Whether we like "big evil corporations" or not we must keep one thing in mind: without them we have no job, no food, no infrastructure and not even a slashdot.
Hardly. People would survive just fine without big corporations. You'd just end up with more individuals and small-to-medium sized businesses making a living. I seriously doubt that jobs & food would be any worse off than currently.
The things that would be different would be: 1) stuff which requires insane amount of capitalization, such as massive chip-making foundries or huge construction projects - probably only the government would be able to afford stuff like this, and 2) the "mass" media would probably be a heckuva lot more diversified, since you wouldn't have the "homogenizing" effect that a large corporation would have.
With trickle-down economics, you have a large amount of money circulating among the individuals & entities which already have a lot of money, and the other elements of society get along with whatever happens to "leak" from that small club. To me, this seems like a very stagnant situation.
On the other hand, if those large flows of money are systemically injected as low in the financial "class" structure as possible (perhaps through really strong & inexpensive educational programs?), then I believe that there are MANY individuals who could take advantage of that kind of help, but who are currently regarded as non-productive members of society because they are "resource-starved" and can't get beyond a survival existence to really achieve their full potential.
I think that policies based on "trickle-up" economics would result in a much more dynamic & equal-opportunity-oriented society.
It's this kind of approach (setting up the system so that the "lower" entities in any system tend to get the benefits) that made me propose the above alternative.
Or are you in favor of taxing the same gains twice?
Well duh, that's why it's called an INCOME tax - the tax applies whenever anyone (supposedly including "legal entities" like corporations) makes any income!
How 'bout this, to avoid "double taxation" - eliminate the corporate loophole, make the corporation pay their proper share of the income tax, but allow the employees to get the income from their stock options tax-free? Uncle Sam is still getting his pound of flesh, right?
Oh right, that wouldn't be a proper application of trickle-down economics - my bad.
The tax code in the USA is more complex than the Win2000 codebase, and has twice as many bugs. I have lost any hope of a simplified tax code,...
This holds true for the entire US legal system, I think.
Too bad there wasn't anything in the Constitution that forced our representatives to keep consolidating the laws into something approaching common sense - I keep daydreaming about the general rule I heard about that one Scandinavian tribe followed: the only valid laws are those which most of the tribal members can recite orally by heart at their annual tribal meeting. Anything which most of the people forgot isn't a law anymore:)
My mother, in the process of changing long distance phone companies, ended up being charged by 3 different long distance phone companies (one slammer & one that refused to believe that she didn't want their service anymore). They were sending her collection notices before she got them to back down by sending her complaints copied to the FTC (Federal Trace Commission) and our local public utility commission (who were in the process of deciding whether they were going to let the local phone company offer high speed Internet access).
As for myself, I discovered that I was being charged for long distance even though I had canceled my land-based line & had gone completely cellular (which took care of those damn long-distance company telemarketers at the same time). The long distance "customer service" representative seemed to be quite annoyed that they couldn't make me keep the service w/o a phone line.
As long as these companies don't get punished for their "mistakes", they don't feel any need to improve their service - and the more mergers occur, the less they have to worry about somebody with better customer service. Too bad individuals can't fine them a few hundred bucks for each mistake - the resultant hemorraghing would probably make them clean up their act REAL fast.
I'm not sure that I've really liked the practice declaring perfectly good evidence "inadmissible" in court - the idea that a rapist, murderer or CEO could be legally freed (and immune to further prosecution for that crime because of the double-jeopardy rule) because the judge or jury has to "ignore" a real piece of evidence really annoys me.
It seems to me, that if even if the evidence was collected illegally, as long as there is a high degree of confidence of its authenticity (e.g., the law enforcement hasn't cooked it up to try and frame the suspect), then it should be used.
_BUT_, the individuals responsible for collecting that evidence illegally should be punished in proportion to the manner that the illegal collection was performed (if they tortured a suspect for instance, then they should be charged under a criminal offense like anybody who tortured another person).
Not sure what to do if you're not sure who collected the illegal evidence (anonymous tipsters) though.
All the desperate attempts to control what I want to listen to and/or watch drives me absolutely nuts.
The 14-year period specified in the original copyright law sounded pretty good. About the only modification I might suggest is something requiring that the listener/viewer always have a way of determining the creator(s) of the copyrighted work, even after the copyright has expired, with the criminal penalty of fraud if someone tries to pass off someone else's work as theirs.
