or an option not to have healthcare at all if I chose to
I fully support this, but somehow we need to identify people who do/don't make that decision by not buying insurance (or proving semi-liquid assets sufficient to cover the first hours of emergency care). This is so 911, ERs, and the government can know not to respond or care for such people.
Obviously, if a private hospital chooses to provide care they are free to do so but there should be no law requiring ER care for those making that choice. Presumably those hospitals choosing to provide such care either have donations to cover it or would end up pricing themselves out of the market because they have to amortize the cost of the uncompensated care over the paying customers.
I'm a big fan of "desk checks". I find bugs in my own code when I do them - some of them are stupid bugs which I would have certainly found in testing (desk checking just catches them earlier and more economically), others are obscure ones (often race conditions) that might, or might not, actually be seen in the wild and some I would have been unlikely to find in testing (and QA would have even less chance of catching).
However, even among some oldsters who are relatively skilled, I find most developers are very bad at desk checking their own code. They think their shit smells good and can't detach themselves from their belief that since the author of the code is (in their not so humble opinion) a genius who, therefore, wouldn't write anything but perfect code. Doing it well requires a certain mindset. If I don't find any bugs when desk checking a significant body of code I've written, I assume I'm being sloppy and redouble my efforts and focus -- and if I find a bug in testing, I ask myself why I didn't catch it in desk checking (sometimes there's a good reason -- such as an API I'm calling doesn't work as advertised or I misunderstood the API and there's not much desk checking will do to catch those cases efficiently).
(BTW, "desk checking" really doesn't require paper and pencil anymore IMHO - I find a few IDE windows w/search et al features makes the process much easier and more thorough for me.)
Why do they not want to "fix healthcare.gov"? Because that's an uninteresting, almost clerical, job made worse by being part of a messy government procurement system. I can't think of any developers that want to do that sort of work -- been done already thousands of times (usually, of course, much better than HealthCare.gov). Most would only do it to pay the mortgage. Of course, the good developers can find something more interesting to do with less bureaucratic pain inflicted on them in the process.
The systems will require maintenance, periodic testing, and failure diagnosis. Also, it's likely that some sort of upgrades would be required over a 30 year service period.
Deploying these widely would also require maintaining the Iridium system indefinitely (rarely is a "safety feature" eliminated once instituted).
Characterizing it as "one time only" cost is not accurate although I have no idea what recurring costs would be.
Anyone even modestly successful in the IT industry, by the time they are thirty, knows way too much about the real world and consequences for their actions to get elected to any office at the level of US Senator or POTUS. It would just be too hard to wipe your brain of reality (unless, perhaps, you suffered a tragic brain injury of some sort).
I had a computer science class in high school (around 2004) and the teacher didn't even know how how to use powerpoint,
Well, that doesn't bother me at all - PowerPoint and Computer Science (even when what the class means by Computer Science is actually Programming) are as related as washing cars is related to designing engines, transmissions, and suspension systems.
A question I ask often (and get lambasted for because it's "politically incorrect").
We (the US and the entire world) must find an answer to this. The industrial revolution provided jobs for those displaced from agriculture by steam tractors and the like. This time, automation is replacing the humans both through directly replacing them and by "self serve" which is just more efficient than the "full serve" model (web retailers, self checkout, self serve gas stations). There doesn't seem to be anywhere for the lesser IQ people to go.
The worst thing we can do is ignore the problem and have lesser IQ produce a disproportionate number of lesser IQ offspring (the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be educated and the less likely you are to have even "replacement" children, let alone a brood). Perhaps we address this by offering aid but at a decreasing rate depending on how many offspring the person has had (broad DNA databases would probably be required to implement this along with free and easy optional sterilization and other forms of birth control). Quite messy.
So, it sounds like the oil is sequestered under rocks. Sure, things that once lived under those particular rocks may not do well, but the oil is obviously being kept out of the broader environment. Eventually bacteria will transform the sequestered sludge into something that's fairly harmless and that will eventually disperse. Meanwhile the 99.9999% of the organisms of the type that lived under those rocks, but didn't actually live under those specific rocks, will go on as if nothing has happened.
Seems like a good outcome.
Sure, it would have been better if the tanker hadn't crashed, but it did - time to move on after (as has been done) reducing the chances of similar environmental impact in the future (now, if we could just due that for cruise ships in Italy).
