People think that "private business can do anything better than the government" when the real meme is "private business can do anything cheaper than the government."
Regardless of whether that's true or not (it certainly isn't in all cases), cheaper is of course not always better. This is especially true if you look at factors like universal access, non-discriminatory prices / service, consumer-friendly terms & conditions, etc.
Where I work, we had some folks (embedded software engineers, cross-compiling on Windows) disabling the on-access virus scanner to speed up their build times.
After a couple of times where this led to worm infection, I showed everyone how to have the on-access virus scanner exclude their ClearCase snapshot views directory, so they get the benefits of faster build times without leaving their machines unprotected.
If you can get your admins to agree, a good compromise for you ought to be excluding your telemetry data directory from on-access scan, instead having a weekly (or whatever) scan of the entire machine Just In Case.
(I used to see something similar... viruses "found" in.tar.gz files that I had created, of code trees or somesuch that can't contain viruses (yet)).
I do it at my company, with MIMEDefang. It has ClamAV scanning everything (including.rar files, BTW). Files with some extensions that are pretty much only useful for viruses around here (.vbs,.wsh,.pif, etc.) are removed entirely, and a warning message left in their place. Files with other "executable-style" extensions get renamed to defang-*.binary, and a message explains how to "Save As".
What this buys me, since both filename and MIME type are changed, is peace of mind that there's no way our Outlook email clients will automatically execute them. It also raises a big red flag that the attachment is potentially executable (defeating the tricks like picture.jpg(buttload of spaces).pif).
Sure, users could end up Saving As some malware and opening it. So far, I haven't seen any problems with that (of course, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened). Our userbase is mostly embedded software engineers, though we do have some "overhead" people. This way, if the engineers want/need to email executables to one another, they can (with a little annoyance).
...it's not like they have a big vault like Scrooge McDuck where they pour all their US dollars and hoard them. Profits go out to shareholders (in hundreds of different countries) or into capital investments (like factories)...
Unfortunately, our system does kind of work like a big vault.
...over 86 percent of the value of all stocks and mutual funds, including pensions, was held by the top 10 percent of households. In 1998, the top 1 percent of Americans owned 47.7 percent of all stock, while the bottom 80 percent owned 4.1 percent.
(Source: http://www.osjspm.org/101_wealth.htm; if you have similar, apples-to-apples-comparable stats from a right-wing site I'd love to see them).
The top 1 percent have average net worth of $3352100 or more, and the top 10 percent have average net worth $475600 or more.
This means that the old "ever-increasing profits are good, because they get distributed to the shareholders, and anyone can be a shareholder" theory is full of crap. 80+% of the money will be going to really rich people, who will buy some stuff, but mostly buy stock with it (which doesn't really help anybody but brokers). This is a very inefficient way to try to 'trickle down' increasing profits to ordinary people.
Or, more succintly, when things cost 80% less to make, they may cost comsumers 50% less. The other 30% will pad some rich guy's pocket. Even if things cost half as much, when I'm making 11% of what I made before (current programmer salary compared to 30 hours a week/$5.15 an hour, working at Wal-Mart), my life is not going to be better.
The interesting statistic to see would be: What percentage of these "frivolous" lawsuits succeed, and what does the average payout tend to be?
This is something we don't really have good stats for (that I know of), and it would be nice.
My "gut" feeling is that few of these kinds of suits actually succeed, and those that do will tend to get small payouts (with some high-profile exceptions, of course). I would be that many/most of those pushing "ban frivolous lawsuits" are also in favor of easing other restrictions on corporate behavior, to make sure profits stay up (but then I'm a knee-jerk liberal).
The real problem in torts (again, from a knee-jerk liberal perspective), in my opinion, is that anyone with lots of money (most corporations) can extort money/behavior out of anyone who doesn't (most individuals) by simply threatening to sue; even if the plaintiff couldn't conceivably win, they can starve out the defendant using legal expenses. I have not seen or been able to come up with a way to remedy this, that does not have large loopholes or cause even further problems.
In this society, everything anyone did was tracked and searchable, so privacy and anonymity were nonexistent. However, this (practically) eliminated crime, as a side effect. With a 100% chance of getting caught and punished, the only crimes left would be crimes of passion, where the perpetrator doesn't care about the consequences.
