Silent corruption of the data is great as long as it's fast eh? Brilliant.
No kidding. One of the rules developers follow (in the real world, at least) is to "make it work, then make it fast" -- which is to say, accuracy comes before speed. Write code that doesn't destroy data first, then refactor and tighten it up. PostgreSQL wisely took this approach...
Nobody has yet even come *close* to defining an objective standard by which "happiness" can be measured. You can find some back-and-forth occasionally on the subject between a couple of generally (though not specifically) like-minded economists on Econlog.
Anybody who goes around quoting statistics as meaningless as measures of "happiness" -- especially on such an amorphous, wide-variation-within-the-set scale as an entire freaking nation -- is not somebody who can be taken seriously. It is a laughable statistic, at best.
"Happiness" is an entirely (and almost by definition) subjective thing, and as such, the only serious objective measures cannot come from the rankings of those people measuring it from outside the body, but rather from inside the brain, where the chemical and physical processes that -- physically -- define "happiness" in our brains can be measured.
Of course, saying this is the most-objective way of measuring happiness, and *doing* it are two very different things... But until such measurements can be taken, easily and repeatably, with high degrees of accuracy and precision, the idea that happiness can be measured to any level better than a few broad, vague, subjective classifications (e.g. "very unhappy", "unhappy", "neutral", "happy", "very happy"), will remain completely laughable.
Write a script (VBS, Perl, whatever) to monitor your process list. Have it poll the process list every quarter of a second or something, and keep a running list of processes that are found. On the first iteration, write the list to one file. On succeeding iterations, compare the list of the i-th iteration to the list of known processes -- if a new process appears that wasn't in a previous iteration, spit it out to another file...
Fortunately, MSFT includes a C# compiler with .NET
on
Why Johnny Can't Code
·
· Score: 1
That's right -- csc.exe ("C-Sharp Compiler"). Check out:
I have C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\csc. exe on my XP box... It will compile C# code, along with any.NET classes. And because C# is a Java clone with a couple elements of syntactical sugar (foreach() and properties come to mind), it's relatively-easy to pick up and learn.
Of course, MSFT doesn't advertise this because they don't want you avoiding their horrifically-expensive (but very nice) Visual Studio suite. And this has only been the case as long as.NET has been out (since 2001 or so) and standard on home desktops (a couple years).
Prior to.NET, during the post-Win95 (IIRC, MSFT stopped offering QBASIC with their OSs after Win95) period to.NET's release and widespread desktop installation, the article's premise that easy-to-find-and-use compilers being unavailable is correct -- there were no compilers included with the world's most-popular OS for several years.
That said, I don't think this is the only reason Johnny can't code, though it's probably a significant one...
Crappier infrastrcuture??? At 300 million mobile phones, i wish to think different. GPRS/WAP/MMS/ ask and you will find ATLEAST 3 providers fighting to provide you service at terms that you would find juicy when compared to US.
"Infrastructure" doesn't refer just to cell phone providers. It refers to:
* Roadways * Train systems * Airline systems * Electrical provision * Clean water provision
and so forth. "Infrastructure" refers to all those basic goods and services which form the backbone of other goods/services -- they are goods/services which enable other goods/services to function.
In all of these areas, India sucks compared to the U.S. - or any 1st-world country for that matter. And a major reason why India is still not considered even a 2nd-world country is because India sucks in these regards. They are particularly bad at providing electrical service -- which, of course, IT relies-on as its lifeblood...
Yeah, I'm sure various corporations will happily boycott Vista -- until MSFT EOLs XP, cutting support, at which point businesses will fork over the cash for a Vista upgrade.
Consumers won't boycott Vista either, because consumers haven't seriously boycotted anything in a very long time...
And before anyone brings up abortion clinic bombers, you want to know why it isn't a problem? Because there are a lot of Christians like me who wouldn't hesitate to shoot those violent fucks if we caught them in the act. Why? Our religion teaches that preserving life is a duty of all Jews and Christians.
That's an interesting position to take: wanting (claiming to want, at least) to preserve life -- at the expense of the life of another. You're willing to kill to save others from being killed.
A literal interpretation of "Thou shalt not kill" in the 10 Commandments shows your position to be internally contradictory. 4 simple words, without ambiguity; yet, even this proves difficult for the defenders of Christianity. As well it should.
