Unsolicited Commercial Email is a scumbag marketing methodology. Most of us who have run responsible, legitimate businesses that use email for marketing are extremely careful and sensitive about how we do it - only emailing existing customers and people who have opted in to a list. And if a third party is sending an email pimping your product you make damned sure they are a legitimate company too.
I see nothing wrong with this attitude. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with refusing to purchase any product whose marketing methods you find annoying. It's called voting with your dollars.
Part of the reason Obama seemed so fantastic is how crappy the guy who immediately proceeded him was.
The real problem is that none of these people seem to care that we've utterly destroyed our manufacturing base in this country and our shitty health care system, more than any discrepancy in wages, has made it entirely impossible to make goods in this country.
Nobody cares anymore because the manufacturers who are left don't have enough money to pay for lobbyists. It's sad. We're going to thrash our dominant position in the world economy over the next 20 years. Unless our currency utterly tanks first and brings things roughly back to parity.
Here's a theory for you - perhaps you and your friends have been self-selecting into a group of well-educated, childless folks in their 30s and 40s? Maybe this is more a function of like befriending like. Beyond the well-known fact that well-to-do, better-educated folks tend to have fewer children on average than the working, ill-educated poor.
That latter association in a modern society seems to be based on the fact that unless you are absurdly wealthy, raising more than a few children to the standard of living and education that you and your social class have become accustomed to is just too costly, and even if you can afford it, you can't devote the amount of time and energy to that many children to make sure they are educated and reared properly (private school, tutors, college, grad school, parties, play dates, etc. etc.).
Whereas the lower and lower middle classes have very little in the way of expectations for what you provide to children beyond 3 meals a day and clothing and getting them to and fro from public school.
I have tested it on a bunch of target search phrases relevant to my business and the results that Bing produces are plainly inferior. It weights substrings in a URL much more highly than Google does and seems to significantly discount anything that looks like inbound link count/quality.
For certain types of queries that aren't in business areas where search engine traffic is competitive, maybe that will produce better results. But in the areas I looked it, it produces garbage.
I would assume that if he was willing to prove by disclosing statements from all banks, etc. that he had actually lost the money, and shown the court where the money had gone (or rather, had a forensic account pick through his statements), that he wouldn't have had to spend 14 years in prison.
If somebody screwed me out of $2.5M that a court had ordered them to pay me, I'd want them to sit in jail and rot if they were too stubborn to prove that they had lost the money.
If on the other hand, this was some sort of massive judicial abuse of a guy who was genuinely down on his luck, then I take this all back and the judge should be drawn and quartered for jailing a guy who legitimately had shown that he didn't have the assets to pay a settlement.
Re:So lets see here...
on
Lost In the Cloud
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well that's misleading. In general, the switching costs for online services are relatively low, but a social networking site has higher switching costs than many due to the network effects (the more users on the site, the more useful/valuable the site is).
Of course, that switching cost isn't as high as the venture capitalists may believe, as we saw with Friendster, then MySpace - as soon as the "cool" factor disappears, migration can happen en masse. The key is that many individuals must essentially cooperate to move to another social networking site. Or some subset of "leaders" have to migrate, creating the sense that the new social networking site is the cool, "in" place to be now and the old site was yesterday's thing.
Now that people see their parents and even grandparents logging into Facebook, I wonder if it will eventually change the perception of Facebook and lead to its eventual replacement.
Also, people seem to be more likely to "add" than to switch outright, at least at first, and then simply abandon the old site when they perceive that their friends have abandoned it too.
My theory is that diversity in web browsers actually helps Google's position. A browser monoculture of Internet Explorer allows Microsoft to wield their monopoly, gives them advantages in developing next-generation web applications, etc. A bi-culture of IE and Firefox was better than that, but still seemed to spur less innovation than a truly competitive landscape. Since Safari and now Chrome have become mainstream the pace of development in web applications have picked up immensely, bringing browsers to the point where Google can eventually wield their position of dominance in search engine traffic to feed up much more sophisticated web applications to browsing web users.
They don't necessarily need all those people to be using Chrome or Firefox or any browser in particular, in fact, strong standards and an ecology of excellent browsers competing in the market will ultimately be in their best interests.
But it is still a rather interesting thing that a company that exerts so much influence over Firefox would use a completely different engine for their branded browser.
