You are thinking of the military of the 1970s. After Reagan, there was a push for COTS everywhere. Global Foundries was sold to fat boys in the robes from the UAE. These days, the U.S. military gets its stuff just like you do. The major defense firms probably do a bit of their own programming with their own tools, but they aren't producing chips. Even Altera is being sold to Intel so they can screw up the FPGA market as badly as they did the processor market.
This is the age old economics 101 thought problem: there it is usually phrased in terms of kidney dialysis. Do you sink all your kidney money into dialysis for the ones you know you can prolong their lives, or do you siphon it off for research. How much do you allocate? What are future generations worth?
Nothing special here regardless of your disillusioned rants on big pharma.
"You know, doing it in a real world setting and demonstrating it is a hell of a lot better than continuing to believe the lie these companies have done an adequate job at security."
No, it isn't, and that's a false choice. It is analogous to shooting a gun in crowded room, observing no one was hit, and then claiming it is a good way to show the police are not doing an adequate job of security. You'd better hope they don't pull this stunt again and cause the car's driver to lose control and wipe out half of your family so the other half can grieve.
This is the same governor who assigned some of the Texas National Guard to observe the Jade Helm military exercises in the southwest because he had been convinced that it might represent a threat to Texas. The idea was that Obama was using Jade Helm as a trial run for martial law before he declared himself President for Life. I wish I were making this up.
"desktop users who want complex and powerful programs to do things?" There aren't enough users who want or need complex and powerful programs to do things. Almost by definition, this will be a small subset of most organizations.
That at it becomes cheaper for corporate IT to support BYOD than building out infrastructure in-house. It also allows idiot MBAs to have their favorite stuff without requiring much support from IT. And when all the real app work can be done in a local cloud which IT can control, all that is required is a UI. Mobile works for much of the UI.
More to the point, MS have the idea that an ecosystem means windows in some form or another. Apple succeeded because they were able to look at parts of the economy in isolation first. If it had a tie in to something they were currently doing, that was even better, but they do not seem demand it from the outset. MS seems to have given their troops marching orders of "Show us a new way to integrate something into Winders". The result is that no market segment they attempt to enter is ever covered adequately with a device + software that addresses its needs. Rather, that they attempt to turn that segment into another outpost of Winders.
"Rule of thumb: If there's a human endeavor that doesn't make human lives better, then it is not worth doing." Really? The Large Hadron Collider. It won't do a damn thing for humans in the foreseeable future and no one is going to trust your prognostications that it will sometime in the distant future. Better shut it down.
The Pluto Probe? Won't do a damn thing for humans. Is it worth it? Group theory? 100 years ago it wasn't worth a damn thing.
The point is that we should do Science for Science sake. Sometime it in the future it might pay off. We cannot know that now. So we should not decide NOW whether it is worth doing.
You mean machines taking over physical labor has worked in the past. Now, machines are taking over intellectual pursuits. What jobs are supposed to be generated out of that?
The problem is that you have assumed an open system. The rest of the system found other things for people to do. When machines start taking over intellectual pursuits as well as mechanical, you've pretty much covered all human endeavors. The system is now closed. You need to find some way of enlarging the system and you'd better do it fairly quickly and constantly, humans have ways of multiplying and turning on each other when they have idle hands.
You mean in the past technology has increased jobs. There is no universal law that it be so in the future.
My sister tried to use this argument about why a particular tree limb didn't need to be cut down. It had never fallen in the past so it would never fall in the future.
"If so much of Europe wouldn't have been so ravaged by the war and focusing on rebuilding, the prosperity Americans experienced at that time wouldn't have existed."
Nope, the American economy at that time was very insular. In fact, the U.S. went into a recession after the war because it had too much excess capacity now producing things that neither the American or any economy needed. It took until 1950 before gdp hit the same level as 1945 (figures adjusted for inflation).
