Interesting, a world where the only thing you own are the things that you actually create. That's at least one step closer to a world without private property entirely, though I'm not getting my hopes up.
Why don't we just have a more direct relationship between insurance cost and hazardous driving. Instead of charging people higher rates because they are in a group that statistically drives more hazardously, such as speeding, why not just allow hazardous driving at a cost. If you want to travel at certain speeds you can as long as you pay high enough insurance. Heck, with nevada already stepping into this, why don't we put the bookies in charge and then we might actually get proportionately accurate insurance rates.
This will never work. Who would pay 25 to speed for one day. When they can speed all week and if they are caught once pay a attorney 75 dollars.
I thought the exact same thing. And in Nevada you can safely assume that a higher than average number of people will actually understand the odds in this situation. Mind you that doesn't mean they won't still take the wrong bet, I mean after all people still play craps, roulette and slot machines.
Actually Mike Rowe never lost anything, he made an out of court agreement with Microsoft. No one knows if he or Microsoft would have won the court case if it had gone that far. Now, Mike Rowe did make one major mistake. In his initial response to Microsoft he had asked how much they would offer for the domain, which put him potentially in violation with the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.
If you ever run into a situation that requires developers to have access to production you have clearly worked in a poorly managed environment.
In the efficient places I have worked the Devs never needed access to production. Users would find bugs and submit them. Testing replicates the issue in a sterile testing environment. If the issue can not be replicated then it's an environmental issue and the admins need to fix it. If the issue is replicated then the developers can set up there dev environment to replicate it and resolve it.
If you are running into any issue that requires the developers to have access to production then you have much bigger problems than access control. Developers should need access to development servers only (which really should just be there local box or a set up identical to the supported configuration if you need to test things like clustering or different platforms). Developers should not even require access to testing environments. If you have valid contracts and adequate testing then the only issues that should get to prod are environmental issue, things that can be handled by administrators.
On the other hand, denying your developers access to anything, be it production servers, IM access, youtube, is just asking for them to circumvent the system. So your developers should never need access to production servers, but I wouldn't waste time trying to lock them out of it, or else they will work around those locks if it turns out that they do need it (because your process failed).
Ah yes, let us all make sure that we lambast every speaker for every juxtaposition of words, or slip, freudian or otherwise. So the guy said internet when he meant to say email, when making a talk about the internet, it happens. This was a speech, not a peer reviewed and edited document. Certainly this is not the catastrophic mistake some would like to make it out to be.
And I'm not even saying that Stevens knows what he's talking about, but I certainly don't think that stumbling over one word, is indicative of his knowledge or even a lack there of.
I'd rather have structural engineers and neurosurgeons with degrees...
I'm glad that people didn't always think that way, or else we wouldn't have any structural engineers or neurosurgeons to begin with. Engineering and Medical Sciences both started out from self educated individuals who used logic and reason (and some times even faith and superstition) to advance their respective areas of knowledge. As time went on, they expanded through practice, apprenticeship and the sharing of knowledge between people knowledgeable in similar subjects. Formal education, though not new as a whole, is new when it comes to the idea that it is the only, or even best, way to acquire practical skills.
Current modern society is wasting the higher education systems on teaching people who have no interest in continuing in academia or research. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors and anyone else who uses practical skills would do much better in a system of apprenticeships, where real world experience is gained early in the education cycle. We need institutions of higher education, but there place is not in turning out the basic skills required to enter the work force, as it's being used today.
People with degrees in their field make, on average, more money than people who do not.
Do you have any references to back this up? There are plenty of studies that show that people with degrees make more on average than those without, but I have not seen that on a field by field basis.
Anecdotally, I have see the exact opposite in my field. Those with degrees are more likely to get through the initial HR screening, and those without usually have to actually put forth some effort to get in the door. But once the interviewing takes place then those without degrees tend to be seeking and are more qualified for the more senior positions. Even with in equal positions, by title, my experience has been that those without degrees are better compensated. I don't know exactly what to attribute it to, other than the obvious factor that a person without a degree has to be better qualified before most companies will even consider them, or that most people without degrees usually have considerably more experience in the field (at the age of 23 they usually have more than 5 times as much experience as someone a year out of college). But again this is totally anecdotal hearsay, and I would really like to see some studies of the subject.
Oh No, slashdot is about to have one less automaton that can't think freely and must stand by the status quo. I suggest you move to a colony that contains only people that think just like you, both of you will be very happy.