And I do realize that there are some technical reasons that their process model works better with the Webcore engine, and that the process model ultimately works better with heterogeneous, powerful web applications that Google wants to deliver.
The problem with this question is people spend way too much time arguing about the "should" part of it. Should is irrelevant. Health care is a scarce good (in the economic sense of the word, not the common meaning of "scarce") and must be allocated in some way. Some might even use the word "rationed" though that also has negative connotations that probably color the debate too much - so I prefer the word allocated.
If you control a portion of the means of production of a society (i.e. an operating system and computing platform that lots of people use and depend on, or any other large company), you will always have more wealth than the average fellow. And wealth allows you to influence the allocation of goods and services - you can hire a team of whoever you want, to do whatever you want within the boundaries of society's laws, given enough money.
And given enough money, if you don't like the laws of a country and how they restrict your ability to procure health care goods and services, you will just fly to another country and procure goods and services there.
This applies to modern socialist countries as well.
In this case, Steve Jobs was apparently eligible for an organ transplant under the rules of a US state. I don't believe they would have twisted the rules on organ transplants based on somebody's wealth, as the consequences for the rule-breakers would be pretty severe. But let's say he hadn't been eligible, but was convinced it was a necessary, life-saving procedure - he would have flown to a country where he could get an organ transplant instead. Again, that's life - without a universal, world-wide system you can't change the laws of supply and demand outside of the bubble of your nation-state.
More productively, we should worry about making the level of care for the other 99.9% of people good enough and fair enough that we don't have to worry about what the wealthiest 0.1% of people are doing. If scarcity of organ transplants is such an issue, we should invest more dollars in research on organ cloning or do more to encourage donations. Outside of this one narrow area of organ donations, other types of health care provision aren't subject to such strict scarcity constraints, and the problem is obviously more complex and nuanced.
But again, arguing that everybody has the "right" to any and all treatments available doesn't make sense. New treatments are developed at very high costs to companies - if you take away their temporary patent rights and the monopoly profits they provide over a period of time, you basically demolish the incentive for private research outside of the bounds of academia and government. So the newest treatments are naturally the most expensive, and we need some means to allocate them.
Right now, the US, with its admittedly very imperfect system, has been effectively subsidizing the rest of the world, especially Europe, with their happy-go-lucky single payer systems. We pay monopoly rates to cover the huge fixed costs of research, and you pay something lower that exceeds marginal costs but doesn't fairly carry its share of research costs. Nonetheless, you benefit from the development of new drugs by firms, European, American and otherwise, that intend to derive their most profitable revenue from the US market.
So to the Europeans out there pushing for US health care reform, be aware that ultimately this will result in companies less willing to negotiate with your single-payer health care systems and higher prices for your governments. In 10 or 15 years, I expect the US's percent of GDP spent on health care to be significantly lower and Europe's to be significantly higher, and for them to be closer to, though probably not at, parity.
My favorite part of living in New York City is getting to have all those first-generation drivers immigrate here and practice their skills as our city's taxi drivers.
My favorite story, from a good friend of mine (i.e. not a BS friend-of-a-friend tale), was a cab ride he had from a fellow who apparently didn't understand that the gas pedal is an input mechanism that can be tuned to the amount of acceleration desired - he thought it was either "on" or "off".
Hilarity ensued going down the West Side Highway as they'd accelerate up to 60, then brake sharply for the next red light. Rinse wash and repeat a dozen times over (if you've been on the West Side Highway, you'll understand).
Anyway, point is there is definitely truth to this - people who grow up around cars seem to have a better intuitive sense of how they are supposed to work and behave, and thus tend to be better drivers.
Just so you know, you did some Mac-specific stuff too. So the basics load and work in Firefox 3.5, for example, but the keymap stuff doesn't seem to work as it does in Safari 4 for Mac (i.e. the equal sign won't show up in a box). And Safari 4 for Windows doesn't seem to be passing right click events into your app properly, so it's totally non-functional.
Look for a doctor who is willing to spend some time talking to patients and working through a diagnostic problem. Treating horses is easy, quick and profitable. Trying to figure out if you're dealing with Zimbabwean or Nigerian Zebras may be rewarding, but it's time consuming. And may or may not be a profitable enterprise.
