So is it okay for me to come into your house, sit on your couch, sleep in your bed without your permission?
I didn't take your house. You still have the use of it.
Agreed it's not stealing. That's propaganda.
But, reasonable copyright exists to encourage creation of artistic works.
Our current system has turned mockingly unreasonable.
Personally, I don't get why their work is so privileged when the rest of society isn't paid everyday of the rest of their life and 70 years beyond for doing work.
I don't get paid for programs I wrote 15 years ago, doctors don't get paid for surgeries they performed 10 years ago, roadmakers do not get paid the rest of their lives for roads they built.
And I think while we would lose some creations (which require a lot of polishing), there would be plenty of creations (strong copyright seems to suppress creativity rather than enhance it. Its better for the artist but worse for society... and copyright was created to benefit society- not the artist.)
Look- do some research on historical population predictions.
They are lower- in some cases by as much as 250 million people lower- than actual population numbers.
We are in this fantasy land that population is going to top out at 12 billion by 2100. More likely it will be closer to 12.5 billion. Systems started breaking down on a global scale back in the 70's when the population was under 4 billion.
In every 1st world country there are sections of the population growing higher than the replacement rate. Those populations (with their pro birth values) will come to dominate the culture in a very short period.
If you invent something to make people not want kids- then people with those values will die out and people who are immune will not. Just picture big screen TV's and personal freedom from raising kids as "penicillin" or "insect resistant grain" and think of 7 billion humans as a bacteria or insect colony.
The only path which might put it off a bit longer would be fusion and directly manufacturing food. Real land needs time to recover and replenish. It can't support the population densities we have now. We are destroying topsoil that took a long time to create. Arable land in the world drops every year. http://one-simple-idea.com/Environment1.htm
"At the current rate of loss of 38,610 square miles per year of arable land, and even if the population didn't grow any larger, ALL arable land could be lost in only 310 years (12 million square miles / 38,610 square miles per year)!"
This is all a side topic to your point on carbs. I disagree carbs alone are nutritious enough to keep people healthy.
If I say, "The sky is blue" am I fantasizing that the sky being blue is a good thing?
No.
I'm saying "the bridge is out and the train will go over the cliff". You are talking about what we are going to feed people in the Dining car. That's all well and good, but it won't matter in the big picture.
And it's against the direction of correcting the problem-- stopping population growth and then rolling it back.
Your ideas on carbs are incomplete. People are very unhealthy on a carb only diet. If you reach a point where only carbs are the option, then people are going to be dying of wierd diseases or be so unhealthy that all you can do is warehouse them because they won't be capable of doing much beyound existing.
You must give them some oils, some vegetables and (usually) some meat. Not large quantities but some- because it's cheaper than vitamins.
You are dealing with exponential growth. The economics and logistics won't work regardless of what you do.
If the 1st world were to withdraw food aid, allow your local farmers to grow crops profitably, allow the population to stabilize at a supportable level, that would be a start.
There are some terrible implications to that statement so it's not going to happen.
End result- a massive die off in the next 50 years regardless of what we do. Nothing will prevent it. It's not just food- it's also water- increasingly brittle systems, a larger population of humans to breed more virulent diseases, insects resistant to genetically engineered crops, more expensive petroleum so pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers all become more expensive.
Any kind of world war will disrupt food delivery. Areas that are not self sufficient will suffer famine and disease very quickly.
It's not just the 3rd world, etc. It's the 1st world as well.
If we could make nutritional carbs which at a low cost that would solve the food problem. Rice and pasta are not nutritional so you need something else.
A lot of people will die / be unhealthy on any gluten based carb (wheat, maize, barley, to some extent oats). They are not adapted to gluten.
The current methods for raising carbs are artificial and as oil becomes more expensive will be unsustainable.
A lot of this talk is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic but I guess we keep trying until the plane hits the ground.
When I shifted my 2000kcal diet to low carbs, I lost 15 pounds. Same calories. Same exercise level. I just cut out bread potatoes and sugar. The benefits of low carb diets for losing weight goes back to at least th 1920's.
Also, gluten is really bad for a lot of people ( miserable at the list- early death is on the list). Wheat gluten is particularly bad.
Red meat from range fed cattle has much healthier meat and fat. It's like the difference between wild caught salmon (very nutricious) and farm raised salmon (very low in nutrition).
Consuming red meat of either kind with moderate amounts wine cleanses the arteries of the fat. Red wine has more anti-oxidants.