Exports didn't start making up a big part of the U.S. economy until the free trade agreements after 1970. One of the things that caused the inflation during the 70's was the 60's. Johnson thought he could have guns and butter. It turns out you can, for awhile, until the extra cash in the economy caused it to overheat. Reagan, but mostly Paul Volker as head of the Fed, wrung it out of the economy....errr...but not the deficit spending, that increased under Reagan. The dot com bubble during the 90s soaked a lot of that up, and caused the budget to balance. Clinton had little to do it with. The bubble burst about 8 months before his presidency ended and thus ended Al Gore's chances to be president. The U.S. then went into a recession from the burst dot com and then 9/11 happened which depressed economic activity further.
Recognizing Kurdistan would cause that little jerk running Turkey to invade the Kurdish regions in Syria and Iraq after declaring Kurdistan to be a threat to his existence. NATO could do much seeing as Turkey is part of NATO without first kicking Turkey out of NATO. They'd be loath to do that. Let's assume they do. The ballless freaks known as Western Europe would decide a talking cure is in order and attempt to talk Erdogan to death. The U.S. doesn't have the assets or the will. Iran would also think of Kurdistan as a threat and take a chunk of it as well. Iraq would see what was happening and decide they too would like a chunk. Meanwhile, Daesh would see this and capitalize taking a bit for themselves.
More generally, I think it is the demented result of a sort of relativism. What you say can be backed by scientists, but I will claim those scientists are not all scientists or that they do not uniformly agree, therefore my opinion is just a relevant as yours. The sleight of hand is that all scientific opinion is now relative and can be cherry picked to support whatever I wish.
There is also the illogical step of arguing from the specific to the general in there. I have one counter-example so I can throw out the consensus. It is a wish for a black and white world: if you claim "most swans are white", then the black one I see is enough to claim "swans are white" is false. Technically, the statement is false, but the underlying belief is that I only need one counter-example to void your claim but subtly alter your statement to mean what I want it to mean.
It shouldn't take long for some of the inhabitants to consider this to be the tip of the Obama Administration spear to take over Texas so they can remove their guns, impose environmental regulations, force money to be spent on education. And this right after the Jade Helm 15 exercises. They are probably Islamic driverless cars.
MS had their own HW/SW platform it did spectacularly miserably for them. Having that combination might be necessary, but it isn't sufficient. What Apple brought was a new way of looking at a mobile phone, then they executed on that view. And Google tried a HW/SW combo with Motorola and still came up snake eyes.
What I took away from these pathetic attempts is that when a company's brass thinks they can just throw together existing crap and somehow beat others, they wind up getting beaten themselves. What matters is redefining a market to play to your strengths, but you'd better be redefining it in a way people want even if they don't know what they want until you give it to them. The latter is the tricky bit, and MS never had that in their genes.
Devaluing their currency would help with exports, that's about it. Well, it will make their imports more expensive which might help their domestic industries. However, the world is already awash with Chinese goods, and the Chinese themselves know better than to rely on domestic suppliers given their "supply" problems, i.e., delivering a good that isn't some cheap knockoff or laced with chemicals you'd rather not come in contact with.
The government has spent the last several years consolidating power and claiming they know how to run a modern kleptocracy. This pokes a hole in their bureaucratic bravado. They have spent a modest amount attempting to prop up the stock market thinking its tanking reflects badly on them. What they fear most is that the Chinese proles might hold them responsible for all the responsibility they claimed while times were good.
If pushed hard enough, they'll create some foreign crisis to re-rally the people to cover the fact the government has no clothes. They'll have been taking notes from Putin's success in showing just how feckless is the West now that the West is all post-modern and above actually defending its principles.
Hmmm...you mean life isn't fair? Have you told anyone else about this?
A country is a big insurance policy...when it operates within its means. When it doesn't, then it is a large unhappy family because SOME family members were thinking only of themselves and not the rest.
