It's the fact that rather than bombing Daesh, they're bombing groups opposed to Daesh, in order to prop up the failing government
On this I consider Putin to be an order of magnitude smarter than all the US presidents and western leaders put together.
At least he understands that if they bomb away only IS, the next jihad group down there will take up their flag and continue the same shit.
You can dislike Assad all you want, and I certainly don't know enough about the guy and his politics to have an informed opinion, but AFAIK he didn't burn people alive in cages and put it on YouTube. He certainly seems like the least of a dozen evils.
The chain of causality seems really simple from an outside. The US went to Iraq to fuck over Hussein, and in doing so they strengthened Al Qaida, which at that time was not a big force in that area. When they went back to bomb out Al Qaida, the IS rose out of the rubble. I frankly don't want to see what will come after IS if this trend continues.
When what you're doing isn't working, you should try something else. Putin bombing all the islamistic fuckers seems like a reasonable approach. I don't see how you can speak about "moderate" islamists when they all share the same religious policy of "kill all infidels" and they mostly disagree about whether or not to rape them beforehand or whether stoning or throwing off a building is the proper method of execution. Calling any of them "moderate" because they take your money to bend whichever way you want like a cheap prostitute is among the most cynical political opportunisms. Nobody in the White House or the Pentagon can be stupid enough to not understand they will turn against the US the next moment.
Sorry, you guys are just too soft-hearted for actual war if you call the US part in WW2 a "real carnage".
The USSR lost around 10 million soldiers in WW. Germany lost about 5 million. China lost 3.5 million.
The USA lost 0.4 million.
The real carnage in WW2 was on the eastern front and in China. For the Germans, the battle of Stalingrad alone cost them as many casualties (at least half a million, possibly up to 800,000) than the entire western front. 80% of the German casualties are thanks to the Russians.
And yes, the USAF bombed some German cities to rubble. But even so, German civilians fled the Red Army towards the west, not the other way around. If you've ever read stories about the siege of Leningrad from the Russian perspective, you know why. I know them. My girlfriend is from St. Petersburg as it is known today. After I've heard her tell WW2 stories from russian perspective, I laugh about US war movies. Omaha Beach: 2000 casualties. The horror. That would have been a quiet day in Stalingrad, where four times as many people died every day for five months straight.
That is what real carnage looks like. Stalingrad had a population of 400,000 before the war. After the German 6th Army was destroyed, an official census counted 1,500 residents. Pictures from Stalingrad look worse than pictures from Hiroshima. That is real carnage.
It depends a lot on which juice you buy. As I drink a lot of juice, I'm checking labels before buying one I don't know yet, and you usually have a good choice. Once you understand that there are different quality levels of juice and how to discern them, you can avoid the crap that is basically coke with fruit flavor.
At home, you can bottle your own water. Or drink it straight from the faucet. If you're worried about what's in there, there are filter devices and they are reasonably cheap (I use one mostly because calcium carbonate isn't good for the tea cooker).
For the road, you can bottle water at home, or sometimes buy a bottle. Why not? Yeah, someone makes a profit, but I have something clean to drink, in many holiday locations that's a luxury. And it's better than giving someone a profit for spoiling your health. And there is much more potential for competition, including locally sourced products.
I'm a militant anti-smoker. I hate it, I avoid places that still allow smoking, and if they do so in break of current anti-smoking legislation, I bring them to the attention of authorities. I've never had a smoking GF and crossed off many potential candidates from the list because of their addiction.
All that said, you can smoke all you want, for all I care, and slowly kill yourself, if you find a way to do it without affecting anyone else who didn't consent to being gassed.
Drinking soda might be unhealthy, but it's not smelly, it doesn't turn people into nervous wrecks if they haven't had one for a day and it doesn't force itself on people around you. I can't tell if someone drank a coke in a room when I come in one hour later. I can tell if someone smoked in their car even if they stopped half a year ago and gave it a very solid cleansing. I can smell if one person is smoking somewhere in the same room in a public space. If you know anything about biology, you understand that if you can smell it, it means toxic levels are reached and the stink is your bodies way of telling you to get the hell out of there.
Drinking soda isn't the "new smoking". The two things are not even on the same level.
Just couldn't take that bullshit seriously. People who blame the victim of a crime usually have an agenda or they are very stupid. I don't think you're stupid, so what's your agenda?