I see your triple hull and raise you - quadruple hull should be required.
At some point, of course, the tanker will be carrying one quart of crude and tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel to power the ship that carts that precious quart of crude around with "ultimate" safety. Occasionally the ship will crash and release all of its diesel fuel, but that quart of crude that is in the container with 20 one foot layers of stainless steel tanks around it will survive and won't sully a rock somewhere.
Perhaps we should assess every person (and their heirs if they are no longer alive) who bought gasoline from Exxon over the prior 20 years an annual surcharge. After all, they presumably benefited in the form of lower prices derived from Exxon (and most everyone else) not using more collision resistant tankers. These people should have, instead, sought out the most ecologically friendly oil company's products - they instead chose to bury their heads in the sand and go with the lowest cost gasoline and were a substantial beneficiary of Exxon's judgement to use today's (at the time) technology instead of refusing to ship oil until they had purchased and deployed better technology.
You do realize that IBM really is an international company and has a lot of US employees don't you? If they hired only American workers, using your logic, every other country would refuse to let IBM sell products in their country. This, of course, would require IBM (and Apple, and GE, and Facebook, and Google, and Intel, and AMD, and...) to split into two independent companies - the US company and the International company. The former would sell overpriced and lame (due to the lack of volume/revenue from the local market to spend on R&D) products to the US. The latter would develop innovative products and sell them to the rest of the first world and the developing economies - and this would be good how?
One interesting question is, what percentage of revenue and profit come from the US market and what percentage of employe salaries and benefits goes to IBM's US employees. Certainly if that is around "in balance" there's little room for complaint (many years ago, I looked at this when they were publishing numbers of employees and revenue by region and it was clear that the US employees were sucking money out of other countries - but I have no idea how it is now and if it's just correcting for past abuses of feathering US employee's nests at the expense of unemployment in other countries).
That depends on state laws. Commonly, a landlord is only allowed to enter a unit they rent to the tenant for their exclusive use for an appropriate reason at reasonable times with reasonable notice. Rules are likely to be different for situations like short term transient housing or boarders. Some jurisdictions may, or may not, let the tenant explicitly grant the landlord more access in the contract.
Remember, the landlord rented or leased the property to the tenant for the tenant's use - by doing so, the landlord has relinquished some control and use of the property in exchange for valuable consideration (the rent!). It's not unlike a dealer leasing a car to you for three years - as long as you make the payments and comply with other aspects of the contract, the dealer can't just decide one morning that he's going to use the car for a couple of days to haul steer manure from the nursery without your permission "because it's his car".
Appropriate reasons for entry include maintenance and repairs either initiated by the landlord or by the tenant. An annual inspection or showing the unit to prospective tenants or property buyers may be an appropriate reason. But the courts in jurisdictions I've lived in would be unlikely to consider weekly inspections of a residential property leased to the tenant for one year to be appropriate barring some extraordinary circumstances.
Reasonable times may be only during business hours or from 8AM to 6PM or something like that for non emergency cases - for true emergencies like a major water leak, any time of day or night is probably usually reasonable.
Reasonable notice varies, but for non emergencies, some jurisdictions require 24 hour written notice. Again, for true emergencies, no notice may be required beyond a knock on the door.
Check your local laws -- some regions are much more "tenant friendly" than others and the laws vary quite a bit across the US.
I think that Illinois_v._Rodriguez allows the evidence to be admitted if the police had a reasonable belief that the person consenting actually has authority over the property even if, later, that belief is shown to be incorrect.
I also don't believe there is any requirement that the person giving consent be on the lease/title -- for example, if someone lives there, they can consent to a police search of any area they have legal access to (such as any common area they are allowed to use/frequent).
But, of course, check with a lawyer before acting on any of this as IANAL.
A landlord can't give consent for the police to search a space that you have rented for your exclusive use. They can enter without your consent in case of an emergency (fire, gas leak, water leak, etc), but a simple request by the police to search is not an emergency. Someeasytoreadsources.
Do note however, as a private actor, a landlord entering your unit legally (or even illegally, but then they would risk being subject to civil and/or criminal consequences for the entry), can observe that you've got a meth lab inside, go to the police and tell them this, and the police can probably easily get a warrant to search because they now have cause. Actually, even if the landlord took (i.e., stole) something of yours from your apartment (such as a gun used in a murder), they can turn it over to the police and it can be used as evidence against you (again, they would risk being subject to civil and/or criminal consequences for the theft). However, these actions on your landlord's part can not be done in coordination with the police. The Fourth Amendment only restricts law enforcement, not private actors.