Are you using "formal methods" for specification and verification of code? How are you PROVING that a bug does not exist. Also, if you KNOW your code has no defects
I think you are missing the point. We don't "know" that the software has no bugs. What we do know is that there have been no reported bugs, which is the only valid measure of bugs in an engineered product. We of course use formal methods of testing, as I said I am an engineer not a programer and anything less would be negligent, but that is not the measure of bugs that I am referring to here.
...before you release it to QA then why do you have a QA? It sounds redundant.
Ignoring the obvious fact that you are confusing Quality Assurance with Quality Control, I'll just say that testing (QC) is not there to find bugs, they are there to verify that bugs don't exist. To put it more bluntly, if QC is finding bugs, someone fucked up. Software is not something that can have random deficiencies like physical manufacturing, so QC should not be finding bugs.
Do you really have the time to create the product you want or do you quit testing at some point and only fix the outstanding bugs to meet some customer deadline?
If there is even the remote possibility that a bug exists, we continue testing until we find the bug or prove it does not exist. And by zero defect I don't mean that what we release to the consumer has no defects, I mean what we release for QA has no defects.
And this has nothing at all to do with "the product I want", as it is all about the product that the client asks for.
The point was that you can create bug free software that meets the needs of the consumer with in an agreed upon timeline. Too often people that push the need for "Engineering", do so just so they can justify there very slow development, and that is just not necessary.
Why waste elective credits on stuff I already knew...
This is exactly why I took computer electives in school. When you can learn any elective they offer in 1/10th the time with none of the hassle, you might as well pick something you already know so you can get the easy credits and use the class time to actually learn something. So I took programing classes (we had those in Jr High and High school where I was, and we actually did programing), I completed the assignments in the first 10 minutes of class then three of the top students, myself included, and the instructor would work on something interesting.
Kids today just don't know how to use their time affectively. School is for keeping the less motivated kids out of trouble, it's not for learning.
If you learned on the job I would bet that you learned to "hack code", not "engineer code"
Everything I know about software I learned either on the Job or on my own time. I am the only person I have ever worked with that would be even close to qualifying to an Engineering title (actually working on getting my Engineers Certification but it's a lot of hoops to get Software Engineering time to count toward the pre requisites in my state), including those with Engineering degrees. The same way people learn programing without formal education, they can also learn the principles of engineering, process, ethics and all the other skills that go along with engineering. There is a reason that every certification board in the United States accepts equal amounts of experience in place of education, because practice is, at the very least, as good as book learning, and most would rightfully argue, better.
That being said, the projects I lead, which is the vast majority of the engineering projects for my current company, are not rushed. We use sound engineering principles in all of our designs and processes. Mind you as any field technician, for lack of a better term, will tell you, sometimes what works on paper does not work in reality and you have to have good technicians (programmers) who can adjust when some engineer (myself included) makes some design that just doesn't work right. Many disasters, in software and other engineering, has been averted because a wise technician decided that the engineered design was not going to work in the real world.
And trust me I do believe that solid engineering is worth every penny, and stand by a 0 defect policy (my team has not release a single engineering defect in well over a year, and we release projects about every other month). But in the end if you can't get the product to the consumer, when they are willing to pay for it, then you don't really have a product.
According to Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon, masturbation is effective, but does not last as long, so you have to do it far more regularly. I would have to reread it to see if he says if it's as effective as the real thing though.
Now from personal experience, something most slashdotters don't have, I would say the real thing is both more effective and has a longer duration.
I don't wish to make an argument promoting any particular faith, but by your logic it is possible that the most prudent course of action would be Pantheism. Again since I'm not interested in promoting faith here, simply voicing a philosophical possibility, I'll leave it up to the read to learn about pantheism themselves.
The only sane position to take is that they're all wrong
What does it benefit you to take the position that they are all wrong. If you take that position and it turns out that any one of them is right, then you are screwed. With that in mind the only really sane position to take is that they are all potentially right, and then act in the way that you think is right for you. There just is no possible benefit from declaring someone else wrong on something that is ultimately unprovable.
More importantly your statement is a logical fallacy. To sum it up, you are saying the only right belief is to believe all belief is wrong. Or more simply, the only thing that is true is false. Yes it's a common atheist argument, but then again it's really just atheists saying that there belief is the right one and all others are wrong.
What reason exactly do we have to believe...
Reason and belief are two separate things, and they are not mutually exclusive. I for one have reason and belief, but I do not profess to have reason to believe.
