Those are not only the people in the greatest position to hurt the company, but also those with the greatest incentive not to do so - why hurt a company that is paying you millions of dollars a year?
Um, because? Seriously, you make it sound like it's a well considered and rational action of self-destruction to become a gambling addict and to start embezzling money. Sure, there are rationalized steps in the process to reduce the risk of getting caught, but one presumes that all employees are only really there to earn a paycheck, getting caught means criminal charges and/or being blacklisted from most companies, and that while people do tend to expand their spending to meet their paycheck, the less the paycheck overall is, the less savings you have and hence the more you really need that job. When you're talking about a million dollars a year, well that's equivalent to 20 years of $50,000/year*, which leaves a lot of room to not really care about a company.
Top management positions aren't that common that one would risk losing one.
How many CEOs, after having ran one business into the ground, have been hired up again to be CEO at another company? I guess that might be because as much as "top management positions aren't that common", it also holds people with top management position experience aren't that common; and why not hire someone with experience, even if it's mostly bad, rather than risk a person with no experience? Really, unless the CEO is stupid enough to be caught outright embezzling money, they're probably in the clear; and considering how much stuff can seemingly be written often as a "business expense" or "perk", it could take quite a lot. That's not to say, of course, it doesn't happen and people haven't been caught/punished; but, the CEO and other top management positions are in the best position of burying evidence, and vague accusations without proof might be enough to force a resignation but maybe not enough to prevent them being rehired elsewhere. After all, if your CEO was robbing you blind, would you like the world to know? And wouldn't you like it best if after they resigned they were rehired by a competitor who you can secretly hope they'll embezzle from as well?
*Yea, I know, because of progressive taxation it's probably closer to 3/4ths that, but then the discussion was "millions of dollars", so feel free to scale up that round figure of a million dollars to compensate--I'm sure the CEO would.
He's saying that the government's actions are inevitable because the populate don't give enough shits to call them on it.
Well, what are we supposed to do when both Republicans and Democrats grant blanket immunity for their misdeeds The courts are so slow, but from the judge's comments it seems they aren't willing to do the right thing, either; and they're likely to claim that based on a selective interpretation of what ex post facto means. The only thing seeming left is to start executing politicians. Well, it's hard to be for that, especially since it makes you look rather crazy to be killing people over vague, undefined privacy issues; also, I don't think the courts or society would really tolerate that, until it's abused to the point that people start committing suicide/homicide or something because of those privacy abuses. Seriously, though, I really don't know what the judge expects, except something as absurd as privacy being *the* electability issue, which I just don't see happening given how important things like, oh, having food on the table is in comparison.
Killing isn't reasonable. [Civil] War isn't reasonable. Yet, I don't see any reasonable path forward for Iran in the near future when those in power are perfectly capable and willing to use that power to commit or accept the violence against those who seek a reasonable change. So, as horrible as it is to be unreasonable, do you have any other ideas? Or do you think the Iranian people should just wait, possibly for decades, for enough people to care just enough that targeted violence by the Iranian government or its supporters isn't enough to oppress the people? I ask in honesty, btw, because that seems to be the repeated tune of why the "Spring" occurred as it was, now.
I think your complaint really boils down to the point that the US does a shitty job taking care of its monuments. So, yeah, if the Enterprise is going to be built, it should be built in Belgium or something.
Well, I think it's also a bit ironic also because in the US there's rather similar laws involving doing a cover version of a song. Yes, there is the issue of whether it's a one time fee or a continuous fee based upon units sold, but in either case it's a mechanical, compulsory process where the copyright holder has little to no say over it. The most interesting part to me of it is that such a law only covers music, AFAIK.
It could be argued this is because music is special, either in that each performance is unique and hence it is that which should be treated as copyrightable, but that leaves the question of why plays and other similar performance works aren't treated the same. After all, it's rather different in whether a group of children or a group of trained actors do Hamlet and whether the play's creator has the right to avoid some sort of "blasphemy" against his artistic vision.
It could also be argued that music is not unique enough in its production--given the seem argument of how few chords are available and how even a few notes might be enough to violate someone else's copyright--but then works like books are based upon a generally unique selection of phonetics and words, although of a grander scale, and based upon plot lines and characters of a generally limited flavor as well. At the same time, authors don't have to pay a "genre" fee and it's usually quite trivial to copy a work or character, so long as one makes a few alterations along the way; still, that would presumably be the same with music since clearly there are many sound-alike songs.
So, overall, I'm just curious about why compulsory licensing of the sort is accepted and whether it's more a means to expand the artistic availability of some authors or more of a money grab by authors (or likely their producers, given how it works in the US) to try to take in more money on copying that is presumed would happen regardless. To that end, it's more of a tax system meant for a subclass of people, and that seems rather dubious.
Well, IIRC (and HPFS dirs seems to effectively confirm it), under HPFS directory entries were sorted alphabetically. So, I can imagine it's as simple as a FindNextFile() loop and very little/no buffering in the boot cycle being the culprit.
I like to think of it this way. America likes to think of itself like it's Charlie Brown*. In reality it's Peppermint Patty**.
*As much as Charlie Brown is treated as a punching bag and is self-deprecating, it appears the world is set against him. He is the underdog who is too worried at times about going too far and hence is wishy-washy, but in a crisis he'll rise up as the natural leader and do the right thing.
**Peppermint Patty is obnoxious, self-centered, and quick to lay blame upon others. Yea, everyone is in love with you, even when they don't even know you exist or love someone else. Golly, you're bossing people around all the time towards your own ends, but why does it seem like some people think you finally deciding to hold yourself back a bit is too little, too late? Oh, sure, you can be the leader, but if things get tough, you want to push the actual responsibility, concerns, etc on someone else. Or you can just ignore that there's any sort of connection between your orders and the implication that they'd actually deal with a problem by actually effecting it in a positive way.
PS - Yea, yea, I've watched too many Peanut specials. I still like them though. I just don't like the idea of living them.
The odd thing is, I don't really see how these discussion relate to the patent in question. You see, the real beauty of MS's solution was having two separate filenames associated with a file, allowing for a great deal of backwards compatibility. The solutions offered by Linus and others amounted to effectively showing LFN-unaware programs only the first n characters of a long filename; the obvious problem with this is filename collision. It also does nothing to support things like UTF-8 or other encoding schemes--and for Windows, just having more common characters as valid. At least thankfully for *nix, their solution doesn't run into the likely main reason MS went the path they used: filename extensions have to be known for DOS/Windows executables.
Of course, the real point of issue is that what MS's solution amounts to is using a limit version of hard links with a clever association and backtracking scheme in the case of renaming/moving, but that's not fundamentally different than the intent of Mac's alias files. To that end, I'd argue that MS's solution might be patentable as a novel, clever hack, but then that'd seem to hold to the extent of any other self-created problem that one finds a work around too, which seems ridiculous.