I'm not sure I agree with this - somebody can steal some money from you, and then you know you're out that amount of money.
Once somebody starts distributing your private information though, that information can be spread through goddess-knows-how-many databases, mailing lists & whatnot, all w/o your knowledge or possibility of intervention. At least the money that was stolen from you is limited by its purchasing power - your private information can be copied & corrupted mercilessly.
(I guess this is the other edge of the two-edged sword of near zero-cost information-distribution - the same technology which enables MP3s & movies to be passed around as digital data allows organizations to collect & distribute our personal information just as easily.)
Actually, especially with the politicians & CEOs (and similar types), instead of kicking them out of the country, I want them around so that I can keep an eye on them and make sure they're not brewing up big trouble for the rest of us. If we kick them out of the country where we can't keep an eye on them, you just know that they'll be back as tin-pot dictators at the head of a brainwashed army of some sort.
I'd much rather put them into many "Big Brother"-style (which is amusing, considering the proposed occupants) houses & have them under constant surveillance, where the general population can watch them in morbid fascination & come to conclusions about how low elements of the human race can sink.
Heh - at the risk of being inflammatory (eh, who am I kidding - it's fun:), we ought to make room for some of these "productive" immigrants by deporting parasitic (doing more harm than good) elements of society.
It might be an interesting country if "citizenship" was based on merit rather than where you were born or who you were born to.
Actually, the people who are receiving these things (at least through the mail) don't just have an expectation that they own them - they actually DO own them, according to law.
It doesn't really matter what DC puts in their license agreement - unless the law is changed, those CueCats are the legal property of the people who received them.
Every time this subject comes up, I see a lot of people arguing about variations on a global moderation system - I keep wondering why nobody brings up the possibility of collaborative filtering.
Basic idea: allow everyone to mark whether or not they like particular articles and/or authors, then use that profile for each user to find the articles and/or authors that user is probably more interested in.
This is even more useful when you compare user's profiles against each other so that if two users have been marking messages/authors in such a way that their profiles are very similar, then when one of the users marks a message/author favorably, it automatically gets a higher rating for the other user (or down, if marked unfavorably).
In effect, each user will statistically get messages rated through a moderation scheme based on their own past history, and the history of other users who happen to agree with them.
So, how come this kind of filtering/moderation system is never discussed? Is it too computationally difficult to implement on a large scale?
I can imagine feeding this information into a "force feedback simulator", and watching those NFL couch potatoes get the crap slammed out of them with every on-screen impact.
I'd find that MUCH more entertaining than actually watching the game.
Typically, Asian people are a lot more self-sacrificing and willing to work for a group; they don't have the "looking out for number one" attitudes that most Western geeks do...
My mother's Korean, but I'm pretty much culturally US, so take my observations with a big grain of salt:)
From what I can tell by observation of my relatives & their associates (many Asian non-Koreans), it isn't so much that Asians are self-sacrificing & willing to work for a group.
Asian individuals are just as willing to jockey for power & stab each other in the back as their Western counterparts. There's a couple things that make Westerners feel uncomfortable though. First, there's definitely a touch of xenophobia in native Asians - even my mother, who has lived in the US for 30 years, feels more comfortable working with a complete Asian stranger than she does working with a Westerner that she might know a little better.
Second, there's the all-important concept of "face". It is a highly undesirable thing for one's self to "lose face" (look bad). One's "face" is often attached to the actions of family members as well, esp. if you are a family member of some importance. Also, by corollary, it is EXTREMELY bad manners to make someone else lose face.
So, what ends up happening, is you have a whole bunch of people being polite to each other so that they don't cause offense by causing the other to look like they're being disrespected. Most of the time, they won't even flat-out disagree with you, even if they think you're being an idiot, because that would imply that they are questioning your judgement (trying to make you look bad).
This drives most Westerners I know nuts, because they're getting signals that everything they say is being agreed to, then later on they'll get some kind of impersonal, vague message politely suggesting that the matter be looked at more closely.
Amusingly enough, from the viewpoint of many of my older Asian relatives, many Westerners are considered charmingly "naive", unable to control their emotional responses during a simple conversation or discussion. (Unfortunately, from their viewpoint, this includes me:( - I'm just glad I'm family.)
That's untrue. Especially today. the typical investor is much closer to the average American citizen, I'd say, than is the average voter.
