Governments do have a role in money systems. The Dutch Central Bank is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, and it's interesting to note that the first 30 years were spent trying to establish faith in paper money. Once this had happened it opened the way for some much needed liquidity in the economy and a lot more economic activity happened as a result of that.
In the 11th century the Vikings raided the monasteries. This provided a much-needed economic boost once the gold came into circulation again. With paper money you NEVER have an end to circulation: you can always print more as needed. So it is very useful if you want to have some influence over the economy to have a currency that you can control. And this has very little to do with "governments being evuhl" and a lot with governments being the "management board of capitalism".
Crises, finally, are not caused by misallocation of funds, but by a lack of return on investment in every sector. *This* causes misallocation of funds as capitalists (sorry: investors) then become desperate for ROI and start to invest in tulips, bad loans and Zynga shares. Eventually that collapses, leaving everyone with worthless stuff, companies go bankrupt and the system is rationalized once again. ROI is restored by companies that are able to buy out their competitors for an apple and an egg, and things start anew.
I do have disagreements with the author - money and contracts are not the same, for instance, and while the choice of distribution of money is political most countries have a central bank that does this, usually outside direct political control - invalidating at least part of the thesis as I see it. But I doubt its complete nonsense.
considering an independent Scotland may have been in the Eurozone at that time,
You can stop considering that. The EU already said "not bloody likely" they're going to be allowed membership as independent state. Unless they also have an army, navy and airforce.
Buying stocks or even the products of a company that supports Greenies is not a responsible act.
And buying the stocks of a company that ignores the law is somehow more responsible? Basically they were asking Tim Cook to ignore the federal mandates on green energy.
Even apart from that moronic idea, locally the number of datacenters we can actually place here in the country is now limited by the capacity of the grid. Doing small scale experiments on how to diminish that reliance, or even go off-grid on a large scale, is very likely to be a smart move. And that is not even taking into account the fact that in the country next door they are actually paying companies to use energy on days they have too much free energy (wind and solar). It makes the energy-intensive companies so competitive that a big one in this country has just gone bankrupt. Making sure that Apple retains an ability to mix and match between different energy providers is just sensible business, however you look at it.
Two points here I think: 1) Yes it is possible to build maintainable triggers - I'm doing it right now, as a matter of fact. However, it's certainly not my first choice since it's (a) hard to debug when they cascade and b) performance is hard to keep under control as they proliferate. Just look at Oracle's older products (or heck, look at Apex) and the huge amounts of triggers firing for even the most simple of tasks. It's a weed that you have to control rigourously or it will grow out and suffocate your software. It is NOT a best practice to use triggers if you can avoid them, they're a last resort if all other options are off the table.
2) Centralizing the business rules has a lot of repercussions beyond the technical side of things. Look at BeInformed's products for that. With proper definition of business rules, a good business rule engine can generate most CRUD-code from scratch, dynamically populating the screens with the required fields. BeInformed's latest product even generated the workflow at runtime, all business rule based. It was much more advanced than reactive. Unfortunately they invested too much and they're now up for grabs as they went under. As I understand it, SAP and Microsoft are fighting over the remains. Which is a much better buy than Reactive.
I'm sure you can find an edge case where some platform can't access the centralized business rule repository, or needs an exception. Or it becomes inflexible and unwieldy. Those are generally signs of failing organizational processes, not technical issues.
That said, there's another point: why can't databases integrate with business rule engines? We're still stuck with constraints from the 60's, even Domain-Key constraints have to be programmed instead of declared. Databases could leap forward if they would deal properly with time, versioning, and business rules. Instead, we get slightly higher marks on the TP benchmarks. That's useless.
It was actually the Dutch intelligence service that handed over the telephone data of 1.8 million phone calls to the NSA. The responsible minister barely survived in parliament last week. As it turns out, none of the leaders in the EU advocate spying on their own citizens... but handing over all the data to another service and getting back the interesting tidbits, now that's different. While they decry the NSA in public, in private most intelligence services have similar programs running.
