systems: crew-mission ships (very X-15 like) and heavy-cargo lifters. But those were too functional (i.e. not sexy enough) and frankly couldn't have funneled that much money into a mondo-beyondo development program run by an aerospace company or three. So, instead, we got a moderate-lift, heavily-crewed ship that tumbles in the airstream of some mishap (thus being completely destroyed) once every 50 to 100 flights.
What was NASA's response to this last November?: let's keep this good thing going
The article claims that for replacement programs, there's "no shortage of ideas"
Typical egghead study: look at one thing and propose a change (ha ha) on that basis.
How about the markedly lower time efficiency in the transaction by making the user and clerk do harder addition and subtraction? How about the sheer irritation of doing math like that all day? People generally find it more difficult to perform 29+18+5 than 25+10+5.
Hmm. How difficult? Let's put the pennies aside for a second. The [5, 10, 25, 50, 100] coinage is based upon a cycle of 5, which produces 5 and 0 alternating in the last digit of your accumulating answer. The proposed "efficient" coinage of [5, 18, 25] probably have a cycle of 1. Just by running a test on counting three possible coins (again, ignoring the penny which always has a cycle of 1), we produce at least 6 possible digits (0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8) in the last digit of the accumulation.
Frankly, I can't see people standing for counting change with this kind of addition going on. We've enough errors and frustration with our coin system based on 1s and 5s.
In any case, 2 crashes in 20 years is a very very good record. You'd be hard pressed to make the airline industry perform so well.
... it's not a matter of risks and flights-per-failure ... it's just that NASA allowed another shuttle to be destroyed, and has further besmirched the supposedly fine reputation of the rocket scientist.
In this case, the rocket engineers themselves have been shamed ... since both failures were known problems that could have been fixed by further engineering.
Yes, I realize that some of that is due to system design at the outset.
But engineers can only do so much with a busted system; in the shuttle's case, a terrible lack of a rescue/survival system.
... it wasn't a case of just the tail and wings tearing off.
NASA has explained from this happens once the shuttle tumbles at Mach something-or-other -- which is a region the shuttle passes through twice every voyage.
They say it flies like a brick, but it certainly doesn't survive the airstream like one.
The 2003 event seemed to produce a tumble once the end data was analyzed ... and once that happened, burn damage to the wing was irrelevant .. the shuttle disintegrated and the pieces had to survive re-entry on their own.
Jeezus, are you trolling?
It seems to me that even if you fold the airlines and NASA each into a frightfully complicated risk polynomial that factored in lives, money, cargo, miles (not counting orbits) and energy, then the shuttle's ~1/63rd failure rate is waaaaay too high. Another way to put it is: how many more billions do we have to pay NASA to bring at least the astronauts back alive? Yet another way: I don't see the sense of spending $5 billion (?) just to have a vehicle go ka-boom and kill 4-8 highly trained people every 60-or-so flights.
The 1986 failure could have been survived by an escape system. Either the astronauts could egress from the intact compartment, or the compartment itself could have been made into a chuted landing pod. But that wasn't done. Only now do we have some sort of escape system, which still doesn't work in the event of a launchpad explosion.
The 2003 failure could have been avoided simply by listening to the engineers who purportedly know about the equipment they have been studying. The shuttle lives on the ability to re-enter, and on top of that, a shuttle's airframe can't survive a tumble *. But that wasn't done either.
If the airline industry operated with such a flagrant disregard for due diligence in saving lives and producing equipment with graceful failure modes, their executives would be lashed by the Congress inside of a month.
To sum up
* Tumbling happened in both cases. The 1986 explosion didn't destroy the shuttle; it broke apart in the airstream once the explosion made it tumble. The entire airframe disintegrated
Most corporations and private companies are outsourcing almost *everything*, usually either overseas (India, mostly) or to local companies that use overseas talent. [...] But there's nothing we (or anyone) can do about it, so we might as well accept it.
... they must be chartered by government.
Hence, the people through their representatives allow corporations to exist.
Furthermore, by further representation, corporations are publicly regulated in many ways.
This is a perverse but pervasive line of thinking in modern America. It is dead wrong philosophically but functions dead right as a status quo.
Corporations can't just declare themselves to exist
So, we are not powerless; there is everything we can do about it; and we do NOT have to accept it. This is a matter of attitude, then willpower, then action. Attitude Correction #1: We simply have to stop thinking that corporations are chartered to do whatever social damage they can get away with. Attitude Correction #2: We are citizens, not just consumers or subjects of a militarized government.
Hopefully with ironic examples like Licensed to Kill, Inc. ("Licensed to Kill, Inc gives special thanks to the Commonwealth of Virginia for granting us the right to peddle death around the world") we will see that the lack of social controls (call it socialism for all I care) has brought our economic (as well as some environmental) doom upon us here in America.