Morals, or more accurately, ethics, are inescapably tied to economics. One has to accommodate and pay restitution for sins of the past. The sins of the future must be prevented by ethically thinking ahead for the future of the country. Greece wants to ignore the sins of the past and ask forgiveness without taking responsibility. They also want to sow the sins of the future by claiming the ethics necessary to avoid them are beyond anything they can do.
That said, the Euro politicians aided and abetted the behavior of Greece. And for that, the rest of Europe will pay one way or another. It matters who you elect to office. The U.S. has similar problems with politicians who refuse to pay for the past deficits in spending and won't acknowledge future debts, all on some misguided belief that that OTHER party is mainly at fault.
It worked for Kansas, the band. As related by the band, when they were starting out they were to open for Aerosmith once. Steven Tyler had gotten a reputation for pulling the power cables to the amps if the opening band was doing too well, it might make Aerosmith look bad when they came on afterward. Kansas' stage manager had been informed of Tyler's antics, so he rigged up the amps to take power from the other side of the stage using hidden cables and put in fake cables to where all could see.
So Kansas goes on and kills, Kansas was very hot, tight band. During the set, Tyler is pacing the sideline backstage getting more and more incensed. Kansas does one encore, Tyler is livid. They do a second encore and Tyler loses his brain cell and rips out the fake cables, which only pissed him off more since that didn't stop Kansas. After that song, Dave Hope, Kansas' bass player, threw down his bass and went to over to explain to Tyler using very colorful language what he was doing wrong. Dave Hope was a big guy back then so it was very impressive. Afterwards, other members of Aerosmith apologized to Kansas for Tyler's behavior.
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"given how much money has to be spent on something like the NSA and still be completely ineffective,"
And you know this? How? They've been sending you memos?
You are thinking of the military of the 1970s. After Reagan, there was a push for COTS everywhere. Global Foundries was sold to fat boys in the robes from the UAE. These days, the U.S. military gets its stuff just like you do. The major defense firms probably do a bit of their own programming with their own tools, but they aren't producing chips. Even Altera is being sold to Intel so they can screw up the FPGA market as badly as they did the processor market.
This is the age old economics 101 thought problem: there it is usually phrased in terms of kidney dialysis. Do you sink all your kidney money into dialysis for the ones you know you can prolong their lives, or do you siphon it off for research. How much do you allocate? What are future generations worth?
Nothing special here regardless of your disillusioned rants on big pharma.
Being unemployed causes a myriad of problems one doesn't have whilst employed. In the U.S., health care is a big inducement to work for "THE COMPANY".
"You know, doing it in a real world setting and demonstrating it is a hell of a lot better than continuing to believe the lie these companies have done an adequate job at security."
No, it isn't, and that's a false choice. It is analogous to shooting a gun in crowded room, observing no one was hit, and then claiming it is a good way to show the police are not doing an adequate job of security. You'd better hope they don't pull this stunt again and cause the car's driver to lose control and wipe out half of your family so the other half can grieve.
This is the same governor who assigned some of the Texas National Guard to observe the Jade Helm military exercises in the southwest because he had been convinced that it might represent a threat to Texas. The idea was that Obama was using Jade Helm as a trial run for martial law before he declared himself President for Life. I wish I were making this up.
"desktop users who want complex and powerful programs to do things?" There aren't enough users who want or need complex and powerful programs to do things. Almost by definition, this will be a small subset of most organizations.
That at it becomes cheaper for corporate IT to support BYOD than building out infrastructure in-house. It also allows idiot MBAs to have their favorite stuff without requiring much support from IT. And when all the real app work can be done in a local cloud which IT can control, all that is required is a UI. Mobile works for much of the UI.
More to the point, MS have the idea that an ecosystem means windows in some form or another. Apple succeeded because they were able to look at parts of the economy in isolation first. If it had a tie in to something they were currently doing, that was even better, but they do not seem demand it from the outset. MS seems to have given their troops marching orders of "Show us a new way to integrate something into Winders". The result is that no market segment they attempt to enter is ever covered adequately with a device + software that addresses its needs. Rather, that they attempt to turn that segment into another outpost of Winders.
