Living in NYC, I must admit to thinking that the 9/11 fund for victims is looking like nothing so much as a feeding trough for laywers. The whole thing makes me want to puke. The folks who really lost out are still left destitute, and a bunch of ambulance chasers are nibbling at the City's (already sickened) coffers.
To address your devil's advocate question, I don't think my response changes.
To follow your example of the water heater, if a tornado or hurricane comes through town, you may be elegible for money from FEMA, but if a murderer kills the breadwinner of the family, you're not. Why are people hit by hurricanes more deserving than those hit by murderers?
I don't believe FEMA (or the Red Cross, or my neighbors) owe me anything if a tornado hits my house. While it may be a useful function to institutionalise aid, the notion that one has an entitlement to it is just wrongheaded. Life is hard, and it is a great and noble thing to help those who have a bad time of it. I try my best to be a good neighbor, because I've been through hardship, and have been helped before by others - call it Karma or whatever you want. But the notion that someone _deserves_ something because they were injured is simply incorrect.
There is a second point here - contrasting natural disasters with acts of willful malice is confusing issues. The resolution is the same: If someone does you wrong and can't be forced to make it right, well, that sucks, but it isn't anyone else's fault. I draw the distinction only to note that human agency makes it even clearer that nobody else it to blame - there is a bright line around the responsible party.
I still maintain that seeking damages against a software company because some redneck shot you for fun is absurd.
So do I gather that you're opposed to the federal government's program of making restitution to the victims of 9/11?
I'll start out by saying that if the WTC were still standing, I would be able to see it our of my window.
If you consider it restitution, then yes, I have a problem with it. If you consider it aid to needy people, and if it is indeed aid to needy people, then that's a somewhat nice, useful function of government.
Look at it this way - if your water heater explodes and burns your house down, do your neighbors owe you anything? This isn't rhetorical - this happened to my family. My answer is no, they don't. It is nice if they do help you out (and they did help us), but it is, and should be, voluntary behaviour.
I shouldn't be sucked in...
on
Google Turns 5
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· Score: 1
I'll start off by saying I generally agree with you. Damn, I shouldn't go out drinking on a Sunday night.
Just a couple of quibbles...
2. Google records everything they can:
It's obviously that they have to record some information to function, but everyone expects information to be collected in aggregate. If someone can say that google has all my search terms linked to my IP address, with dates and times, then I would be concerned.
The problem is not aggregation. The issue is personal data. If I know you search for slash stories, and have a thing for Mr. Wharf, I can make certain other assumptions, which may or may not be something we want to encourage in the wider framework of our culture.
5. Google hires spooks:
Any large company has people that have been emplayed in unusual places. That doesn't show any rational link.
I have a problem with former spies working for Google. Much like the airline industry, there is a revolving door bewtween government and industry. I do believe that Google is too prone to making nice-nice with creepy countries, be that China or, well, now, the US. That said, they seem to want to be rational, but the past behaviour does not inspire trust.
Give me a good answer about who should compensate victims for being shot by little shits who can't pay for the damage they wreak.
That's easy. Nobody.
If the perpetrator of a crime cannot make restitution, the victim does not have any further recourse. It sucks, but that's just the way it works. Life ain't fair.
I must admit that I completely fail to understand why a software developer should be held to legal responsibility for a couple of dumbshits shooting at cars. Hell, I've had a bad couple of years - if I go on a rampage and shoot a few people, I'm sure someone's responsible for that - Oh, not me, surely some television show, or Id software, or maybe those people who fired me, or those other people who didn't accept my proposal, of that guy who looked at me funny on the subway...
The fact is that looking for a source of compensation for a tragedy has turned in to sick game of extortion by lawyer. I'm very interested in law, and may actually go back to school to pick up more knowledge here, but this sort of thing is a gross abuse of what law is supposed to provide - a fair, level field for people to prosper or not, to the best of thier own abilites.
Kazaa has become an abondanded street filled with hookers and the black market. If you don't want the law to clean up your street then you better do it yourself.
If you don't like the seedy side of town, why do you go there?
Of course, this analogy falls flat, because some people are forced by economics to live a place they would rather not. Nobody is forced to use P2P apps. If you don't want your kids to use P2P apps, here's a hint: Don't let them. If you are unable to stop them, then you should think about your parenting skills before you shout "there should be a law..."