Red meat studies are based on farm raised cattle which are fed antibiotics and also have a higher level of estrogen like pesticides along with other chemicals.
OTH, range fed cattle is bloody expensive. Your organic dollars are better spent on the "dirty dozen" vegetables if you have limited cash.
No- Afganistan was not an oil issue as far as I can see. The primary reason for attacking Afganistan was Alqaeda was based there and the Taliban was protecting it.
If you recall, Bush said he would not distinguish between terrorists and nations that harbored them.
Doesn't matter whether we receive it or not. The question is why were we involved in Iraq. And it was mainly oil.
For a more recent example- How much do you think it is costing us per day to keep the navy (tens of millions) in the Strait of Hormuz. Think they would be there if it wasn't an oil conduit?
How expensive would oil be if the oil companies had to pay the bill for that military protection?
Over population is the root problem that is ignored/shouted down.
There is no need to have no children (as one of your anonymous reponders replies). Just have 1 child for one generation and then return to 2.1 children and population of the earth drops below 4 billion in about 40 years.
The oceans replenish, land recovers.
The economy absolutely crashes but products are plentiful.
---
With overpopulation we destroy the fisheries (already happening), increase the chances of a pandemic, have increasingly fragile complex food and energy delivery systems ( if we have a world war that interrupts shipping now, billions would die).
The environment is increasingly polluted, the water supply is exhausted to the point that the oceans become more saline, all assets are exhausted faster.
---
The specific cause can't be known- but something real bad happens within 50 years. I hope I'm dead by then.
And the kicker is - there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop it at this point. It's like we are locked in a train headed towards a canyon where the bridge is out. Everything seems fine for now.
Okay... here are the facts http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/ One recent comprehensive study of U.S. energy subsidies (see graph below) identified $72.5 billion in federal subsidies for fossil fuels between 2002-2008, or just over $10 billion annually. For more information on the range of subsidies, see below.
And that ignores over a Trillion dollars in military spending in Iraq- which would have NEVER HAPPENED if Iraq lacked oil.
Don't forget the massive subsidies for oil- over a trillion dollars spent in Iraq which would not have been spent if Iraq did not have oil.
In addition to straightforward subsidies, the oil industry also has access to substantial US military aid. Even when it's not being used directly, it's being paid for to sit around ready to use.
On the flip side- China's subsidies to solar go beyond subsidies to get the industry started and are so large that they are essentially an attempt to destroy solar industries in other countries.
If we had to pay the true cost for coal, nuclear, wind, oil, then solar would be an expensive option. I consider it every year. I'm likely to go partial solar soon. My highest electrical bills are when the sun is out the longest. I don't need batteries- I just need something to run the A/C and fridge during the day.
With the dollar dropping by half in value, they've lost 500 billion dollars in purchasing power.
They do this to keep products cheap enough to sell to the US so they population has work and won't get antsy. They build empty cities for similar reasons (well actually I can't comprehend exactly why they build empty cities and empty buildings- it seems goofy).
China being a huge country is not an asset, it's a liability.
They do have a good legal lock on assets- but many of those assets are only rare at the current prices. As soon as rare earth prices go up 50%, millions of tons of rare earth can come on line- including a huge mine in the US.
About the time they stop building empty cities, the demand for copper and other building materials is going to drop through the floor.
--
The US leadership class appears to have lost it and descended into greed.
-- The true threat to the work is not china or the US but the corporations and the top 1%. And it's almost certainly two decades too late to do anything about it.
GPS can be spoofed now. It can't be long before wide spread spoofing and jamming takes place. Seems like they'll have to go back to navigating by landmarks. Perhaps they could use something like google earth that scans and recognizes the terrain where they are.
Good response. I'll try to stop frothing at the mouth!
1) He did it secretly so he wasn't subject to the same government enforced audit rules on the data as IT was/is. After the program was delivered to a few dozen customers the company found out and moved him and the program inside the business to protect itself legally. 2) He wrote it specifically for the palm handheld model sold in 2004-2005 with a very particular barcode device. 3) He wrote it specifically for Windows XP. 4) He wrote it on his own time so it was "free" but it took him several months. 5) He wasn't subject to any change control or documentation discipline. 6) He did pretty well on avoiding hard coding but... 7) He wrote the desktop portion in vb6 which quickly went out of support. 8) He didn't coordinate his activities with any other inventory/ar/order entry department. When we went to a new backend- it was a mess. 9) After it passed a few dozen customers- he couldn't support it and the support was dumped on IT. Who had to train up a full time employee (over $100k per year with benefits) to support the application.