There are a lot of reasons why the USA was the "good guys" in the Cold War as far as the EU was concerned - but I think that if you were to ask around in South America there won't be a lot of people thinking back fondly on the good old days, what with the US laying mines in civil harbours, the CIA openly sponsoring coups right, left and center, and all. In the EU the USA had to win the propaganda war versus the Warsaw pact. You don't do that by openly showing your skull-and-bones flag. Apart from that, a lot of people sincerely believed they were the good guys and acted like it. I think that the Snowden files have damaged that image beyond repair.
Of course encryption would solve things. However, encryption would make it more difficult for her OWN intelligence service to spy on the citizens. That would be... double plus ungood.
The U.S. can do very much to an European citizen. Putting him on a no-fly list. Outbidding his company by tipping his bids to their own company. Stealing trade secrets and contract details to competitors. Damaging his reputation by disclosing secrets he has to keep to interesting parties. Letting some accidental data breach happen.
Yes, I'm sure those things will have an impact on 99% of all EU citizens... Since we all regularly fly to the US doing business versus US competitors. Not.
Your own government doing this is much more dangerous than any other government: google "schleppnetzfahndung" and "berufsverbot" for nice examples of Germany in the 70's versus the trade unions, dissidents, journalists... they ruined the reputation of hundreds of thousands of people who just didn't toe the line. And it didn't just happen in Germany, lots of examples of EU governments doing stuff like that. Hell, the Greek government only recently removed the requirement that your religion has to be on the passport.
I'm not a fan of what the NSA has been doing, but let's be clear here: it was with full knowledge and cooperation of most EU intelligence services.
Socialists say: "the enemy is at home". I find that to be more prophetic every time I read the news, lately.
And if you want to get rich, get a contract that says you get one million dollar every time you fart.
No one will sign contracts like that. Photographers, especially college kids, are cheap and plentiful. There's no need to pay them more than beer money.
In the industrial revolution in the UK there weren't actually many workers with dark skin working in the factories. So for most factory workers, it literally was "everybody" who had fair skin. It wasn't until much later that migrants entered the UK and other European countries. Funny enough, that also had a link with the growth of tourism, because both depended on cheap(er) mass travel.
It's a classic case of people absorbing the ideas of the rulers.
The desire for darker skin grew with the onset of the industrial revolution. factory workers didn't see much light so everybody had fair skin - and vitamine D deficiency as well. Remember rachitis - the "English disease"? Combine that with the growth of tourism in the sixties as people became more affluent, and they wanted to look not like a downtrodden factory worker, but as someone who could afford to move to a warmer climate during the summer. That took serious money back then.
We believe it just as much as Americans believe that we routinely kill off the elderly in The Netherlands (*), smoke dope all day while walking around on wooden shoes, all while tending to our tulips:)
(*) We do, but only on special, state-appointed holidays.
Unless you think solving logical puzzles and doing calculations is just "rote memorization". Because that would mean that all of science is based on that, which would also indicate that they're on to something there if they go for that as well.
As an aside: rote memorization is an important part of learning anyway, since if you don't *know* when stuff happened, or what the base formulas are for something that took us 2000 years to develop, you're not going to just deduce them from the basics when you need them. You're not even going to know what you don't know. So the basis of learning is knowing what there is - then applying that with skill, intelligence and creativity.
My in-laws are Chinese. And while their educational system is still geared towards suppressing deviating opinions, right up into university, their students are quite able to keep up with Western students when they come over here to study (we met quite a few over the last years). Here, they find the hard part is not the knowledge - they can learn - but the "intelligent application of learned skills". Once they learn that as well (it's a thing you can learn), they still have the advantage of a huge pool of knowledge they can draw from, as well as the creative bits. And since these students are slowly replacing the teachers in China as well, you can bet the Chinese system will change as well. The Dragon is still just gearing up...
Now, an internet forum is not an "organization which endangers national or public security"
Actually, the legal justification for this is that the internet forum is the ONLY way in which these people meet, exchange ideas, put together timetables, and organize. Which means that the forum members are an organization and the forum is the embodiment of that organization.
While one can (and lots of people will!) certainly argue the point, it's not without merit. I don't condone *anything* the AIVD does, including this, because their main function is to protect the status quo and that only coincidentally happens to also protect some lives here and there, but to say they're outside the law is going a bit too fast. The law that pertains to this subject is very likely outdated and should be reviewed.