And for the record, I am of a belief that is indistinguishable from atheism except that I accept it is a faith none the less.
Just wanted to second the reading of Addicted to Hate. I read it somewhere between 8 and 10 years ago, before I heard about the WBC or their "God Hates..." message, and I was very disturbed by what I read. Once the WBC became famous though, I was not in anyway surprised. Don't read Addicted to Hate if you are easily disturbed, because this story is about a man that at the very least wants people to think he's very wicked, and at worst is one disturbed mind.
The market had nothing to do with the decision...it was Sony's cheque book...
Doesn't that mean precisely that the market made the decision. For the market to work it will always come down to someone's cheque book. And, as is usually the problem with free market economy, the one with the biggest cheque book, or the one willing the write the biggest cheque, is the one that control's the market.
The need to attempt this study with paroxetine (Paxil), an SSRI with considerably higher rates of suicidal ideation than fluoxetine. Fluoxetine is actually relatively low in suicidal ideation, at least among humans.
I don't know, I think I'd take 3 months in jail over a 675k or even a 67.5k "fine". Seems like I would need to be making over 240k/year for it to be more expensive(overall), and thats just the 67.5k award, or 2.7million/year for the larger award.
You are missing a lot of factors in your equation. 3 months of jail time does not cost you 3 months pay. It cost you your job, and depending on what type of work you do, if can cost you your career. depending on you savings, it could cost you a foreclosure on your home and a repossession of any thing you are financing. I can tell you for me, and other's in a similar position, 3 months in jail would cost me millions over the rest of my life. Given the choice between a 67.5k fine and 3 months in jail, there would be no question, the fine is the way to go. But this is why I avoid breaking laws that I am not willing to lose my lively hood over.
What kind of deterrent, one of the reasons for fines, would it be if it was easy to pay. You make the fine $24 dollars and people would distribute copyrighted material all day long. The purpose of a fine is not just to punish the current violator, it's to make sure that no one else wants to take the risk in the future. I'm not saying the law or the ruling are correct, I'm just saying that if we accept any fine as being acceptable then it better be large enough to keep it from ever having to happen again.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, a world where the only thing you own are the things that you actually create. That's at least one step closer to a world without private property entirely, though I'm not getting my hopes up.
Why don't we just have a more direct relationship between insurance cost and hazardous driving. Instead of charging people higher rates because they are in a group that statistically drives more hazardously, such as speeding, why not just allow hazardous driving at a cost. If you want to travel at certain speeds you can as long as you pay high enough insurance. Heck, with nevada already stepping into this, why don't we put the bookies in charge and then we might actually get proportionately accurate insurance rates.
This will never work. Who would pay 25 to speed for one day. When they can speed all week and if they are caught once pay a attorney 75 dollars.
I thought the exact same thing. And in Nevada you can safely assume that a higher than average number of people will actually understand the odds in this situation. Mind you that doesn't mean they won't still take the wrong bet, I mean after all people still play craps, roulette and slot machines.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with the government giving 'special' rights in exchange for money.
Then you must disagree with all fines. A fine is simply an after the fact charge that only applies if you get caught.
Actually Mike Rowe never lost anything, he made an out of court agreement with Microsoft. No one knows if he or Microsoft would have won the court case if it had gone that far. Now, Mike Rowe did make one major mistake. In his initial response to Microsoft he had asked how much they would offer for the domain, which put him potentially in violation with the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.
If you ever run into a situation that requires developers to have access to production you have clearly worked in a poorly managed environment.
In the efficient places I have worked the Devs never needed access to production. Users would find bugs and submit them. Testing replicates the issue in a sterile testing environment. If the issue can not be replicated then it's an environmental issue and the admins need to fix it. If the issue is replicated then the developers can set up there dev environment to replicate it and resolve it.
Yes. DBA's were never needed...
FTFY
If you are running into any issue that requires the developers to have access to production then you have much bigger problems than access control. Developers should need access to development servers only (which really should just be there local box or a set up identical to the supported configuration if you need to test things like clustering or different platforms). Developers should not even require access to testing environments. If you have valid contracts and adequate testing then the only issues that should get to prod are environmental issue, things that can be handled by administrators.
On the other hand, denying your developers access to anything, be it production servers, IM access, youtube, is just asking for them to circumvent the system. So your developers should never need access to production servers, but I wouldn't waste time trying to lock them out of it, or else they will work around those locks if it turns out that they do need it (because your process failed).