For the light stuff- we have report builders and so on for users to do their thing. Then you discover they've written a major accounting package secretly in excel which isn't scaling and they need help. They leave for the holiday or at 5pm to go to the party and expect IT to work over time/on holidays to figure out just why their excel program isn't communicating with the backend after the latest excel/windows/OS patch.
Doing it right and supporting it for 8 years is much more challenging than whipping up a drupal web site which won't matter in 8 months.
Understanding when it is a key business practice that must work in 8 years vs a one off is something the user's lack the ability to understand.
They don't care about the mess they leave behind.
Something written in a language or tool or operating system which is having significant upgrades every 2 years is not going to be supportable.
You like it so much- YOU support it. You stay up there on christmas day, over night to support the app you created.
You are probably the same user who comes with a project that is going to require 300 hours of work and says you promised it to the customer by two weeks from now. You COULD have asked us how long it would take. You expect us to work nights and weekends to deliver the product. You get the bonus- we get the shaft.
IT needs to find a way to charge sales people the true cost of these custom one-off's. Then perhaps salespeople would be more motivated to use standard processes.
And the end result is that his hand held inventory system isn't supported and the customer is pissed off.
I agree on the bureaucracy-- especially since SOX came into the picutre.
A genuine, supportable product takes more work than something hacked together.
I wouldn't mind if support for the user stuff stayed WITH THE USER. But it hasn't. Repeatedly.
He did what he had to, the customers started using it, he left, now it doesn't work and it will take big bucks to continue support- if it's even possible- pretty much looks like it will have to be rewritten from scratch.
In my view, we should steer the customers to standard practices and those who do not like it can go elsewhere. It doesn't make sense to spend $100k to support a customer who returns a $20k per year profit.
It's clear to my management that all programmers are like a grey glorp which can be poured on any programming project and be equally productive.
In fact, when someone is MORE productive, management feels uncomfortable because they are now dependent on that person. So they want to externalize that person's knowledge and put in a new person to force the process.
But once the body of knowledge is large enough, it takes time to read, comprehend, and understand the documents around the process. And management gets really upset over the mistakes made for the first 6 months until you know the process (poorly).
Any complex area can take years (not "a year") to master.
Many technology areas change faster than a year now too. I do not think any serious business project should be done in those technologies. The support costs and risks are too high.
We suffer with this every day and I'm not even IN that kind of support area any more.
User starts using personal device. User develops key business practice on device. User leaves. Now it's MY problem to support the practice. (in my case it's a handheld inventory system- which doesn't work with windows 7, doesn't work on new hand held devices)
You should not develop ANYTHING you will use for more than 12 months on a device. Any permanent processes should be written in cobol or java.
Everything else changes too fast. The support costs become huge. You can't specialize in a gazillion specialize languages and so you can't support them when they don't work with build "XZY".
Be especially careful of anything that runs on user hardware and software- because you can't control it. They change from IE8 to IE10 preview edition and say FIXITFIXITFIXIT.
Re:Of course they back SOPA...
on
GoDaddy Backs SOPA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sox slows down productivity of mega corporations by a factor of 10.
What took 4 days in 2000 takes 40 days today.
We had a production emergency with a huge client today... it took FOUR HOURS to get permission for a programmer to debug the problem in production.
A few years back we had a 1 line change to a program. It took 47 days.
Both of these used to be much faster and easier.
I agree big companies can afford to pay the legal costs.
But they suffer invisible massive productivity costs.
And it does NOTHING to stop massive fraud (see MF Global).
Slashdot Mirror
So is it okay for me to come into your house, sit on your couch, sleep in your bed without your permission?
I didn't take your house. You still have the use of it.
Agreed it's not stealing. That's propaganda.
But, reasonable copyright exists to encourage creation of artistic works.
Our current system has turned mockingly unreasonable.
Personally, I don't get why their work is so privileged when the rest of society isn't paid everyday of the rest of their life and 70 years beyond for doing work.
I don't get paid for programs I wrote 15 years ago, doctors don't get paid for surgeries they performed 10 years ago, roadmakers do not get paid the rest of their lives for roads they built.
And I think while we would lose some creations (which require a lot of polishing), there would be plenty of creations (strong copyright seems to suppress creativity rather than enhance it. Its better for the artist but worse for society... and copyright was created to benefit society- not the artist.)