Actually, why don't we impose the corporate death penalty on VW and its parent company, Porsche?
As much as the outrage is justified, I think there are companies much higher on that list. But yes, why don't we at least have a corporate death penalty? Just its existence would help a lot.
Of course, that sort of thing is never going to happen in Germany, because the Piechs are politically well connected wealthy industrialists, the unions are extremely powerful, and the state has had its fingers in VW management too.
Sadly, yes. But that is not just true of VW and Germany, it is true of almost every multinational corporation.
The unions are "extremely powerful"? Wow, that's news and I lived all my life in Germany. No, they are not, unless you compare it to the ultra-capitalist USA which for all practical purposes doesn't even have unions.
Besides, if the death penalty is done in a proper way, the unions would not even object. Look, if you kill a corporation you have to ask yourself what to do with all its assets. If you revoke the charter, who owns everything? The shareholders? Uh, no? Because if you do it that way, a lot of the deterence goes away. One idea I've read about is to take the corporation away from its owners and turn it into a collective, owned by its workers.
Executive and judicial branches without politicians: that's roughly the system that existed under Bismarck, under Marxism, and under fascism.
In which fantasy parallel reality? I said less power, not higher concentration of power by putting it into fewer hands.
What I meant with "less politicians" and "less power" was that the government should implement the will of the people, not have a will of its own. As long as they are public servants and administrators, it doesn't matter how big or small the government is. The problem is not the size in square feet or employees, but the amount of power they wield.
the only political ideas you recognized are the totalitarian ideas you have been raised with.
You have no idea how I was raised, you're just making an ad hominem argument to cover up that you have no content to argue with. Free hint: When you argue with a german and you want to attack how he was raised, make sure you know first if he was raised in East or in West Germany. It's a very big difference, still noticeable today, 25 years after the reunification.
The VWs produce more NOx than allowed, but the allowable numbers are so low as to be arguably worse than useless given that diesels use less fuel and thus produce less particulates and CO2. (We discussed here how gassers produce just as much carbon soot as diesels per gallon, and almost all of it is ultra-fine particulates.)
If you don't like the rules, there are democratic (or, sadly, undemocratic lobbying) procedures for changing the rules. Cheating isn't one of them.
Yes, it hits home and all that. From a European perspective: This is news, why? Ten times that many people die every day much closer in terror attacks, drowning in the mediterranean sea and so on. Ah yes, they are brown people, right?
No, I understand that if it's closer it's more important. Tribe mentality and all that, we are humans, our social brain is not built for this age. And yet, something strikes me morally wrong about this preference.
I don't see any legal, moral, or logical principle that says that these tests have to be exactly reproducible.
Can't explain colour to a blind man, sorry.
No, that's simply a fact: once billions of dollars are involved, you're into the territory where pretty much any kind of criminal conduct becomes worthwhile.
Which is why we have jail time for serious crimes, because with just fines, exactly this would happen. You are proving my argument for me, thanks.
That is not a power we should hand to the executive branch
I didn't say we should. When I use the word "sentence" in a legal context, it should be clear that I'm speaking about the judicial branch.
You keep arguing for an expansion of governmental powers and penalties as the solution to problems.
In a very, very narrow sense, yes. I'm arguing that since we understand serious crimes need a higher punishment than fines when it comes to humans, why are we so stupid to think that fines are enough of a deterence for corporations? Even blind people see it doesn't work.
Regulations that you think of being regulations of big corporations end up infringing on everyday liberties of individuals
The inverse is true. I'm asking that the regulations already in existence for individuals are also applied to corporations.
The distinction you're trying to make between regulating corporations and limiting individual liberties doesn't exist in the real world.
Sadly, they do: There is no equivalent of jail time for corporations.
Because we need some government, some level of that kind of abuse and corruption is inevitable, but it needs to be kept to a minimum, and the only way of doing that is to keep governmental power to an absolute minimum.
That is a philosophical argument I disagree with, but that's a different topic. (I want to see power of government reduced, not government itself. We need public servants and administrative bodies. What we don't need are politicians.)
Sorry, but you're an idiot. You are blaming the victim for the crime.
Yes, guilty you. You only kept your wallet in your pocket while nobody was pointing a gun at you. Your fault that you lost your money. Should have considered all circumstances.
pet peeve: Can we stop calling everything a "war" ?