The Leaf's top speed of 93 is plenty for normal people.
That's only true for city driving and short trips - which of course is about all you are likely to use the Leaf for due to its range. There are roads where I have regularly driving a little above 93 MPH for most of an hour - sure, I'm passing cars, but every so often I have to slow down to merge right to let someone by (since I'm a courteous driver) whose headlights are gaining on me from a 1/2 mile back (I'm actually happy to let them by - it reduced my chance of getting a speeding ticket as if there's an cop around, they will usually get pulled over, not I). On these roads, I don't think going above 93MPH, at least on occasion, is "abnormal".
I'm in a neighborhood that is very smart, but very poor.
Smart people usually figure out how to solve their problems, so I assume not being poor is not very high on the priority list of those in your neighborhood -- and that's fine, but it's their decision.
However, since the state of Washington was guaranteed to vote for Obama (he carried Washington by almost 15% over the incompetent Republican candidate), smart people would have considered sending a message by voting for a third party candidate (perhaps Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Justice, Socialism and Liberation, or Socialist Workers) that better reflected their core principles rather than voting for big business Democrat who didn't need their vote to win. It's very strange that 80% of your neighborhood didn't think to do so given their superior intellect and instead made a conscious decision to waste their time and vote by voting to no effect (maybe that's why they are poor, they don't understand math or simple concepts like the Electoral College?).
However, I suspect it's more likely that the people in your neighborhood are not quite as smart as you think. Don't worry, it's a common failing for people of lower intelligence to overestimate their own intelligence and inaccurately estimate the intelligence of others. In fact, it's called the Downing effect which, oddly, results in people with lower IQs tending to overestimate their IQ and people with higher IQs tending to underestimate their IQs. Perhaps this is because it requires intelligence to understand intelligence.
I think Google has only guaranteed free internet for 7 years. Without adjusting for inflation, that $300 'construction fee' amortized over the guaranteed free period works out to be about $3.57/month.
So, he's a manager (VP Engineering) and it appears he thinks he's not a very good engineering manager (since such beasts don't exist in his view). So why does he think anyone would care about the views of an inferior engineering manager on what constitutes a good engineering manager? Very odd argument he has here!
And, he's not correct. Good engineering managers are hard to find, just as good engineers are. But, to assume that the only reason someone would go into management is because they can't cut it as an engineer is naive. It's not unusual for people to be very good at something but actually prefer to do something else (which they may also be very good at). I, for example, am very good at a wide variety of menial tasks (washing windows, vacuuming and the like) because I am careful, through, and have high standards for doing a job well - however I avoid doing them whenever possible because I really prefer to do other things that I'm also good at.
The "new look" is great for those who prefer whitespace to content. But, of course, why would anyone be browsing/. if they really cared about content so perhaps there's at least some logic to the new layout facet of Beta.
And, no, I won't contribute to the spam by saying "fuck beta" as that would probably cause me to lose Karma.
"Modest needs" includes those expenses associated with being married and having a rug rat or two and saving for retirement. Of course, sometimes a developer's spouse makes a lot more money so that can reduce the compensation level required to meet modest needs - perhaps down to zero. BTW, I'm in no way suggesting that developers should not seek pay above their modest needs or that employers should try to keep salaries down to a level just covering their developer's modest needs -- the market will decide if compensation is above or below a particular individual's modest needs.
However, most great developers I've worked with don't have extravagant needs and as long as those needs are met, they are likely to value the nature of the work more than salary (within reason of course).
Of course, those managers should be replaced (first level managers should always have been passionate programmers at some point in their career, else it's almost impossible for them to do their job correctly).
However, developers also need to understand that in the commercial world the reason that most projects they are working on exist is to make the company money -- after all, that's where the money comes from to pay them. Rarely is a significant commercial project created and staffed just to entertain developers.
Some of the "poisons" you mention are usually required to some extent if a significant sized project is going to be as successful in the long term as it could be. Professional commercial developers, both those that are passionate and those that are not, recognize this.