I'm not an anti-gun, anti-violence crazy (I am not a pro-violence crazy either, although some might argue I'm a pro-gun crazy:-/ ). I am vehemently in favor of the RKBA, and I recognize the undesireable necessity of violence at certain times. But in so doing, I also recognize that the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment is -- like most ideological stances -- too simplistic and absolutist to be useful. A nice ideal that has no relevance to the real world. Not that killing people shouldn't be a last resort (it must *always* be), but death is, and always has been, an unfortunate part of life.
"We have a serious problem. Whenever I try to pitch Linux to anyone under 30, the question I get is: 'Will it work with my iPod?," he said. "We are not yet as a community making the painful compromises need to achieve widespread desktop market share. Until we do, we will get locked out of more hardware."
Raymond is concerned the window of opportunity is closing for Linux on the desktop. He calculates the end of the transition to 64-bit computing by the close of 2008. According to his studies, the best opportunity to displace the dominant operating system (in this case Windows on the desktop) takes place with a major architectural shift like this.
Raymond believes Linux will get locked out for 30-odd years until the next platform shift as it's so far not doing enough to reach out to non-technical users.
"The end of the 64-bit transition happens at the end of 2008. After that the operating system gets locked in for the next 30 years. I'm worried we are not doing enough to appeal to non-technical users. I'm worried we will be locked out of the desktop for a very long time," he said.
I think ESR is correct here, though I'm not sure what exactly about today's environment discourages proprietary vendors from Linux...
The best time to try to get people on a new OS is during a shift in architecture. The estimate of 2008 being the year when 64-bit transitions are done seems a bit of a guess, but a range between 2008-2010 seems about right to me, when considering corporate and personal users' transitions.
The way Linux and the OSS movement needs to deal with proprietary software is to make it optional, not to try to exclude it altogether. For every piece of proprietary code we allow, we should also permit an open version to exist as well, and the OS and our apps shouldn't *require* proprietary software to run.
Of course, there's no reason this can't happen already. iPods *could* work on Linux -- if only Apple wanted to release a version of iTunes for Linux (of course, their desire to do this, as they have for Windows, is not a technical problem but a business one: Linux on the desktop doesn't have nearly the hand-forcing, monopolistic market share of Windows to make it profitable). And, in the opposite direction, some inspired OSS hackers could probably make the iPod work with Linux -- if only Apple were more forward-thinking and permit them to, without fear of legal assault.
The question is one of incentive. What incentives do vendors of proprietary software have to sell their wares for Linux? The ability to remain closed-source is a strong incentive, but again, this can already occur: look at Nvidia's drivers, or Cisco's VPN client...
I'll vote for Badnarik again only if the Libertarian Party somehow can't possibly manage to run somebody less batshit crazy. ("Hey guys, let's go blow up the U.N. building in NYC! I'll bet that'll be popular with voters!! And let's drive there without a driver's license, and sleep in our cars!")
Ah, I love the smell of strawman arguments in the morning. It smells like VICTORY!
If I were a better comedian, it'd be easy to make a counter-parody of the socialists that make such libertarian parodies: You don't hear of North Koreans suffering from digging Union Carbide ditches while singing in the acid rain, do you? Of course not; their economic system is too backward to get them to a post-agrarian level in the first place!
I'm sure after a few years living under the gun of Fidel Castro or former Chairman Mao or Kim Jong-Il -- or, at least, after living with the 10% unemployment rate of France, or the nearly-complete reliance on other nations for military defense of the no-longer-raping-and-pillaging Nordic countries -- you'll be happy to come crawling back to your non-coerced 8-10 hour/day jobs here in the U.S..
(Admittedly, I've never been a particularly-funny guy.)
On unions, I will say this:
I'm a philosophical supporter of non-coercive unions (though not a member) -- and libertarian. The costs of unions -- increased healthcare costs, increased wages, the layers of management that goes into building a union (just like any organization), etc. -- are passed-on to the end consumer, like any tax. So unions do, to some extent, cause inflation and act as a hidden tax.
But in a free market, labor and management are necessarily almost always at odds -- one views the other as a necessary expense in the pursuit of increased profit, while the other views the one as a limited, but necessary purchaser of their time and rights. And in order to secure anything resembling a stable, safe work relationship without major government interference, the work relationship requires the presence of a powerful base of unionized labor with significant negotiating ability. But in saying that, I'm basically echoing the (compared to today) free-market views of the original AFL founder...
In short: Corporate management has people who spend their days figuring out how to wring the most out of their employees; why shouldn't employees have people who spend their days figuring out how to wring the most out of their corporate management?