In The Netherlands, the reason the Chipcard had a lot of trouble and overruns was because of all the extra demands tacked onto it for tracking and tracing people. The basic functionality wasn't all that hard.
And now we also have the system where, if you have a birtday party with 10 kids, you basically have to stay at home or arrange for a whole bunch of cars, because for some reason a "group card" just doesn't seem possible. Tracking and tracing: the main driving force behind most IT-projects, it seems.
I stopped paying attention to copyright when the Disney extension was approved. It was robbery in broad daylight
On one hand, the EU got to screw over the Third World by keeping agriculture subsidized and tariff walls alive and kicking - leading to higher food prices in the EU and lack of a market outside of it - and on the other hand the US got to screw everyone else by AGAIN extending the copyright time up to a gazillion years after the author died "because of the children", or in reality, because of the copyright on Disney's moneymakers.
In both cases entertainers still got the short end of the straw. Disney doesn't really need it, and the people who need it are unlikely to profit from extended copyright *after their death* but still suffer all the extra provisions in copyright law. Like sampling - just ask the Verve.
Copyright was dead to me when it was no longer either fair, or reasonable. The government can try to enforce it's (in this case, literally) corrupt laws, and I will encrypt everything and give them the finger.
Slashdot Mirror
Governments do have a role in money systems. The Dutch Central Bank is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, and it's interesting to note that the first 30 years were spent trying to establish faith in paper money. Once this had happened it opened the way for some much needed liquidity in the economy and a lot more economic activity happened as a result of that.
In the 11th century the Vikings raided the monasteries. This provided a much-needed economic boost once the gold came into circulation again. With paper money you NEVER have an end to circulation: you can always print more as needed. So it is very useful if you want to have some influence over the economy to have a currency that you can control. And this has very little to do with "governments being evuhl" and a lot with governments being the "management board of capitalism".
Crises, finally, are not caused by misallocation of funds, but by a lack of return on investment in every sector. *This* causes misallocation of funds as capitalists (sorry: investors) then become desperate for ROI and start to invest in tulips, bad loans and Zynga shares. Eventually that collapses, leaving everyone with worthless stuff, companies go bankrupt and the system is rationalized once again. ROI is restored by companies that are able to buy out their competitors for an apple and an egg, and things start anew.
I do have disagreements with the author - money and contracts are not the same, for instance, and while the choice of distribution of money is political most countries have a central bank that does this, usually outside direct political control - invalidating at least part of the thesis as I see it. But I doubt its complete nonsense.
... our utterly grody stock control system that has a MySQL backend and needs to talk to our wanky CRM system written in fuck knows what.
Tell me how lambda calculus is really the same thing.
The CRM system is written using MS VB with Linq queries. That's how.
considering an independent Scotland may have been in the Eurozone at that time,
You can stop considering that. The EU already said "not bloody likely" they're going to be allowed membership as independent state. Unless they also have an army, navy and airforce.
Buying stocks or even the products of a company that supports Greenies is not a responsible act.
And buying the stocks of a company that ignores the law is somehow more responsible? Basically they were asking Tim Cook to ignore the federal mandates on green energy.
Even apart from that moronic idea, locally the number of datacenters we can actually place here in the country is now limited by the capacity of the grid. Doing small scale experiments on how to diminish that reliance, or even go off-grid on a large scale, is very likely to be a smart move. And that is not even taking into account the fact that in the country next door they are actually paying companies to use energy on days they have too much free energy (wind and solar). It makes the energy-intensive companies so competitive that a big one in this country has just gone bankrupt. Making sure that Apple retains an ability to mix and match between different energy providers is just sensible business, however you look at it.
Two points here I think:
1) Yes it is possible to build maintainable triggers - I'm doing it right now, as a matter of fact. However, it's certainly not my first choice since it's (a) hard to debug when they cascade and b) performance is hard to keep under control as they proliferate. Just look at Oracle's older products (or heck, look at Apex) and the huge amounts of triggers firing for even the most simple of tasks. It's a weed that you have to control rigourously or it will grow out and suffocate your software. It is NOT a best practice to use triggers if you can avoid them, they're a last resort if all other options are off the table.