For example, coding conventions make it easier for other developers over the coming years (or even decades) to grok code quickly - making their work faster and less error prone. On the average, a line of code in a successful project will be read many more times than it is modified and probably by many more developers so a trivial "inconvenience" or "stifling of personal expression" imposed on the code author/modifier is well worth the long term benefits of consistency. Of course, coding conventions should be as crisp as possible and should be tolerant of "violations" for special circumstances that other professionals would generally agree with for that case. I hate when I have to debug/understand/modify a module where the original implementation used camel case member names, the next substantial modification added underscore separated word member naming, the next substantial modifications used all lowercase "run together" member naming, and somewhere along the line someone prepended 'm_' to the members they added. In such cases, when debugging, I have to remember if a member was named bytesLeft, bytes_left, bytesleft or BytesLeft (or all of those prepended with an 'm_') - most likely, I end up wasting a few seconds here and there because I did forget which style was used for 'bytes left' since I last used it a couple days ago. As well, when I add a new member to a class with a mishmash of member naming conventions, I have to think about which of the existing ones to adopt (the most recently added?, the most prevalent in the class?, whatever I felt like doing that day?). In the long term, reasonable coding conventions save time for relatively little cost -- sort of like getting a flu vaccination (your arm may be slightly sore for a day or two every year, but you may go for decades without ever suffering for days with a flu).
Documentation is similar. Appropriately detailed design documentation allows more architectural/design flaws or improvements to be identified early because more experts can reasonably review the design before time has been spent writing code that needs to be reworked or customer commitments aren't met because an obscure concurrency bug that is architectural in nature was found late in system test and the product was delayed requiring that (unhappy) customers change their plans. Appropriate user/administrator level documentation is also critical and saves time in the long run for many projects -- it saves calls to the support line, it improves the training materials for customers as well as internal employees, and it results in a more knowledgeable support staff able to handle cases rather than escalate them to engineering. All of these get customer issues resolved, on the average, earlier and at less cost. Although, in most cases, I personally don't think developers should generally be writing the end user/administrator docs -- professional tech writers should be doing so from the (updated) functional design docs because it's rare that good developers like to write such docs and, more importantly, it's rare that they are very competent at it.
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I fully support this, but somehow we need to identify people who do/don't make that decision by not buying insurance (or proving semi-liquid assets sufficient to cover the first hours of emergency care). This is so 911, ERs, and the government can know not to respond or care for such people.
Obviously, if a private hospital chooses to provide care they are free to do so but there should be no law requiring ER care for those making that choice. Presumably those hospitals choosing to provide such care either have donations to cover it or would end up pricing themselves out of the market because they have to amortize the cost of the uncompensated care over the paying customers.
I'm a big fan of "desk checks". I find bugs in my own code when I do them - some of them are stupid bugs which I would have certainly found in testing (desk checking just catches them earlier and more economically), others are obscure ones (often race conditions) that might, or might not, actually be seen in the wild and some I would have been unlikely to find in testing (and QA would have even less chance of catching).
However, even among some oldsters who are relatively skilled, I find most developers are very bad at desk checking their own code. They think their shit smells good and can't detach themselves from their belief that since the author of the code is (in their not so humble opinion) a genius who, therefore, wouldn't write anything but perfect code. Doing it well requires a certain mindset. If I don't find any bugs when desk checking a significant body of code I've written, I assume I'm being sloppy and redouble my efforts and focus -- and if I find a bug in testing, I ask myself why I didn't catch it in desk checking (sometimes there's a good reason -- such as an API I'm calling doesn't work as advertised or I misunderstood the API and there's not much desk checking will do to catch those cases efficiently).
(BTW, "desk checking" really doesn't require paper and pencil anymore IMHO - I find a few IDE windows w/search et al features makes the process much easier and more thorough for me.)
Why do they not want to "fix healthcare.gov"? Because that's an uninteresting, almost clerical, job made worse by being part of a messy government procurement system. I can't think of any developers that want to do that sort of work -- been done already thousands of times (usually, of course, much better than HealthCare.gov). Most would only do it to pay the mortgage. Of course, the good developers can find something more interesting to do with less bureaucratic pain inflicted on them in the process.
The systems will require maintenance, periodic testing, and failure diagnosis. Also, it's likely that some sort of upgrades would be required over a 30 year service period.
Deploying these widely would also require maintaining the Iridium system indefinitely (rarely is a "safety feature" eliminated once instituted).