Calling it a global smartphone war makes it sound like a real issue. What's wrong with simply calling it a conflict?
We have enough actual, real wars. You know, with bombings, dead, raped, crippled and mutilated people. Calling a bunch of high-paid lawyers having an argument in a cozy courtroom a war is, IMNSHO, an affront to anyone suffering from a real war.
the testing procedure can simply consist of measuring actual emissions in real world driving.
No, they can't. Re: consistency.
You could add such a test to check if real-world conditions are within the margin of error of the test results, but I guess nobody suspected such an illegal rigging until now.
The rewards of cheating on such tests are so high that no criminal penalty will deter companies from engaging in such behaviors
I disagree, but since we haven't even tried, there is no evidence to support either your or my claim. So let's revoke a few corporate charters and see what happens. We certainly have enough corporations on the list for death penalty crimes.
The only way such tests can ever work is if the EPA treats its relationships with manufacturers as adversarial and designs tests so that they are cheat-proof.
There is no such thing as a cheat-proof test. You can make it more difficult, that's all. Going this way means entering an arms race.
Of course the EPA should assume a more critical position. But in principle, the testing itself is absolutely fine. What you have here is the equivalent of someone submitting a software to the QA department that specifically behaves differently when running on the QA departments computers. How you can blame the QA department is beyond me.
Faulty reasoning like yours, namely that if we just pass enough laws and make the enforcement and penalties tough enough, crime will stop, is responsible for the sky high prison population and police violations of civil liberties.
I wonder where you get that strange conclusion from that is nowhere in anything I wrote.
I argue that we should apply at least the same if not tougher standards to corporations as we already apply to humans. I argue we should jail (temporary shutdown) or execute (revoke corporate charter) them if their crimes justify it. And I argue that monetary fines against corporations don't work, and for extreme cases of criminal activity, those responsible ought to be jailed. Yeah, that would raise prison population. By maybe 100 CEOs - about 0.005% of the current USA prison population.
By all means, set a million non-violent drug-users free and take that military equipment back from the police. All that is not the point here.
That's why we have jail, because making him pay a few millions in fines would be little more than a "oh fuck, there goes my second yacht" moment. But if he spends his retirement years behind bars, that pension won't do him much good.
In reality, it would be abused immediately. If we were to implement an "interested in" user-agent header, advertisers would begin collecting them roughly three minutes afterwards, and then tell their clients which to use to reach the largest audience, no matter what it is they are actually advertising.
Can I get elected to that board? How? Just so they have one person there who consistently says "no" to any and all ads that they want to label "acceptable".
The only acceptable ad is one that I, the recipient consider acceptable. In such case, I will search it. When I buy a new car, I am interested in product information about cars. At no other times do I want to see advertisement for cars. It really is that simple.
You could blame the EPA if their testing procedures were faulty, e.g. they only test the car at low speed or with special fuel or whatever.
In this case, the only problem with the test procedure was that it was known to the manufacturer. In fact, that the testing procedure is consistent (i.e. always the same) is an absolute requirement because you want consistent, i.e. comparable, results. Maybe you could have kept the exact conditions a secret, but even then they would be fairly easy to guess correctly.
Heck, without reading any in-depth articles I've glanced that they used speed as one indicator. Basically, the code said "if wheels are turning but you're not moving, assume you are on a test rig". That's not rocket science. And not the EPAs fault.
This. Germany (home of VW) has already opened a criminal investigation against the former CEO, so maybe/. could step out of its US-centric world-view for a moment, especially when reporting about a foreign company?
There's a lot less unpredictability in building a house than in writing a program.
That depends a lot on what software we are talking about. And it is also a consequence of the imaturity of software development. In the early stages of everything, it's hit-and-miss, trial-and-error with little predictability, see the first airplanes. But, as a matter of fact, predictability is one of the main factors that you use to measure maturity.
On top of both of those, what infrastructure are you assuming for the software projects, and what performance, reliability and security requirements do you have for your software? Any of those variables can radically change what a cost-effective development approach would be.
No difference to building a house at all, except for labels. Of course what you need in quality, or maybe earthquake resistance, or if it rains a lot or almost never, how much isolation you need for cold winters and hot summers, all these things matter, which is why you figure them into the total cost.