That, along with stronger shareholder power in publicly-traded companies, ought to at least curb the madness that is modern executive compensation, and without resorting to government interference (at least for the most part, depending on how the increase in shareholder power is designed). Not that getting to such a point is as easy as it was for me to type that point though; it never is...
CIOs (in Fortune 500 companies, at least) are so far removed from the proles at the bottom of the corporate pyramid -- the admins/engineers, developers, etc. -- that they frankly don't have a damn clue as to what they need. It is not their job to know *specifically* what they need that far down the corporate ladder; that is the job of one or more layers of middle-management they have separating the CIO from the people with actual technical skills (unlike the CIO), i.e. the rest of us unwashed masses (and in IT, this is sometimes a literal phrase...).
The CIO's job is to manage management en-masse (to "throw IQ points" at problems, as Bill Gates' approach tends to be), and to have "Big Ideas", or at least read the same business-tech magazines their lowly technical people do (eWeek, InformationWeek, etc.) which present big ideas -- and then tell the techies what to do, even if it's technically the wrong thing to do. Your typical CIO does not have a technical background...
There is no real Terrorism to speak of, in practical terms. Statistically you have a better chance of being struck by lightning multiple times - or be killed in a random crash with an 18 wheel Deisel, than perishing in a 'terror attack'.
That is true -- for now.
Statistics being always based on past events, however, that statistic will change when (and given a sufficiently-long timeline, this is not an "if") a terrorist uses more-deadly means than flying airplanes into buildings to attack us -- i.e., when they use some kind of WMD...
I strive every day to make bug-free code, but I realize it's unrealistic to expect I'll ever get there. It doesn't make the ideal any less important or valuable.
Yes it does. The ideal becomes less valuable (though not necessarily less important) because it fails to abide by the econ 101 reality of opportunity cost and the law of diminishing returns.
Because a perfect program is impossible, it has an infinitely-long development time. But the marginal returns to your attempts to refine your code decrease as time goes on -- that is time that you could be spending on another piece of software that is "good enough", but not "perfect".
I strive for minimally-buggy code every day, and all too often, I do find myself in the same perfectionist mode, striving to write better code at the expense of much more time. But it's ultimately not a practical stance; at the end of the day, something functional, even if imperfect, must result; your project has to conform to the same limitations of the project triangle that everybody else's has to...
I'll make an analogy to the ideal of freedom and free people. The ideal is fine, and I agree with it 100%. But the reality is that nobody demands freedom anymore in the wake of high-profile terrorist threats (even though the statistical reality is that you're still more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack), and thus, the ideal has become less valuable (though not less important -- but then, questions of importance tend to be subjective)...
How is security a "reasonable" (yes, define that word, please) expectation in the computing world?
First, a security tautology: there is no such thing as 100% security. Any newbie in computer security can tell you this. Thus, the expectation of *perfect* security is not reasonable (whether it is expected of Microsoft or OSS or Apple, or any other software or software vendor).
Secondly, empirical evidence. Look at Microsoft's very-long list of security flaws. They are so numerous and widespread that even non-technical joes-on-the-street can tell you that Microsoft's products are insecure. Thus, again, on the basis of Microsoft's history, it cannot be expected that they will produce better security, until they actually begin doing so.
Thus, whether "reasonable" is defined as: * "based on the wisdom of experts", or * "empirical historical evidence", or * "the word of the man on the street"
...it is regardless *clearly* unreasonable to expect secure software from Microsoft.
*Attempts* at providing security is a reasonable expectation. *Security*, is not.
Time had an article titled "The End of Management?" a while back, in which they discussed companies which had successfully used internal prediction markets (among their employees) to make company-wide decisions. HP and BP were cited as examples.
As it turned out, they were finding empirically-better sucecss using these markets than they were with using their layers upon layers of bureaucratic, 20th-century-style management.
Frankly, I don't think management will ever go away *completely*; who else is going to create the items in the market upon which employees will bid? So on that note, I do think Time's title is a little over-zealous.
But at the same time, I do think such markets can be a force for flattening organizational hierarchy and reducing management headcount. And as more companies become enlightened to the idea of prediction markets -- rather than just mere internal polls, which, unlike a market, have no serious, direct incentive to make a correct decision -- they will turn to such markets instead of middle-managers, who tend to have been promoted into management because they are technically-incompetent and/or are better than other people at dressing well and kissing ass.
The "people's revolution", if there is ever to be one, will (in usual paradoxical economic form) probably not come at the hands of a communist dictator or a starry-eyed Euro-socialist, but rather, in the back rooms of corporate America.