More precisely, what most (all?) software licenses disclaim in the implied warranty of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.
This means that (to re-use their analogy) if I buy a product which is advertised as a "car", it should be capable of the basic purpose of a "car" (i.e. transporting people and cargo from place to place over paved roads). It doesn't say that the product has to get good gas mileage, last for any particular length of time, or anything like that.
Therefore, if I sold a car that dies after 1,000 miles, I'm not violating the implied warranty of merchantability. However, if I sold a car that had no room for people or cargo, it would violate the implied warranty.
An example from the software field would be to sell time-tracking software with no means of data entry. When sued, you point to the EULA and say "we don't guarantee that this product can be used to track time."
I would anticipate, given increasing corporate control of our government, that, rather than the software industry getting liability restrictions such as this placed upon it, instead, more industries will be able to exempt themselves from these implied warranties. ("If you read our Grocery Sales Terms and Conditions, you'd see that by shopping in this store, you agree that the food we sell is not warranted to be fit for human consumption.")
I personally consider all "companies out to make money" my enemy. I know economics is not a zero-sum game, but it is also not an infinite-sum game. The drive for ever-increasing profit growth rate means that eventually every corporation will start squeezing its customers to increase profits.
They own more and more of the government every year. When all entertainment is pay-per-view, all software (and most hardware) need a subscription to work, when for-profit companies own agriculture (via genetically-modified seeds), when crossing a corporation means getting sued into oblivion (because it's impossible to have the means to defend yourself even from frivolous lawsuits), when companies can buy their stuff from other cheaper places, but you cannot (backed by technology and bought legislation), what will your life be like? How will the "free market" save us?
Some "gifted kids" deal with your sort of issues by simply doing things that make them look smart, but aren't hard. That's one of the advantages I have now in having a non-technical manager - some things that are pretty easy for geeks seem like genius to them.
I don't know what the solution for this kind of motivation-drain is. I'm a former genius, like yourself, and got into a fairly typical disillusioned-underachievement pattern in my mid-twenties or so, as life experience made it apparent to me that hard work and ability don't count for a damn thing. (Ask some slashdotters! Try to get a job you'd be able to do easily, but haven't done already for 5 years!)
Now I'm 31, just coasting on raw ability, managing not to get fired, and that'll work OK until the last job I have experience in moves offshore. Then I get the fun of trying to "break into" the electrician's trade with no experience, or something like that. It would be nice if I could work up to my potential, but why?
High school wasn't so bad for me, though (despite the inevitable ostracism, and, in a rural school, no other geeks). One thing that helped was to position myself second in many things (e.g. I ended up salutatorian rather than valedictorian). That removes an immense amount of pressure, while not squandering too much potential. Sometimes it's a hard lesson that there's always someone "better" than you (whatever metric / area you choose), but once you internalize that, everything's easier. It's impossible to be the "best" at everything, and essentially impossible to be the "best" at anything, given wide a wide enough field of competition (in more and more fields these days, the competition is global).
I tried a book recently, "Smart Boys" by Barbara Kerr, wondering if it had some answers. It didn't for me (lack of "manliness" didn't cause me any more problems than anything else), but might for others in similar situations. She did a "Smart Girls" as well (first, in fact).
Even better than running cables: Run, from the wiring closet to boxes located in the walls (just like outlet boxes) throughout the house, conduit with strings inside.
Then, you can change wiring anytime (run coax to your set-top box, Ethernet to your machine room, phones hither and thither, etc.) without having to have every possible wire going to every possible room. The string makes it easy to fish a cable through an otherwise-empty conduit.
I don't think it's a management failure, but a market failure.
The market simply will not bear the cost, in money or time, for software to be Done Right. For any given project, at least one of your competitors will over-promise the result for cheap, on a death-march schedule. This means you (as a company) must follow suit, or nobody buys your software.
Also, often a software company is somewhere back in the chain of contractors. If a PHVP at FooCorp says the project must be finished in 18 months, that means that Vendor A must be finished in 12 months, and so Vendor A's vendor B must be finished in 6 months. If you are vendor B, if you tell vendor A that to get it done well will either cost more or take 9 months, you'll just be rejected (A's price they can pay, and their schedule, are out of their hands).
This pigeonholing is something I see as seriously damaging to society: the Entry-Level Problem.