Finally, most custom software projects involve a lot more novelty than a house.
A lot of software is not half as custom as the customer thinks and the developer makes him believe.
but it is quite hard to estimate (within a factor of two or three) how much effort it will take to develop a feature that the developers have never tried before and that the customer can't thoroughly explain.
Strangely, architects also build buildings for the first time sometimes. Not family houses, but high profile buildings. And yes, there are sometimes budget overruns. But the whole thing rarely collapses on itself.
I've been looking into building a house recently, and it taught me something about software development:
To understand what I would get for how much money, I went to a "park" of houses. 20 or so houses of different styles and sizes, with price tags. So by spending a few hours walking through them all, I could get a pretty good understanding of what I would get for which price. From that point, I can start an informed discussion with a company asking for the house I want, based on what I saw, with an idea of what my expectations will mean in cost.
I have never seen something like that in software. If I want to have a software written or even just a website made, where can I go to check out examples with price tags? It seems to me that everybody keeps the final, real prices a secret. They are not showing you that this website with these functions and this design cost $x to create, and that software tool with these features cost $y.
The industry is based on estimated costs, not real costs.
It actually is the other way around. Things that add value are free for some reason. They should cost money. Not a lot (scale economy) but a little. If something of value is for free, your critical mind should ask itself what the catch is.
Sometimes there isn't a catch. People do things out of love for the thing sometimes. I have a couple computer games online that you can play for free, or you can give me some money if you want, but unlike most "free" games these days it won't get you in-game advantages. There are a lot of people doing things this way, simply because they enjoy doing it.
But when a company offer something for free, there is always a catch. Maybe it's marketing, or advertisement, or collecting and selling your personal data, or it's a bait-and-switch, or they hope to "convert" you to a paying user for another product or whatever, but they're never doing it out of the kindness of their heart, because corporations don't have hearts, they have balance sheets.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the fact that rather than bombing Daesh, they're bombing groups opposed to Daesh, in order to prop up the failing government
On this I consider Putin to be an order of magnitude smarter than all the US presidents and western leaders put together.
At least he understands that if they bomb away only IS, the next jihad group down there will take up their flag and continue the same shit.
You can dislike Assad all you want, and I certainly don't know enough about the guy and his politics to have an informed opinion, but AFAIK he didn't burn people alive in cages and put it on YouTube. He certainly seems like the least of a dozen evils.
The chain of causality seems really simple from an outside. The US went to Iraq to fuck over Hussein, and in doing so they strengthened Al Qaida, which at that time was not a big force in that area. When they went back to bomb out Al Qaida, the IS rose out of the rubble. I frankly don't want to see what will come after IS if this trend continues.
When what you're doing isn't working, you should try something else. Putin bombing all the islamistic fuckers seems like a reasonable approach. I don't see how you can speak about "moderate" islamists when they all share the same religious policy of "kill all infidels" and they mostly disagree about whether or not to rape them beforehand or whether stoning or throwing off a building is the proper method of execution. Calling any of them "moderate" because they take your money to bend whichever way you want like a cheap prostitute is among the most cynical political opportunisms. Nobody in the White House or the Pentagon can be stupid enough to not understand they will turn against the US the next moment.
Now THAT was real carnage
ROFL.
Sorry, you guys are just too soft-hearted for actual war if you call the US part in WW2 a "real carnage".
The USSR lost around 10 million soldiers in WW.
Germany lost about 5 million.
China lost 3.5 million.
The USA lost 0.4 million.
The real carnage in WW2 was on the eastern front and in China. For the Germans, the battle of Stalingrad alone cost them as many casualties (at least half a million, possibly up to 800,000) than the entire western front. 80% of the German casualties are thanks to the Russians.
And yes, the USAF bombed some German cities to rubble. But even so, German civilians fled the Red Army towards the west, not the other way around. If you've ever read stories about the siege of Leningrad from the Russian perspective, you know why. I know them. My girlfriend is from St. Petersburg as it is known today. After I've heard her tell WW2 stories from russian perspective, I laugh about US war movies. Omaha Beach: 2000 casualties. The horror. That would have been a quiet day in Stalingrad, where four times as many people died every day for five months straight.
That is what real carnage looks like.