1) In the very pramble the national government is esablished to "promote the general Welfare". While that particular phase is very open to interpretaion, it is hard to see that a publically avalible hospital is not in the direction of "the general Welfare".
Not to be rude, but you do know what a preamble is, right? While it might seem otherwise blatantly obvious, the purpose of the US Constitution wasn't to enrich a king or grow tobacco for export. It was created to, as one of its main purposes, "promote the general Welfare". That doesn't mean Congress has carte-blanche power to do anything or everything it wants in the name of "the general Welfare". That's as absurd as those who would argue action needs to be done "for the children".
2) Section 8 of the Constitution once again allows specifically for taxation "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". One could agure that this only means the general welfare of the Unites States as a body and not the individual of it. But that seems contrary to the general spirit of the document, and would have to be decided by the US Supreme Court. Since they have specifically not said so, the overwhelming presumption must be that it is in keeping with the law.
Well, the general spirit of the document is to frequently speak in terms of the Federal government's actions in relationship to states, although that's admittedly not a hard rule (the Bill of Rights comes to mind as well as various "people" references). In any case, I can only really see your argument holding up in the context of "the health of the American people is tantamount to the health of the United States" and hence use that as justification. But, that's honestly a bit of a stretch. I think the line gives more justification for the CDC and FEMA than anything. And while yes, the current system puts the US at an economic disadvantage compared to other countries, I don't really think having the economic edge as a road to prosperity was really in the mindset of the framers of the Constitution. After all, the line in question speaks of duties, imposts, etc, which if anything are more about limiting trade.
3) Presumably the question was grounded out of something like "why should the government be allowed to complete (unfairly) with private business".
Or perhaps it was a legitimate concern about the validity of the legislation? You see, I'm actually quite for things like social security, welfare, socialized healthcare, etc. But I also recognize that the language of the Constitution was never really written in consideration of the US as it is today. And as much as people don't like to think of it, it's not an unreasonable point to raise that instead of poking at various vague wordings throughout the document based in a language and a culture foreign to us--as you in continuing on note, businesses and corporations of then are quite different from now--that it might be appropriate to amend the Constitution to better establish the Will of the People who do seek a much more active Federal government in their lives. After all, for all the rantings about the new health care laws, the same people who tended to gripe about the expansion of medical care for all through the government, even if through a mandate, were just as likely to gripe about the shrinking of medical care for some (the elderly) through the government; the speaks to me more of a selfishness that I don't think is actually commonly shared.
If you write that just as a sort of simple-minded Python loop, at some point you will see that that is the bottleneck in your system.
Perhaps that's because Python loops suck? I mean, literally, try writing a version of this in various languages and time them:
value=0 for i in xrange(1000000000):
value=i
At least the last time I tried it, just about every language but Python had a sensible execution time (read, without 20 seconds). Python? It takes minutes to execute.:/ And I don't think it's the result of some optimization either, as you can look at gcc's assembly to see it will at sufficiently low optimization actually produce the one billion loop and it still executes fast.
Okay, probably been done before and somewhat off-topic, but how about sphere breakout? Ie, a central "core" piece with wedge pieces layered on top (think something like Tetrisphere) and a paddle a ways from the surface to bounce the ball off. Take away all the pieces and add a second paddle to make it 3D Pong. I assume a trackball would be a good controller.
Oh, and please reply if you know of any other games that could be done this way or have already been done this way. I know my idea isn't original and isn't worth $100,000. But, then, Pong wasn't really worth it either. It just happened to be the right program at the right time to cash in; but, then, that's the core point of it, not per se the game itself.
Google should be all about advertising, because that is their only business which makes money: They made $35 billion or so last year on advertising, and $1.3B on everything else.
I disagree on three fronts.
Google is a web search company that learned how to use advertising to fund their services. Their constant efforts, until recently, to diversify into other fields is heavily based upon that core point: it should be R&D, not D&R. D&R leaves you to optimum hills, but it ignores entire mountains beyond the valleys. R&D leaves you to expand into wholly new fields and to then see how, if at all possible, to support those ideas financially.
More to the point, though, just because Google today makes ~$35 billion/year on advertising doesn't mean it will tomorrow. The next "threat" like Facebook might severely undermine their business, and it's not like they can simply take their "monopoly"--read pile of cash--and buy or out compete a new competitor in a new field just because they were "the" darling of R&D for years. It's that think that lead to the actions of IBM and Microsoft and lots of other companies. Instead of either accepting that they were good and what they were good at and not expanding or trying to expand into another, unrelated field, a lot of money is wasted trying to remain king in a field where it's not even clear if there's a real threat--Facebook may "steal" some of their profits, but it's more than likely that Facebook will do more to grow the advertising pie than anything.
Finally, web searches and advertising may just be the low hanging fruit. 3M didn't start out making scotch tape. IBM used to be more about machines than service. It doesn't take much to realize that Google may have a lot of winners in its R&D that may, in the long term, outstrip what advertising has to offer. Even if it doesn't, there's still a lot of potential for that revenue to be in addition to advertising and to help weather any real or imagined market uncertain about advertising as a stable base for the company's future. You know the saying about not putting all one's eggs in one basket...
It's funny, in a way. For all the talk about the risk of terrorist hacking, it has yet to occur. Yet, year after year, the DHS has reported dismal scores (read C or worse) for just about every part of the Federal Government. Sure, each year there's another report with more goals to meet. But, failing to make the necessary progress, basically relying upon the kindness of terrorists to not attack, seems to border on criminal negligence. If anything, the FBI should focus more on the actual crimes occurring, not on potential and hypothetical ones that may never materialize.
But, yea, let's talk about the terrorist hackers... I mean, it's better to focus on them and use them as an excuse to crack down on all criminals (and plenty of non-criminals) than to, you know, try to crack down on government to actually do its job which would make a lot of it a non-issue.:/
I'm sorry, is "society" really entitled to everything a person created, ever?
Society is not entitled to an unpublished work. A person is note entitled to copyright an unpublished work. Well, that'd be how it would work if copyright were somehow sensible...
My opinion is that, no, society isn't entitled to everything - a person is quite entitled to not release something and its no loss at all to society at large, because it never influenced it in the first place.
It's a funny idea, granting a monopoly over society to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" on a work that "never influenced it in the first place". Except, of course, one would reasonably assume that some of those works not published are forerunners of works that were published and those works did influence society. So, either the works are influential and should be copyrighted and at some level be forced available to the public (if nothing else, something like viewable in the Library of Congress) or the works aren't influential and should not have a copyright, with public copies being limited to just how well the work can be protected by physical means.
I think the issue at hand is focusing on the wrong thing. AT&T sells "unlimited data", not "unlimited bandwidth". So, yes, the speed of the highway doesn't change, but the average speed of delivery by car does. Hence, the theoretical (and likely actual) throughput is reduced artificially.
But the bandwidth has always been limited... you can't have unlimited bandwidth.
Granted. So, that means either (a) AT&T is lying and hence committing fraud* or (b) they're using a more limited definition of the word "unlimited".
