Remember that shot in "Avatar" where a guy makes a vague gesture of waving a document from his desktop screen and towards a pad in his hand, and the document does exactly that? Those folks have finally replaced paper - not because of that one thing, but because it implies a document is always with you, effortlessly and seamlessly.
It goes much further than that. Paper documents you've printed off and carry with you can be *found* in a couple of seconds. During a meeting if you say, "I've got it right here"...and more than about four seconds elapse before you are showing that document or reading aloud from it, the conversation moves on past you. And it takes more than four seconds to find a document in a file system; less than four to shuffle through up to several pieces of paper (we can hold up to seven things in mental RAM, remember) and pull something out. So printing something serves as a proxy for making it more accessible.
At the moment, if you want to share that electronic document, you go through multiple steps, again breaking up a conversational flow - or it's impossible because your pad is Android and their's is iPad, or something. Or your meeting guest isn't on the corporate LAN. But if the guest brings six copies on paper, the sharing is accomplished in 15 seconds of passing-around-the-room.
Most printing I saw in the last few years related to meetings and passing out copies; or it was training materials. When you make a vague gesture waving the document on your pad to all the other pads in the room, and "it just works", a lot of modern printing needs will go away. When everything is searchable as quickly and quietly shuffling through some paper with half an eye while staying in a conversation, more will go away.
The problems will be solved one at a time. What people still haven't absorbed about computer use is the UI dictum that a four-second delay causes loss of focus and an eight-second delay starts the user off on different tasks - in a meeting, task #1 is to pay attention to the meeting, so the job of the pad simply doesn't get done and paper is brought next time. After we finally get sub-second, or at least less than 4-second solutions to all the things that paper is good at, use will finally decline. Sail had a long overlap with steam, too.
We spend far more attempting to avert air crashes than car crashes. The regulators of both form of transportation have struggled with why they are pushed by political forces above them to have such different levels of concern for the same lives. People doing polls and focus groups, professors doing anthropological studies, say, have formed the opinion that it relates to control.
We chafe at having our autonomy restricted in cars - speed limits, four-way stops, seat belt laws, helmet laws, all unpopular, though such restrictions seem small prices to pay for your life. The cost of a highway interchange, at $50 million plus a million or more a year to maintain and replace, can be controversial though it would save a life per year in perpetuity, a couple or three million per life. We feel a death is a lot less anybody else's fault if we were in control of the vehicle at the time. On the other hand, a death in air traffic is just being tossed into the ground at 600 MPH by somebody else who screwed up. We really hate that a lot more.
So, yeah, autopilots are always going to have to do twice as well to be half as appreciated. It's a glitch in human nature. Sorry.
..except the book said only 5% of "federal service" volunteers made it into the military. The rest did all the other of society's tough jobs (bedpans and invalid care, remote mines, etc) to earn their votes.
>>The thing is nearly half a century old....it needs to be retired.
Non-sequitur. Can it do the job or not? The sewer taking away wastewater from your street may be much older. It hasn't been replaced because the wastewater is still leaving. But that's speaking of the specific asset; the *design* of your sewer dates to Rome. And then there's your table knife.
"The Emergency State" America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs David C. Unger...goes back to the 30s and the run-up to WW2...and how American never drew down its military spending by much, ever after.
The relevant point it makes with a lot of history, endless citations, is that the threats America faces - including many posted here - are articulated by working backwards from the size and cost of military, intelligence, and other security budgets that are desired. The Communist threat was merely overestimated, wildly; the threats of "Rogue Nations" that held spending up until Terrorism was elevated from a risk smaller than lightning strikes to existential concern was the real doozy.
"The Pentagon Wars" Col. James Burton (or enjoy the Carey Elwes/Kelsey Grammar comedy movie - yes, the true story was so stupid they made a comedy of it)...of special relevance to the F-35, which this book pre-dates, is how the Pentagon brass *hated* the F16 because it did only one thing (dogfight) and did it better than the much more expensive F15, which could do the whole kitchen sink of the time. Makes the point that every new plane since WW2 (F16 excepted) has been twice the weight and twice the cost of the previous one. It has whole chapters on how much the brass have always hated the A10 because it offers little work for AF brass. It's best used providing close air support, which means some Army lieutenant is tasking it with a walkie-talkie, whereas strategic bombing requires vast amounts of planning and strategy, proper work for Air Marshals.