2) Centralizing the business rules has a lot of repercussions beyond the technical side of things. Look at BeInformed's products for that. With proper definition of business rules, a good business rule engine can generate most CRUD-code from scratch, dynamically populating the screens with the required fields. BeInformed's latest product even generated the workflow at runtime, all business rule based. It was much more advanced than reactive. Unfortunately they invested too much and they're now up for grabs as they went under. As I understand it, SAP and Microsoft are fighting over the remains. Which is a much better buy than Reactive.
I'm sure you can find an edge case where some platform can't access the centralized business rule repository, or needs an exception. Or it becomes inflexible and unwieldy. Those are generally signs of failing organizational processes, not technical issues.
That said, there's another point: why can't databases integrate with business rule engines? We're still stuck with constraints from the 60's, even Domain-Key constraints have to be programmed instead of declared. Databases could leap forward if they would deal properly with time, versioning, and business rules. Instead, we get slightly higher marks on the TP benchmarks. That's useless.
It was actually the Dutch intelligence service that handed over the telephone data of 1.8 million phone calls to the NSA. The responsible minister barely survived in parliament last week. As it turns out, none of the leaders in the EU advocate spying on their own citizens... but handing over all the data to another service and getting back the interesting tidbits, now that's different. While they decry the NSA in public, in private most intelligence services have similar programs running.
There are a lot of reasons why the USA was the "good guys" in the Cold War as far as the EU was concerned - but I think that if you were to ask around in South America there won't be a lot of people thinking back fondly on the good old days, what with the US laying mines in civil harbours, the CIA openly sponsoring coups right, left and center, and all. In the EU the USA had to win the propaganda war versus the Warsaw pact. You don't do that by openly showing your skull-and-bones flag. Apart from that, a lot of people sincerely believed they were the good guys and acted like it. I think that the Snowden files have damaged that image beyond repair.
Sounds reasonable, just couldn't resist the Orwellian interpretation :)
I don't know about you, but if I communicate things in private I rarely use twitter. Or facebook.
I can picture this already. Sort of like how it would be happening in a Stainless Steel Rat novel :)
"Here is your mandatory super-secret one time pad, citizen! If you use this pad, all your mail is encrypted and impossible to break!"
"Oh, why thank you!"
Of course encryption would solve things. However, encryption would make it more difficult for her OWN intelligence service to spy on the citizens. That would be... double plus ungood.
Knowing Mrs Merkel's reputation, I'd say the blackjack and hookers quote is more plausible :)
They also have to avoid the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. Good luck with that.
The U.S. can do very much to an European citizen. Putting him on a no-fly list. Outbidding his company by tipping his bids to their own company. Stealing trade secrets and contract details to competitors. Damaging his reputation by disclosing secrets he has to keep to interesting parties. Letting some accidental data breach happen.
Yes, I'm sure those things will have an impact on 99% of all EU citizens... Since we all regularly fly to the US doing business versus US competitors. Not.
Your own government doing this is much more dangerous than any other government: google "schleppnetzfahndung" and "berufsverbot" for nice examples of Germany in the 70's versus the trade unions, dissidents, journalists... they ruined the reputation of hundreds of thousands of people who just didn't toe the line. And it didn't just happen in Germany, lots of examples of EU governments doing stuff like that. Hell, the Greek government only recently removed the requirement that your religion has to be on the passport.
I'm not a fan of what the NSA has been doing, but let's be clear here: it was with full knowledge and cooperation of most EU intelligence services.
Socialists say: "the enemy is at home". I find that to be more prophetic every time I read the news, lately.
And if you want to get rich, get a contract that says you get one million dollar every time you fart.
No one will sign contracts like that. Photographers, especially college kids, are cheap and plentiful. There's no need to pay them more than beer money.
CGI probably has documentation on a large number of pretty bad decisions by the officials involved, so I doubt they'd lose the case.