Basically, it's extremely difficult to get a job unless you've been doing the exact same job for some years. Ability to learn, aptitude with the required skills, etc. don't matter at all to those who do the selection.
Example: My wife once got rejected for a PC repair job, because, despite her experience in PC repair, she didn't have verifiable experience repairing Dells.
This is all a consequence of endemic short-term thinking; why train anybody when you can just make that cost an externality?
I'd like to be able to get a job as a web developer or DBA (jobs I'm doing here at my company), but since those aren't part of my official title, I'm screwed if they try to verify it (HR has no clue, of course).
Better yet, do what I do. I track all of the finances in GnuCash (though a spreadsheet would probably work just as well for the Windows folks). I enter everything from my receipts (including cash), and balance all accounts (credit cards, checking, loans, cash). I update a budget in a spreadeheet (which, because I made it, is more flexible than any package I know; it allows categories to have monthly, quarterly or yearly budgets).
I pay bills via the time-honored check-via-USPS method, except for some where online payments are Free (my credit union's mortgage, car loan, Visa). BellSouth and Verizon Wireless have Free online payments as well, so I may go to using those.
Total time this takes: 1 hour or so 3-4 times a month. I don't need any proprietary online bill payment "solution" or proprietary software, and have as much control over my finances as anyone could expect.
They do get a fee. My credit union will generate your transactions in.QIF format, which you can then import. Intuit stopped supporting that in Q2005. From my credit union's (login-necessary, which is why I'm quoting) online banking site:
If you choose to upgrade to or purchase Quicken 2005, you will lose the ability to import your [bank] transactions.
[bank] has chosen not to support the real-time.OFX interface required for Quicken 2005 as Intuit now charges each financial institution a yearly licensing, setup and maintenance fee to achieve the same functionality available in all previous versions of their software. However instead of assessing a fee based on the number of actual Quicken users here at [bank], they require a fee based upon our asset size and TOTAL number of members.
As a not-for-profit organization, we are not willing to submit to such an unfair pricing structure.
Open Source is also about shipping a quality product, rather than rushing a buggy, incomplete product out the door because {the customer demands it, we need to recognize revenue, there's a "temporary" "crisis"}. The goal in a for-profit corporation is to increase profits for the shareholders, and any product produced is simply a by-product.
That's why it's possible for open-source software to not suck, whereas software developed by a for-profit corporation must suck.
I don't think there's anything we can do about it, unless some radical re-plumbing of the marketplace happens (like software liability). The current market simply will not bear the cost of Software Done Right - if you try it, all of your customers will defect to the lowest bidder, who rushes an incomplete, bug-ridden product out the door.
It could well become illegal to sell A/D converters unless they recognize watermarking in the source stream and refuse to encode streams so watermarked. At that point the content industry will have achieved their Holy Grail of closing the analog hole.
I have heard the argument, though, that something like this couldn't come about, because there are some life-critical applications (e.g. medical telemetry) where you can't tolerate a false positive (the A/D converter cutting out because it thinks it's being used to pirate music). This will lead to "medical-grade" A/D converters, which will, of course, get used to pirate music.
The WIPO throws a monkey wrench in that plan; other countries are getting pressure to adopt DMCA-style laws from their respective entertainment / software cartels.
This happened to my grandmother once. She was buying a field that adjoined her property, for about $5k. When she was talking to the closing attorney, he said the terms of the sale were "cash". This, of course, means that the seller isn't going to finance the sale themselves (by allowing the buyer to pay them over time).
She got some weird looks showing up at the closing with a shoebox full of paper money.
The real problem is that the economic system that forces corporations to behave this way will destroy society.
Just apply "tragedy of the commons" and "prisoner's dilemma" to current corporate behavior. Since at least one company will squeeze out all social responsibility in the pursuit of ever-increasing profit growth rates, all must do so to remain competitive. The "commons" they are plundering consists of their customers and employees.
This inexorably (as far as I can tell) leads to everyone's standard of living being Third World-level (if a community starts to demand higher wages, all of the jobs will leave for places with lower labor cost), and remaining so forever, except for people that started out wealthy enough to make a living by investing.