Even if Unger is wrong, and it's rational to expect two wars at once from mid-size opponents (the current justification for the Emergency State), you wouldn't so much prefer to fight 10 MIGs with 10 F-16s as you'd prefer to fight a billion dollars worth of MIGs with a billion dollars worth of F16s (dozens) than a billion dollars worth of F35s (a few).
The powerwall is all cool-looking and compact, but I don't actually budget a lot for fashion statements in my basic infrastructure.
I see that wal-mart sells "deep discharge marine batteries" that hold about 1kWh for $99. So that's $1400 to duplicate a powerwall's storage. I guess if a powerwall can take over 4X as many cycles as lead acid, it wins. For solar and daily cycling. (My interest is getting through The Big One with a $500 generator that doesn't have to be on 24H a day, so I think the cheaper solution is the win.)
...law and medicine in particular soared straight towards 50/50 with no dips, whereas women avoid IT with every downturn. The first downturn was after the dot-bomb, and now the larger financial slowdown. What's the diff? The other three are real professions. This gives them some protections from the members being turned into commodities when there's a surplus of them. There are reduced openings, even job losses, but a floor on how badly they're paid and treated.
Women are just being rational and evaluating it as a job and career - and their tendencies should be read as the canary in the coal mine: coming in from the outside, they have a clearer view. Make IT a real profession like law, medicine, engineering, with state level licensing requirements, and you'll get rid of a lot of the industry's worst features, have a buffer against H1-B outsourcing, and the gender issue will go away as with the other professions. Women
There, I have now doubled the number of times "France" appears in the discussion. (It was twice when I posted).
That's normal. You see these giant arguments go on and on about whether it is economically feasible or safe or whatever, and not only do detractors fail to address the nation that's been getting most power from it for 40 years without accidents, contamination, public protests of note, and affordably enough....the weird thing is the promoters hardly mention it, either.
Well, who needs USB when the device will soon be revealed to have an internal brain interface chip.
Of course, you will need a chip implanted in your own skull to connect. And, incidentally, it will only connect to Apple and also, for medical reasons, it will be impossible to install anybody else's brain interface chips, meaning you will then be committed to Apple for life, and only Apple.
This will not constitute a significant negative to their hardcore base.
I'm not aware of a fully socialist country, much less a fully socialist democracy. No, really, look it up. The wikipedia still has the clear, original definition of "socialism": the government owns every store, factory, and farm. Every business and employment of every kind is a government department. That's what Russia was "soviet socialist" republic. "Communism" is about living communally, eating communally, like the Spartans and the Amish.
So Americans looking to denigrate promoted both words downward. Socialist Russia (which never reached 100% socialism, there were always private businesses) was called "Communist Russia", though only a few of their farm communities were communes. And countries with high levels of social services like Sweden got tagged with the "socialist" label, when it was a wild exaggeration for having some government departments much larger than American counterparts...rather the way America had a much larger department of defense than Sweden. (I consider it harmless, fun,trolling to refer to America's "Socialist Army" and "Socialist NSA", forgive me.)
Every time I hear countries with higher levels of social services than America called "Socialist", I check Wikipedia again to see if the dictionaries have thrown up their arms and accepted this as the new meaning of "Socialist", but, nope, you're still saying that Canada must have a Government Department of Food Growing and the Government Department of Car Making.
Now that America is waaay out there as a bizarre outlier in medical care systems, honestly, it's America that should have the funny adjective in front of the name. But we need to ditch the "ist" adjectives that are just too sweeping and prone to wrong interpretation. "Low-Service Democracy" vs "High Service Democracy" ?
OH, and incidentally, if you imagine that your government doesn't "Control the Health Care System" in America, you're blind. Medicare may only be for 65+, but because those are the people that need the most care, that's half the medical work. Not to forget that the government licenses all the physicians, approves all the drugs and medical equipment, and on and on. They control it without paying for it. They call the tune without paying the piper...generally a bad feedback loop.
...because we were so far unable to hear unpopular things on the Internet, which is heavily censored.
From way over at the other end of the political spectrum, I don`t think the issues that Amy Goodman & co at ``Democracy Now`` like to follow are as well-covered by larger media outlets as they `should` be, but, I don`t imagine that CBS has other priorities because of some dark conspiracy; Amy`s fave topics just get lower ratings.