You refuse twice to actually address questions asked directly to you, make bizarre assumptions about what I think (hint: you have no idea what my "small narrowly focused world" consists of, or what my beliefs are, other than that I disclosed that I dislike Bush), insult me repeatedly, and finally fall back on the classic "well it's worse elsewhere, so shut up" argument.
So, have fun bashing strawmen and knowing you're such a worldly deep thinker that there's no reason to draw attention to problems at home because it is so much worse in Zimbabwe.
they're not citizens
they're mostly terrorist assholes captured in a war
you do understand that, don't you?
I understand that more than one US citizen has been detained without due process, and that the current US regime refuses to divulge the identities of numerous other people who are still being detained without due process. Without knowing who they are, we don't know what nationality they are. I'm not going to start in with how the semantic absurdity "enemy combatant" is being used to circumvent international law, because that's slightly a different topic...
it was not done for a personal vendetta. so you watch a lot of hollywood movies, huh?;-)
Intelligent minds can disagree here. Perhaps the Bush family hatred of Hussein wasn't the issue, perhaps it was merely the desire to loot the country. Would you care to defend that next?
there is no suppressing speech for corporate interests, there is suppressing piracy for corporate interests
Arresting people who talk about security measures and legally forbidding people to post links to certain kinds of software is not suppression of speech? Care to explain how that works? I suppose if I hit you every time you say something, I'm not attempting to stop you from speaking, right?
So, to get back to my questions, would you like to demonstrate where exactly in your pantheon of statist evil the various actions fall?
So to sum up, you spit out the definition of hyperbole, babble about who's the spitting image of hyperbole, who's making hyperbolic comments, what statement is a hyperbole. I'm glad you're practicing the use of that word, but you're getting a bit redundant.
Perhaps you can enlighten us on the proper scale of response to recent events, perhaps a matrix of proper comparisons.
Let's start with these:
- Indefinite detention of citizens without due process
This is like:
a) Nazi Germany
b) Today's China
c) The worst abuses of the British state during the worst of the IRA attacks
d) Mommy grounding me for something I didn't do
e) Perfectly OK and right and proper
- Invading a nation and seizing its assests for a personal vandetta
This is like:
a) Nazi Germany
b) China's behavior towards the other China
c) The worst abuses of [pick a European nation state] during the imperialist phase of history
d) Mommy rooting through my crap and taking my porno
e) perfectly OK and right and proper
- Suppressing speech for corporate interests
This is like:
a) Nazi book burning
b) China censoring the internet
c) England handing out monopolies on book publishing
d) Mommy telling me not to swear
e) perfectly OK and right and proper
Please, tell all us ignrnt fools the proper way to use metaphor. We're pining for your wisdom
I'm with you. I can't stand Java. If I were a sadist, Java is the language I'd make my submissives code in. Nice and restrictive, with horrific little tricks like the Date object.
OTOH, I really like Perl's permissive notion of objects. We've built a niftly little framework and our own database libs that self configure against a database and let us crank out ungodly amounts of functionality quickly.
But of course, didn't you know that every time you use emacs, God kills a kitten?... Vim is the path to enlightenment.
You rapidly back yourself into a corner with this reasoning. See, in this hypothetical, it doesn't matter if you copy an existing car or not - the capability guarantees that it will be used. If we become draconian about duplicating Fords, so that only Ford can do so, someone will design an "open source" version. Now, you can either prop up Ford by making new laws to stop this (shades of SCO's arguments regarding the GPL, no?), or you can let Ford fail. Alternately, you can try to ban the new technology. You always end up with bald rent seeking if you choose incorrectly.
(And by the way, with matter replication technologies, why would Ford still bother to employ the thousands of people they do now? Presumably, your fears are of a massive economic impact caused by an entire industry shutting down. Well, it would still massively downsize, causing the vast majority of that impact, while further concentrating the wealth of the owners. All you've managed to do is to make sure only a select few are allowed to benefit.)
Of course, this is nothing but a fun hypothetical. But we do see the same thing happening right now with intangibles. Throughout history, law has always evolved to keep some semblance of sync with reality. Sometimes, this is done rationally. Sometimes, you get the French Revolution. Which would you prefer?