Sure, the corporations are signing their own death warrants, as their profits won't be able to increase too much after the economy collapses. But even if they do see this coming, care (some execs have ethics, some don't, and those that don't wouldn't care if the economy collapses as long as they'll personally be OK), and believe it (many have drank the Republican Kool-Aid, and believe that the free market will magically prevent this catastrophe), the necessity of remaining competitive prevents them from doing anything about it.
I've had this sort of thing used as an argument against my particular vision of capitalist dystopia.
I believe that, in a world populated by increase-profits-by-any-means companies, and frictionless free trade, because of "tragedy of the commons", that the entire world's standard of living will drop to the lowest level they are today, and stay there forever. (I also believe, because of "prisoner's dilemma", that it's impossible to buck the trend, because if your company acts in a socially responsible manner, it will have its lunch eaten by some company that doesn't).
However, once wealth gets concentrated to a small number of individuals, individual ethics come into play. The Gates Foundation is an indication that it's possible for an individual person to act in a socially-responsible way (as opposed to corporations, who must not.) It's a counterbalancing force to corporate evil - one that actually stands a chance of mitigating its effects.
If you're trying to secure anything against the government or any entity with physical force at its disposal, you have to think about "rubber hose cryptanalysis" - the attacker beats you with a rubber hose until you divulge your password / keys / etc.
Not sure if there's a good way around that other than the old "data / machines self-destruct if you don't check in every so often" - and even that is incomplete protection and carries nontrivial risk of losing the data.
Hmmm... I've been wondering what to do to try to resist the U.S. & world economy from collapsing under the weight of (essentially) capitalism. I wonder how I can opt out of (and try to get others to avoid contributing to) the spiraling problems of Wal-Mart-ization, race to the bottom, etc.
Perhaps our two problems will solve each other (economic collapse will improve the environment, albeit with some minor consequences for those of us living through it).
They don't even realize that corporations / the wealthy need a strong consumer base to keep the money / resources / etc. rolling in. They're killing themselves with this short-term-profit-at-all-costs behavior.
As long as enough people are snowed by the lassiez-faire capitalist propaganda (what's good for corporations is good for everybody; the money concentrating in the investors will somehow magically create new jobs, etc.), this will continue.
I hope the executives like living in mud huts and roaming the streets searching for food, because once you and I are, eventually so will they.
The problem is that these restrictions benefit somebody (i.e. a big business interest).
These interests either don't know they're destroying society piece by piece, don't care, or think they're not (because of conservative ideology that says whatever is good for business is good for society).
We're heading for a Tragedy Of The Commons writ large, where our society and economy collapse because of the desire of the few to make short-term profit.
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Regardless of whether that's true or not (it certainly isn't in all cases), cheaper is of course not always better. This is especially true if you look at factors like universal access, non-discriminatory prices / service, consumer-friendly terms & conditions, etc.
After a couple of times where this led to worm infection, I showed everyone how to have the on-access virus scanner exclude their ClearCase snapshot views directory, so they get the benefits of faster build times without leaving their machines unprotected.
If you can get your admins to agree, a good compromise for you ought to be excluding your telemetry data directory from on-access scan, instead having a weekly (or whatever) scan of the entire machine Just In Case.
(I used to see something similar... viruses "found" in .tar.gz files that I had created, of code trees or somesuch that can't contain viruses (yet)).
What this buys me, since both filename and MIME type are changed, is peace of mind that there's no way our Outlook email clients will automatically execute them. It also raises a big red flag that the attachment is potentially executable (defeating the tricks like picture.jpg(buttload of spaces).pif).
Sure, users could end up Saving As some malware and opening it. So far, I haven't seen any problems with that (of course, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened). Our userbase is mostly embedded software engineers, though we do have some "overhead" people. This way, if the engineers want/need to email executables to one another, they can (with a little annoyance).
Or, more succintly, when things cost 80% less to make, they may cost comsumers 50% less. The other 30% will pad some rich guy's pocket. Even if things cost half as much, when I'm making 11% of what I made before (current programmer salary compared to 30 hours a week/$5.15 an hour, working at Wal-Mart), my life is not going to be better.
This is something we don't really have good stats for (that I know of), and it would be nice.
My "gut" feeling is that few of these kinds of suits actually succeed, and those that do will tend to get small payouts (with some high-profile exceptions, of course). I would be that many/most of those pushing "ban frivolous lawsuits" are also in favor of easing other restrictions on corporate behavior, to make sure profits stay up (but then I'm a knee-jerk liberal).