As for *COMMENTS*... as for the notion that The People are unable to be heard for lack of a web site that lets them get their thoughts out for all to see...holy cow, I`ve been reading the most astonishing nonsense spewed by eccentrics and nuts onto the Internet since it was invented; I mean, 30 years since the first conspiracy-theory threads on USENET.
The notion that we NEED one more takes my breath away, like saying our society doesn`t have enough access to Big Macs; the notion that he can SELL one more in a saturated market - by perhaps being extra-friendly to some particularly objectionable bunch that have worn out their welcome elsewhere...that makes total sense.
Publishing - the man's own media appearances is an "onslaught"? Isn't that more like "routine"? It barely qualifies as journalism, too easy.
Isn't holding people accountable for their public positions the very job of journalists?
And The Times - every journalist has been howling for those tax returns for a nearly a year, they've been expected for 40 years - and now actually showing a couple of pages of a really old one is an "onslaught"? Most would say, "no brainer".
Let's assume those 400 people hired to handle paper were an inferior result, but they couldn't have been too horrible or the state would have been browbeaten into hiring more. So I'm going to spitball that 800 staff at an average of $70K per year each (with all bennies and burdens, they'd probably gross $50K), would cost $56 million a year...or $240 million over 4.2 years, not an indecent lifespan for a major web app these days.
So frankly, what's the point in automating at all, if it's going to be as expensive as a decent manual solution that would have been up and running in 3 months?
Col. Jim Burton's "The Pentagon Wars" is back in print. While the Kelsey Grammer/Carey Elwes comedy movie is focused on their reluctance to test the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, much of the book is about the development of the F-16 by the "Fighter Mafia" - Col. John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Finney, and designer Harry Hilliker - and how how hard they had to fight to get the F-16 built and accepted. The F-16 hate in this forum could be coming from the 3- and 4-stars that wanted another standard Pentagon product: twice the weight and twice the price of the aircraft that came before it. But the F-16 was lighter and cheaper than the F-15 and focused laserlike on the job of dogfighting. The F-35 has finally gone as far as you can go in the other direction: multi-multi-purpose, does everything, but the weight and especially the cost are almost comically bloated.
The question is not whether an F-35 could beat an F-16: it's whether a billion dollars of F-35 could beat a billion dollars of F-16s. And that's not even up for discussion.
Can I give them credit for killing 88% of the German soldiers who died in the war? Because that's apparently the number.
And you really have to wonder exactly what we would have done with 8 times as many German soldiers all focused on western Europe. I think things would have gone badly.
If you look up "WebCamGate" from 2010, when a school district was taking 60,000+ photos of students at home in their bedrooms by activating their school laptops, the administrator telling subordinates to conceal the surveillance, wrote back to a complainant with a note almost like that, "Why would we do such a thing? We would never do that!" Look up the name "Dimedio". So you'll have to forgive our skepticism.
Thanks for that. The damning statement is how all these people that the rest of us regard actually more highly than rocket scientists - who haven't put anybody on the moon lately, and biomedical scientists could save our lives - are "computer illiterate".
There was this time when the excuse for being computer illiterate was age; the dang things just came up on business too fast. But now I'm the retired one, explaining simple Excel things to people 20 years younger. These "biomedical researchers" are mainly under 45, that is, had computers since Jr. High and Windows since college; they've had Excel to study for 20 years, all their careers.
I saw it with engineering - I was the formal IT guy for 7 years, then switched to become one of the engineers, albeit the local power-user and covert developer. I had expected to become obsolete as I aged, overrun by the superior expertise of people who grew up with computers, programming in elementary school. And there was ONE hacker, 20 years my junior, who could outstrip me on complex bits of configuration and development - and oddly enough, he had become a techie while a biomedical technician, writing Perl scripts to parse endlessly long DNA strings. But then there were nearly 100 engineers in the same company that would make the most eye-rolling mistakes and never even try to learn any underlying understanding of why the spreadsheet does certain things.
Over and over and over, I would correct something and try to teach some basics, but be put off with a request to just fix that exact problem, they were in a hurry. Not infrequently, they would be back in six months, asking me to do it again, "I forgot, I'm sorry, what was that again?" The uptake on a little bit of real instruction on the 2nd go-round was better, but still not 50%.