If you believe that the average American citizen who has a few shares of stock purchased through a 401(k) has as much influence with a large corporation as a large institutional investor with a couple million shares of stock, there's this bridge I can sell you really cheap...
And the government controlling big business is what, if not 'centrally-controlled'?
A properly functioning government doesn't have to micromanage businesses - it just has to put bounds on the behavior of business to prevent them from abusing the power of their resources to hurt the society that the government is supposed to be protecting. (Whether or not the current government is actually behaving in the best interests of society, or is instead behaving in the best interests of those with lots of money, is a whole 'nother discussion.)
That doesn't exactly make sense, or fit in with the Constitution as I see it. The government has no right to arbitrarily sieze private property.
The government supposedly exists to protect the society - they have whatever rights the society thinks they need to protect the society. Put another way, if an individual is using their own private property in such a way that it is hurting other members of the society, then they shouldn't be surprised when the "other" members of the society gang up on them to whoop their ass, or delegate that power to an agent (e.g., the government) to perform the ass-whooping for them.
Private property is a concept which is "allowed" by the society - it's not a right, it's a privilege. (A deeply ENGRAINED privilege, and one which normally yields great benefits for the members of society, but still just a privilege).
I don't like what the government is doing with drug laws. Can I do something about it? Can I sue the government? No. I can get arrested.
If your viewpoint about the drug war is in line with the majority of the society, then this means that the government is no longer properly taking care of its duties as a steward of the society. It doesn't mean that letting business have its own way is better.
In most cases, the coporations, while acting in their owners' best interests, DO have much better results than government.
BS. The corporations have much better results (earning profit) FOR the owners. The government doesn't exist to make a profit - it's supposed to exist to take care of the society. The primary problems that I see with the current state of the government is where "big business" has subverted the function of the government from taking care of the society, to where the government is taking care of the "big business". I bet you still believe that trickle-down economics really does mostly help poor people.
Again, that's exactly why this country is the most powreful in the world.
Hardly. The US is powerful because of 1) a relatively sheltered geographic locale, 2) abundant natural resources, 3) we haven't had the necessity of rebuilding our country's infrastructure after a couple of World Wars, 4) a steady flow of immigration from the rest of the world to keep the population from stagnating, and 5) a healthy SMALL business environment (at least in the past, not so sure now). BIG business has generally proven to be a progress-inhibiting, stagnation-inducing, corrupting influence on both society & government.
Bad guys are people who hurt me or those who I care about. _Dangerous_ guys are people who have the potential to hurt me or those who I care about (even if they haven't done any hurting yet).
Being under the scrutiny of either type of person makes me feel unsafe, and looking for a means of protecting myself (either through offense or defense).
You would rather have big government then big business?
Yes, as long as the government is still accountable to the society. "Big business" is only accountable to its investors, who tend to be more well-to-do than the "typical" member of society.
Last I checked, but the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the huge success of the US has essentially proved that big government very bad, and big business works well.
Hardly. All they proved is that a centrally-controlled economy isn't all that efficient.
As far as big business working "well", all big business is good for is making money for its investors. If its actions start hurting the society in general, it should be destroyed and cut out, just like any parasitic cancerous growth.
The Libertarians believe in as little government as possible. Private citizens (or entities, such as corporations) should be left alone.
I'm perfectly willing to live & let live, until some moron comes along & does something to hurt me or my family (steal my possessions, befoul my air & water, etc). When that happens, then I want them punished, to discourage them (and others) from doing it again - I certainly don't want them "left alone".
Perhaps people could do something like the eCase product to be able to make something which was the size of a cellular phone, but still had the display capacity of a PDA?
I didn't intend to say that the QA teams are composed of grunts, but that unless they are MUCH more talented developers than the actual developers (which is definitely not the case if they are usually composed of "entry-level" programms), they aren't going to be able to come up with ways of testing the internals of the code & pinpointing errors as well as people who were on the original development team.
For the most part, the QA team will test the interfaces to the various components of the code (not just the UI interface), as well as correct any superficial problems.
For finding & correcting deep-down, fundamental design-type problems, you need experienced developers with a gut-level instinctive understanding of the code that they're working with (unless you're talking about a trivial amount of code).
Furthermore, the best place to find & correct bugs is early in the development process - BEFORE a lot of structure has been built around that code. By the time a serious bug is discovered by a QA team, the developers are going to have to do a lot of work to patch the problem - and in the face of a deadline, this usually results in sloppy work. Whereas, if the bug is discovered earlier in the development process, it takes much less effort to the correct the problem.