Propping up industries that cannot adapt to a technological advance through legal methods is always doomed to fail, and always costs the economy as a whole more value than it produces. (It is still a favorite activity, because it always enriches some while taking in smaller amounts from everyone else.
Like I said before, this is economics, which is an implication of physics. Many people have tried, but getting in an argument about fairness with physics generally hasn't proven to be a gainful past time, as anyone who has fallen down the stairs or wrecked thier car will confirm to you.
Now think about this: if matter replicators were invented and could be bought cheaply, is it really OK to buy one item of something and replicate it endlessly? Say I buy a car, and my neighbour wants one, would it be ok if i gave him a copy? If this happened, pretty soon car manufacturers would be going out of business
Yes, that is exactly what I'd expect to happen.
It is called economics. It is a consequence of physics.
I suppose you support a legal ruling requiring everyone to use scribes to duplicate books, too?
I found an IT niche that works well in economic downturns. Entirely by accident, but it worked out. Now, we're trying to grow into product, not consulting. Change, grow, incorporate, hire bean counter, code monkey, blah. But it does seem worth it, at least for me.
Wish you the best of luck with your career change!
I don't have a degree. I'm heavily qualified, based on world experience (many peers think I'm 3133t for my math skills, security habits and coding behaviour). I'm a college dropout. I won't explain why, that would be silly.
If you feel you aren't a candidate for the job market, no matter reason why, start your own company. That's what I did. Over or under-qualified, it doesn't matter.
The worst it can do is fail, and then you can start another or go back to academia, unlike careers with large companies.
Christ, VB as a productivity language? J++ as a migration language? c# and a real development language may make some sense sometimes, if you're trapped. Sure, I guess VB works out, if you have to. There are languages that actually make string parsing sensible, but I'm not one to tell people what to use.
But damn, they don't care at all about the most important languages they compete with, sh and perl. All the admin languages they've tried really quite blow. I fix problems every day with sh, and as far as I can tell, That Creepy Virus Vector is the response. That's not competition, that's pathetic. And I build applications in perl (and sometimes other languages) that pull people away from MS. I'm done ranting, back to coding for me (mostly perl, sometimes Java when I have to, C when it is useful, and various pgplsql/plsql/etc. DB languages when it makes sense.)
To summarize, you simply won't get a good statistical answer to this. Ever.
Fair enough. You're right. You can, however, look at the costs of punishing people and the effects on the community of doing so.
No doubt, there are sick, twisted motherfuckers out there. The question is whether or not current criminal enforcement actually has sufficent deterrent value to offset the cost of enforcement.
Note: I'm assuming we want to spare little kids of being abused, and that the punitive view of law enforcement is beside the point. I'm not a big fan of vindictive behaviour, only what stops people from being evil.
You're either using a really old version, you don't know what you're doing, or your trolling.
I've been doing DB development for 12 years and have worked on at least 8 different DB platforms (I'm probably forgetting some), and Postgres is hands down my favorite so far.
You can change just about anything you want in a PG table on the fly. There are a few things that are mildly tricky to change, such as whether or not a column is compressed, but even that can be changed without taking the database offline.
Altering a column definition is a 5 line process, which can be done within a transaction, so that it doesn't affect anyone else connected. Try that on Mysql.
Postgres' main problem right now is that they ship with exremely conservative default parameters, in an attempt to run everywhere out of the box. This is fine for DBAs who actually do thier job - of course you should learn and tune the DB. The problem is that Mysql refugees who aren't used to using a real DB (sorry, flame me) play with it for 10 minutes, decide performance sucks, and badmouth it for eternity.
Postgres doesn't compete with Mysql - there is no competition, PG wins hands-down. Postgres competes with Oracle.
IANAME (I Am Not A Macro-Economist), but the state sponsored economic attack sounds pretty dicey to me, since to have any real affect on raising inflation you'd have to produce so many counterfeit bills it'd become obvious what the source of the bills was.
And some times, you may not care that it is obvious.
There's decent evidence that the US has done exactly this in recent conflicts, at least in Iraq I and Bosnia. Google around for it if you're interested.
Yeah, that gets tricky. That's why I said _pricing_ is very a very different beast.