Shall we say that I can't say "unlimited soup and salad" because eventually the restaurant closes, and you have to stop?
That's a bad analogy. The "restaurant" closes at the end of the month for everyone. If it closed early for you, it'd be a limited plan.
Is it unjustified for a restaurant to say such as well, if they require that you can only order one plate at a time? "Because you cannot send me 1 billion plates of soup and salad at one time, your 'unlimited' deal is limited, therefore you're lying to us!"
So long as it's the standard convention that you only get one plate at a time, then it can still be called unlimited. However, if after eating n plates of food, they take away your plate and give you a tiny cup saucer, they're clearly limiting your ability to eat.
As the person above you commented, it's about unlimited data, and indeed, your data is unlimited, because you can get as much data as you want, as long as you're willing to wait for it.
Hardly. If the standard bandwidth for the first 1/4th of the month allows you to download 3GB, but after that point you're throttled to 1/10th the standard speed, you can only d/l an additional ~0.9GB. No amount of waiting will grant you d/ling 4GB in a month. And it's not like the discussion is merely about granting a "fairer", higher priority to other users who have used less bandwidth because that would at least hypothetically grant you the possibility of d/ling even up to ~12GB/month if there's few enough other users sharing the bandwidth. Throttling, after all, is a different beast than simply QoS or other prioritizing.
I didn't think it were necessary to explain that bandwidth cannot physically be unlimited, so it shouldn't be necessary to mention... apparently, they built a better idiot though...*
*Well, I guess that falls into the area of "a company can lie as much as it want, be as deceptive as it wants, etc, so long as the lie is so grand or the deception so vast that no reasonable person would believe it". That's obviously stupid because there's a clear intent and that's the critical aspect of why they'd even bother to advertise the plan as "unlimited". If you can't physically have unlimited bandwidth, then a reasonable understanding that unlimited in the stated context means the dictionary definition of unlimited mean unrestrained. Well, throttling is clearly a restraint. I can only imagine that as others have stated, the unlimited plan came first and the heavy bandwidth came later, which lead to those in charge thinking more of how in some vague, twisted way a plan may be interpreted as "unlimited" while still in a common and obvious way not be.
Well, yea, it's sort of a repeating story. Businessman creates a conglomerate empire, too often through dubiously ethical means. Later on, either through guilt or through boredom, the power that's acquired is used more towards philanthropy or just rots in a vault somewhere because the purpose was never the power itself or to wield it but the challenge to acquire that power in the first place and how to use it. Of course, that's just a caricature of the situation, and it's silly to label such people as one-dimensional supervillains.
But I think the point stands that as much as we can be happy that, say, philanthropists do go out of their way to spend their money for the benefit of others, we often turn a blind eye to the fact that government trivially spends more and does greater pragmatic good (health care, paid or manditory, and food programs come to mind), often again through dubiously ethical means*. And not being one-dimensional, I don't think it reasonable to label a person "good" or "evil" in a one-dimensional sense. Certainly, it's hard to think of any one person as a stellar example of perfection in some area. But, then, that's fine. I certainly don't expect as such. That's just hyper projecting and distorting actions, as if there needs to be some level of Godhood attributed to people to have respect or disrespect for their real actions. I think it's enough to just appreciate reality as it is.
*As much as I'm all about freedom and choice, I think it a bit dubious to pretend that business always gives you choice and government does not. A business that dumps toxic waste into a shared river certainly isn't giving you a choice. Neither is a business who, having undercut the competition, has decided to grant you such a pitiful wage that it's neigh impossible for many people to save enough to move away. Thankfully, government has been forced to step in and take away some of these evils. And that's the point, in fact, that the vast majority of people deciding to force actions, even if it goes against the freedom of a few, might be the right and ethical thing to do. It's not a matter of "might makes right", as certainly democracies are just as capable of and have harmed minorities in the past. The point, then, is the matter at hand heavily determines how ethical the situation is, not simply waving a hand about the mechanism and entirely ignoring the consequences. So, while I don't embrace at all the idea of government nosing itself into every bit of what would be great freedom, I think it crazy to call for anarchy just because government makes things worse at times; no system is perfect, which is why you have to actually weigh what's actually going on and not just hand wave in a one-dimensional sort of way.
PS - Thank you very much for the links. Your two examples are very much good examples of the point, as of how different Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller were.
Yep, in the land of the free, the average person can decide. That's why, unlike other countries, you frequently see large-breasted, bare-chested women selling orange juice in ads. Oh, right, we can't allow that because that's indecent and we have to "think of the children". Well, if we presume that skinny models are causing eating disorders especially in adolescents, then we're already half way there in the "think of the children" part. So, the only real question is, is it indecent for a person to be ridiculously underweight and be portrayed as a role model of some sort based on that property. If something as natural as nudity is indecent, something as unnatural as heavily controlled dieting to maintain an unhealthy low weight certainly seems to rank really up there.
But time and time again we see "attacks" from Chinese IP addresses and the Chinese government saying "Help us catch these criminals, *snicker*, they are too wily for we, the stupid Chinese who manage to control our populace with a giant firewall but can neither detect nor trace these attacks from within our borders."
With no intent to excuse or defend the Chinese government, but isn't that pretty much the quid pro quo the US and the USSR/China has had for ages? I mean, if the situation was reversed, how quick would the US government be to track, arrest, and possible extradite a US hacker? This, btw, is one reason why I find the situation with the Afghanistan War so absurd.*
*Yea, this seems like quite a detour, but hear me out. Put simply, Afghanistan has its own self-interests which often include looking the other way when it might give a perceived international enemy a bloody nose. The US has, I'm certain, done the same thing in reverse--although admittedly it never rose to the level of killing thousands of people at once, just usually less than thirty at a time over years, often overtly, and sometimes in the form of lobbing a cruise missile at a "terrorist base" that turns out to be a factory. That the US should then pull a "you're either with us or against us" then becomes rather absurd on its face, especially considering how the US has remained incredibly silent about places like China which clearly isn't "with us" except in the most generic sense of being perfectly willing to crush and kill perceived enemies of the government--note, not the people. Btw, yes, this means I agree with the poster below that says this is more cyber-espionage than cyber-war. If China wanted to cripple the US in a cyber-war, there'd be a pretty severe real-war retaliation. That's the only part of MAD keeing the US safe. It certainly isn't the US having excellent cyber security.
For those who support the idea of copyright, SOPA is on its face wrongheaded. Again and again, legislation is enacted or pushed to be enacted "for the artists". It makes me think of all the times similar wordings "for the workers" invariable is designed to benefit companies. I thought it was well understood that trickle-down economics doesn't work. It's not enough to find ways to give companies, IP based or not, more money through tax breaks or longer/stronger copyright terms in the hopes they'll decide to pass some of those benefits down to the actual people behind the work. Unions as they are obviously aren't enough if the government is so concerned that it keeps pushing for more, global copyright treaties and laws.