The real problem in torts (again, from a knee-jerk liberal perspective), in my opinion, is that anyone with lots of money (most corporations) can extort money/behavior out of anyone who doesn't (most individuals) by simply threatening to sue; even if the plaintiff couldn't conceivably win, they can starve out the defendant using legal expenses. I have not seen or been able to come up with a way to remedy this, that does not have large loopholes or cause even further problems.
In this society, everything anyone did was tracked and searchable, so privacy and anonymity were nonexistent. However, this (practically) eliminated crime, as a side effect. With a 100% chance of getting caught and punished, the only crimes left would be crimes of passion, where the perpetrator doesn't care about the consequences.
This means that (to re-use their analogy) if I buy a product which is advertised as a "car", it should be capable of the basic purpose of a "car" (i.e. transporting people and cargo from place to place over paved roads). It doesn't say that the product has to get good gas mileage, last for any particular length of time, or anything like that.
Therefore, if I sold a car that dies after 1,000 miles, I'm not violating the implied warranty of merchantability. However, if I sold a car that had no room for people or cargo, it would violate the implied warranty.
An example from the software field would be to sell time-tracking software with no means of data entry. When sued, you point to the EULA and say "we don't guarantee that this product can be used to track time."
I would anticipate, given increasing corporate control of our government, that, rather than the software industry getting liability restrictions such as this placed upon it, instead, more industries will be able to exempt themselves from these implied warranties. ("If you read our Grocery Sales Terms and Conditions, you'd see that by shopping in this store, you agree that the food we sell is not warranted to be fit for human consumption.")
A negative side, effect, though, is that his first words were all registered trademarks. (Really! He'd point to my phone and say 'Motorola').
They own more and more of the government every year. When all entertainment is pay-per-view, all software (and most hardware) need a subscription to work, when for-profit companies own agriculture (via genetically-modified seeds), when crossing a corporation means getting sued into oblivion (because it's impossible to have the means to defend yourself even from frivolous lawsuits), when companies can buy their stuff from other cheaper places, but you cannot (backed by technology and bought legislation), what will your life be like? How will the "free market" save us?
I don't know what the solution for this kind of motivation-drain is. I'm a former genius, like yourself, and got into a fairly typical disillusioned-underachievement pattern in my mid-twenties or so, as life experience made it apparent to me that hard work and ability don't count for a damn thing. (Ask some slashdotters! Try to get a job you'd be able to do easily, but haven't done already for 5 years!)
Now I'm 31, just coasting on raw ability, managing not to get fired, and that'll work OK until the last job I have experience in moves offshore. Then I get the fun of trying to "break into" the electrician's trade with no experience, or something like that. It would be nice if I could work up to my potential, but why?
High school wasn't so bad for me, though (despite the inevitable ostracism, and, in a rural school, no other geeks). One thing that helped was to position myself second in many things (e.g. I ended up salutatorian rather than valedictorian). That removes an immense amount of pressure, while not squandering too much potential. Sometimes it's a hard lesson that there's always someone "better" than you (whatever metric / area you choose), but once you internalize that, everything's easier. It's impossible to be the "best" at everything, and essentially impossible to be the "best" at anything, given wide a wide enough field of competition (in more and more fields these days, the competition is global).
I tried a book recently, "Smart Boys" by Barbara Kerr, wondering if it had some answers. It didn't for me (lack of "manliness" didn't cause me any more problems than anything else), but might for others in similar situations. She did a "Smart Girls" as well (first, in fact).
Then, you can change wiring anytime (run coax to your set-top box, Ethernet to your machine room, phones hither and thither, etc.) without having to have every possible wire going to every possible room. The string makes it easy to fish a cable through an otherwise-empty conduit.
The market simply will not bear the cost, in money or time, for software to be Done Right. For any given project, at least one of your competitors will over-promise the result for cheap, on a death-march schedule. This means you (as a company) must follow suit, or nobody buys your software.
Also, often a software company is somewhere back in the chain of contractors. If a PHVP at FooCorp says the project must be finished in 18 months, that means that Vendor A must be finished in 12 months, and so Vendor A's vendor B must be finished in 6 months. If you are vendor B, if you tell vendor A that to get it done well will either cost more or take 9 months, you'll just be rejected (A's price they can pay, and their schedule, are out of their hands).