"Coverity was also run on the Windows source code. Unfortunately, the 32-bit integer iterator in Coverity was 1 count too small to store the count of the number of bugs found, and so Coverity's counter rolled-over, showing that Windows actually has -2,147,483,648 bugs. Microsoft employees were ecstatic at the results, and Steve Ballmer was said to be seen dancing in his office, yelling 'developers, developers, developers, developers!!'."
Indeed! When the law has become so complex that even the lawyers must specialize in a particular part of it -- because the law is too complex even for legal professionals to fully-understand it -- the law is clearly FAR too complex for any human being, for whom the standard of "ignorance is no defense" is always applied...
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. One of the rules developers follow (in the real world, at least) is to "make it work, then make it fast" -- which is to say, accuracy comes before speed. Write code that doesn't destroy data first, then refactor and tighten it up. PostgreSQL wisely took this approach...
Happiness as a measure of a nation? Oh please.
Nobody has yet even come *close* to defining an objective standard by which "happiness" can be measured. You can find some back-and-forth occasionally on the subject between a couple of generally (though not specifically) like-minded economists on Econlog.
Anybody who goes around quoting statistics as meaningless as measures of "happiness" -- especially on such an amorphous, wide-variation-within-the-set scale as an entire freaking nation -- is not somebody who can be taken seriously. It is a laughable statistic, at best.
"Happiness" is an entirely (and almost by definition) subjective thing, and as such, the only serious objective measures cannot come from the rankings of those people measuring it from outside the body, but rather from inside the brain, where the chemical and physical processes that -- physically -- define "happiness" in our brains can be measured.
Of course, saying this is the most-objective way of measuring happiness, and *doing* it are two very different things... But until such measurements can be taken, easily and repeatably, with high degrees of accuracy and precision, the idea that happiness can be measured to any level better than a few broad, vague, subjective classifications (e.g. "very unhappy", "unhappy", "neutral", "happy", "very happy"), will remain completely laughable.
Write a script (VBS, Perl, whatever) to monitor your process list. Have it poll the process list every quarter of a second or something, and keep a running list of processes that are found. On the first iteration, write the list to one file. On succeeding iterations, compare the list of the i-th iteration to the list of known processes -- if a new process appears that wasn't in a previous iteration, spit it out to another file...
That's right -- csc.exe ("C-Sharp Compiler"). Check out:
. exe on my XP box... It will compile C# code, along with any .NET classes. And because C# is a Java clone with a couple elements of syntactical sugar (foreach() and properties come to mind), it's relatively-easy to pick up and learn.
.NET has been out (since 2001 or so) and standard on home desktops (a couple years).
.NET, during the post-Win95 (IIRC, MSFT stopped offering QBASIC with their OSs after Win95) period to .NET's release and widespread desktop installation, the article's premise that easy-to-find-and-use compilers being unavailable is correct -- there were no compilers included with the world's most-popular OS for several years.
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<version number>\csc.exe
I have C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\csc
Of course, MSFT doesn't advertise this because they don't want you avoiding their horrifically-expensive (but very nice) Visual Studio suite. And this has only been the case as long as
Prior to
That said, I don't think this is the only reason Johnny can't code, though it's probably a significant one...
While there has been no attack, there was an attempted attack this year: an attempted beheading of high-level officials in Candian govn't.
India's infrastructure is mediocre.
"Infrastructure" doesn't refer just to cell phone providers. It refers to:
* Roadways
* Train systems
* Airline systems
* Electrical provision
* Clean water provision
and so forth. "Infrastructure" refers to all those basic goods and services which form the backbone of other goods/services -- they are goods/services which enable other goods/services to function.
In all of these areas, India sucks compared to the U.S. - or any 1st-world country for that matter. And a major reason why India is still not considered even a 2nd-world country is because India sucks in these regards. They are particularly bad at providing electrical service -- which, of course, IT relies-on as its lifeblood...
Good hardware sells itself -- like Betamax!
Yeah, I'm sure various corporations will happily boycott Vista -- until MSFT EOLs XP, cutting support, at which point businesses will fork over the cash for a Vista upgrade.
Consumers won't boycott Vista either, because consumers haven't seriously boycotted anything in a very long time...
That's an interesting position to take: wanting (claiming to want, at least) to preserve life -- at the expense of the life of another. You're willing to kill to save others from being killed.