It is called MBA Breath. It is putrid, you want to get away, but the memory lingers with you like a malevolent spirit.
"Rule of thumb: If there's a human endeavor that doesn't make human lives better, then it is not worth doing." Really? The Large Hadron Collider. It won't do a damn thing for humans in the foreseeable future and no one is going to trust your prognostications that it will sometime in the distant future. Better shut it down.
The Pluto Probe? Won't do a damn thing for humans. Is it worth it? Group theory? 100 years ago it wasn't worth a damn thing.
The point is that we should do Science for Science sake. Sometime it in the future it might pay off. We cannot know that now. So we should not decide NOW whether it is worth doing.
You mean machines taking over physical labor has worked in the past. Now, machines are taking over intellectual pursuits. What jobs are supposed to be generated out of that?
The problem is that you have assumed an open system. The rest of the system found other things for people to do. When machines start taking over intellectual pursuits as well as mechanical, you've pretty much covered all human endeavors. The system is now closed. You need to find some way of enlarging the system and you'd better do it fairly quickly and constantly, humans have ways of multiplying and turning on each other when they have idle hands.
You mean in the past technology has increased jobs. There is no universal law that it be so in the future.
My sister tried to use this argument about why a particular tree limb didn't need to be cut down. It had never fallen in the past so it would never fall in the future.
"If so much of Europe wouldn't have been so ravaged by the war and focusing on rebuilding, the prosperity Americans experienced at that time wouldn't have existed."
Nope, the American economy at that time was very insular. In fact, the U.S. went into a recession after the war because it had too much excess capacity now producing things that neither the American or any economy needed. It took until 1950 before gdp hit the same level as 1945 (figures adjusted for inflation).
Exports didn't start making up a big part of the U.S. economy until the free trade agreements after 1970. One of the things that caused the inflation during the 70's was the 60's. Johnson thought he could have guns and butter. It turns out you can, for awhile, until the extra cash in the economy caused it to overheat. Reagan, but mostly Paul Volker as head of the Fed, wrung it out of the economy....errr...but not the deficit spending, that increased under Reagan. The dot com bubble during the 90s soaked a lot of that up, and caused the budget to balance. Clinton had little to do it with. The bubble burst about 8 months before his presidency ended and thus ended Al Gore's chances to be president. The U.S. then went into a recession from the burst dot com and then 9/11 happened which depressed economic activity further.
If Iran violates the agreement, what is Europe going to do other than attempt another talking cure? Come back when you folks grow some balls.
Nope. Iran has a ballistic missile program. They don't need enough nukes to wipe the U.S., just threaten New York or Washington.
Israel...total domination over the Sunni countries in the mid-east? How?
Recognizing Kurdistan would cause that little jerk running Turkey to invade the Kurdish regions in Syria and Iraq after declaring Kurdistan to be a threat to his existence. NATO could do much seeing as Turkey is part of NATO without first kicking Turkey out of NATO. They'd be loath to do that. Let's assume they do. The ballless freaks known as Western Europe would decide a talking cure is in order and attempt to talk Erdogan to death. The U.S. doesn't have the assets or the will. Iran would also think of Kurdistan as a threat and take a chunk of it as well. Iraq would see what was happening and decide they too would like a chunk. Meanwhile, Daesh would see this and capitalize taking a bit for themselves.
More generally, I think it is the demented result of a sort of relativism. What you say can be backed by scientists, but I will claim those scientists are not all scientists or that they do not uniformly agree, therefore my opinion is just a relevant as yours. The sleight of hand is that all scientific opinion is now relative and can be cherry picked to support whatever I wish.
There is also the illogical step of arguing from the specific to the general in there. I have one counter-example so I can throw out the consensus. It is a wish for a black and white world: if you claim "most swans are white", then the black one I see is enough to claim "swans are white" is false. Technically, the statement is false, but the underlying belief is that I only need one counter-example to void your claim but subtly alter your statement to mean what I want it to mean.