Poor understanding of how to use computer applications is still the greatest barrier to using computers to improve productivity.
The same reason these companies expensively imported people rather than sending the work to their country?
The same reason you go to an American physician rather than to India?
The same reason you have your bridge designed by American engineers rather than Indonesians? (hint: different reason on that one. It's not legal to build the bridge. What if it weren't legal to put a car on American roads without software from licensed programmers? That applies to the rest of the engineering...)
I'm wearying of it, but so far I just post the same thing over and over when I read about this topic. You don't see this with comparable white-collar high-knowledge professions like accounting, teaching, law, medicine and engineering....because they are all licensed.
This is not about unionism or protectionism. It's not holding onto the job for nationalism's sake or racism. Any race can get a license, indeed foreigners can be licensed - if they can pass the tests. Most of this outsourcing is not about putting in equivalent people; it's about being able to afford more of them and make up for the lower productivity and accuracy.
Information technology should be a licensed profession for multiple reasons; there are a lot of crappy local programmers that shouldn't have such jobs, too. This isn't about handy helpers or kid's games any more: our civilization depends on code that works right and we lose money, privacy and opportunity every day from IT failures. Medicine was not a licensed profession just a few generations back; it was licensed when it was time. For IT, it's now time.
The last several years of my career - which was as an engineer that did a lot of programming, not a programmer...but the IT department was so hard to get hold of, or get results from, I ended up doing a lot of "favours" around the office -- I did a bunch of web pages with perl scripts.
I never got into Javascript or even much DHTML, so these looked like 1993 web pages. They had a few simple forms with a couple of text boxes, a radio button set, etc. You could get customized reports with them that IT just didn't have time for...and I could customize in a new feature in an hour or two. So they grew like coral over a few years, and we ended up with several of them before the requests wound down.
IT was not happy...not because I'd used poor programming practice. (I have a CompSci degree too, I know how to comment and write clear code.)
No, IT thought it was awful because of the 1990's Perl/CGI-gateway architecture; only Microsoft tools should be allowed, this was unmaintainable, etc. ("Unmaintainable" continued after a junior engineer took over maintenance when IT wouldn't. He had the code figured out in a few weeks.)
I guess my point is you need to put "Bad" in quotes, because it's always an opinion...and lots of people mistake "bad" for "not the current fad".
The entire reason this worked is that these were *small* problems; IT could have done them easily, but each report only served a few people and IT was consumed with Big Systems that served everybody. That's also why there were just a few of them needed, it was a small "market". So I guess another point is that you don't always have to use the giant Official Corporate Development Environment Hammer to hit every nail. Those are chosen to be able to handle Big Problems, but the overall bureaucracy can be too heavy to nimbly solve small ones. Be open to small, simple, script-sized solutions. IT people constantly call those "Bad", usually with dire warnings that they will grow and become spaghetti-code monsters that will suck up all your money.
With respect, what the F do they know? They only get called in for those monsters. They may be unaware there are twenty times as many out there that did NOT grow into monsters and the small solution was just right and ran for a decade. So the next time you're pretty sure you just have a Small Problem, tell IT to stuff it and solve it yourself.
Something can look incremental but actually be pretty dramatic. We're kind of spoiled by Moore's Law having a doubling time of just a few years.
Increases in battery life have been "incremental" but also exponential - the increase has been something like 7% per year on the average, a ten-year doubling. And of course, we ate most of it with higher power consumption in most battery-powered devices: the phones, tablets and laptops. But look at how long something simpler like an iPod lasts now compared to 2001 and it's dramatic.
Electric cars are going get much more serious after one more doubling, and while the car companies would pay billions to have it happen overnight, it's still going to happen in 10 years even with the "incremental" progress.
Assange IS this story, and his name comes up here surprisingly seldom. Here's a game plan for you: Trump is an extreme case of conspiracy theorist; it wasn't just birtherism, he believes in a lot of them. A Clinton-murder conspiracy has got to be catnip to him right now, desperate as he is. So Assange is floating one: and if Trump bits, Assange plays him a bit, leads him on, his statements get more extreme...and Assange pulls out the rug.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that shot in "Avatar" where a guy makes a vague gesture of waving a document from his desktop screen and towards a pad in his hand, and the document does exactly that? Those folks have finally replaced paper - not because of that one thing, but because it implies a document is always with you, effortlessly and seamlessly.