A literal interpretation of "Thou shalt not kill" in the 10 Commandments shows your position to be internally contradictory. 4 simple words, without ambiguity; yet, even this proves difficult for the defenders of Christianity. As well it should.
I'm not an anti-gun, anti-violence crazy (I am not a pro-violence crazy either, although some might argue I'm a pro-gun crazy
I think ESR is correct here, though I'm not sure what exactly about today's environment discourages proprietary vendors from Linux...
The best time to try to get people on a new OS is during a shift in architecture. The estimate of 2008 being the year when 64-bit transitions are done seems a bit of a guess, but a range between 2008-2010 seems about right to me, when considering corporate and personal users' transitions.
The way Linux and the OSS movement needs to deal with proprietary software is to make it optional, not to try to exclude it altogether. For every piece of proprietary code we allow, we should also permit an open version to exist as well, and the OS and our apps shouldn't *require* proprietary software to run.
Of course, there's no reason this can't happen already. iPods *could* work on Linux -- if only Apple wanted to release a version of iTunes for Linux (of course, their desire to do this, as they have for Windows, is not a technical problem but a business one: Linux on the desktop doesn't have nearly the hand-forcing, monopolistic market share of Windows to make it profitable). And, in the opposite direction, some inspired OSS hackers could probably make the iPod work with Linux -- if only Apple were more forward-thinking and permit them to, without fear of legal assault.
The question is one of incentive. What incentives do vendors of proprietary software have to sell their wares for Linux? The ability to remain closed-source is a strong incentive, but again, this can already occur: look at Nvidia's drivers, or Cisco's VPN client...
I'll vote for Badnarik again only if the Libertarian Party somehow can't possibly manage to run somebody less batshit crazy. ("Hey guys, let's go blow up the U.N. building in NYC! I'll bet that'll be popular with voters!! And let's drive there without a driver's license, and sleep in our cars!")
I know it's asking a lot of the LP, but...
I don't have any science to back up my suspicion, but I suspect that whether somebody *feels* less-stressed depends on the person.
I don't feel less-stressed when I'm done working out at the gym or done running, for instance. But when I'm done doing martial arts? Yeah, definitely!
I also feel less-stressed when I get enough sleep...
Ah, I love the smell of strawman arguments in the morning. It smells like VICTORY!
If I were a better comedian, it'd be easy to make a counter-parody of the socialists that make such libertarian parodies: You don't hear of North Koreans suffering from digging Union Carbide ditches while singing in the acid rain, do you? Of course not; their economic system is too backward to get them to a post-agrarian level in the first place!
I'm sure after a few years living under the gun of Fidel Castro or former Chairman Mao or Kim Jong-Il -- or, at least, after living with the 10% unemployment rate of France, or the nearly-complete reliance on other nations for military defense of the no-longer-raping-and-pillaging Nordic countries -- you'll be happy to come crawling back to your non-coerced 8-10 hour/day jobs here in the U.S..
(Admittedly, I've never been a particularly-funny guy.)
On unions, I will say this:
I'm a philosophical supporter of non-coercive unions (though not a member) -- and libertarian. The costs of unions -- increased healthcare costs, increased wages, the layers of management that goes into building a union (just like any organization), etc. -- are passed-on to the end consumer, like any tax. So unions do, to some extent, cause inflation and act as a hidden tax.
But in a free market, labor and management are necessarily almost always at odds -- one views the other as a necessary expense in the pursuit of increased profit, while the other views the one as a limited, but necessary purchaser of their time and rights. And in order to secure anything resembling a stable, safe work relationship without major government interference, the work relationship requires the presence of a powerful base of unionized labor with significant negotiating ability. But in saying that, I'm basically echoing the (compared to today) free-market views of the original AFL founder...
In short: Corporate management has people who spend their days figuring out how to wring the most out of their employees; why shouldn't employees have people who spend their days figuring out how to wring the most out of their corporate management?
That, along with stronger shareholder power in publicly-traded companies, ought to at least curb the madness that is modern executive compensation, and without resorting to government interference (at least for the most part, depending on how the increase in shareholder power is designed). Not that getting to such a point is as easy as it was for me to type that point though; it never is...
Portable On Demand Storage?
CIOs (in Fortune 500 companies, at least) are so far removed from the proles at the bottom of the corporate pyramid -- the admins/engineers, developers, etc. -- that they frankly don't have a damn clue as to what they need. It is not their job to know *specifically* what they need that far down the corporate ladder; that is the job of one or more layers of middle-management they have separating the CIO from the people with actual technical skills (unlike the CIO), i.e. the rest of us unwashed masses (and in IT, this is sometimes a literal phrase...).