If you're just trying to allocate costs internally, that's one thing - you don't need to worry about market issues quite so much. But if you're selling to others, pricing somehting like this is very complicated. There are whole companies that specialize in pricing things like this... (I've always wondered how they set thier prices.)
An economist might say there should be a spot market, with the price set by whatever someone is willing to pay for a given service. That doesn't work so well for, say, university lab situations where you just want to type your paper, or even Kinkos, where it would take longer to haggle the price than to just print the damn thing.
But the trick, really, is to recognize finite resources and set a price that maximizes the utilization of the system. From an economic perspective, as close as is reasonable to a full disk, pegged CPU, and constantly printing printer is ideal. Once you factor in other factors, this most likely changes.
In a former life, I had to do this for a dot com. This was on a consulting basis, and as an annoying (for me) side project.
The companie's CFO and I worked together on it. In general, take the cost of the machine, the depeciation cycle, the cost of maintaining the machine (admin time, support, replacement parts, bandwidth, hosting or space in the office, etc.) to get a cost per time unit. Then, using a system accounting package, estimate CPU, disk and bandwidth usage.
At this point, the accountant has to determine reasonable values for each of those, and not being an accountant, I can't speak to how that is done. Once you're this far, though, costing is simply division.
If you need to price it, that's a different matter entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
To address your devil's advocate question, I don't think my response changes.
To follow your example of the water heater, if a tornado or hurricane comes through town, you may be elegible for money from FEMA, but if a murderer kills the breadwinner of the family, you're not. Why are people hit by hurricanes more deserving than those hit by murderers?
I don't believe FEMA (or the Red Cross, or my neighbors) owe me anything if a tornado hits my house. While it may be a useful function to institutionalise aid, the notion that one has an entitlement to it is just wrongheaded. Life is hard, and it is a great and noble thing to help those who have a bad time of it. I try my best to be a good neighbor, because I've been through hardship, and have been helped before by others - call it Karma or whatever you want. But the notion that someone _deserves_ something because they were injured is simply incorrect.
There is a second point here - contrasting natural disasters with acts of willful malice is confusing issues. The resolution is the same: If someone does you wrong and can't be forced to make it right, well, that sucks, but it isn't anyone else's fault. I draw the distinction only to note that human agency makes it even clearer that nobody else it to blame - there is a bright line around the responsible party.
I still maintain that seeking damages against a software company because some redneck shot you for fun is absurd.
I'll start out by saying that if the WTC were still standing, I would be able to see it our of my window.
If you consider it restitution, then yes, I have a problem with it. If you consider it aid to needy people, and if it is indeed aid to needy people, then that's a somewhat nice, useful function of government.
Look at it this way - if your water heater explodes and burns your house down, do your neighbors owe you anything? This isn't rhetorical - this happened to my family. My answer is no, they don't. It is nice if they do help you out (and they did help us), but it is, and should be, voluntary behaviour.
Just a couple of quibbles...
2. Google records everything they can: It's obviously that they have to record some information to function, but everyone expects information to be collected in aggregate. If someone can say that google has all my search terms linked to my IP address, with dates and times, then I would be concerned.
The problem is not aggregation. The issue is personal data. If I know you search for slash stories, and have a thing for Mr. Wharf, I can make certain other assumptions, which may or may not be something we want to encourage in the wider framework of our culture.
5. Google hires spooks: Any large company has people that have been emplayed in unusual places. That doesn't show any rational link.
I have a problem with former spies working for Google. Much like the airline industry, there is a revolving door bewtween government and industry. I do believe that Google is too prone to making nice-nice with creepy countries, be that China or, well, now, the US. That said, they seem to want to be rational, but the past behaviour does not inspire trust.
That's easy. Nobody.
If the perpetrator of a crime cannot make restitution, the victim does not have any further recourse. It sucks, but that's just the way it works. Life ain't fair.
I must admit that I completely fail to understand why a software developer should be held to legal responsibility for a couple of dumbshits shooting at cars. Hell, I've had a bad couple of years - if I go on a rampage and shoot a few people, I'm sure someone's responsible for that - Oh, not me, surely some television show, or Id software, or maybe those people who fired me, or those other people who didn't accept my proposal, of that guy who looked at me funny on the subway...
