This statement is significantly true (to the extent that people should probably pay it heed more often than they do) but utterly neglects the effects of information, and that can make a huge difference. For instance, someone may have been willing to pay me $10,000 for a few hundreds of shares of Enron stock, back in the day, if they didn't know there was going to be some massive fraud and the company was about to announce massive bankruptcy and go under in the next 5 minutes or so. In most meaningful senses of the word, the stock really wasn't worth $10,000, at least not to the poor purchaser. (Or you could buy some property only to discover that it's got massive PCB contamination and now you're legally responsible for cleaning it up. Or a used car, only it's a lemon. Or most kinds of fraud, really.)
Eh, "virtually untouchable" is not so bad, really. I'll take that over the British scheme, I think. After all, there's (usually) more effective ways to defend one's self against libel than lawsuits.
You know, they say a lot of things about Python, but at least it doesn't name two of the most basic and important language operations after the contents of address register and contents of decrement register like some (otherwise-spiffy (if you overlook the (numerous) parentheses)) languages out there.
Your premise raises the question: What exactly is the point of having an "advanced" civilization? Oh, sure, being able to colonize space is probably good to get in there, but besides that, why are we working towards this goal? I suggest "carnal desires" will figure somewhere or another. (In the meantime, they make decent incentives).
My company has just reached the point where the developers have permission to break IE6 on the fancy-new drag-n-drop customizable-homepage-layout for our application and other similar features. For new features like that, IE7+ is fine going forward.
We're in the tens-of-thousands to millions-of-dollars off-the-shelf software segment, for what that's worth.
the quest for jobs, they want to try to encourage domestic consumption.
Yeah, Obama is pretty protectionist. Myself, I'm just still amazed that otherwise-intelligent people seem to believe that forcing 90% of the country to pay 10% of the country twice as much for cheap plastic gizmos and electronics is the way to make us all more prosperous.
To borrow a charge leveled at the previous administration, "prosperity theater" is more like it...
I don't work with detailed specs, but I do work with estimating a lot of small tasks (on the order of days at most) instead of estimating one big thing. I think that's sort of the Scrumm-my angle they're talking about in TFS, though.
My company started as a dinky little post-dotcom-startup, doing certain agile practices (extreme programming with a little bit of scrum), and it's since been bought out and now sells quality software to big enterprise customers tens of thousands to millions of dollars. As with any development methodology, it's got its ups and its downs, and depending on how you're trying to actually operate as a business, you'll need to make adaptations; moreover, it helps a lot if you actually employ intelligent people who know what they're doing.
Yes, maybe the Agile hype is a bit much, but so is the anti-Agile-hype hype. It's actually a good idea to start with simple things that work and are easy to code (so you can start making money today) instead of waiting forever building the Perfect System. The key is to manage the transition to more complicated things in an effective manner (so you can keep making money tomorrow). You start by thinking in the back of your mind about how you can make things easier to transition to the Perfect System in the future. That's probably the main tricky part.
You can walk into a store and buy something with Mac OS X for $500, though. If you want to get something running HPUX or AIX you're probably talking to a sales rep over the phone and getting a quote somewhere in the low five figures (or worse).
This is what the economists call the "principal-agent" problem. The principal (shareholders) hire a bunch of people to do things in their best interests (get the company to make money and give that money to the principals) but the agents (CEOs, and his own agents) are "looking out for their own interests" and just set things up so they get rich one way or another.
It's "evil and wrong when somebody else does it" in this case because they're supposedly being paid to do better. It's "normal and acceptable" to some extent when you do it, because you're usually doing it with your own life and your own resources, unless you aren't, in which case that's just hypocrisy, which is nothing new in the world one way or another....
Testosterone has been noted for its role in motivating for achievement and risk-taking, particular with regards to Finance. I understand the effects are supposed to be complex, though, as with all hormones, and there are women who have high levels of it as well, so... well, just use caution before generalizing, kthx.
The problem is calculating the "carbon added" is potentially quite obnoxious, and not always straightforward. Imagine the legal tussles, and all the decisions they'd make wrong. Is, say, Marini's Sweets (of Santa Cruz) going to have to calculate the carbon consumption from heating a cauldron of chocolate to make their chocolate-covered bacon chunk ice cream? Will they get a credit if it reduces the heating needs of their adjacent retail store? Should they really have to hire someone to figure it out for them? Does the air conditioning in the Austin, TX offices of IBM count as carbon input into their Lotus Notes product? And this is the stuff that's easy to come up with. How do you assign a value to an import where they haven't kept up with the paperwork? Wild-ass guessing? VAT, moreover, is widely recognized as obnoxious in the paperwork (and weirdly skewed in certain cases... like software companies, where they spin value out of nothing.)
Just taxing the use of oil/coal/gas and other such fuels is at least relatively simple.
You forgot "gains the trust of the indigenous populations and rebels against the imperialist ruling establishment exploiting said resource in a holy war."
The difference in Dune is that only the eyes are blue.
Fast to write, sure, but "nice"? The language is a mess, its metaprogramming is weak, and its packaging system is almost as bad as C. If you want a "nice" language go for Ruby or even Python something. (I do Perl myself, which has its share of cruft and hacks, but at least I have a decent package/namespace system.)
You didn't have to deal with the Colbert Report fan club, did you? OMGLOLBUSH!