You can still say that the QA team is responsible for finding THOSE kinds of bugs earlier & earlier in the development cycle, but then the QA team pretty much gets merged into the development team - which was my point to begin with, that the QA process should really be an intimate part of the development process, from bottom-up and top-down.
I have a qualified disagreement with this statement also.
While I agree that THE developer is not the best person to check their own code, ANOTHER developer (esp. if the other developer hasn't been working too closely w/the 1st one, but has a firm understanding of the internals of the existing code) is an excellent way of improving one's code.
It's a question of the granularity of testing - a QA test guy can only test the overall product like a black box, exploring errors that can only be activated directly through the external interface, and if they discover a problem, they can only describe the symptoms.
A _developer_, on the other hand, can test & review the code from the inside out, resulting in robust components & code maintainability which an external tester only has an indirect interest (and a very limited set of ways that they can reach some of the internal code). The developer can also point directly to the source of problems, saving incredible amounts of redundant debugging effort (e.g., to reconstruct that really annoying bug which only shows up under a certain race condition...)
A good QA test suite is still essential to make sure that final overall product looks & behaves like it was supposed to, but you don't make robust bottom up, incremental improvements by blackbox testing.
Unfortunately, most of the companies I have seen/worked at aren't willing to expend the resources necessary to have another developer THOROUGHLY review & test each other's code. (As far as I can tell, the managers seem to think that this kind of activity is "not productive", and/or it will cost too much to hire enough developers to do such testing in a reasonable amount of time.) Usually, I end up in a few code reviews where a bunch of people scan the code quickly, looking for typos or uninitialized pointers or other such simple problems.
I dunno, wouldn't that cubic inch of 2-million sun black hole actually be more massive than the entire Earth?
So it would be more likely that the Earth would get "eaten" by that cubic inch. Then again, if that chunk of black hole is too small to maintain its integrity, it may just evaporate violently and blow everything in the immediately spacial environment to plasma...
They did? When did this happen - I would've thought there would have been a lot of talk about this?
The word I heard was that MS had used a lot of Windows machines as "front ends" to the Hotmail service (to make it look like the Hotmail service was completely running as a Windows-enterprise service), but that the backends (database/file services/etc) were still running some form of BSD because the Windows platforms couldn't handle the load.
Perhaps it was just somebody who wanted to cause a lot of uproar in the Linux-fanatic crowd.
I've heard that the poll is supposed to only allow one vote per unique IP address. Could somebody fake hundreds of thousands of IP addresses if they knew that the "fake IP" data streams would always be routed through their host?
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. People would survive just fine without big corporations. You'd just end up with more individuals and small-to-medium sized businesses making a living. I seriously doubt that jobs & food would be any worse off than currently.
The things that would be different would be: 1) stuff which requires insane amount of capitalization, such as massive chip-making foundries or huge construction projects - probably only the government would be able to afford stuff like this, and 2) the "mass" media would probably be a heckuva lot more diversified, since you wouldn't have the "homogenizing" effect that a large corporation would have.
'cause I believe in trickle-UP economics!
With trickle-down economics, you have a large amount of money circulating among the individuals & entities which already have a lot of money, and the other elements of society get along with whatever happens to "leak" from that small club. To me, this seems like a very stagnant situation.
On the other hand, if those large flows of money are systemically injected as low in the financial "class" structure as possible (perhaps through really strong & inexpensive educational programs?), then I believe that there are MANY individuals who could take advantage of that kind of help, but who are currently regarded as non-productive members of society because they are "resource-starved" and can't get beyond a survival existence to really achieve their full potential.
I think that policies based on "trickle-up" economics would result in a much more dynamic & equal-opportunity-oriented society.
It's this kind of approach (setting up the system so that the "lower" entities in any system tend to get the benefits) that made me propose the above alternative.
Well duh, that's why it's called an INCOME tax - the tax applies whenever anyone (supposedly including "legal entities" like corporations) makes any income!
How 'bout this, to avoid "double taxation" - eliminate the corporate loophole, make the corporation pay their proper share of the income tax, but allow the employees to get the income from their stock options tax-free? Uncle Sam is still getting his pound of flesh, right?
Oh right, that wouldn't be a proper application of trickle-down economics - my bad.
This holds true for the entire US legal system, I think.