Stalingrad had a population of 400,000 before the war. After the German 6th Army was destroyed, an official census counted 1,500 residents. Pictures from Stalingrad look worse than pictures from Hiroshima. That is real carnage.
It depends a lot on which juice you buy. As I drink a lot of juice, I'm checking labels before buying one I don't know yet, and you usually have a good choice. Once you understand that there are different quality levels of juice and how to discern them, you can avoid the crap that is basically coke with fruit flavor.
Because people are idiots, true.
At home, you can bottle your own water. Or drink it straight from the faucet. If you're worried about what's in there, there are filter devices and they are reasonably cheap (I use one mostly because calcium carbonate isn't good for the tea cooker).
For the road, you can bottle water at home, or sometimes buy a bottle. Why not? Yeah, someone makes a profit, but I have something clean to drink, in many holiday locations that's a luxury. And it's better than giving someone a profit for spoiling your health. And there is much more potential for competition, including locally sourced products.
This.
I'm a militant anti-smoker. I hate it, I avoid places that still allow smoking, and if they do so in break of current anti-smoking legislation, I bring them to the attention of authorities. I've never had a smoking GF and crossed off many potential candidates from the list because of their addiction.
All that said, you can smoke all you want, for all I care, and slowly kill yourself, if you find a way to do it without affecting anyone else who didn't consent to being gassed.
Drinking soda might be unhealthy, but it's not smelly, it doesn't turn people into nervous wrecks if they haven't had one for a day and it doesn't force itself on people around you. I can't tell if someone drank a coke in a room when I come in one hour later. I can tell if someone smoked in their car even if they stopped half a year ago and gave it a very solid cleansing. I can smell if one person is smoking somewhere in the same room in a public space. If you know anything about biology, you understand that if you can smell it, it means toxic levels are reached and the stink is your bodies way of telling you to get the hell out of there.
Drinking soda isn't the "new smoking". The two things are not even on the same level.
I made it ten postings ago. I don't get paid for explaining things ten times, so if some readers don't get the point, I don't care much.
Just couldn't take that bullshit seriously. People who blame the victim of a crime usually have an agenda or they are very stupid. I don't think you're stupid, so what's your agenda?
He's guilty of abusing words as well, unless he secretly owned a bunch of nukes. Your point is?
Actually, why don't we impose the corporate death penalty on VW and its parent company, Porsche?
As much as the outrage is justified, I think there are companies much higher on that list. But yes, why don't we at least have a corporate death penalty? Just its existence would help a lot.
Of course, that sort of thing is never going to happen in Germany, because the Piechs are politically well connected wealthy industrialists, the unions are extremely powerful, and the state has had its fingers in VW management too.
Sadly, yes. But that is not just true of VW and Germany, it is true of almost every multinational corporation.
The unions are "extremely powerful"? Wow, that's news and I lived all my life in Germany. No, they are not, unless you compare it to the ultra-capitalist USA which for all practical purposes doesn't even have unions.
Besides, if the death penalty is done in a proper way, the unions would not even object. Look, if you kill a corporation you have to ask yourself what to do with all its assets. If you revoke the charter, who owns everything? The shareholders? Uh, no? Because if you do it that way, a lot of the deterence goes away. One idea I've read about is to take the corporation away from its owners and turn it into a collective, owned by its workers.
Executive and judicial branches without politicians: that's roughly the system that existed under Bismarck, under Marxism, and under fascism.
In which fantasy parallel reality? I said less power, not higher concentration of power by putting it into fewer hands.
What I meant with "less politicians" and "less power" was that the government should implement the will of the people, not have a will of its own. As long as they are public servants and administrators, it doesn't matter how big or small the government is. The problem is not the size in square feet or employees, but the amount of power they wield.
the only political ideas you recognized are the totalitarian ideas you have been raised with.
You have no idea how I was raised, you're just making an ad hominem argument to cover up that you have no content to argue with. Free hint: When you argue with a german and you want to attack how he was raised, make sure you know first if he was raised in East or in West Germany. It's a very big difference, still noticeable today, 25 years after the reunification.
The VWs produce more NOx than allowed, but the allowable numbers are so low as to be arguably worse than useless given that diesels use less fuel and thus produce less particulates and CO2. (We discussed here how gassers produce just as much carbon soot as diesels per gallon, and almost all of it is ultra-fine particulates.)