Basically, it's extremely difficult to get a job unless you've been doing the exact same job for some years. Ability to learn, aptitude with the required skills, etc. don't matter at all to those who do the selection.
Example: My wife once got rejected for a PC repair job, because, despite her experience in PC repair, she didn't have verifiable experience repairing Dells.
This is all a consequence of endemic short-term thinking; why train anybody when you can just make that cost an externality?
I'd like to be able to get a job as a web developer or DBA (jobs I'm doing here at my company), but since those aren't part of my official title, I'm screwed if they try to verify it (HR has no clue, of course).
I pay bills via the time-honored check-via-USPS method, except for some where online payments are Free (my credit union's mortgage, car loan, Visa). BellSouth and Verizon Wireless have Free online payments as well, so I may go to using those.
Total time this takes: 1 hour or so 3-4 times a month. I don't need any proprietary online bill payment "solution" or proprietary software, and have as much control over my finances as anyone could expect.
That's why it's possible for open-source software to not suck, whereas software developed by a for-profit corporation must suck.
I don't think there's anything we can do about it, unless some radical re-plumbing of the marketplace happens (like software liability). The current market simply will not bear the cost of Software Done Right - if you try it, all of your customers will defect to the lowest bidder, who rushes an incomplete, bug-ridden product out the door.
I have heard the argument, though, that something like this couldn't come about, because there are some life-critical applications (e.g. medical telemetry) where you can't tolerate a false positive (the A/D converter cutting out because it thinks it's being used to pirate music). This will lead to "medical-grade" A/D converters, which will, of course, get used to pirate music.
The WIPO throws a monkey wrench in that plan; other countries are getting pressure to adopt DMCA-style laws from their respective entertainment / software cartels.
She got some weird looks showing up at the closing with a shoebox full of paper money.
Just apply "tragedy of the commons" and "prisoner's dilemma" to current corporate behavior. Since at least one company will squeeze out all social responsibility in the pursuit of ever-increasing profit growth rates, all must do so to remain competitive. The "commons" they are plundering consists of their customers and employees.
This inexorably (as far as I can tell) leads to everyone's standard of living being Third World-level (if a community starts to demand higher wages, all of the jobs will leave for places with lower labor cost), and remaining so forever, except for people that started out wealthy enough to make a living by investing.
Sure, the corporations are signing their own death warrants, as their profits won't be able to increase too much after the economy collapses. But even if they do see this coming, care (some execs have ethics, some don't, and those that don't wouldn't care if the economy collapses as long as they'll personally be OK), and believe it (many have drank the Republican Kool-Aid, and believe that the free market will magically prevent this catastrophe), the necessity of remaining competitive prevents them from doing anything about it.
I believe that, in a world populated by increase-profits-by-any-means companies, and frictionless free trade, because of "tragedy of the commons", that the entire world's standard of living will drop to the lowest level they are today, and stay there forever. (I also believe, because of "prisoner's dilemma", that it's impossible to buck the trend, because if your company acts in a socially responsible manner, it will have its lunch eaten by some company that doesn't).
However, once wealth gets concentrated to a small number of individuals, individual ethics come into play. The Gates Foundation is an indication that it's possible for an individual person to act in a socially-responsible way (as opposed to corporations, who must not.) It's a counterbalancing force to corporate evil - one that actually stands a chance of mitigating its effects.
Not sure if there's a good way around that other than the old "data / machines self-destruct if you don't check in every so often" - and even that is incomplete protection and carries nontrivial risk of losing the data.
Perhaps our two problems will solve each other (economic collapse will improve the environment, albeit with some minor consequences for those of us living through it).
As long as enough people are snowed by the lassiez-faire capitalist propaganda (what's good for corporations is good for everybody; the money concentrating in the investors will somehow magically create new jobs, etc.), this will continue.
I hope the executives like living in mud huts and roaming the streets searching for food, because once you and I are, eventually so will they.
These interests either don't know they're destroying society piece by piece, don't care, or think they're not (because of conservative ideology that says whatever is good for business is good for society).
We're heading for a Tragedy Of The Commons writ large, where our society and economy collapse because of the desire of the few to make short-term profit.