In particular, you should go to a specialist, not just a general practitioner who deals with sniffly noses and common issues all the time. Find a pulmonologist who can scope your lungs (bronchoscopy), take chest X-rays, do a blood work-up, spirometry tests, and maybe a CT scan. Not saying you need all those tests, but they should be willing to use all those tools to diagnose a respiratory issue.
If you are using numpy you are using both Python and Fortran to do serious numerical calculations. I generally don't work with particularly large data sets, so I can't speak to that, but for the fairly serious financial number crunching I do, Python is a fantastic tool, with the help of lots of highly optimized Fortran libraries.
Any statistician will tell you that if you put enough free parameters in a model, you can calibrate it to the given data. Admittedly, string theory has some impressive parts to it, but it seems like it's just excess parameter fitting for a class of models that can all explain roughly the standard model.
But if somebody does come up with a particular string-theoretic model with new, testable implications that get verified that would be impressive - it would certainly indicate that they are barking up the right tree rather than just working on a pleasant geometric abstraction that can be set up to reduce to the messy realities of our fundamental forces and particles.
Very simple explanation - nothing in the universe builds humility like an education in physics. If you don't walk out of a physics degree feeling like you know less than you did when you started, like all you've done is build layer upon layer of model and gained only modest flashes of insight into reality after marathon sessions of math, then you've done something wrong.
I wasn't comparing New York to 100km outside of Mumbai, I was comparing New York to Houston.
And I certainly realize that Houston is nowhere near as expensive as New York, but I was baffled to hear that for less than what I pay for rent in a single year in New York, I could own an apartment in Houston.
LOL, you can't even rent a decent apartment for a year for $43 a square foot in New York.
Prices for mediocre condo buildings start around $600-$800 a square foot, and a nice/new building is going to be $1000-$1500 a square foot or more. And that's after the economic meltdown.
Removing the watermark from your installed copy of RC1 is easy. Just Google it. Took me 10 minutes to find a set of working instructions and make it happen.
Oracle is in the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems. Sun is the primary sponsor of OpenOffice, since they acquired StarDivision and their StarOffice product in 1999, and open sourced it.
Didn't Slashdot run an article a few weeks ago about a paper that apparently proved the Alcubierre-style FTL drive was basically impossible? Ah, I found it: here. At least unstable from a quantum perspective.
Just beware that Watson has become well-known as a bit of a self-promoter, determined to snare more credit than Francis Crick for their discovery of the structure of DNA in the public media. You could also just argue that because Crick was a more private individual focused on other scientific exploits throughout his career, he simply didn't do as much hyping around as Watson did.
So Double Helix may be a great read, but it should be taken with a small grain of salt for completeness of picture.
This is great, until one of the drunk idiots on the plane happens to have a gun and starts shooting things up.
The whole problem with the Armed Populace solution to crime is that so many members of our populace are prone to drunk and/or irrational behavior, and the more guns are around, the more likely something really stupid or deadly will happen.
But yeah, most "rational", planned crime will be deterred and certain terrorist acts will be implausible.
I'm just not sure if we'd be safer overall.
Obviously, in rural areas people do tend to have guns for protection/hunting/etc. and you would be an idiot to try to rob them. It just doesn't work so well in highly populated, packed in areas like New York City. I just can't imagine with all the drunk fucks walking around the East Village on a Friday night how many shootings there would be if everybody was armed. As it is now, they tend to just piss on buildings and get thrown out of bars by bouncers.
Hah, at first I thought you must have been on my team, but there were only three of us, and none were named Johannes (and there were no cigars)
Similar setup to your story -
At customer site. There was a major contractual dispute from day 1, AND the CTO who had signed the deal on the project was fired the week before we arrived. Everybody at the company from the QA guys, to the engineers, to top management hated our guts (they hadn't deployed our software yet, so it was mostly out of fear for their own jobs for the IT guys, and from management it was because they thought they'd been fucked for paying half a million dollars for a system that we had only half-built - because of course, our sales guy had lied flagrantly to them and refused to let me meet with them before the project started).
The Chairman of the company would regularly walk into our office (shared by our entire team) and re-task my engineer with re-writing our entire Java software platform in C# (which he described as ".NET") - because he had read that.NET was much better than Java. This engineer was a skittish guy, so I then would have to spend a half hour straightening him out and calming him down every time this happened.