And you don't understand at all.
And it doesn't matter either way.
Peace out.
I can't go with my girlfriend any more. Too loud for her to bear.
One theater is getting to be too loud for me too. Approaching rock concert levels.
Look- do some research on historical population predictions.
They are lower- in some cases by as much as 250 million people lower- than actual population numbers.
We are in this fantasy land that population is going to top out at 12 billion by 2100. More likely it will be closer to 12.5 billion. Systems started breaking down on a global scale back in the 70's when the population was under 4 billion.
In every 1st world country there are sections of the population growing higher than the replacement rate. Those populations (with their pro birth values) will come to dominate the culture in a very short period.
If you invent something to make people not want kids- then people with those values will die out and people who are immune will not. Just picture big screen TV's and personal freedom from raising kids as "penicillin" or "insect resistant grain" and think of 7 billion humans as a bacteria or insect colony.
The only path which might put it off a bit longer would be fusion and directly manufacturing food. Real land needs time to recover and replenish. It can't support the population densities we have now. We are destroying topsoil that took a long time to create. Arable land in the world drops every year.
http://one-simple-idea.com/Environment1.htm
"At the current rate of loss of 38,610 square miles per year of arable land, and even if the population didn't grow any larger, ALL arable land could be lost in only 310 years (12 million square miles / 38,610 square miles per year)!"
This is all a side topic to your point on carbs. I disagree carbs alone are nutritious enough to keep people healthy.
If I say, "The sky is blue" am I fantasizing that the sky being blue is a good thing?
No.
I'm saying "the bridge is out and the train will go over the cliff". You are talking about what we are going to feed people in the Dining car. That's all well and good, but it won't matter in the big picture.
And it's against the direction of correcting the problem-- stopping population growth and then rolling it back.
Your ideas on carbs are incomplete. People are very unhealthy on a carb only diet. If you reach a point where only carbs are the option, then people are going to be dying of wierd diseases or be so unhealthy that all you can do is warehouse them because they won't be capable of doing much beyound existing.
You must give them some oils, some vegetables and (usually) some meat. Not large quantities but some- because it's cheaper than vitamins.
Based on....
Carbs are not enough.
You are dealing with exponential growth. The economics and logistics won't work regardless of what you do.
If the 1st world were to withdraw food aid, allow your local farmers to grow crops profitably, allow the population to stabilize at a supportable level, that would be a start.
There are some terrible implications to that statement so it's not going to happen.
End result- a massive die off in the next 50 years regardless of what we do. Nothing will prevent it. It's not just food- it's also water- increasingly brittle systems, a larger population of humans to breed more virulent diseases, insects resistant to genetically engineered crops, more expensive petroleum so pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers all become more expensive.
Any kind of world war will disrupt food delivery. Areas that are not self sufficient will suffer famine and disease very quickly.
It's not just the 3rd world, etc. It's the 1st world as well.
Agreed.
If we could make nutritional carbs which at a low cost that would solve the food problem. Rice and pasta are not nutritional so you need something else.
A lot of people will die / be unhealthy on any gluten based carb (wheat, maize, barley, to some extent oats). They are not adapted to gluten.
The current methods for raising carbs are artificial and as oil becomes more expensive will be unsustainable.
A lot of this talk is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic but I guess we keep trying until the plane hits the ground.
When I shifted my 2000kcal diet to low carbs, I lost 15 pounds. Same calories. Same exercise level. I just cut out bread potatoes and sugar. The benefits of low carb diets for losing weight goes back to at least th 1920's.
Also, gluten is really bad for a lot of people ( miserable at the list- early death is on the list). Wheat gluten is particularly bad.
Otherwise, I agree with what you are saying.
Red meat from range fed cattle has much healthier meat and fat. It's like the difference between wild caught salmon (very nutricious) and farm raised salmon (very low in nutrition).
Consuming red meat of either kind with moderate amounts wine cleanses the arteries of the fat. Red wine has more anti-oxidants.
Red meat studies are based on farm raised cattle which are fed antibiotics and also have a higher level of estrogen like pesticides along with other chemicals.
OTH, range fed cattle is bloody expensive. Your organic dollars are better spent on the "dirty dozen" vegetables if you have limited cash.