If there really is an actual interest in the worker, why aren't laws written that actually benefit the worker? Eliminate de facto work-for-hire. Set a minimum wage and benefits for artists. Create a government initialized organized, yet artist paid and run, legal pool for dealing with things like contracts with companies for their work, pursuing piracy by both companies and end users, etc. I'm certain there are other ideas which would promote the arts and sciences by encouraging artists to produce, so investigate that and enact further laws to that end. In essence, where's all the talk about actually improving productivity and benefits? Why is the question of piracy framed in whether Disney's profits go up or down by 0.1% instead of whether there's enough animators producing good work and whether their pay is going up or down and whether it's deserved? Acting upon monolithic companies is clearly doing no good, but is it any wonder when democracies and business don't tend to like a government that deeply meddles with the inner-workings of an economy? At the same time, how can using a broad stroke and a giant club really have a directed effect?
Maybe that's just macroeconomics?:/ I don't really know enough to say.
While they're at it, I propose including a specification for a P2P system as part of the HTML5 specification using an onion layered approach to provide a level of anonymity with an encrypted caching system. I mean, what better way to guarantee you can upload content and have it shared even if your servers are overloaded while providing a mechanism that while people may hold part or all of copyrighted works meant for others that they don't really "possess" them and hence need not worry about potential copyright infringement until the point that they actively seek them out through some unauthorized means?
PS - No, I don't really think it's a good idea. I don't really think the video or canvas tags are particularly good ideas, either. I say this primarily because there's no reasonable way to graciously fall back as a general point (here is a hack solution, although I imagine it fails badly in practice for things like live video). Further, I'd point out that things like video and canvas are bound to be used and abused in annoying ways and may lead to all sorts of security issues, which is one reason why plenty among us tend to try to avoid things like flash as well when we can through admittedly imperfect extensions. I'd like to at least see some effort in the HTML5 specification to address these issues first before throwing even more stuff on top. Honestly, though, I'm not even sure if video really belongs in the HTML spec at all.
It takes a remarkable human being to trust science over his or her own beliefs when the two are in conflict. It's one thing when we haven't decided what the right answer is--but when we've decided, God help Science if it's not on our side. We are more likely to question methodology, etc... if the result is not one that we like.
You know, I really wholeheartedly disagree. There's a lot of things I believed when I was younger that I've changed my belief in that involve science. No, it didn't just spontaneously occur. It was the byproduct of again and again think I knew something, coming up the cold truth of observation again and again that I was wrong, and seeing again and again that science got it right. It wasn't enough for me to simply accept that I knew how the world worked and to ignore what my eyes told me. Yet, at the same time, I wasn't so gullible to just listen to what anyone had to say.
Is my world view perfect now with science? Of course not. And I'm certain that in the past people felt the same sort of confidence in religion, alone, in explaining the world, even knowing how imperfect and vague it seemed at times. But the difference is, as a point, science isn't set in stone and it doesn't require shoehorning reality to fit it while a lot of people twist reality, mentally, to fit their religious beliefs. Mind you, I'm not saying the issue is religion per se as the same issue happens if you replace the word religion with alchemy. The point is, while there were and are people who recognize that religion or science can fail in places and that it is so for whatever reason, there are others who are so fixated upon their own beliefs to ignore reality and the need to actually consider it first.
Of course, that's where the "extremists" come in as to be so extreme is a byproduct of their beliefs superseding reality, and I have to say Rick Santorum is a great example of an extremist as well as plenty of Republican politicians in their rhetoric. The point, then, is that most people aren't like Rick Santorum, but it's rather clear that there are at least more vocal if not more common Republicans who are extremists, at least certainly at the national level.
This is troubling among people conducting experiments as much as it is among politicians. Clinical trials where someone has made up their mind beforehand and so doesn't even bother to write down a patient symptom that the person conducting the trial believes is easily explained, for example.
You do realize there's this thing called "double blind studies", right? So it's just as probable that a control patient as a treatment patient with a symptom will not have it written down, unless it's clear who is receiving the treatment (which rather proves the point the treatment is effective in the desired effect or a side effect) and the scientist is explicitly nerfing the results which is quite honestly horribly unethical and a pretty serious charge to be laying down and I'd imagine speaks more of a profit motive than simply some mistaken belief--not that that makes it any better. In short, I just don't think that's a reasonable analogy because it precisely is a byproduct of actually judging reality, not of ignoring it.
Agreed. All of the other sales people have already lied to your potential customer so what do you have to do? Bad mouth the competition? Thats not professional.
Not necessary. You spell out how you do things, how much things cost and why, and why you give your timeframe. Ie, if you have n developers then they cost n*~$ to pay for the time allotted. You know from past experience that a project of the given scope will take about ~y time, and throwing more developers at it than n won't speed up the job while cutting n by even a few will drastically increasing the time. Etc. Obviously, you Power Point the overview of why you think it'll cost ~$X and take ~Y time, and you can spell out the calculations in a more thorough report (which should probably be only a few pages long, if it's a small enough project); most of the data should be similar enough so the actual calculations, Power Point, etc is mostly reusable.
Oh, and if it's unprofessional to tell the truth and bad mouth the competition, how is it not unprofessional to lie and overpromte yourself?
Tell them that you do things differently? It is not like they haven't heard that before.
Show them you're different. Give past examples of where it cost ~$X and took ~Y time for a similar project. Make it clear to them that simply doing rough calculations without a more systematic analysis after the fact to confirm those calculations often produces unrealistically low price and time figures, which rarely panned out and leave the costumer upset that a product isn't done on time and often, through efforts to speed up the project (hiring more developers, pushing the developers to work longer hours which is less efficient and more error prone, etc), ends up costing more than what your figures show. If necessary, give them an example of the "before we did it this way" to show how it's true. Just make sure it's an example that's old enough that you can make it clear you've changed your ways since then.
Give them testimonials from other clients who were happy with you? That is a great idea, if you have testimonials, but the customer doesn't care if you have good reputation and a high price, during the economic downturn these decisions almost exclusively come down to who has the lowest price. So sadly you have nothing left to do but say, "Yes we can do that at that price under that timeframe."
And tell them it'll possibly cost them in the long term, when that attractive low price ends up including a ton of baggage that costs more in the long term. If they're worried about the sticker price and convinced it'll look better if they can just buy it cheap now and leave it to others to fix it later with additional fees, offer to provide a payment plan to take the bite off the price. You'll still get most (if not all) the needed capital flowing in when you need it and you're more likely to get the sale.
I am all for it, but when it comes to business you just can't think in terms of what is in the best long term interest for everyone. When you are struggling to get off the ground and keep the lights on you can't even think in terms of long term interest for yourself and your company, let alone the entire industry.
I agree something must be done but this is why the market is a horrible tool to affect positive changes to social and community policy.