It goes much further than that. Paper documents you've printed off and carry with you can be *found* in a couple of seconds. During a meeting if you say, "I've got it right here"...and more than about four seconds elapse before you are showing that document or reading aloud from it, the conversation moves on past you. And it takes more than four seconds to find a document in a file system; less than four to shuffle through up to several pieces of paper (we can hold up to seven things in mental RAM, remember) and pull something out. So printing something serves as a proxy for making it more accessible.
At the moment, if you want to share that electronic document, you go through multiple steps, again breaking up a conversational flow - or it's impossible because your pad is Android and their's is iPad, or something. Or your meeting guest isn't on the corporate LAN. But if the guest brings six copies on paper, the sharing is accomplished in 15 seconds of passing-around-the-room.
Most printing I saw in the last few years related to meetings and passing out copies; or it was training materials. When you make a vague gesture waving the document on your pad to all the other pads in the room, and "it just works", a lot of modern printing needs will go away. When everything is searchable as quickly and quietly shuffling through some paper with half an eye while staying in a conversation, more will go away.
The problems will be solved one at a time. What people still haven't absorbed about computer use is the UI dictum that a four-second delay causes loss of focus and an eight-second delay starts the user off on different tasks - in a meeting, task #1 is to pay attention to the meeting, so the job of the pad simply doesn't get done and paper is brought next time. After we finally get sub-second, or at least less than 4-second solutions to all the things that paper is good at, use will finally decline. Sail had a long overlap with steam, too.
We spend far more attempting to avert air crashes than car crashes. The regulators of both form of transportation have struggled with why they are pushed by political forces above them to have such different levels of concern for the same lives. People doing polls and focus groups, professors doing anthropological studies, say, have formed the opinion that it relates to control.
We chafe at having our autonomy restricted in cars - speed limits, four-way stops, seat belt laws, helmet laws, all unpopular, though such restrictions seem small prices to pay for your life. The cost of a highway interchange, at $50 million plus a million or more a year to maintain and replace, can be controversial though it would save a life per year in perpetuity, a couple or three million per life. We feel a death is a lot less anybody else's fault if we were in control of the vehicle at the time. On the other hand, a death in air traffic is just being tossed into the ground at 600 MPH by somebody else who screwed up. We really hate that a lot more.
So, yeah, autopilots are always going to have to do twice as well to be half as appreciated. It's a glitch in human nature. Sorry.
..except the book said only 5% of "federal service" volunteers made it into the military. The rest did all the other of society's tough jobs (bedpans and invalid care, remote mines, etc) to earn their votes.
>>The thing is nearly half a century old....it needs to be retired.
Non-sequitur. Can it do the job or not? The sewer taking away wastewater from your street may be much older. It hasn't been replaced because the wastewater is still leaving. But that's speaking of the specific asset; the *design* of your sewer dates to Rome. And then there's your table knife.
"The Emergency State" ...goes back to the 30s and the run-up to WW2...and how American never drew down its military spending by much, ever after.
America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs
David C. Unger
The relevant point it makes with a lot of history, endless citations, is that the threats America faces - including many posted here - are articulated by working backwards from the size and cost of military, intelligence, and other security budgets that are desired. The Communist threat was merely overestimated, wildly; the threats of "Rogue Nations" that held spending up until Terrorism was elevated from a risk smaller than lightning strikes to existential concern was the real doozy.
"The Pentagon Wars" ...of special relevance to the F-35, which this book pre-dates, is how the Pentagon brass *hated* the F16 because it did only one thing (dogfight) and did it better than the much more expensive F15, which could do the whole kitchen sink of the time. Makes the point that every new plane since WW2 (F16 excepted) has been twice the weight and twice the cost of the previous one. It has whole chapters on how much the brass have always hated the A10 because it offers little work for AF brass. It's best used providing close air support, which means some Army lieutenant is tasking it with a walkie-talkie, whereas strategic bombing requires vast amounts of planning and strategy, proper work for Air Marshals.