Google turned up this data:
http://www.eatwild.com/healthbenefits.htm
Notable comments:
Research shows that lean beef actually lowers your "bad" LDL cholesterol levels.[2]
Healthy fat (Omega 3) levels drop continuously in the feedlot down to zero after 200 days.
Vitamin E. In addition to being higher in omega-3s and CLA, meat from grassfed animals is also higher in vitamin E.
No- Afganistan was not an oil issue as far as I can see. The primary reason for attacking Afganistan was Alqaeda was based there and the Taliban was protecting it.
If you recall, Bush said he would not distinguish between terrorists and nations that harbored them.
Doesn't matter whether we receive it or not. The question is why were we involved in Iraq. And it was mainly oil.
For a more recent example- How much do you think it is costing us per day to keep the navy (tens of millions) in the Strait of Hormuz. Think they would be there if it wasn't an oil conduit?
How expensive would oil be if the oil companies had to pay the bill for that military protection?
Over population is the root problem that is ignored/shouted down.
There is no need to have no children (as one of your anonymous reponders replies). Just have 1 child for one generation and then return to 2.1 children and population of the earth drops below 4 billion in about 40 years.
The oceans replenish, land recovers.
The economy absolutely crashes but products are plentiful.
---
With overpopulation we destroy the fisheries (already happening), increase the chances of a pandemic, have increasingly fragile complex food and energy delivery systems ( if we have a world war that interrupts shipping now, billions would die).
The environment is increasingly polluted, the water supply is exhausted to the point that the oceans become more saline, all assets are exhausted faster.
---
The specific cause can't be known- but something real bad happens within 50 years. I hope I'm dead by then.
And the kicker is - there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop it at this point.
It's like we are locked in a train headed towards a canyon where the bridge is out. Everything seems fine for now.
Okay... here are the facts
http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/
One recent comprehensive study of U.S. energy subsidies (see graph below) identified $72.5 billion in federal subsidies for fossil fuels between 2002-2008, or just over $10 billion annually. For more information on the range of subsidies, see below.
And that ignores over a Trillion dollars in military spending in Iraq- which would have NEVER HAPPENED if Iraq lacked oil.
Don't forget the massive subsidies for oil- over a trillion dollars spent in Iraq which would not have been spent if Iraq did not have oil.
In addition to straightforward subsidies, the oil industry also has access to substantial US military aid. Even when it's not being used directly, it's being paid for to sit around ready to use.
On the flip side- China's subsidies to solar go beyond subsidies to get the industry started and are so large that they are essentially an attempt to destroy solar industries in other countries.
If we had to pay the true cost for coal, nuclear, wind, oil, then solar would be an expensive option. I consider it every year. I'm likely to go partial solar soon. My highest electrical bills are when the sun is out the longest. I don't need batteries- I just need something to run the A/C and fridge during the day.
China owns a trillion dollars worth of US debt.
With the dollar dropping by half in value, they've lost 500 billion dollars in purchasing power.
They do this to keep products cheap enough to sell to the US so they population has work and won't get antsy. They build empty cities for similar reasons (well actually I can't comprehend exactly why they build empty cities and empty buildings- it seems goofy).
China being a huge country is not an asset, it's a liability.
They do have a good legal lock on assets- but many of those assets are only rare at the current prices. As soon as rare earth prices go up 50%, millions of tons of rare earth can come on line- including a huge mine in the US.
About the time they stop building empty cities, the demand for copper and other building materials is going to drop through the floor.
--
The US leadership class appears to have lost it and descended into greed.
--
The true threat to the work is not china or the US but the corporations and the top 1%. And it's almost certainly two decades too late to do anything about it.
And neither is the rest of the world...
That's one of the human race's doomsday scenarios and it's 50 to 150 years out. We'll probably solve it somehow tho.
Overpopulation is the one that won't be solved.
This was my first thought too now.
GPS can be spoofed now. It can't be long before wide spread spoofing and jamming takes place. Seems like they'll have to go back to navigating by landmarks. Perhaps they could use something like google earth that scans and recognizes the terrain where they are.
Warner is selling those pictures for money.
I.e. Warner is selling the look and feel of LV bags to make money for Warner.
Good response. I'll try to stop frothing at the mouth!
1) He did it secretly so he wasn't subject to the same government enforced audit rules on the data as IT was/is. After the program was delivered to a few dozen customers the company found out and moved him and the program inside the business to protect itself legally.
2) He wrote it specifically for the palm handheld model sold in 2004-2005 with a very particular barcode device.