Too bad there wasn't anything in the Constitution that forced our representatives to keep consolidating the laws into something approaching common sense - I keep daydreaming about the general rule I heard about that one Scandinavian tribe followed: the only valid laws are those which most of the tribal members can recite orally by heart at their annual tribal meeting. Anything which most of the people forgot isn't a law anymore :)
My mother, in the process of changing long distance phone companies, ended up being charged by 3 different long distance phone companies (one slammer & one that refused to believe that she didn't want their service anymore). They were sending her collection notices before she got them to back down by sending her complaints copied to the FTC (Federal Trace Commission) and our local public utility commission (who were in the process of deciding whether they were going to let the local phone company offer high speed Internet access).
As for myself, I discovered that I was being charged for long distance even though I had canceled my land-based line & had gone completely cellular (which took care of those damn long-distance company telemarketers at the same time). The long distance "customer service" representative seemed to be quite annoyed that they couldn't make me keep the service w/o a phone line.
As long as these companies don't get punished for their "mistakes", they don't feel any need to improve their service - and the more mergers occur, the less they have to worry about somebody with better customer service. Too bad individuals can't fine them a few hundred bucks for each mistake - the resultant hemorraghing would probably make them clean up their act REAL fast.
I'm not sure that I've really liked the practice declaring perfectly good evidence "inadmissible" in court - the idea that a rapist, murderer or CEO could be legally freed (and immune to further prosecution for that crime because of the double-jeopardy rule) because the judge or jury has to "ignore" a real piece of evidence really annoys me.
It seems to me, that if even if the evidence was collected illegally, as long as there is a high degree of confidence of its authenticity (e.g., the law enforcement hasn't cooked it up to try and frame the suspect), then it should be used.
_BUT_, the individuals responsible for collecting that evidence illegally should be punished in proportion to the manner that the illegal collection was performed (if they tortured a suspect for instance, then they should be charged under a criminal offense like anybody who tortured another person).
Not sure what to do if you're not sure who collected the illegal evidence (anonymous tipsters) though.
Does anyone else besides me see a conflict-of-interest in letting government agencies decide what they want to declassify?
All the desperate attempts to control what I want to listen to and/or watch drives me absolutely nuts.
The 14-year period specified in the original copyright law sounded pretty good. About the only modification I might suggest is something requiring that the listener/viewer always have a way of determining the creator(s) of the copyrighted work, even after the copyright has expired, with the criminal penalty of fraud if someone tries to pass off someone else's work as theirs.
I'm not sure I agree with this - somebody can steal some money from you, and then you know you're out that amount of money.
Once somebody starts distributing your private information though, that information can be spread through goddess-knows-how-many databases, mailing lists & whatnot, all w/o your knowledge or possibility of intervention. At least the money that was stolen from you is limited by its purchasing power - your private information can be copied & corrupted mercilessly.
(I guess this is the other edge of the two-edged sword of near zero-cost information-distribution - the same technology which enables MP3s & movies to be passed around as digital data allows organizations to collect & distribute our personal information just as easily.)
Actually, especially with the politicians & CEOs (and similar types), instead of kicking them out of the country, I want them around so that I can keep an eye on them and make sure they're not brewing up big trouble for the rest of us. If we kick them out of the country where we can't keep an eye on them, you just know that they'll be back as tin-pot dictators at the head of a brainwashed army of some sort.
I'd much rather put them into many "Big Brother"-style (which is amusing, considering the proposed occupants) houses & have them under constant surveillance, where the general population can watch them in morbid fascination & come to conclusions about how low elements of the human race can sink.
Heh - at the risk of being inflammatory (eh, who am I kidding - it's fun :), we ought to make room for some of these "productive" immigrants by deporting parasitic (doing more harm than good) elements of society.
:)
It might be an interesting country if "citizenship" was based on merit rather than where you were born or who you were born to.
Of course, who would take the "rejects"?
Actually, the people who are receiving these things (at least through the mail) don't just have an expectation that they own them - they actually DO own them, according to law.
It doesn't really matter what DC puts in their license agreement - unless the law is changed, those CueCats are the legal property of the people who received them.
Every time this subject comes up, I see a lot of people arguing about variations on a global moderation system - I keep wondering why nobody brings up the possibility of collaborative filtering.
Basic idea: allow everyone to mark whether or not they like particular articles and/or authors, then use that profile for each user to find the articles and/or authors that user is probably more interested in.