Ah yes, let us all make sure that we lambast every speaker for every juxtaposition of words, or slip, freudian or otherwise. So the guy said internet when he meant to say email, when making a talk about the internet, it happens. This was a speech, not a peer reviewed and edited document. Certainly this is not the catastrophic mistake some would like to make it out to be.
And I'm not even saying that Stevens knows what he's talking about, but I certainly don't think that stumbling over one word, is indicative of his knowledge or even a lack there of.
I'd rather have structural engineers and neurosurgeons with degrees...
I'm glad that people didn't always think that way, or else we wouldn't have any structural engineers or neurosurgeons to begin with. Engineering and Medical Sciences both started out from self educated individuals who used logic and reason (and some times even faith and superstition) to advance their respective areas of knowledge. As time went on, they expanded through practice, apprenticeship and the sharing of knowledge between people knowledgeable in similar subjects. Formal education, though not new as a whole, is new when it comes to the idea that it is the only, or even best, way to acquire practical skills.
Current modern society is wasting the higher education systems on teaching people who have no interest in continuing in academia or research. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors and anyone else who uses practical skills would do much better in a system of apprenticeships, where real world experience is gained early in the education cycle. We need institutions of higher education, but there place is not in turning out the basic skills required to enter the work force, as it's being used today.
People with degrees in their field make, on average, more money than people who do not.
Do you have any references to back this up? There are plenty of studies that show that people with degrees make more on average than those without, but I have not seen that on a field by field basis.
Anecdotally, I have see the exact opposite in my field. Those with degrees are more likely to get through the initial HR screening, and those without usually have to actually put forth some effort to get in the door. But once the interviewing takes place then those without degrees tend to be seeking and are more qualified for the more senior positions. Even with in equal positions, by title, my experience has been that those without degrees are better compensated. I don't know exactly what to attribute it to, other than the obvious factor that a person without a degree has to be better qualified before most companies will even consider them, or that most people without degrees usually have considerably more experience in the field (at the age of 23 they usually have more than 5 times as much experience as someone a year out of college). But again this is totally anecdotal hearsay, and I would really like to see some studies of the subject.
That's it. I quit Slashdot.
Oh No, slashdot is about to have one less automaton that can't think freely and must stand by the status quo. I suggest you move to a colony that contains only people that think just like you, both of you will be very happy.
Are you using "formal methods" for specification and verification of code? How are you PROVING that a bug does not exist. Also, if you KNOW your code has no defects
I think you are missing the point. We don't "know" that the software has no bugs. What we do know is that there have been no reported bugs, which is the only valid measure of bugs in an engineered product. We of course use formal methods of testing, as I said I am an engineer not a programer and anything less would be negligent, but that is not the measure of bugs that I am referring to here.
...before you release it to QA then why do you have a QA? It sounds redundant.
Ignoring the obvious fact that you are confusing Quality Assurance with Quality Control, I'll just say that testing (QC) is not there to find bugs, they are there to verify that bugs don't exist. To put it more bluntly, if QC is finding bugs, someone fucked up. Software is not something that can have random deficiencies like physical manufacturing, so QC should not be finding bugs.
Do you really have the time to create the product you want or do you quit testing at some point and only fix the outstanding bugs to meet some customer deadline?
If there is even the remote possibility that a bug exists, we continue testing until we find the bug or prove it does not exist. And by zero defect I don't mean that what we release to the consumer has no defects, I mean what we release for QA has no defects.
And this has nothing at all to do with "the product I want", as it is all about the product that the client asks for.
The point was that you can create bug free software that meets the needs of the consumer with in an agreed upon timeline. Too often people that push the need for "Engineering", do so just so they can justify there very slow development, and that is just not necessary.
Why waste elective credits on stuff I already knew...
This is exactly why I took computer electives in school. When you can learn any elective they offer in 1/10th the time with none of the hassle, you might as well pick something you already know so you can get the easy credits and use the class time to actually learn something. So I took programing classes (we had those in Jr High and High school where I was, and we actually did programing), I completed the assignments in the first 10 minutes of class then three of the top students, myself included, and the instructor would work on something interesting.
Kids today just don't know how to use their time affectively. School is for keeping the less motivated kids out of trouble, it's not for learning.