3) He wrote it specifically for Windows XP.
4) He wrote it on his own time so it was "free" but it took him several months.
5) He wasn't subject to any change control or documentation discipline.
6) He did pretty well on avoiding hard coding but...
7) He wrote the desktop portion in vb6 which quickly went out of support.
8) He didn't coordinate his activities with any other inventory/ar/order entry department. When we went to a new backend- it was a mess.
9) After it passed a few dozen customers- he couldn't support it and the support was dumped on IT. Who had to train up a full time employee (over $100k per year with benefits) to support the application.
For the light stuff- we have report builders and so on for users to do their thing.
Then you discover they've written a major accounting package secretly in excel which isn't scaling and they need help. They leave for the holiday or at 5pm to go to the party and expect IT to work over time/on holidays to figure out just why their excel program isn't communicating with the backend after the latest excel/windows/OS patch.
Well FIXITNOW, are you going to pay for the staff to fix it?
Because at my company- the business users don't.
If you want to write a custom process- then YOU come in on weekends, nights, holidays to support it when it breaks.
Doing it right and supporting it for 8 years is much more challenging than whipping up a drupal web site which won't matter in 8 months.
Understanding when it is a key business practice that must work in 8 years vs a one off is something the user's lack the ability to understand.
They don't care about the mess they leave behind.
Something written in a language or tool or operating system which is having significant upgrades every 2 years is not going to be supportable.
You like it so much- YOU support it. You stay up there on christmas day, over night to support the app you created.
You are probably the same user who comes with a project that is going to require 300 hours of work and says you promised it to the customer by two weeks from now. You COULD have asked us how long it would take. You expect us to work nights and weekends to deliver the product. You get the bonus- we get the shaft.
IT needs to find a way to charge sales people the true cost of these custom one-off's. Then perhaps salespeople would be more motivated to use standard processes.
And the end result is that his hand held inventory system isn't supported and the customer is pissed off.
I agree on the bureaucracy-- especially since SOX came into the picutre.
A genuine, supportable product takes more work than something hacked together.
I wouldn't mind if support for the user stuff stayed WITH THE USER. But it hasn't. Repeatedly.
He did what he had to, the customers started using it, he left, now it doesn't work and it will take big bucks to continue support- if it's even possible- pretty much looks like it will have to be rewritten from scratch.
In my view, we should steer the customers to standard practices and those who do not like it can go elsewhere. It doesn't make sense to spend $100k to support a customer who returns a $20k per year profit.
Now how can you believe that.
It's clear to my management that all programmers are like a grey glorp which can be poured on any programming project and be equally productive.
In fact, when someone is MORE productive, management feels uncomfortable because they are now dependent on that person. So they want to externalize that person's knowledge and put in a new person to force the process.
But once the body of knowledge is large enough, it takes time to read, comprehend, and understand the documents around the process. And management gets really upset over the mistakes made for the first 6 months until you know the process (poorly).
Any complex area can take years (not "a year") to master.
Many technology areas change faster than a year now too. I do not think any serious business project should be done in those technologies. The support costs and risks are too high.
Exactly.
We suffer with this every day and I'm not even IN that kind of support area any more.
User starts using personal device.
User develops key business practice on device.
User leaves.
Now it's MY problem to support the practice. (in my case it's a handheld inventory system- which doesn't work with windows 7, doesn't work on new hand held devices)
You should not develop ANYTHING you will use for more than 12 months on a device. Any permanent processes should be written in cobol or java.
Everything else changes too fast. The support costs become huge. You can't specialize in a gazillion specialize languages and so you can't support them when they don't work with build "XZY".
Be especially careful of anything that runs on user hardware and software- because you can't control it. They change from IE8 to IE10 preview edition and say FIXITFIXITFIXIT.
Sox slows down productivity of mega corporations by a factor of 10.
What took 4 days in 2000 takes 40 days today.
We had a production emergency with a huge client today... it took FOUR HOURS to get permission for a programmer to debug the problem in production.
A few years back we had a 1 line change to a program. It took 47 days.
Both of these used to be much faster and easier.
I agree big companies can afford to pay the legal costs.
But they suffer invisible massive productivity costs.
And it does NOTHING to stop massive fraud (see MF Global).
They did not restore the original flavor. It really wasn't even close.
As others here say-- get some coca cola with sugar in it.
I'll add, chill it to below 40 degrees and drink it from a chilled glass.
Heaven.