This is even more useful when you compare user's profiles against each other so that if two users have been marking messages/authors in such a way that their profiles are very similar, then when one of the users marks a message/author favorably, it automatically gets a higher rating for the other user (or down, if marked unfavorably).
In effect, each user will statistically get messages rated through a moderation scheme based on their own past history, and the history of other users who happen to agree with them.
So, how come this kind of filtering/moderation system is never discussed? Is it too computationally difficult to implement on a large scale?
I can imagine feeding this information into a "force feedback simulator", and watching those NFL couch potatoes get the crap slammed out of them with every on-screen impact.
I'd find that MUCH more entertaining than actually watching the game.
My mother's Korean, but I'm pretty much culturally US, so take my observations with a big grain of salt :)
From what I can tell by observation of my relatives & their associates (many Asian non-Koreans), it isn't so much that Asians are self-sacrificing & willing to work for a group.
Asian individuals are just as willing to jockey for power & stab each other in the back as their Western counterparts. There's a couple things that make Westerners feel uncomfortable though. First, there's definitely a touch of xenophobia in native Asians - even my mother, who has lived in the US for 30 years, feels more comfortable working with a complete Asian stranger than she does working with a Westerner that she might know a little better.
Second, there's the all-important concept of "face". It is a highly undesirable thing for one's self to "lose face" (look bad). One's "face" is often attached to the actions of family members as well, esp. if you are a family member of some importance. Also, by corollary, it is EXTREMELY bad manners to make someone else lose face.
So, what ends up happening, is you have a whole bunch of people being polite to each other so that they don't cause offense by causing the other to look like they're being disrespected. Most of the time, they won't even flat-out disagree with you, even if they think you're being an idiot, because that would imply that they are questioning your judgement (trying to make you look bad).
This drives most Westerners I know nuts, because they're getting signals that everything they say is being agreed to, then later on they'll get some kind of impersonal, vague message politely suggesting that the matter be looked at more closely.
Amusingly enough, from the viewpoint of many of my older Asian relatives, many Westerners are considered charmingly "naive", unable to control their emotional responses during a simple conversation or discussion. (Unfortunately, from their viewpoint, this includes me :( - I'm just glad I'm family.)
If you believe that the average American citizen who has a few shares of stock purchased through a 401(k) has as much influence with a large corporation as a large institutional investor with a couple million shares of stock, there's this bridge I can sell you really cheap...
A properly functioning government doesn't have to micromanage businesses - it just has to put bounds on the behavior of business to prevent them from abusing the power of their resources to hurt the society that the government is supposed to be protecting. (Whether or not the current government is actually behaving in the best interests of society, or is instead behaving in the best interests of those with lots of money, is a whole 'nother discussion.)
The government supposedly exists to protect the society - they have whatever rights the society thinks they need to protect the society. Put another way, if an individual is using their own private property in such a way that it is hurting other members of the society, then they shouldn't be surprised when the "other" members of the society gang up on them to whoop their ass, or delegate that power to an agent (e.g., the government) to perform the ass-whooping for them.
Private property is a concept which is "allowed" by the society - it's not a right, it's a privilege. (A deeply ENGRAINED privilege, and one which normally yields great benefits for the members of society, but still just a privilege).
If your viewpoint about the drug war is in line with the majority of the society, then this means that the government is no longer properly taking care of its duties as a steward of the society. It doesn't mean that letting business have its own way is better.
BS. The corporations have much better results (earning profit) FOR the owners. The government doesn't exist to make a profit - it's supposed to exist to take care of the society. The primary problems that I see with the current state of the government is where "big business" has subverted the function of the government from taking care of the society, to where the government is taking care of the "big business". I bet you still believe that trickle-down economics really does mostly help poor people.
Hardly. The US is powerful because of 1) a relatively sheltered geographic locale, 2) abundant natural resources, 3) we haven't had the necessity of rebuilding our country's infrastructure after a couple of World Wars, 4) a steady flow of immigration from the rest of the world to keep the population from stagnating, and 5) a healthy SMALL business environment (at least in the past, not so sure now). BIG business has generally proven to be a progress-inhibiting, stagnation-inducing, corrupting influence on both society & government.
Bad guys are people who hurt me or those who I care about. _Dangerous_ guys are people who have the potential to hurt me or those who I care about (even if they haven't done any hurting yet).
Being under the scrutiny of either type of person makes me feel unsafe, and looking for a means of protecting myself (either through offense or defense).