Characterizing it as "one time only" cost is not accurate although I have no idea what recurring costs would be.
Not much hope.
Anyone even modestly successful in the IT industry, by the time they are thirty, knows way too much about the real world and consequences for their actions to get elected to any office at the level of US Senator or POTUS. It would just be too hard to wipe your brain of reality (unless, perhaps, you suffered a tragic brain injury of some sort).
Well, that doesn't bother me at all - PowerPoint and Computer Science (even when what the class means by Computer Science is actually Programming) are as related as washing cars is related to designing engines, transmissions, and suspension systems.
Now, that is horrifying.
A question I ask often (and get lambasted for because it's "politically incorrect").
We (the US and the entire world) must find an answer to this. The industrial revolution provided jobs for those displaced from agriculture by steam tractors and the like. This time, automation is replacing the humans both through directly replacing them and by "self serve" which is just more efficient than the "full serve" model (web retailers, self checkout, self serve gas stations). There doesn't seem to be anywhere for the lesser IQ people to go.
The worst thing we can do is ignore the problem and have lesser IQ produce a disproportionate number of lesser IQ offspring (the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be educated and the less likely you are to have even "replacement" children, let alone a brood). Perhaps we address this by offering aid but at a decreasing rate depending on how many offspring the person has had (broad DNA databases would probably be required to implement this along with free and easy optional sterilization and other forms of birth control). Quite messy.
So, it sounds like the oil is sequestered under rocks. Sure, things that once lived under those particular rocks may not do well, but the oil is obviously being kept out of the broader environment. Eventually bacteria will transform the sequestered sludge into something that's fairly harmless and that will eventually disperse. Meanwhile the 99.9999% of the organisms of the type that lived under those rocks, but didn't actually live under those specific rocks, will go on as if nothing has happened.
Seems like a good outcome.
Sure, it would have been better if the tanker hadn't crashed, but it did - time to move on after (as has been done) reducing the chances of similar environmental impact in the future (now, if we could just due that for cruise ships in Italy).
I see your triple hull and raise you - quadruple hull should be required.
At some point, of course, the tanker will be carrying one quart of crude and tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel to power the ship that carts that precious quart of crude around with "ultimate" safety. Occasionally the ship will crash and release all of its diesel fuel, but that quart of crude that is in the container with 20 one foot layers of stainless steel tanks around it will survive and won't sully a rock somewhere.
Perhaps we should assess every person (and their heirs if they are no longer alive) who bought gasoline from Exxon over the prior 20 years an annual surcharge. After all, they presumably benefited in the form of lower prices derived from Exxon (and most everyone else) not using more collision resistant tankers. These people should have, instead, sought out the most ecologically friendly oil company's products - they instead chose to bury their heads in the sand and go with the lowest cost gasoline and were a substantial beneficiary of Exxon's judgement to use today's (at the time) technology instead of refusing to ship oil until they had purchased and deployed better technology.
(See how this works?)
You do realize that IBM really is an international company and has a lot of US employees don't you? If they hired only American workers, using your logic, every other country would refuse to let IBM sell products in their country. This, of course, would require IBM (and Apple, and GE, and Facebook, and Google, and Intel, and AMD, and...) to split into two independent companies - the US company and the International company. The former would sell overpriced and lame (due to the lack of volume/revenue from the local market to spend on R&D) products to the US. The latter would develop innovative products and sell them to the rest of the first world and the developing economies - and this would be good how?
One interesting question is, what percentage of revenue and profit come from the US market and what percentage of employe salaries and benefits goes to IBM's US employees. Certainly if that is around "in balance" there's little room for complaint (many years ago, I looked at this when they were publishing numbers of employees and revenue by region and it was clear that the US employees were sucking money out of other countries - but I have no idea how it is now and if it's just correcting for past abuses of feathering US employee's nests at the expense of unemployment in other countries).
That depends on state laws. Commonly, a landlord is only allowed to enter a unit they rent to the tenant for their exclusive use for an appropriate reason at reasonable times with reasonable notice. Rules are likely to be different for situations like short term transient housing or boarders. Some jurisdictions may, or may not, let the tenant explicitly grant the landlord more access in the contract.