If you don't like the rules, there are democratic (or, sadly, undemocratic lobbying) procedures for changing the rules. Cheating isn't one of them.
Yes, it hits home and all that. From a European perspective: This is news, why? Ten times that many people die every day much closer in terror attacks, drowning in the mediterranean sea and so on. Ah yes, they are brown people, right?
No, I understand that if it's closer it's more important. Tribe mentality and all that, we are humans, our social brain is not built for this age. And yet, something strikes me morally wrong about this preference.
I don't see any legal, moral, or logical principle that says that these tests have to be exactly reproducible.
Can't explain colour to a blind man, sorry.
No, that's simply a fact: once billions of dollars are involved, you're into the territory where pretty much any kind of criminal conduct becomes worthwhile.
Which is why we have jail time for serious crimes, because with just fines, exactly this would happen. You are proving my argument for me, thanks.
That is not a power we should hand to the executive branch
I didn't say we should. When I use the word "sentence" in a legal context, it should be clear that I'm speaking about the judicial branch.
You keep arguing for an expansion of governmental powers and penalties as the solution to problems.
In a very, very narrow sense, yes. I'm arguing that since we understand serious crimes need a higher punishment than fines when it comes to humans, why are we so stupid to think that fines are enough of a deterence for corporations? Even blind people see it doesn't work.
Regulations that you think of being regulations of big corporations end up infringing on everyday liberties of individuals
The inverse is true. I'm asking that the regulations already in existence for individuals are also applied to corporations.
The distinction you're trying to make between regulating corporations and limiting individual liberties doesn't exist in the real world.
Sadly, they do: There is no equivalent of jail time for corporations.
Because we need some government, some level of that kind of abuse and corruption is inevitable, but it needs to be kept to a minimum, and the only way of doing that is to keep governmental power to an absolute minimum.
That is a philosophical argument I disagree with, but that's a different topic.
(I want to see power of government reduced, not government itself. We need public servants and administrative bodies. What we don't need are politicians.)
Sorry, but you're an idiot. You are blaming the victim for the crime.
Yes, guilty you. You only kept your wallet in your pocket while nobody was pointing a gun at you. Your fault that you lost your money. Should have considered all circumstances.
pet peeve: Can we stop calling everything a "war" ?
Calling it a global smartphone war makes it sound like a real issue. What's wrong with simply calling it a conflict?
We have enough actual, real wars. You know, with bombings, dead, raped, crippled and mutilated people. Calling a bunch of high-paid lawyers having an argument in a cozy courtroom a war is, IMNSHO, an affront to anyone suffering from a real war.
the testing procedure can simply consist of measuring actual emissions in real world driving.
No, they can't. Re: consistency.
You could add such a test to check if real-world conditions are within the margin of error of the test results, but I guess nobody suspected such an illegal rigging until now.
The rewards of cheating on such tests are so high that no criminal penalty will deter companies from engaging in such behaviors
I disagree, but since we haven't even tried, there is no evidence to support either your or my claim. So let's revoke a few corporate charters and see what happens. We certainly have enough corporations on the list for death penalty crimes.
The only way such tests can ever work is if the EPA treats its relationships with manufacturers as adversarial and designs tests so that they are cheat-proof.
There is no such thing as a cheat-proof test. You can make it more difficult, that's all. Going this way means entering an arms race.
Of course the EPA should assume a more critical position. But in principle, the testing itself is absolutely fine. What you have here is the equivalent of someone submitting a software to the QA department that specifically behaves differently when running on the QA departments computers. How you can blame the QA department is beyond me.
Faulty reasoning like yours, namely that if we just pass enough laws and make the enforcement and penalties tough enough, crime will stop, is responsible for the sky high prison population and police violations of civil liberties.
I wonder where you get that strange conclusion from that is nowhere in anything I wrote.
I argue that we should apply at least the same if not tougher standards to corporations as we already apply to humans. I argue we should jail (temporary shutdown) or execute (revoke corporate charter) them if their crimes justify it.
And I argue that monetary fines against corporations don't work, and for extreme cases of criminal activity, those responsible ought to be jailed. Yeah, that would raise prison population. By maybe 100 CEOs - about 0.005% of the current USA prison population.
By all means, set a million non-violent drug-users free and take that military equipment back from the police. All that is not the point here.