Yes, as long as the government is still accountable to the society. "Big business" is only accountable to its investors, who tend to be more well-to-do than the "typical" member of society.
Hardly. All they proved is that a centrally-controlled economy isn't all that efficient.
As far as big business working "well", all big business is good for is making money for its investors. If its actions start hurting the society in general, it should be destroyed and cut out, just like any parasitic cancerous growth.
I'm perfectly willing to live & let live, until some moron comes along & does something to hurt me or my family (steal my possessions, befoul my air & water, etc). When that happens, then I want them punished, to discourage them (and others) from doing it again - I certainly don't want them "left alone".
Perhaps people could do something like the eCase product to be able to make something which was the size of a cellular phone, but still had the display capacity of a PDA?
eCase URL:
http://inviso.com/ecase.html
I didn't intend to say that the QA teams are composed of grunts, but that unless they are MUCH more talented developers than the actual developers (which is definitely not the case if they are usually composed of "entry-level" programms), they aren't going to be able to come up with ways of testing the internals of the code & pinpointing errors as well as people who were on the original development team.
For the most part, the QA team will test the interfaces to the various components of the code (not just the UI interface), as well as correct any superficial problems.
For finding & correcting deep-down, fundamental design-type problems, you need experienced developers with a gut-level instinctive understanding of the code that they're working with (unless you're talking about a trivial amount of code).
Furthermore, the best place to find & correct bugs is early in the development process - BEFORE a lot of structure has been built around that code. By the time a serious bug is discovered by a QA team, the developers are going to have to do a lot of work to patch the problem - and in the face of a deadline, this usually results in sloppy work. Whereas, if the bug is discovered earlier in the development process, it takes much less effort to the correct the problem.
You can still say that the QA team is responsible for finding THOSE kinds of bugs earlier & earlier in the development cycle, but then the QA team pretty much gets merged into the development team - which was my point to begin with, that the QA process should really be an intimate part of the development process, from bottom-up and top-down.
I have a qualified disagreement with this statement also.
While I agree that THE developer is not the best person to check their own code, ANOTHER developer (esp. if the other developer hasn't been working too closely w/the 1st one, but has a firm understanding of the internals of the existing code) is an excellent way of improving one's code.
It's a question of the granularity of testing - a QA test guy can only test the overall product like a black box, exploring errors that can only be activated directly through the external interface, and if they discover a problem, they can only describe the symptoms.
A _developer_, on the other hand, can test & review the code from the inside out, resulting in robust components & code maintainability which an external tester only has an indirect interest (and a very limited set of ways that they can reach some of the internal code). The developer can also point directly to the source of problems, saving incredible amounts of redundant debugging effort (e.g., to reconstruct that really annoying bug which only shows up under a certain race condition...)
A good QA test suite is still essential to make sure that final overall product looks & behaves like it was supposed to, but you don't make robust bottom up, incremental improvements by blackbox testing.
Unfortunately, most of the companies I have seen/worked at aren't willing to expend the resources necessary to have another developer THOROUGHLY review & test each other's code. (As far as I can tell, the managers seem to think that this kind of activity is "not productive", and/or it will cost too much to hire enough developers to do such testing in a reasonable amount of time.) Usually, I end up in a few code reviews where a bunch of people scan the code quickly, looking for typos or uninitialized pointers or other such simple problems.
It's gonna take a lot more than the world's spare computing cycles to do that for you, buddy...
I dunno, wouldn't that cubic inch of 2-million sun black hole actually be more massive than the entire Earth?
So it would be more likely that the Earth would get "eaten" by that cubic inch. Then again, if that chunk of black hole is too small to maintain its integrity, it may just evaporate violently and blow everything in the immediately spacial environment to plasma...
They did? When did this happen - I would've thought there would have been a lot of talk about this?
The word I heard was that MS had used a lot of Windows machines as "front ends" to the Hotmail service (to make it look like the Hotmail service was completely running as a Windows-enterprise service), but that the backends (database/file services/etc) were still running some form of BSD because the Windows platforms couldn't handle the load.
Has this changed in the last year?
Perhaps it was just somebody who wanted to cause a lot of uproar in the Linux-fanatic crowd.
I've heard that the poll is supposed to only allow one vote per unique IP address. Could somebody fake hundreds of thousands of IP addresses if they knew that the "fake IP" data streams would always be routed through their host?