It could've also meant to be a +2 Hilarious! but I haven't seen that either :)
Try this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_tanning
In the industrial revolution in the UK there weren't actually many workers with dark skin working in the factories. So for most factory workers, it literally was "everybody" who had fair skin. It wasn't until much later that migrants entered the UK and other European countries. Funny enough, that also had a link with the growth of tourism, because both depended on cheap(er) mass travel.
It's a classic case of people absorbing the ideas of the rulers.
The desire for darker skin grew with the onset of the industrial revolution. factory workers didn't see much light so everybody had fair skin - and vitamine D deficiency as well. Remember rachitis - the "English disease"? Combine that with the growth of tourism in the sixties as people became more affluent, and they wanted to look not like a downtrodden factory worker, but as someone who could afford to move to a warmer climate during the summer. That took serious money back then.
We believe it just as much as Americans believe that we routinely kill off the elderly in The Netherlands (*), smoke dope all day while walking around on wooden shoes, all while tending to our tulips :)
(*) We do, but only on special, state-appointed holidays.
From the people who yesterday gave us that Gothenburg is the capital of Sweden, now comes the news that Shanghai is a country.
Knowing the Shanghai-na, I'm pretty sure they'd agree with this assessment :)
I'm going to quote the reply from ShanghaiBill to a similar comment in the thread above this one:
Baloney. Have you even looked at the test? Here are some example questions http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/03/are-you-smarter-than-a-15-year-old-oecd-pisa-questions [the guardian]. The questions involve a lot more than "rote memorization".
Unless you think solving logical puzzles and doing calculations is just "rote memorization". Because that would mean that all of science is based on that, which would also indicate that they're on to something there if they go for that as well.
As an aside: rote memorization is an important part of learning anyway, since if you don't *know* when stuff happened, or what the base formulas are for something that took us 2000 years to develop, you're not going to just deduce them from the basics when you need them. You're not even going to know what you don't know. So the basis of learning is knowing what there is - then applying that with skill, intelligence and creativity.
My in-laws are Chinese. And while their educational system is still geared towards suppressing deviating opinions, right up into university, their students are quite able to keep up with Western students when they come over here to study (we met quite a few over the last years). Here, they find the hard part is not the knowledge - they can learn - but the "intelligent application of learned skills". Once they learn that as well (it's a thing you can learn), they still have the advantage of a huge pool of knowledge they can draw from, as well as the creative bits. And since these students are slowly replacing the teachers in China as well, you can bet the Chinese system will change as well. The Dragon is still just gearing up...
Now, an internet forum is not an "organization which endangers national or public security"
Actually, the legal justification for this is that the internet forum is the ONLY way in which these people meet, exchange ideas, put together timetables, and organize. Which means that the forum members are an organization and the forum is the embodiment of that organization.
While one can (and lots of people will!) certainly argue the point, it's not without merit. I don't condone *anything* the AIVD does, including this, because their main function is to protect the status quo and that only coincidentally happens to also protect some lives here and there, but to say they're outside the law is going a bit too fast. The law that pertains to this subject is very likely outdated and should be reviewed.
In The Netherlands, the reason the Chipcard had a lot of trouble and overruns was because of all the extra demands tacked onto it for tracking and tracing people. The basic functionality wasn't all that hard.
And now we also have the system where, if you have a birtday party with 10 kids, you basically have to stay at home or arrange for a whole bunch of cars, because for some reason a "group card" just doesn't seem possible. Tracking and tracing: the main driving force behind most IT-projects, it seems.
I stopped paying attention to copyright when the Disney extension was approved. It was robbery in broad daylight
On one hand, the EU got to screw over the Third World by keeping agriculture subsidized and tariff walls alive and kicking - leading to higher food prices in the EU and lack of a market outside of it - and on the other hand the US got to screw everyone else by AGAIN extending the copyright time up to a gazillion years after the author died "because of the children", or in reality, because of the copyright on Disney's moneymakers.
In both cases entertainers still got the short end of the straw. Disney doesn't really need it, and the people who need it are unlikely to profit from extended copyright *after their death* but still suffer all the extra provisions in copyright law. Like sampling - just ask the Verve.
Copyright was dead to me when it was no longer either fair, or reasonable. The government can try to enforce it's (in this case, literally) corrupt laws, and I will encrypt everything and give them the finger.