The fact is that looking for a source of compensation for a tragedy has turned in to sick game of extortion by lawyer. I'm very interested in law, and may actually go back to school to pick up more knowledge here, but this sort of thing is a gross abuse of what law is supposed to provide - a fair, level field for people to prosper or not, to the best of thier own abilites.
If you don't like the seedy side of town, why do you go there?
Of course, this analogy falls flat, because some people are forced by economics to live a place they would rather not. Nobody is forced to use P2P apps. If you don't want your kids to use P2P apps, here's a hint: Don't let them. If you are unable to stop them, then you should think about your parenting skills before you shout "there should be a law..."
So, have fun bashing strawmen and knowing you're such a worldly deep thinker that there's no reason to draw attention to problems at home because it is so much worse in Zimbabwe.
I understand that more than one US citizen has been detained without due process, and that the current US regime refuses to divulge the identities of numerous other people who are still being detained without due process. Without knowing who they are, we don't know what nationality they are. I'm not going to start in with how the semantic absurdity "enemy combatant" is being used to circumvent international law, because that's slightly a different topic...
it was not done for a personal vendetta. so you watch a lot of hollywood movies, huh? ;-)
Intelligent minds can disagree here. Perhaps the Bush family hatred of Hussein wasn't the issue, perhaps it was merely the desire to loot the country. Would you care to defend that next?
there is no suppressing speech for corporate interests, there is suppressing piracy for corporate interests
Arresting people who talk about security measures and legally forbidding people to post links to certain kinds of software is not suppression of speech? Care to explain how that works? I suppose if I hit you every time you say something, I'm not attempting to stop you from speaking, right?
So, to get back to my questions, would you like to demonstrate where exactly in your pantheon of statist evil the various actions fall?
Perhaps you can enlighten us on the proper scale of response to recent events, perhaps a matrix of proper comparisons.
Let's start with these:
- Indefinite detention of citizens without due process
This is like:
a) Nazi Germany
b) Today's China
c) The worst abuses of the British state during the worst of the IRA attacks
d) Mommy grounding me for something I didn't do
e) Perfectly OK and right and proper
- Invading a nation and seizing its assests for a personal vandetta
This is like:
a) Nazi Germany
b) China's behavior towards the other China
c) The worst abuses of [pick a European nation state] during the imperialist phase of history
d) Mommy rooting through my crap and taking my porno
e) perfectly OK and right and proper
- Suppressing speech for corporate interests
This is like:
a) Nazi book burning
b) China censoring the internet
c) England handing out monopolies on book publishing
d) Mommy telling me not to swear
e) perfectly OK and right and proper
Please, tell all us ignrnt fools the proper way to use metaphor. We're pining for your wisdom
Yes. Agreed. That's why it is a problem for certain vendors.
Data hostage situations don't happen only under Win/Office...
OTOH, I really like Perl's permissive notion of objects. We've built a niftly little framework and our own database libs that self configure against a database and let us crank out ungodly amounts of functionality quickly.
But of course, didn't you know that every time you use emacs, God kills a kitten?... Vim is the path to enlightenment.
(And by the way, with matter replication technologies, why would Ford still bother to employ the thousands of people they do now? Presumably, your fears are of a massive economic impact caused by an entire industry shutting down. Well, it would still massively downsize, causing the vast majority of that impact, while further concentrating the wealth of the owners. All you've managed to do is to make sure only a select few are allowed to benefit.)
Of course, this is nothing but a fun hypothetical. But we do see the same thing happening right now with intangibles. Throughout history, law has always evolved to keep some semblance of sync with reality. Sometimes, this is done rationally. Sometimes, you get the French Revolution. Which would you prefer?
Propping up industries that cannot adapt to a technological advance through legal methods is always doomed to fail, and always costs the economy as a whole more value than it produces. (It is still a favorite activity, because it always enriches some while taking in smaller amounts from everyone else.
Like I said before, this is economics, which is an implication of physics. Many people have tried, but getting in an argument about fairness with physics generally hasn't proven to be a gainful past time, as anyone who has fallen down the stairs or wrecked thier car will confirm to you.
Yes, that is exactly what I'd expect to happen.
It is called economics. It is a consequence of physics.