In addition, we had twice daily project status meetings staffed with a "project manager" whose only job was to send a complete transcript of the meeting to the CEO (different fellow from the Chairman, and of course, they were both in charge of the project on their end, and would regularly issue opposing instructions). After every project meeting the CEO would come barging in and start berating me for our slow progress on getting the system up and running.
Oh yeah, I was supposed to be the lead developer in addition to managing the project, which meant I was doing all my programming between 5pm and midnight every night.
Their IT staff took over 6 weeks to provision a simple test server for us (this was intentional, of course, as their IT team was trying to make us fail), so we had to sneak in our own Linux box for test purposes.
Another nice catch - we had to replicate a module of their existing system, when there was no documentation of how the module worked, and one contractor who had built it who knew how it worked - and his entire $250,000 a year consulting gig relied on him having sole possession of that knowledge. And part of our job was to extract the information from him and replicate and document this module, so they could fire him.
All of this while my mother was hospitalized for surgery for stage 4 colon cancer (she did not die while I was on this project, thank god, because it probably would have pushed me over the edge - though she did pass away several years later).
Worst 4 months of my life, I have to say. Way worse than the first summer programming job I had at the age of 18 where I had to work in the server room.
Postscript: The VP of Engineering for this company, not surprisingly, passed away from a heart attack a few years later, I heard. He was in his mid-thirties. The contractor with the $250k a year gig was promoted to a full-time gig as VP of Research and Development, paying even more. After about a year he was fired and then sued into the ground by the company because he insisted on trying to charge them royalties for the software he wrote.
And the engineer on my team actually went off to work for the Chairman's new company in California. Apparently some people like being abused.
No, it's an ML dialect for the JVM, like F# is in the.NET universe. ML/OCaml and similar languages have been around for years and years, so it's not just a new fad.
Scala just compiles down to Java bytecode which means it can interoperate with the huge quantity of existing Java libraries with basically zero incremental effort, and allow the benefits of writing code in a modern ML-like language (functional expressiveness, static typing, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
Unsolicited Commercial Email is a scumbag marketing methodology. Most of us who have run responsible, legitimate businesses that use email for marketing are extremely careful and sensitive about how we do it - only emailing existing customers and people who have opted in to a list. And if a third party is sending an email pimping your product you make damned sure they are a legitimate company too.
I see nothing wrong with this attitude. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with refusing to purchase any product whose marketing methods you find annoying. It's called voting with your dollars.
Part of the reason Obama seemed so fantastic is how crappy the guy who immediately proceeded him was.
The real problem is that none of these people seem to care that we've utterly destroyed our manufacturing base in this country and our shitty health care system, more than any discrepancy in wages, has made it entirely impossible to make goods in this country.
Nobody cares anymore because the manufacturers who are left don't have enough money to pay for lobbyists. It's sad. We're going to thrash our dominant position in the world economy over the next 20 years. Unless our currency utterly tanks first and brings things roughly back to parity.
Here's a theory for you - perhaps you and your friends have been self-selecting into a group of well-educated, childless folks in their 30s and 40s? Maybe this is more a function of like befriending like. Beyond the well-known fact that well-to-do, better-educated folks tend to have fewer children on average than the working, ill-educated poor.
That latter association in a modern society seems to be based on the fact that unless you are absurdly wealthy, raising more than a few children to the standard of living and education that you and your social class have become accustomed to is just too costly, and even if you can afford it, you can't devote the amount of time and energy to that many children to make sure they are educated and reared properly (private school, tutors, college, grad school, parties, play dates, etc. etc.).
Whereas the lower and lower middle classes have very little in the way of expectations for what you provide to children beyond 3 meals a day and clothing and getting them to and fro from public school.
I have tested it on a bunch of target search phrases relevant to my business and the results that Bing produces are plainly inferior. It weights substrings in a URL much more highly than Google does and seems to significantly discount anything that looks like inbound link count/quality.
For certain types of queries that aren't in business areas where search engine traffic is competitive, maybe that will produce better results. But in the areas I looked it, it produces garbage.
Let me fix that for you:
You don't do much driving *in Florida*, do you ?
I would assume that if he was willing to prove by disclosing statements from all banks, etc. that he had actually lost the money, and shown the court where the money had gone (or rather, had a forensic account pick through his statements), that he wouldn't have had to spend 14 years in prison.