Remember, the landlord rented or leased the property to the tenant for the tenant's use - by doing so, the landlord has relinquished some control and use of the property in exchange for valuable consideration (the rent!). It's not unlike a dealer leasing a car to you for three years - as long as you make the payments and comply with other aspects of the contract, the dealer can't just decide one morning that he's going to use the car for a couple of days to haul steer manure from the nursery without your permission "because it's his car".
Appropriate reasons for entry include maintenance and repairs either initiated by the landlord or by the tenant. An annual inspection or showing the unit to prospective tenants or property buyers may be an appropriate reason. But the courts in jurisdictions I've lived in would be unlikely to consider weekly inspections of a residential property leased to the tenant for one year to be appropriate barring some extraordinary circumstances.
Reasonable times may be only during business hours or from 8AM to 6PM or something like that for non emergency cases - for true emergencies like a major water leak, any time of day or night is probably usually reasonable.
Reasonable notice varies, but for non emergencies, some jurisdictions require 24 hour written notice. Again, for true emergencies, no notice may be required beyond a knock on the door.
Check your local laws -- some regions are much more "tenant friendly" than others and the laws vary quite a bit across the US.
I think that Illinois_v._Rodriguez allows the evidence to be admitted if the police had a reasonable belief that the person consenting actually has authority over the property even if, later, that belief is shown to be incorrect.
I also don't believe there is any requirement that the person giving consent be on the lease/title -- for example, if someone lives there, they can consent to a police search of any area they have legal access to (such as any common area they are allowed to use/frequent).
But, of course, check with a lawyer before acting on any of this as IANAL.
No.
A landlord can't give consent for the police to search a space that you have rented for your exclusive use. They can enter without your consent in case of an emergency (fire, gas leak, water leak, etc), but a simple request by the police to search is not an emergency. Some easy to read sources.
Do note however, as a private actor, a landlord entering your unit legally (or even illegally, but then they would risk being subject to civil and/or criminal consequences for the entry), can observe that you've got a meth lab inside, go to the police and tell them this, and the police can probably easily get a warrant to search because they now have cause. Actually, even if the landlord took (i.e., stole) something of yours from your apartment (such as a gun used in a murder), they can turn it over to the police and it can be used as evidence against you (again, they would risk being subject to civil and/or criminal consequences for the theft). However, these actions on your landlord's part can not be done in coordination with the police. The Fourth Amendment only restricts law enforcement, not private actors.
That's only true for city driving and short trips - which of course is about all you are likely to use the Leaf for due to its range. There are roads where I have regularly driving a little above 93 MPH for most of an hour - sure, I'm passing cars, but every so often I have to slow down to merge right to let someone by (since I'm a courteous driver) whose headlights are gaining on me from a 1/2 mile back (I'm actually happy to let them by - it reduced my chance of getting a speeding ticket as if there's an cop around, they will usually get pulled over, not I). On these roads, I don't think going above 93MPH, at least on occasion, is "abnormal".
Smart people usually figure out how to solve their problems, so I assume not being poor is not very high on the priority list of those in your neighborhood -- and that's fine, but it's their decision.
However, since the state of Washington was guaranteed to vote for Obama (he carried Washington by almost 15% over the incompetent Republican candidate), smart people would have considered sending a message by voting for a third party candidate (perhaps Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Justice, Socialism and Liberation, or Socialist Workers) that better reflected their core principles rather than voting for big business Democrat who didn't need their vote to win. It's very strange that 80% of your neighborhood didn't think to do so given their superior intellect and instead made a conscious decision to waste their time and vote by voting to no effect (maybe that's why they are poor, they don't understand math or simple concepts like the Electoral College?).
However, I suspect it's more likely that the people in your neighborhood are not quite as smart as you think. Don't worry, it's a common failing for people of lower intelligence to overestimate their own intelligence and inaccurately estimate the intelligence of others. In fact, it's called the Downing effect which, oddly, results in people with lower IQs tending to overestimate their IQ and people with higher IQs tending to underestimate their IQs. Perhaps this is because it requires intelligence to understand intelligence.
I think Google has only guaranteed free internet for 7 years. Without adjusting for inflation, that $300 'construction fee' amortized over the guaranteed free period works out to be about $3.57/month.
Well, that's pretty close to reality, just a minor rephrasing is required to actually capture human nature:
So, he's a manager (VP Engineering) and it appears he thinks he's not a very good engineering manager (since such beasts don't exist in his view). So why does he think anyone would care about the views of an inferior engineering manager on what constitutes a good engineering manager? Very odd argument he has here!