If you learned on the job I would bet that you learned to "hack code", not "engineer code"
Everything I know about software I learned either on the Job or on my own time. I am the only person I have ever worked with that would be even close to qualifying to an Engineering title (actually working on getting my Engineers Certification but it's a lot of hoops to get Software Engineering time to count toward the pre requisites in my state), including those with Engineering degrees. The same way people learn programing without formal education, they can also learn the principles of engineering, process, ethics and all the other skills that go along with engineering. There is a reason that every certification board in the United States accepts equal amounts of experience in place of education, because practice is, at the very least, as good as book learning, and most would rightfully argue, better.
That being said, the projects I lead, which is the vast majority of the engineering projects for my current company, are not rushed. We use sound engineering principles in all of our designs and processes. Mind you as any field technician, for lack of a better term, will tell you, sometimes what works on paper does not work in reality and you have to have good technicians (programmers) who can adjust when some engineer (myself included) makes some design that just doesn't work right. Many disasters, in software and other engineering, has been averted because a wise technician decided that the engineered design was not going to work in the real world.
And trust me I do believe that solid engineering is worth every penny, and stand by a 0 defect policy (my team has not release a single engineering defect in well over a year, and we release projects about every other month). But in the end if you can't get the product to the consumer, when they are willing to pay for it, then you don't really have a product.
According to Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon, masturbation is effective, but does not last as long, so you have to do it far more regularly. I would have to reread it to see if he says if it's as effective as the real thing though.
Now from personal experience, something most slashdotters don't have, I would say the real thing is both more effective and has a longer duration.
I don't wish to make an argument promoting any particular faith, but by your logic it is possible that the most prudent course of action would be Pantheism. Again since I'm not interested in promoting faith here, simply voicing a philosophical possibility, I'll leave it up to the read to learn about pantheism themselves.
The only sane position to take is that they're all wrong
What does it benefit you to take the position that they are all wrong. If you take that position and it turns out that any one of them is right, then you are screwed. With that in mind the only really sane position to take is that they are all potentially right, and then act in the way that you think is right for you. There just is no possible benefit from declaring someone else wrong on something that is ultimately unprovable.
More importantly your statement is a logical fallacy. To sum it up, you are saying the only right belief is to believe all belief is wrong. Or more simply, the only thing that is true is false. Yes it's a common atheist argument, but then again it's really just atheists saying that there belief is the right one and all others are wrong.
What reason exactly do we have to believe...
Reason and belief are two separate things, and they are not mutually exclusive. I for one have reason and belief, but I do not profess to have reason to believe.
And for the record, I am of a belief that is indistinguishable from atheism except that I accept it is a faith none the less.
Just wanted to second the reading of Addicted to Hate. I read it somewhere between 8 and 10 years ago, before I heard about the WBC or their "God Hates..." message, and I was very disturbed by what I read. Once the WBC became famous though, I was not in anyway surprised. Don't read Addicted to Hate if you are easily disturbed, because this story is about a man that at the very least wants people to think he's very wicked, and at worst is one disturbed mind.
The market had nothing to do with the decision...it was Sony's cheque book...
Doesn't that mean precisely that the market made the decision. For the market to work it will always come down to someone's cheque book. And, as is usually the problem with free market economy, the one with the biggest cheque book, or the one willing the write the biggest cheque, is the one that control's the market.
The need to attempt this study with paroxetine (Paxil), an SSRI with considerably higher rates of suicidal ideation than fluoxetine. Fluoxetine is actually relatively low in suicidal ideation, at least among humans.
And usually came home with nothing more than some minor scratches and bruises. You don't even have to go that far, but what's the fun in that.
I don't know, I think I'd take 3 months in jail over a 675k or even a 67.5k "fine". Seems like I would need to be making over 240k/year for it to be more expensive(overall), and thats just the 67.5k award, or 2.7million/year for the larger award.
You are missing a lot of factors in your equation. 3 months of jail time does not cost you 3 months pay. It cost you your job, and depending on what type of work you do, if can cost you your career. depending on you savings, it could cost you a foreclosure on your home and a repossession of any thing you are financing. I can tell you for me, and other's in a similar position, 3 months in jail would cost me millions over the rest of my life. Given the choice between a 67.5k fine and 3 months in jail, there would be no question, the fine is the way to go. But this is why I avoid breaking laws that I am not willing to lose my lively hood over.
What kind of deterrent, one of the reasons for fines, would it be if it was easy to pay. You make the fine $24 dollars and people would distribute copyrighted material all day long. The purpose of a fine is not just to punish the current violator, it's to make sure that no one else wants to take the risk in the future. I'm not saying the law or the ruling are correct, I'm just saying that if we accept any fine as being acceptable then it better be large enough to keep it from ever having to happen again.