Well, with that I can agree, so I can understand how you feel about it. At the same time, the above is also used as an excuse to do nothing which makes the situation stay the same or become worse. It's the same thing with government spending. When times are good, taxes are lowered because there's a "surplus" of funds. When times are bad, spending and deficits are increased to pay for all those social services that can no longer be paid for by taxes, in part because of lower taxes but also because of few tax payers. Lather, rinse, repeat,
Theme these days is, get projects at any cost, we will figure it out once the project starts moving.
Survival in the global economy demands this kind of business strategy though. It sucks I know but when you are a small company with a tight budget and you got ferociously hungry competitors in a super-saturated market then you have some tough choices to make.
I used to think this way until I saw the books and I participated in sales meetings. When the choice is to sell fiction and hope for the best, or just hope another opportunity comes around in 3 months before you run out of money for payroll... well then maybe you wouldn't be so quick to point fingers at sales.
How does that logic follow, exactly? If you're surrounded by ferociously hungry competitors in a super-saturated market, you don't behave just them to get ahead or even stay above water. You set yourself as different. How do you do that? By actually knowing what you're doing, for a start. That means knowing up front realistic deadlines, realistic costs, etc, and then you sell it to your buyers showing exactly why you think not only why you're the right company for the job but also why anyone else who claims they can do it faster and cheaper is likely wrong.
Will it mean you'll lose out on opportunities when they don't believe you? Yes, almost certainly. But is it better to nearly lie and have a lot of one time customers or have a few repeat customer who will be unpaid spokesmen for your company so in the long-term you'll have a steady supply of customers? Yes, I can see how it sucks to be in an economic downturn and want to guarantee a payroll for employees you know deserve to have a steady job, but it's your job as a salesman to find more opportunities, be they large or small, when such times occur. It's not your job to nearly lie, no matter how many other people do it or how little backfire you've received from it so far because that sort of thinking, while it sadly might get you ahead and give you steady employment for life, is also the very essence of why so few people actually trust sales people and honestly is the cause of the economic downturn in the first place. To fight a disease by spewing your own version of it just makes the situation worse in the long-term for everyone.:(
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Um, because? Seriously, you make it sound like it's a well considered and rational action of self-destruction to become a gambling addict and to start embezzling money. Sure, there are rationalized steps in the process to reduce the risk of getting caught, but one presumes that all employees are only really there to earn a paycheck, getting caught means criminal charges and/or being blacklisted from most companies, and that while people do tend to expand their spending to meet their paycheck, the less the paycheck overall is, the less savings you have and hence the more you really need that job. When you're talking about a million dollars a year, well that's equivalent to 20 years of $50,000/year*, which leaves a lot of room to not really care about a company.
How many CEOs, after having ran one business into the ground, have been hired up again to be CEO at another company? I guess that might be because as much as "top management positions aren't that common", it also holds people with top management position experience aren't that common; and why not hire someone with experience, even if it's mostly bad, rather than risk a person with no experience? Really, unless the CEO is stupid enough to be caught outright embezzling money, they're probably in the clear; and considering how much stuff can seemingly be written often as a "business expense" or "perk", it could take quite a lot. That's not to say, of course, it doesn't happen and people haven't been caught/punished; but, the CEO and other top management positions are in the best position of burying evidence, and vague accusations without proof might be enough to force a resignation but maybe not enough to prevent them being rehired elsewhere. After all, if your CEO was robbing you blind, would you like the world to know? And wouldn't you like it best if after they resigned they were rehired by a competitor who you can secretly hope they'll embezzle from as well?
*Yea, I know, because of progressive taxation it's probably closer to 3/4ths that, but then the discussion was "millions of dollars", so feel free to scale up that round figure of a million dollars to compensate--I'm sure the CEO would.
Well, what are we supposed to do when both Republicans and Democrats grant blanket immunity for their misdeeds The courts are so slow, but from the judge's comments it seems they aren't willing to do the right thing, either; and they're likely to claim that based on a selective interpretation of what ex post facto means. The only thing seeming left is to start executing politicians. Well, it's hard to be for that, especially since it makes you look rather crazy to be killing people over vague, undefined privacy issues; also, I don't think the courts or society would really tolerate that, until it's abused to the point that people start committing suicide/homicide or something because of those privacy abuses. Seriously, though, I really don't know what the judge expects, except something as absurd as privacy being *the* electability issue, which I just don't see happening given how important things like, oh, having food on the table is in comparison.
Killing isn't reasonable. [Civil] War isn't reasonable. Yet, I don't see any reasonable path forward for Iran in the near future when those in power are perfectly capable and willing to use that power to commit or accept the violence against those who seek a reasonable change. So, as horrible as it is to be unreasonable, do you have any other ideas? Or do you think the Iranian people should just wait, possibly for decades, for enough people to care just enough that targeted violence by the Iranian government or its supporters isn't enough to oppress the people? I ask in honesty, btw, because that seems to be the repeated tune of why the "Spring" occurred as it was, now.
I think your complaint really boils down to the point that the US does a shitty job taking care of its monuments. So, yeah, if the Enterprise is going to be built, it should be built in Belgium or something.
Well, I think it's also a bit ironic also because in the US there's rather similar laws involving doing a cover version of a song. Yes, there is the issue of whether it's a one time fee or a continuous fee based upon units sold, but in either case it's a mechanical, compulsory process where the copyright holder has little to no say over it. The most interesting part to me of it is that such a law only covers music, AFAIK.
It could be argued this is because music is special, either in that each performance is unique and hence it is that which should be treated as copyrightable, but that leaves the question of why plays and other similar performance works aren't treated the same. After all, it's rather different in whether a group of children or a group of trained actors do Hamlet and whether the play's creator has the right to avoid some sort of "blasphemy" against his artistic vision.
It could also be argued that music is not unique enough in its production--given the seem argument of how few chords are available and how even a few notes might be enough to violate someone else's copyright--but then works like books are based upon a generally unique selection of phonetics and words, although of a grander scale, and based upon plot lines and characters of a generally limited flavor as well. At the same time, authors don't have to pay a "genre" fee and it's usually quite trivial to copy a work or character, so long as one makes a few alterations along the way; still, that would presumably be the same with music since clearly there are many sound-alike songs.
So, overall, I'm just curious about why compulsory licensing of the sort is accepted and whether it's more a means to expand the artistic availability of some authors or more of a money grab by authors (or likely their producers, given how it works in the US) to try to take in more money on copying that is presumed would happen regardless. To that end, it's more of a tax system meant for a subclass of people, and that seems rather dubious.
Well, IIRC (and HPFS dirs seems to effectively confirm it), under HPFS directory entries were sorted alphabetically. So, I can imagine it's as simple as a FindNextFile() loop and very little/no buffering in the boot cycle being the culprit.
I like to think of it this way. America likes to think of itself like it's Charlie Brown*. In reality it's Peppermint Patty**.
*As much as Charlie Brown is treated as a punching bag and is self-deprecating, it appears the world is set against him. He is the underdog who is too worried at times about going too far and hence is wishy-washy, but in a crisis he'll rise up as the natural leader and do the right thing.