CNN and Fox don't incite their audiences to vandalize Wikipedia as a joke, either.
(Okay, it was a sorta-funny joke.... the first time. maybe.)
Slashdot Mirror
Texas has its own currency now? Hmm, can you say inflation hedge?
It's like a whole 'nother country.
This statement is significantly true (to the extent that people should probably pay it heed more often than they do) but utterly neglects the effects of information, and that can make a huge difference. For instance, someone may have been willing to pay me $10,000 for a few hundreds of shares of Enron stock, back in the day, if they didn't know there was going to be some massive fraud and the company was about to announce massive bankruptcy and go under in the next 5 minutes or so. In most meaningful senses of the word, the stock really wasn't worth $10,000, at least not to the poor purchaser. (Or you could buy some property only to discover that it's got massive PCB contamination and now you're legally responsible for cleaning it up. Or a used car, only it's a lemon. Or most kinds of fraud, really.)
Eh, "virtually untouchable" is not so bad, really. I'll take that over the British scheme, I think. After all, there's (usually) more effective ways to defend one's self against libel than lawsuits.
You know, they say a lot of things about Python, but at least it doesn't name two of the most basic and important language operations after the contents of address register and contents of decrement register like some (otherwise-spiffy (if you overlook the (numerous) parentheses)) languages out there.
(Just the contents of cash register, apparently.)
Your premise raises the question: What exactly is the point of having an "advanced" civilization? Oh, sure, being able to colonize space is probably good to get in there, but besides that, why are we working towards this goal? I suggest "carnal desires" will figure somewhere or another. (In the meantime, they make decent incentives).
We're in the tens-of-thousands to millions-of-dollars off-the-shelf software segment, for what that's worth.
Yeah, Obama is pretty protectionist. Myself, I'm just still amazed that otherwise-intelligent people seem to believe that forcing 90% of the country to pay 10% of the country twice as much for cheap plastic gizmos and electronics is the way to make us all more prosperous. To borrow a charge leveled at the previous administration, "prosperity theater" is more like it...
Really? You don't think that the CIA, KGB, or the intelligence agencies of China | Iran | Israel | Elbonia have managed it, ever?
I don't work with detailed specs, but I do work with estimating a lot of small tasks (on the order of days at most) instead of estimating one big thing. I think that's sort of the Scrumm-my angle they're talking about in TFS, though.
I think the big-iron IBM philosophy response to that question is "Eh, throw that shit on an expansion card and we'll virtualize it fir ya."
My company started as a dinky little post-dotcom-startup, doing certain agile practices (extreme programming with a little bit of scrum), and it's since been bought out and now sells quality software to big enterprise customers tens of thousands to millions of dollars. As with any development methodology, it's got its ups and its downs, and depending on how you're trying to actually operate as a business, you'll need to make adaptations; moreover, it helps a lot if you actually employ intelligent people who know what they're doing.
Yes, maybe the Agile hype is a bit much, but so is the anti-Agile-hype hype. It's actually a good idea to start with simple things that work and are easy to code (so you can start making money today) instead of waiting forever building the Perfect System. The key is to manage the transition to more complicated things in an effective manner (so you can keep making money tomorrow). You start by thinking in the back of your mind about how you can make things easier to transition to the Perfect System in the future. That's probably the main tricky part.
You can walk into a store and buy something with Mac OS X for $500, though. If you want to get something running HPUX or AIX you're probably talking to a sales rep over the phone and getting a quote somewhere in the low five figures (or worse).
This is what the economists call the "principal-agent" problem. The principal (shareholders) hire a bunch of people to do things in their best interests (get the company to make money and give that money to the principals) but the agents (CEOs, and his own agents) are "looking out for their own interests" and just set things up so they get rich one way or another.
It's "evil and wrong when somebody else does it" in this case because they're supposedly being paid to do better. It's "normal and acceptable" to some extent when you do it, because you're usually doing it with your own life and your own resources, unless you aren't, in which case that's just hypocrisy, which is nothing new in the world one way or another....
I'll help you with quilting and embroidery as soon as you help me with approximate nonnegative matrix factorization and Team Fortress, dear. :)
Google sez: testosterone+finance
Sorry. I was shooting for a 'Funny'. :b
I agree. In the name of liberty, we should continue to limit the processing of these requests to post-it notes.
Just taxing the use of oil/coal/gas and other such fuels is at least relatively simple.
There are a couple of them like that, the real cerebral types. For instance: Ender's Game. (Not that Mr. Card hasn't been trying to get it filmed since 1992).
The difference in Dune is that only the eyes are blue.
That just goes to show that with enough resources, you can brute-force anything.
The question for you and me is: do you want to be the brute?
Congratulations. You have just explained half the code snippets on The Daily WTF.
Do you use the for-case paradigm too?
Fast to write, sure, but "nice"? The language is a mess, its metaprogramming is weak, and its packaging system is almost as bad as C. If you want a "nice" language go for Ruby or even Python something. (I do Perl myself, which has its share of cruft and hacks, but at least I have a decent package/namespace system.)
You didn't have to deal with the Colbert Report fan club, did you? OMGLOLBUSH!
CNN and Fox don't incite their audiences to vandalize Wikipedia as a joke, either.
(Okay, it was a sorta-funny joke.... the first time. maybe.)
Eh, can't be any worse than the Colbert Report.