That's why we have jail, because making him pay a few millions in fines would be little more than a "oh fuck, there goes my second yacht" moment. But if he spends his retirement years behind bars, that pension won't do him much good.
In principle, yes.
In reality, it would be abused immediately. If we were to implement an "interested in" user-agent header, advertisers would begin collecting them roughly three minutes afterwards, and then tell their clients which to use to reach the largest audience, no matter what it is they are actually advertising.
Can I get elected to that board? How? Just so they have one person there who consistently says "no" to any and all ads that they want to label "acceptable".
The only acceptable ad is one that I, the recipient consider acceptable. In such case, I will search it. When I buy a new car, I am interested in product information about cars. At no other times do I want to see advertisement for cars. It really is that simple.
Utter bullshit.
You could blame the EPA if their testing procedures were faulty, e.g. they only test the car at low speed or with special fuel or whatever.
In this case, the only problem with the test procedure was that it was known to the manufacturer. In fact, that the testing procedure is consistent (i.e. always the same) is an absolute requirement because you want consistent, i.e. comparable, results. Maybe you could have kept the exact conditions a secret, but even then they would be fairly easy to guess correctly.
Heck, without reading any in-depth articles I've glanced that they used speed as one indicator. Basically, the code said "if wheels are turning but you're not moving, assume you are on a test rig". That's not rocket science. And not the EPAs fault.
This. Germany (home of VW) has already opened a criminal investigation against the former CEO, so maybe /. could step out of its US-centric world-view for a moment, especially when reporting about a foreign company?
Not a useful saying for budgeting.
Aphorisms are never good for hard numbers. They are good for making a point in a concise way.
There's a lot less unpredictability in building a house than in writing a program.
That depends a lot on what software we are talking about. And it is also a consequence of the imaturity of software development. In the early stages of everything, it's hit-and-miss, trial-and-error with little predictability, see the first airplanes. But, as a matter of fact, predictability is one of the main factors that you use to measure maturity.
On top of both of those, what infrastructure are you assuming for the software projects, and what performance, reliability and security requirements do you have for your software? Any of those variables can radically change what a cost-effective development approach would be.
No difference to building a house at all, except for labels. Of course what you need in quality, or maybe earthquake resistance, or if it rains a lot or almost never, how much isolation you need for cold winters and hot summers, all these things matter, which is why you figure them into the total cost.
Finally, most custom software projects involve a lot more novelty than a house.
A lot of software is not half as custom as the customer thinks and the developer makes him believe.
but it is quite hard to estimate (within a factor of two or three) how much effort it will take to develop a feature that the developers have never tried before and that the customer can't thoroughly explain.
Strangely, architects also build buildings for the first time sometimes. Not family houses, but high profile buildings. And yes, there are sometimes budget overruns. But the whole thing rarely collapses on itself.
I mentioned this in my post, that people do things for the love of the thing itself. Did you read before posting reply?
I've been looking into building a house recently, and it taught me something about software development:
To understand what I would get for how much money, I went to a "park" of houses. 20 or so houses of different styles and sizes, with price tags. So by spending a few hours walking through them all, I could get a pretty good understanding of what I would get for which price. From that point, I can start an informed discussion with a company asking for the house I want, based on what I saw, with an idea of what my expectations will mean in cost.
I have never seen something like that in software. If I want to have a software written or even just a website made, where can I go to check out examples with price tags? It seems to me that everybody keeps the final, real prices a secret. They are not showing you that this website with these functions and this design cost $x to create, and that software tool with these features cost $y.
The industry is based on estimated costs, not real costs.
It actually is the other way around. Things that add value are free for some reason. They should cost money. Not a lot (scale economy) but a little. If something of value is for free, your critical mind should ask itself what the catch is.
Sometimes there isn't a catch. People do things out of love for the thing sometimes. I have a couple computer games online that you can play for free, or you can give me some money if you want, but unlike most "free" games these days it won't get you in-game advantages. There are a lot of people doing things this way, simply because they enjoy doing it.
But when a company offer something for free, there is always a catch. Maybe it's marketing, or advertisement, or collecting and selling your personal data, or it's a bait-and-switch, or they hope to "convert" you to a paying user for another product or whatever, but they're never doing it out of the kindness of their heart, because corporations don't have hearts, they have balance sheets.