It shouldn't take long for some of the inhabitants to consider this to be the tip of the Obama Administration spear to take over Texas so they can remove their guns, impose environmental regulations, force money to be spent on education. And this right after the Jade Helm 15 exercises. They are probably Islamic driverless cars.
Stalin was evil, Mao was evil, Lil'Kimmy Jong Un is evil. How many people has MS, Google, and Starbucks killed?
MS had their own HW/SW platform it did spectacularly miserably for them. Having that combination might be necessary, but it isn't sufficient. What Apple brought was a new way of looking at a mobile phone, then they executed on that view. And Google tried a HW/SW combo with Motorola and still came up snake eyes.
What I took away from these pathetic attempts is that when a company's brass thinks they can just throw together existing crap and somehow beat others, they wind up getting beaten themselves. What matters is redefining a market to play to your strengths, but you'd better be redefining it in a way people want even if they don't know what they want until you give it to them. The latter is the tricky bit, and MS never had that in their genes.
Devaluing their currency would help with exports, that's about it. Well, it will make their imports more expensive which might help their domestic industries. However, the world is already awash with Chinese goods, and the Chinese themselves know better than to rely on domestic suppliers given their "supply" problems, i.e., delivering a good that isn't some cheap knockoff or laced with chemicals you'd rather not come in contact with.
The government has spent the last several years consolidating power and claiming they know how to run a modern kleptocracy. This pokes a hole in their bureaucratic bravado. They have spent a modest amount attempting to prop up the stock market thinking its tanking reflects badly on them. What they fear most is that the Chinese proles might hold them responsible for all the responsibility they claimed while times were good.
If pushed hard enough, they'll create some foreign crisis to re-rally the people to cover the fact the government has no clothes. They'll have been taking notes from Putin's success in showing just how feckless is the West now that the West is all post-modern and above actually defending its principles.
Hmmm...you mean life isn't fair? Have you told anyone else about this?
A country is a big insurance policy...when it operates within its means. When it doesn't, then it is a large unhappy family because SOME family members were thinking only of themselves and not the rest.
Morals, or more accurately, ethics, are inescapably tied to economics. One has to accommodate and pay restitution for sins of the past. The sins of the future must be prevented by ethically thinking ahead for the future of the country. Greece wants to ignore the sins of the past and ask forgiveness without taking responsibility. They also want to sow the sins of the future by claiming the ethics necessary to avoid them are beyond anything they can do.
That said, the Euro politicians aided and abetted the behavior of Greece. And for that, the rest of Europe will pay one way or another. It matters who you elect to office. The U.S. has similar problems with politicians who refuse to pay for the past deficits in spending and won't acknowledge future debts, all on some misguided belief that that OTHER party is mainly at fault.
It worked for Kansas, the band. As related by the band, when they were starting out they were to open for Aerosmith once. Steven Tyler had gotten a reputation for pulling the power cables to the amps if the opening band was doing too well, it might make Aerosmith look bad when they came on afterward. Kansas' stage manager had been informed of Tyler's antics, so he rigged up the amps to take power from the other side of the stage using hidden cables and put in fake cables to where all could see.
So Kansas goes on and kills, Kansas was very hot, tight band. During the set, Tyler is pacing the sideline backstage getting more and more incensed. Kansas does one encore, Tyler is livid. They do a second encore and Tyler loses his brain cell and rips out the fake cables, which only pissed him off more since that didn't stop Kansas. After that song, Dave Hope, Kansas' bass player, threw down his bass and went to over to explain to Tyler using very colorful language what he was doing wrong. Dave Hope was a big guy back then so it was very impressive. Afterwards, other members of Aerosmith apologized to Kansas for Tyler's behavior.
You left out Aliens. Cue the Greek guy with the Electric Hair.