**Peppermint Patty is obnoxious, self-centered, and quick to lay blame upon others. Yea, everyone is in love with you, even when they don't even know you exist or love someone else. Golly, you're bossing people around all the time towards your own ends, but why does it seem like some people think you finally deciding to hold yourself back a bit is too little, too late? Oh, sure, you can be the leader, but if things get tough, you want to push the actual responsibility, concerns, etc on someone else. Or you can just ignore that there's any sort of connection between your orders and the implication that they'd actually deal with a problem by actually effecting it in a positive way.
PS - Yea, yea, I've watched too many Peanut specials. I still like them though. I just don't like the idea of living them.
The odd thing is, I don't really see how these discussion relate to the patent in question. You see, the real beauty of MS's solution was having two separate filenames associated with a file, allowing for a great deal of backwards compatibility. The solutions offered by Linus and others amounted to effectively showing LFN-unaware programs only the first n characters of a long filename; the obvious problem with this is filename collision. It also does nothing to support things like UTF-8 or other encoding schemes--and for Windows, just having more common characters as valid. At least thankfully for *nix, their solution doesn't run into the likely main reason MS went the path they used: filename extensions have to be known for DOS/Windows executables.
Of course, the real point of issue is that what MS's solution amounts to is using a limit version of hard links with a clever association and backtracking scheme in the case of renaming/moving, but that's not fundamentally different than the intent of Mac's alias files. To that end, I'd argue that MS's solution might be patentable as a novel, clever hack, but then that'd seem to hold to the extent of any other self-created problem that one finds a work around too, which seems ridiculous.
Not to be rude, but you do know what a preamble is, right? While it might seem otherwise blatantly obvious, the purpose of the US Constitution wasn't to enrich a king or grow tobacco for export. It was created to, as one of its main purposes, "promote the general Welfare". That doesn't mean Congress has carte-blanche power to do anything or everything it wants in the name of "the general Welfare". That's as absurd as those who would argue action needs to be done "for the children".
Well, the general spirit of the document is to frequently speak in terms of the Federal government's actions in relationship to states, although that's admittedly not a hard rule (the Bill of Rights comes to mind as well as various "people" references). In any case, I can only really see your argument holding up in the context of "the health of the American people is tantamount to the health of the United States" and hence use that as justification. But, that's honestly a bit of a stretch. I think the line gives more justification for the CDC and FEMA than anything. And while yes, the current system puts the US at an economic disadvantage compared to other countries, I don't really think having the economic edge as a road to prosperity was really in the mindset of the framers of the Constitution. After all, the line in question speaks of duties, imposts, etc, which if anything are more about limiting trade.
Or perhaps it was a legitimate concern about the validity of the legislation? You see, I'm actually quite for things like social security, welfare, socialized healthcare, etc. But I also recognize that the language of the Constitution was never really written in consideration of the US as it is today. And as much as people don't like to think of it, it's not an unreasonable point to raise that instead of poking at various vague wordings throughout the document based in a language and a culture foreign to us--as you in continuing on note, businesses and corporations of then are quite different from now--that it might be appropriate to amend the Constitution to better establish the Will of the People who do seek a much more active Federal government in their lives. After all, for all the rantings about the new health care laws, the same people who tended to gripe about the expansion of medical care for all through the government, even if through a mandate, were just as likely to gripe about the shrinking of medical care for some (the elderly) through the government; the speaks to me more of a selfishness that I don't think is actually commonly shared.
Perhaps that's because Python loops suck? I mean, literally, try writing a version of this in various languages and time them:
value=0
for i in xrange(1000000000):
value=i
At least the last time I tried it, just about every language but Python had a sensible execution time (read, without 20 seconds). Python? It takes minutes to execute. :/ And I don't think it's the result of some optimization either, as you can look at gcc's assembly to see it will at sufficiently low optimization actually produce the one billion loop and it still executes fast.
Okay, probably been done before and somewhat off-topic, but how about sphere breakout? Ie, a central "core" piece with wedge pieces layered on top (think something like Tetrisphere) and a paddle a ways from the surface to bounce the ball off. Take away all the pieces and add a second paddle to make it 3D Pong. I assume a trackball would be a good controller.
Oh, and please reply if you know of any other games that could be done this way or have already been done this way. I know my idea isn't original and isn't worth $100,000. But, then, Pong wasn't really worth it either. It just happened to be the right program at the right time to cash in; but, then, that's the core point of it, not per se the game itself.
I disagree on three fronts.
Google is a web search company that learned how to use advertising to fund their services. Their constant efforts, until recently, to diversify into other fields is heavily based upon that core point: it should be R&D, not D&R. D&R leaves you to optimum hills, but it ignores entire mountains beyond the valleys. R&D leaves you to expand into wholly new fields and to then see how, if at all possible, to support those ideas financially.
More to the point, though, just because Google today makes ~$35 billion/year on advertising doesn't mean it will tomorrow. The next "threat" like Facebook might severely undermine their business, and it's not like they can simply take their "monopoly"--read pile of cash--and buy or out compete a new competitor in a new field just because they were "the" darling of R&D for years. It's that think that lead to the actions of IBM and Microsoft and lots of other companies. Instead of either accepting that they were good and what they were good at and not expanding or trying to expand into another, unrelated field, a lot of money is wasted trying to remain king in a field where it's not even clear if there's a real threat--Facebook may "steal" some of their profits, but it's more than likely that Facebook will do more to grow the advertising pie than anything.
Finally, web searches and advertising may just be the low hanging fruit. 3M didn't start out making scotch tape. IBM used to be more about machines than service. It doesn't take much to realize that Google may have a lot of winners in its R&D that may, in the long term, outstrip what advertising has to offer. Even if it doesn't, there's still a lot of potential for that revenue to be in addition to advertising and to help weather any real or imagined market uncertain about advertising as a stable base for the company's future. You know the saying about not putting all one's eggs in one basket...
It's funny, in a way. For all the talk about the risk of terrorist hacking, it has yet to occur. Yet, year after year, the DHS has reported dismal scores (read C or worse) for just about every part of the Federal Government. Sure, each year there's another report with more goals to meet. But, failing to make the necessary progress, basically relying upon the kindness of terrorists to not attack, seems to border on criminal negligence. If anything, the FBI should focus more on the actual crimes occurring, not on potential and hypothetical ones that may never materialize.
But, yea, let's talk about the terrorist hackers... I mean, it's better to focus on them and use them as an excuse to crack down on all criminals (and plenty of non-criminals) than to, you know, try to crack down on government to actually do its job which would make a lot of it a non-issue. :/
Society is not entitled to an unpublished work. A person is note entitled to copyright an unpublished work. Well, that'd be how it would work if copyright were somehow sensible...
It's a funny idea, granting a monopoly over society to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" on a work that "never influenced it in the first place". Except, of course, one would reasonably assume that some of those works not published are forerunners of works that were published and those works did influence society. So, either the works are influential and should be copyrighted and at some level be forced available to the public (if nothing else, something like viewable in the Library of Congress) or the works aren't influential and should not have a copyright, with public copies being limited to just how well the work can be protected by physical means.