I suppose you support a legal ruling requiring everyone to use scribes to duplicate books, too?
I'm actually having a good time.
I found an IT niche that works well in economic downturns. Entirely by accident, but it worked out. Now, we're trying to grow into product, not consulting. Change, grow, incorporate, hire bean counter, code monkey, blah. But it does seem worth it, at least for me.
Wish you the best of luck with your career change!
As opposed to a using a system that just works?
If you feel you aren't a candidate for the job market, no matter reason why, start your own company. That's what I did. Over or under-qualified, it doesn't matter. The worst it can do is fail, and then you can start another or go back to academia, unlike careers with large companies.
So, am I to assume that the Linux kernel is 5333% infringing code?
Man, I wish I could code that efficiently.
But damn, they don't care at all about the most important languages they compete with, sh and perl. All the admin languages they've tried really quite blow. I fix problems every day with sh, and as far as I can tell, That Creepy Virus Vector is the response. That's not competition, that's pathetic. And I build applications in perl (and sometimes other languages) that pull people away from MS. I'm done ranting, back to coding for me (mostly perl, sometimes Java when I have to, C when it is useful, and various pgplsql/plsql/etc. DB languages when it makes sense.)
I've always wondered this. Diamond is referred to as inorganic. Organic means "carbon based". What am I missing?
I know, I should have paid more attention in chemistry.
Fair enough. You're right. You can, however, look at the costs of punishing people and the effects on the community of doing so.
No doubt, there are sick, twisted motherfuckers out there. The question is whether or not current criminal enforcement actually has sufficent deterrent value to offset the cost of enforcement.
Note: I'm assuming we want to spare little kids of being abused, and that the punitive view of law enforcement is beside the point. I'm not a big fan of vindictive behaviour, only what stops people from being evil.
You're either using a really old version, you don't know what you're doing, or your trolling.
I've been doing DB development for 12 years and have worked on at least 8 different DB platforms (I'm probably forgetting some), and Postgres is hands down my favorite so far.
You can change just about anything you want in a PG table on the fly. There are a few things that are mildly tricky to change, such as whether or not a column is compressed, but even that can be changed without taking the database offline.
Altering a column definition is a 5 line process, which can be done within a transaction, so that it doesn't affect anyone else connected. Try that on Mysql.
Postgres' main problem right now is that they ship with exremely conservative default parameters, in an attempt to run everywhere out of the box. This is fine for DBAs who actually do thier job - of course you should learn and tune the DB. The problem is that Mysql refugees who aren't used to using a real DB (sorry, flame me) play with it for 10 minutes, decide performance sucks, and badmouth it for eternity.
Postgres doesn't compete with Mysql - there is no competition, PG wins hands-down. Postgres competes with Oracle.
Require accounts. Allow people to keep individual lists of users from whom they don't want to hear. Allow users to subscribe to each othere's lists.
And some times, you may not care that it is obvious.
There's decent evidence that the US has done exactly this in recent conflicts, at least in Iraq I and Bosnia. Google around for it if you're interested.
If you're just trying to allocate costs internally, that's one thing - you don't need to worry about market issues quite so much. But if you're selling to others, pricing somehting like this is very complicated. There are whole companies that specialize in pricing things like this... (I've always wondered how they set thier prices.)
An economist might say there should be a spot market, with the price set by whatever someone is willing to pay for a given service. That doesn't work so well for, say, university lab situations where you just want to type your paper, or even Kinkos, where it would take longer to haggle the price than to just print the damn thing.
But the trick, really, is to recognize finite resources and set a price that maximizes the utilization of the system. From an economic perspective, as close as is reasonable to a full disk, pegged CPU, and constantly printing printer is ideal. Once you factor in other factors, this most likely changes.
The companie's CFO and I worked together on it. In general, take the cost of the machine, the depeciation cycle, the cost of maintaining the machine (admin time, support, replacement parts, bandwidth, hosting or space in the office, etc.) to get a cost per time unit. Then, using a system accounting package, estimate CPU, disk and bandwidth usage.
At this point, the accountant has to determine reasonable values for each of those, and not being an accountant, I can't speak to how that is done. Once you're this far, though, costing is simply division.
If you need to price it, that's a different matter entirely.