Col. James Burton (or enjoy the Carey Elwes/Kelsey Grammar comedy movie - yes, the true story was so stupid they made a comedy of it)
Even if Unger is wrong, and it's rational to expect two wars at once from mid-size opponents (the current justification for the Emergency State), you wouldn't so much prefer to fight 10 MIGs with 10 F-16s as you'd prefer to fight a billion dollars worth of MIGs with a billion dollars worth of F16s (dozens) than a billion dollars worth of F35s (a few).
The powerwall is all cool-looking and compact, but I don't actually budget a lot for fashion statements in my basic infrastructure.
I see that wal-mart sells "deep discharge marine batteries" that hold about 1kWh for $99. So that's $1400 to duplicate a powerwall's storage. I guess if a powerwall can take over 4X as many cycles as lead acid, it wins. For solar and daily cycling. (My interest is getting through The Big One with a $500 generator that doesn't have to be on 24H a day, so I think the cheaper solution is the win.)
...law and medicine in particular soared straight towards 50/50 with no dips, whereas women avoid IT with every downturn. The first downturn was after the dot-bomb, and now the larger financial slowdown.
What's the diff? The other three are real professions. This gives them some protections from the members being turned into commodities when there's a surplus of them. There are reduced openings, even job losses, but a floor on how badly they're paid and treated.
Women are just being rational and evaluating it as a job and career - and their tendencies should be read as the canary in the coal mine: coming in from the outside, they have a clearer view. Make IT a real profession like law, medicine, engineering, with state level licensing requirements, and you'll get rid of a lot of the industry's worst features, have a buffer against H1-B outsourcing, and the gender issue will go away as with the other professions. Women
There, I have now doubled the number of times "France" appears in the discussion. (It was twice when I posted).
That's normal. You see these giant arguments go on and on about whether it is economically feasible or safe or whatever, and not only do detractors fail to address the nation that's been getting most power from it for 40 years without accidents, contamination, public protests of note, and affordably enough....the weird thing is the promoters hardly mention it, either.
France. Triple.
Well, who needs USB when the device will soon be revealed to have an internal brain interface chip.
Of course, you will need a chip implanted in your own skull to connect. And, incidentally, it will only connect to Apple and also, for medical reasons, it will be impossible to install anybody else's brain interface chips, meaning you will then be committed to Apple for life, and only Apple.
This will not constitute a significant negative to their hardcore base.
I'm not aware of a fully socialist country, much less a fully socialist democracy. No, really, look it up. The wikipedia still has the clear, original definition of "socialism": the government owns every store, factory, and farm. Every business and employment of every kind is a government department. That's what Russia was "soviet socialist" republic. "Communism" is about living communally, eating communally, like the Spartans and the Amish.
So Americans looking to denigrate promoted both words downward. Socialist Russia (which never reached 100% socialism, there were always private businesses) was called "Communist Russia", though only a few of their farm communities were communes. And countries with high levels of social services like Sweden got tagged with the "socialist" label, when it was a wild exaggeration for having some government departments much larger than American counterparts...rather the way America had a much larger department of defense than Sweden. (I consider it harmless, fun,trolling to refer to America's "Socialist Army" and "Socialist NSA", forgive me.)
Every time I hear countries with higher levels of social services than America called "Socialist", I check Wikipedia again to see if the dictionaries have thrown up their arms and accepted this as the new meaning of "Socialist", but, nope, you're still saying that Canada must have a Government Department of Food Growing and the Government Department of Car Making.
Now that America is waaay out there as a bizarre outlier in medical care systems, honestly, it's America that should have the funny adjective in front of the name. But we need to ditch the "ist" adjectives that are just too sweeping and prone to wrong interpretation. "Low-Service Democracy" vs "High Service Democracy" ?
OH, and incidentally, if you imagine that your government doesn't "Control the Health Care System" in America, you're blind. Medicare may only be for 65+, but because those are the people that need the most care, that's half the medical work. Not to forget that the government licenses all the physicians, approves all the drugs and medical equipment, and on and on. They control it without paying for it. They call the tune without paying the piper...generally a bad feedback loop.
...because we were so far unable to hear unpopular things on the Internet, which is heavily censored.
From way over at the other end of the political spectrum, I don`t think the issues that Amy Goodman & co at ``Democracy Now`` like to follow are as well-covered by larger media outlets as they `should` be, but, I don`t imagine that CBS has other priorities because of some dark conspiracy; Amy`s fave topics just get lower ratings.