I think the issue at hand is focusing on the wrong thing. AT&T sells "unlimited data", not "unlimited bandwidth". So, yes, the speed of the highway doesn't change, but the average speed of delivery by car does. Hence, the theoretical (and likely actual) throughput is reduced artificially.
Granted. So, that means either (a) AT&T is lying and hence committing fraud* or (b) they're using a more limited definition of the word "unlimited".
That's a bad analogy. The "restaurant" closes at the end of the month for everyone. If it closed early for you, it'd be a limited plan.
So long as it's the standard convention that you only get one plate at a time, then it can still be called unlimited. However, if after eating n plates of food, they take away your plate and give you a tiny cup saucer, they're clearly limiting your ability to eat.
Hardly. If the standard bandwidth for the first 1/4th of the month allows you to download 3GB, but after that point you're throttled to 1/10th the standard speed, you can only d/l an additional ~0.9GB. No amount of waiting will grant you d/ling 4GB in a month. And it's not like the discussion is merely about granting a "fairer", higher priority to other users who have used less bandwidth because that would at least hypothetically grant you the possibility of d/ling even up to ~12GB/month if there's few enough other users sharing the bandwidth. Throttling, after all, is a different beast than simply QoS or other prioritizing.
*Well, I guess that falls into the area of "a company can lie as much as it want, be as deceptive as it wants, etc, so long as the lie is so grand or the deception so vast that no reasonable person would believe it". That's obviously stupid because there's a clear intent and that's the critical aspect of why they'd even bother to advertise the plan as "unlimited". If you can't physically have unlimited bandwidth, then a reasonable understanding that unlimited in the stated context means the dictionary definition of unlimited mean unrestrained. Well, throttling is clearly a restraint. I can only imagine that as others have stated, the unlimited plan came first and the heavy bandwidth came later, which lead to those in charge thinking more of how in some vague, twisted way a plan may be interpreted as "unlimited" while still in a common and obvious way not be.
Well, yea, it's sort of a repeating story. Businessman creates a conglomerate empire, too often through dubiously ethical means. Later on, either through guilt or through boredom, the power that's acquired is used more towards philanthropy or just rots in a vault somewhere because the purpose was never the power itself or to wield it but the challenge to acquire that power in the first place and how to use it. Of course, that's just a caricature of the situation, and it's silly to label such people as one-dimensional supervillains.
But I think the point stands that as much as we can be happy that, say, philanthropists do go out of their way to spend their money for the benefit of others, we often turn a blind eye to the fact that government trivially spends more and does greater pragmatic good (health care, paid or manditory, and food programs come to mind), often again through dubiously ethical means*. And not being one-dimensional, I don't think it reasonable to label a person "good" or "evil" in a one-dimensional sense. Certainly, it's hard to think of any one person as a stellar example of perfection in some area. But, then, that's fine. I certainly don't expect as such. That's just hyper projecting and distorting actions, as if there needs to be some level of Godhood attributed to people to have respect or disrespect for their real actions. I think it's enough to just appreciate reality as it is.
*As much as I'm all about freedom and choice, I think it a bit dubious to pretend that business always gives you choice and government does not. A business that dumps toxic waste into a shared river certainly isn't giving you a choice. Neither is a business who, having undercut the competition, has decided to grant you such a pitiful wage that it's neigh impossible for many people to save enough to move away. Thankfully, government has been forced to step in and take away some of these evils. And that's the point, in fact, that the vast majority of people deciding to force actions, even if it goes against the freedom of a few, might be the right and ethical thing to do. It's not a matter of "might makes right", as certainly democracies are just as capable of and have harmed minorities in the past. The point, then, is the matter at hand heavily determines how ethical the situation is, not simply waving a hand about the mechanism and entirely ignoring the consequences. So, while I don't embrace at all the idea of government nosing itself into every bit of what would be great freedom, I think it crazy to call for anarchy just because government makes things worse at times; no system is perfect, which is why you have to actually weigh what's actually going on and not just hand wave in a one-dimensional sort of way.
PS - Thank you very much for the links. Your two examples are very much good examples of the point, as of how different Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller were.
Yep, in the land of the free, the average person can decide. That's why, unlike other countries, you frequently see large-breasted, bare-chested women selling orange juice in ads. Oh, right, we can't allow that because that's indecent and we have to "think of the children". Well, if we presume that skinny models are causing eating disorders especially in adolescents, then we're already half way there in the "think of the children" part. So, the only real question is, is it indecent for a person to be ridiculously underweight and be portrayed as a role model of some sort based on that property. If something as natural as nudity is indecent, something as unnatural as heavily controlled dieting to maintain an unhealthy low weight certainly seems to rank really up there.
*sigh*
Maybe if the typewriters are shitty quality. However, speaking of shitty quality, typewriter *cleaning* services...
With no intent to excuse or defend the Chinese government, but isn't that pretty much the quid pro quo the US and the USSR/China has had for ages? I mean, if the situation was reversed, how quick would the US government be to track, arrest, and possible extradite a US hacker? This, btw, is one reason why I find the situation with the Afghanistan War so absurd.*
*Yea, this seems like quite a detour, but hear me out. Put simply, Afghanistan has its own self-interests which often include looking the other way when it might give a perceived international enemy a bloody nose. The US has, I'm certain, done the same thing in reverse--although admittedly it never rose to the level of killing thousands of people at once, just usually less than thirty at a time over years, often overtly, and sometimes in the form of lobbing a cruise missile at a "terrorist base" that turns out to be a factory. That the US should then pull a "you're either with us or against us" then becomes rather absurd on its face, especially considering how the US has remained incredibly silent about places like China which clearly isn't "with us" except in the most generic sense of being perfectly willing to crush and kill perceived enemies of the government--note, not the people. Btw, yes, this means I agree with the poster below that says this is more cyber-espionage than cyber-war. If China wanted to cripple the US in a cyber-war, there'd be a pretty severe real-war retaliation. That's the only part of MAD keeing the US safe. It certainly isn't the US having excellent cyber security.
For those who support the idea of copyright, SOPA is on its face wrongheaded. Again and again, legislation is enacted or pushed to be enacted "for the artists". It makes me think of all the times similar wordings "for the workers" invariable is designed to benefit companies. I thought it was well understood that trickle-down economics doesn't work. It's not enough to find ways to give companies, IP based or not, more money through tax breaks or longer/stronger copyright terms in the hopes they'll decide to pass some of those benefits down to the actual people behind the work. Unions as they are obviously aren't enough if the government is so concerned that it keeps pushing for more, global copyright treaties and laws.