And, he's not correct. Good engineering managers are hard to find, just as good engineers are. But, to assume that the only reason someone would go into management is because they can't cut it as an engineer is naive. It's not unusual for people to be very good at something but actually prefer to do something else (which they may also be very good at). I, for example, am very good at a wide variety of menial tasks (washing windows, vacuuming and the like) because I am careful, through, and have high standards for doing a job well - however I avoid doing them whenever possible because I really prefer to do other things that I'm also good at.
The "new look" is great for those who prefer whitespace to content. But, of course, why would anyone be browsing /. if they really cared about content so perhaps there's at least some logic to the new layout facet of Beta.
And, no, I won't contribute to the spam by saying "fuck beta" as that would probably cause me to lose Karma.
But, what would the viewers view if the contributors boycott?
Whoosh. (I didn't realize on /. I needed to use the HTML 99 tag <humor>. I will be more careful in the future.)
And you're also helping reduce unemployment. If everyone opted out, we would need more TSA agents. True grassroots stimulus!
"Modest needs" includes those expenses associated with being married and having a rug rat or two and saving for retirement. Of course, sometimes a developer's spouse makes a lot more money so that can reduce the compensation level required to meet modest needs - perhaps down to zero. BTW, I'm in no way suggesting that developers should not seek pay above their modest needs or that employers should try to keep salaries down to a level just covering their developer's modest needs -- the market will decide if compensation is above or below a particular individual's modest needs.
However, most great developers I've worked with don't have extravagant needs and as long as those needs are met, they are likely to value the nature of the work more than salary (within reason of course).
Of course, those managers should be replaced (first level managers should always have been passionate programmers at some point in their career, else it's almost impossible for them to do their job correctly).
However, developers also need to understand that in the commercial world the reason that most projects they are working on exist is to make the company money -- after all, that's where the money comes from to pay them. Rarely is a significant commercial project created and staffed just to entertain developers.
Some of the "poisons" you mention are usually required to some extent if a significant sized project is going to be as successful in the long term as it could be. Professional commercial developers, both those that are passionate and those that are not, recognize this.
For example, coding conventions make it easier for other developers over the coming years (or even decades) to grok code quickly - making their work faster and less error prone. On the average, a line of code in a successful project will be read many more times than it is modified and probably by many more developers so a trivial "inconvenience" or "stifling of personal expression" imposed on the code author/modifier is well worth the long term benefits of consistency. Of course, coding conventions should be as crisp as possible and should be tolerant of "violations" for special circumstances that other professionals would generally agree with for that case. I hate when I have to debug/understand/modify a module where the original implementation used camel case member names, the next substantial modification added underscore separated word member naming, the next substantial modifications used all lowercase "run together" member naming, and somewhere along the line someone prepended 'm_' to the members they added. In such cases, when debugging, I have to remember if a member was named bytesLeft, bytes_left, bytesleft or BytesLeft (or all of those prepended with an 'm_') - most likely, I end up wasting a few seconds here and there because I did forget which style was used for 'bytes left' since I last used it a couple days ago. As well, when I add a new member to a class with a mishmash of member naming conventions, I have to think about which of the existing ones to adopt (the most recently added?, the most prevalent in the class?, whatever I felt like doing that day?). In the long term, reasonable coding conventions save time for relatively little cost -- sort of like getting a flu vaccination (your arm may be slightly sore for a day or two every year, but you may go for decades without ever suffering for days with a flu).
Documentation is similar. Appropriately detailed design documentation allows more architectural/design flaws or improvements to be identified early because more experts can reasonably review the design before time has been spent writing code that needs to be reworked or customer commitments aren't met because an obscure concurrency bug that is architectural in nature was found late in system test and the product was delayed requiring that (unhappy) customers change their plans. Appropriate user/administrator level documentation is also critical and saves time in the long run for many projects -- it saves calls to the support line, it improves the training materials for customers as well as internal employees, and it results in a more knowledgeable support staff able to handle cases rather than escalate them to engineering. All of these get customer issues resolved, on the average, earlier and at less cost. Although, in most cases, I personally don't think developers should generally be writing the end user/administrator docs -- professional tech writers should be doing so from the (updated) functional design docs because it's rare that good developers like to write such docs and, more importantly, it's rare that they are very competent at it.