As for *COMMENTS* ... as for the notion that The People are unable to be heard for lack of a web site that lets them get their thoughts out for all to see...holy cow, I`ve been reading the most astonishing nonsense spewed by eccentrics and nuts onto the Internet since it was invented; I mean, 30 years since the first conspiracy-theory threads on USENET.
The notion that we NEED one more takes my breath away, like saying our society doesn`t have enough access to Big Macs; the notion that he can SELL one more in a saturated market - by perhaps being extra-friendly to some particularly objectionable bunch that have worn out their welcome elsewhere...that makes total sense.
Publishing - the man's own media appearances is an "onslaught"? Isn't that more like "routine"? It barely qualifies as journalism, too easy.
Isn't holding people accountable for their public positions the very job of journalists?
And The Times - every journalist has been howling for those tax returns for a nearly a year, they've been expected for 40 years - and now actually showing a couple of pages of a really old one is an "onslaught"? Most would say, "no brainer".
Let's assume those 400 people hired to handle paper were an inferior result, but they couldn't have been too horrible or the state would have been browbeaten into hiring more. So I'm going to spitball that 800 staff at an average of $70K per year each (with all bennies and burdens, they'd probably gross $50K), would cost $56 million a year...or $240 million over 4.2 years, not an indecent lifespan for a major web app these days.
So frankly, what's the point in automating at all, if it's going to be as expensive as a decent manual solution that would have been up and running in 3 months?
Col. Jim Burton's "The Pentagon Wars" is back in print. While the Kelsey Grammer/Carey Elwes comedy movie is focused on their reluctance to test the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, much of the book is about the development of the F-16 by the "Fighter Mafia" - Col. John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Finney, and designer Harry Hilliker - and how how hard they had to fight to get the F-16 built and accepted.
The F-16 hate in this forum could be coming from the 3- and 4-stars that wanted another standard Pentagon product: twice the weight and twice the price of the aircraft that came before it. But the F-16 was lighter and cheaper than the F-15 and focused laserlike on the job of dogfighting.
The F-35 has finally gone as far as you can go in the other direction: multi-multi-purpose, does everything, but the weight and especially the cost are almost comically bloated.
The question is not whether an F-35 could beat an F-16: it's whether a billion dollars of F-35 could beat a billion dollars of F-16s. And that's not even up for discussion.
Can I give them credit for killing 88% of the German soldiers who died in the war? Because that's apparently the number.
And you really have to wonder exactly what we would have done with 8 times as many German soldiers all focused on western Europe. I think things would have gone badly.
Hey, this ECPA thing allows for imprisonment of up to five years! Let's send a message!
If you look up "WebCamGate" from 2010, when a school district was taking 60,000+ photos of students at home in their bedrooms by activating their school laptops, the administrator telling subordinates to conceal the surveillance, wrote back to a complainant with a note almost like that, "Why would we do such a thing? We would never do that!" Look up the name "Dimedio". So you'll have to forgive our skepticism.
Did they change their name to one of the evil Transformers before or after starting to mis-treat their staff?
Thanks for that. The damning statement is how all these people that the rest of us regard actually more highly than rocket scientists - who haven't put anybody on the moon lately, and biomedical scientists could save our lives - are "computer illiterate".
There was this time when the excuse for being computer illiterate was age; the dang things just came up on business too fast. But now I'm the retired one, explaining simple Excel things to people 20 years younger. These "biomedical researchers" are mainly under 45, that is, had computers since Jr. High and Windows since college; they've had Excel to study for 20 years, all their careers.
I saw it with engineering - I was the formal IT guy for 7 years, then switched to become one of the engineers, albeit the local power-user and covert developer. I had expected to become obsolete as I aged, overrun by the superior expertise of people who grew up with computers, programming in elementary school. And there was ONE hacker, 20 years my junior, who could outstrip me on complex bits of configuration and development - and oddly enough, he had become a techie while a biomedical technician, writing Perl scripts to parse endlessly long DNA strings. But then there were nearly 100 engineers in the same company that would make the most eye-rolling mistakes and never even try to learn any underlying understanding of why the spreadsheet does certain things.
Over and over and over, I would correct something and try to teach some basics, but be put off with a request to just fix that exact problem, they were in a hurry. Not infrequently, they would be back in six months, asking me to do it again, "I forgot, I'm sorry, what was that again?" The uptake on a little bit of real instruction on the 2nd go-round was better, but still not 50%.