The CIO's job is to manage management en-masse (to "throw IQ points" at problems, as Bill Gates' approach tends to be), and to have "Big Ideas", or at least read the same business-tech magazines their lowly technical people do (eWeek, InformationWeek, etc.) which present big ideas -- and then tell the techies what to do, even if it's technically the wrong thing to do. Your typical CIO does not have a technical background...
That is true -- for now.
Statistics being always based on past events, however, that statistic will change when (and given a sufficiently-long timeline, this is not an "if") a terrorist uses more-deadly means than flying airplanes into buildings to attack us -- i.e., when they use some kind of WMD...
Yes it does. The ideal becomes less valuable (though not necessarily less important) because it fails to abide by the econ 101 reality of opportunity cost and the law of diminishing returns.
Because a perfect program is impossible, it has an infinitely-long development time. But the marginal returns to your attempts to refine your code decrease as time goes on -- that is time that you could be spending on another piece of software that is "good enough", but not "perfect".
I strive for minimally-buggy code every day, and all too often, I do find myself in the same perfectionist mode, striving to write better code at the expense of much more time. But it's ultimately not a practical stance; at the end of the day, something functional, even if imperfect, must result; your project has to conform to the same limitations of the project triangle that everybody else's has to...
I'll make an analogy to the ideal of freedom and free people. The ideal is fine, and I agree with it 100%. But the reality is that nobody demands freedom anymore in the wake of high-profile terrorist threats (even though the statistical reality is that you're still more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack), and thus, the ideal has become less valuable (though not less important -- but then, questions of importance tend to be subjective)...
How is security a "reasonable" (yes, define that word, please) expectation in the computing world?
First, a security tautology: there is no such thing as 100% security. Any newbie in computer security can tell you this. Thus, the expectation of *perfect* security is not reasonable (whether it is expected of Microsoft or OSS or Apple, or any other software or software vendor).
Secondly, empirical evidence. Look at Microsoft's very-long list of security flaws. They are so numerous and widespread that even non-technical joes-on-the-street can tell you that Microsoft's products are insecure. Thus, again, on the basis of Microsoft's history, it cannot be expected that they will produce better security, until they actually begin doing so.
Thus, whether "reasonable" is defined as:
* "based on the wisdom of experts", or
* "empirical historical evidence", or
* "the word of the man on the street"
...it is regardless *clearly* unreasonable to expect secure software from Microsoft.
*Attempts* at providing security is a reasonable expectation. *Security*, is not.
That's a classic example, but by no means the only one, unfortunately... :-/
Time had an article titled "The End of Management?" a while back, in which they discussed companies which had successfully used internal prediction markets (among their employees) to make company-wide decisions. HP and BP were cited as examples.
As it turned out, they were finding empirically-better sucecss using these markets than they were with using their layers upon layers of bureaucratic, 20th-century-style management.
Frankly, I don't think management will ever go away *completely*; who else is going to create the items in the market upon which employees will bid? So on that note, I do think Time's title is a little over-zealous.
But at the same time, I do think such markets can be a force for flattening organizational hierarchy and reducing management headcount. And as more companies become enlightened to the idea of prediction markets -- rather than just mere internal polls, which, unlike a market, have no serious, direct incentive to make a correct decision -- they will turn to such markets instead of middle-managers, who tend to have been promoted into management because they are technically-incompetent and/or are better than other people at dressing well and kissing ass.
The "people's revolution", if there is ever to be one, will (in usual paradoxical economic form) probably not come at the hands of a communist dictator or a starry-eyed Euro-socialist, but rather, in the back rooms of corporate America.
"Coverity was also run on the Windows source code. Unfortunately, the 32-bit integer iterator in Coverity was 1 count too small to store the count of the number of bugs found, and so Coverity's counter rolled-over, showing that Windows actually has -2,147,483,648 bugs. Microsoft employees were ecstatic at the results, and Steve Ballmer was said to be seen dancing in his office, yelling 'developers, developers, developers, developers!!'."
Indeed! When the law has become so complex that even the lawyers must specialize in a particular part of it -- because the law is too complex even for legal professionals to fully-understand it -- the law is clearly FAR too complex for any human being, for whom the standard of "ignorance is no defense" is always applied...
You must not live in IL then. We are more of a corruptocracy (rule by corruption) than anything, particularly in the city of Chicago...
I have.
"640k should be enough for anybody".