If there really is an actual interest in the worker, why aren't laws written that actually benefit the worker? Eliminate de facto work-for-hire. Set a minimum wage and benefits for artists. Create a government initialized organized, yet artist paid and run, legal pool for dealing with things like contracts with companies for their work, pursuing piracy by both companies and end users, etc. I'm certain there are other ideas which would promote the arts and sciences by encouraging artists to produce, so investigate that and enact further laws to that end. In essence, where's all the talk about actually improving productivity and benefits? Why is the question of piracy framed in whether Disney's profits go up or down by 0.1% instead of whether there's enough animators producing good work and whether their pay is going up or down and whether it's deserved? Acting upon monolithic companies is clearly doing no good, but is it any wonder when democracies and business don't tend to like a government that deeply meddles with the inner-workings of an economy? At the same time, how can using a broad stroke and a giant club really have a directed effect?
Maybe that's just macroeconomics? :/ I don't really know enough to say.
While they're at it, I propose including a specification for a P2P system as part of the HTML5 specification using an onion layered approach to provide a level of anonymity with an encrypted caching system. I mean, what better way to guarantee you can upload content and have it shared even if your servers are overloaded while providing a mechanism that while people may hold part or all of copyrighted works meant for others that they don't really "possess" them and hence need not worry about potential copyright infringement until the point that they actively seek them out through some unauthorized means?
PS - No, I don't really think it's a good idea. I don't really think the video or canvas tags are particularly good ideas, either. I say this primarily because there's no reasonable way to graciously fall back as a general point (here is a hack solution, although I imagine it fails badly in practice for things like live video). Further, I'd point out that things like video and canvas are bound to be used and abused in annoying ways and may lead to all sorts of security issues, which is one reason why plenty among us tend to try to avoid things like flash as well when we can through admittedly imperfect extensions. I'd like to at least see some effort in the HTML5 specification to address these issues first before throwing even more stuff on top. Honestly, though, I'm not even sure if video really belongs in the HTML spec at all.
You know, I really wholeheartedly disagree. There's a lot of things I believed when I was younger that I've changed my belief in that involve science. No, it didn't just spontaneously occur. It was the byproduct of again and again think I knew something, coming up the cold truth of observation again and again that I was wrong, and seeing again and again that science got it right. It wasn't enough for me to simply accept that I knew how the world worked and to ignore what my eyes told me. Yet, at the same time, I wasn't so gullible to just listen to what anyone had to say.
Is my world view perfect now with science? Of course not. And I'm certain that in the past people felt the same sort of confidence in religion, alone, in explaining the world, even knowing how imperfect and vague it seemed at times. But the difference is, as a point, science isn't set in stone and it doesn't require shoehorning reality to fit it while a lot of people twist reality, mentally, to fit their religious beliefs. Mind you, I'm not saying the issue is religion per se as the same issue happens if you replace the word religion with alchemy. The point is, while there were and are people who recognize that religion or science can fail in places and that it is so for whatever reason, there are others who are so fixated upon their own beliefs to ignore reality and the need to actually consider it first.
Of course, that's where the "extremists" come in as to be so extreme is a byproduct of their beliefs superseding reality, and I have to say Rick Santorum is a great example of an extremist as well as plenty of Republican politicians in their rhetoric. The point, then, is that most people aren't like Rick Santorum, but it's rather clear that there are at least more vocal if not more common Republicans who are extremists, at least certainly at the national level.
You do realize there's this thing called "double blind studies", right? So it's just as probable that a control patient as a treatment patient with a symptom will not have it written down, unless it's clear who is receiving the treatment (which rather proves the point the treatment is effective in the desired effect or a side effect) and the scientist is explicitly nerfing the results which is quite honestly horribly unethical and a pretty serious charge to be laying down and I'd imagine speaks more of a profit motive than simply some mistaken belief--not that that makes it any better. In short, I just don't think that's a reasonable analogy because it precisely is a byproduct of actually judging reality, not of ignoring it.
Not necessary. You spell out how you do things, how much things cost and why, and why you give your timeframe. Ie, if you have n developers then they cost n*~$ to pay for the time allotted. You know from past experience that a project of the given scope will take about ~y time, and throwing more developers at it than n won't speed up the job while cutting n by even a few will drastically increasing the time. Etc. Obviously, you Power Point the overview of why you think it'll cost ~$X and take ~Y time, and you can spell out the calculations in a more thorough report (which should probably be only a few pages long, if it's a small enough project); most of the data should be similar enough so the actual calculations, Power Point, etc is mostly reusable.
Oh, and if it's unprofessional to tell the truth and bad mouth the competition, how is it not unprofessional to lie and overpromte yourself?
Show them you're different. Give past examples of where it cost ~$X and took ~Y time for a similar project. Make it clear to them that simply doing rough calculations without a more systematic analysis after the fact to confirm those calculations often produces unrealistically low price and time figures, which rarely panned out and leave the costumer upset that a product isn't done on time and often, through efforts to speed up the project (hiring more developers, pushing the developers to work longer hours which is less efficient and more error prone, etc), ends up costing more than what your figures show. If necessary, give them an example of the "before we did it this way" to show how it's true. Just make sure it's an example that's old enough that you can make it clear you've changed your ways since then.
And tell them it'll possibly cost them in the long term, when that attractive low price ends up including a ton of baggage that costs more in the long term. If they're worried about the sticker price and convinced it'll look better if they can just buy it cheap now and leave it to others to fix it later with additional fees, offer to provide a payment plan to take the bite off the price. You'll still get most (if not all) the needed capital flowing in when you need it and you're more likely to get the sale.
Well, with that I can agree, so I can understand how you feel about it. At the same time, the above is also used as an excuse to do nothing which makes the situation stay the same or become worse. It's the same thing with government spending. When times are good, taxes are lowered because there's a "surplus" of funds. When times are bad, spending and deficits are increased to pay for all those social services that can no longer be paid for by taxes, in part because of lower taxes but also because of few tax payers. Lather, rinse, repeat,
How does that logic follow, exactly? If you're surrounded by ferociously hungry competitors in a super-saturated market, you don't behave just them to get ahead or even stay above water. You set yourself as different. How do you do that? By actually knowing what you're doing, for a start. That means knowing up front realistic deadlines, realistic costs, etc, and then you sell it to your buyers showing exactly why you think not only why you're the right company for the job but also why anyone else who claims they can do it faster and cheaper is likely wrong.
Will it mean you'll lose out on opportunities when they don't believe you? Yes, almost certainly. But is it better to nearly lie and have a lot of one time customers or have a few repeat customer who will be unpaid spokesmen for your company so in the long-term you'll have a steady supply of customers? Yes, I can see how it sucks to be in an economic downturn and want to guarantee a payroll for employees you know deserve to have a steady job, but it's your job as a salesman to find more opportunities, be they large or small, when such times occur. It's not your job to nearly lie, no matter how many other people do it or how little backfire you've received from it so far because that sort of thinking, while it sadly might get you ahead and give you steady employment for life, is also the very essence of why so few people actually trust sales people and honestly is the cause of the economic downturn in the first place. To fight a disease by spewing your own version of it just makes the situation worse in the long-term for everyone. :(