Poor understanding of how to use computer applications is still the greatest barrier to using computers to improve productivity.
The same reason these companies expensively imported people rather than sending the work to their country?
The same reason you go to an American physician rather than to India?
The same reason you have your bridge designed by American engineers rather than Indonesians? (hint: different reason on that one. It's not legal to build the bridge. What if it weren't legal to put a car on American roads without software from licensed programmers? That applies to the rest of the engineering...)
I'm wearying of it, but so far I just post the same thing over and over when I read about this topic. You don't see this with comparable white-collar high-knowledge professions like accounting, teaching, law, medicine and engineering. ...because they are all licensed.
This is not about unionism or protectionism. It's not holding onto the job for nationalism's sake or racism. Any race can get a license, indeed foreigners can be licensed - if they can pass the tests. Most of this outsourcing is not about putting in equivalent people; it's about being able to afford more of them and make up for the lower productivity and accuracy.
Information technology should be a licensed profession for multiple reasons; there are a lot of crappy local programmers that shouldn't have such jobs, too. This isn't about handy helpers or kid's games any more: our civilization depends on code that works right and we lose money, privacy and opportunity every day from IT failures. Medicine was not a licensed profession just a few generations back; it was licensed when it was time. For IT, it's now time.
The last several years of my career - which was as an engineer that did a lot of programming, not a programmer...but the IT department was so hard to get hold of, or get results from, I ended up doing a lot of "favours" around the office -- I did a bunch of web pages with perl scripts.
I never got into Javascript or even much DHTML, so these looked like 1993 web pages. They had a few simple forms with a couple of text boxes, a radio button set, etc. You could get customized reports with them that IT just didn't have time for...and I could customize in a new feature in an hour or two. So they grew like coral over a few years, and we ended up with several of them before the requests wound down.
IT was not happy...not because I'd used poor programming practice. (I have a CompSci degree too, I know how to comment and write clear code.)
No, IT thought it was awful because of the 1990's Perl/CGI-gateway architecture; only Microsoft tools should be allowed, this was unmaintainable, etc. ("Unmaintainable" continued after a junior engineer took over maintenance when IT wouldn't. He had the code figured out in a few weeks.)
I guess my point is you need to put "Bad" in quotes, because it's always an opinion...and lots of people mistake "bad" for "not the current fad".
The entire reason this worked is that these were *small* problems; IT could have done them easily, but each report only served a few people and IT was consumed with Big Systems that served everybody. That's also why there were just a few of them needed, it was a small "market". So I guess another point is that you don't always have to use the giant Official Corporate Development Environment Hammer to hit every nail. Those are chosen to be able to handle Big Problems, but the overall bureaucracy can be too heavy to nimbly solve small ones. Be open to small, simple, script-sized solutions. IT people constantly call those "Bad", usually with dire warnings that they will grow and become spaghetti-code monsters that will suck up all your money.
With respect, what the F do they know? They only get called in for those monsters. They may be unaware there are twenty times as many out there that did NOT grow into monsters and the small solution was just right and ran for a decade. So the next time you're pretty sure you just have a Small Problem, tell IT to stuff it and solve it yourself.
Something can look incremental but actually be pretty dramatic. We're kind of spoiled by Moore's Law having a doubling time of just a few years.
Increases in battery life have been "incremental" but also exponential - the increase has been something like 7% per year on the average, a ten-year doubling. And of course, we ate most of it with higher power consumption in most battery-powered devices: the phones, tablets and laptops. But look at how long something simpler like an iPod lasts now compared to 2001 and it's dramatic.
Electric cars are going get much more serious after one more doubling, and while the car companies would pay billions to have it happen overnight, it's still going to happen in 10 years even with the "incremental" progress.
Ah, but does he hate Trump more? That's the problem for Clinton-haters this fall.
Assange IS this story, and his name comes up here surprisingly seldom. Here's a game plan for you: Trump is an extreme case of conspiracy theorist; it wasn't just birtherism, he believes in a lot of them. A Clinton-murder conspiracy has got to be catnip to him right now, desperate as he is. So Assange is floating one: and if Trump bits, Assange plays him a bit, leads him on, his statements get more extreme...and Assange pulls out the rug.