If somebody screwed me out of $2.5M that a court had ordered them to pay me, I'd want them to sit in jail and rot if they were too stubborn to prove that they had lost the money.
If on the other hand, this was some sort of massive judicial abuse of a guy who was genuinely down on his luck, then I take this all back and the judge should be drawn and quartered for jailing a guy who legitimately had shown that he didn't have the assets to pay a settlement.
Well that's misleading. In general, the switching costs for online services are relatively low, but a social networking site has higher switching costs than many due to the network effects (the more users on the site, the more useful/valuable the site is).
Of course, that switching cost isn't as high as the venture capitalists may believe, as we saw with Friendster, then MySpace - as soon as the "cool" factor disappears, migration can happen en masse. The key is that many individuals must essentially cooperate to move to another social networking site. Or some subset of "leaders" have to migrate, creating the sense that the new social networking site is the cool, "in" place to be now and the old site was yesterday's thing.
Now that people see their parents and even grandparents logging into Facebook, I wonder if it will eventually change the perception of Facebook and lead to its eventual replacement.
Also, people seem to be more likely to "add" than to switch outright, at least at first, and then simply abandon the old site when they perceive that their friends have abandoned it too.
My theory is that diversity in web browsers actually helps Google's position. A browser monoculture of Internet Explorer allows Microsoft to wield their monopoly, gives them advantages in developing next-generation web applications, etc. A bi-culture of IE and Firefox was better than that, but still seemed to spur less innovation than a truly competitive landscape. Since Safari and now Chrome have become mainstream the pace of development in web applications have picked up immensely, bringing browsers to the point where Google can eventually wield their position of dominance in search engine traffic to feed up much more sophisticated web applications to browsing web users.
They don't necessarily need all those people to be using Chrome or Firefox or any browser in particular, in fact, strong standards and an ecology of excellent browsers competing in the market will ultimately be in their best interests.
But it is still a rather interesting thing that a company that exerts so much influence over Firefox would use a completely different engine for their branded browser.
And I do realize that there are some technical reasons that their process model works better with the Webcore engine, and that the process model ultimately works better with heterogeneous, powerful web applications that Google wants to deliver.
The problem with this question is people spend way too much time arguing about the "should" part of it. Should is irrelevant. Health care is a scarce good (in the economic sense of the word, not the common meaning of "scarce") and must be allocated in some way. Some might even use the word "rationed" though that also has negative connotations that probably color the debate too much - so I prefer the word allocated.
If you control a portion of the means of production of a society (i.e. an operating system and computing platform that lots of people use and depend on, or any other large company), you will always have more wealth than the average fellow. And wealth allows you to influence the allocation of goods and services - you can hire a team of whoever you want, to do whatever you want within the boundaries of society's laws, given enough money.
And given enough money, if you don't like the laws of a country and how they restrict your ability to procure health care goods and services, you will just fly to another country and procure goods and services there.
This applies to modern socialist countries as well.
In this case, Steve Jobs was apparently eligible for an organ transplant under the rules of a US state. I don't believe they would have twisted the rules on organ transplants based on somebody's wealth, as the consequences for the rule-breakers would be pretty severe. But let's say he hadn't been eligible, but was convinced it was a necessary, life-saving procedure - he would have flown to a country where he could get an organ transplant instead. Again, that's life - without a universal, world-wide system you can't change the laws of supply and demand outside of the bubble of your nation-state.
More productively, we should worry about making the level of care for the other 99.9% of people good enough and fair enough that we don't have to worry about what the wealthiest 0.1% of people are doing. If scarcity of organ transplants is such an issue, we should invest more dollars in research on organ cloning or do more to encourage donations. Outside of this one narrow area of organ donations, other types of health care provision aren't subject to such strict scarcity constraints, and the problem is obviously more complex and nuanced.
But again, arguing that everybody has the "right" to any and all treatments available doesn't make sense. New treatments are developed at very high costs to companies - if you take away their temporary patent rights and the monopoly profits they provide over a period of time, you basically demolish the incentive for private research outside of the bounds of academia and government. So the newest treatments are naturally the most expensive, and we need some means to allocate them.
Right now, the US, with its admittedly very imperfect system, has been effectively subsidizing the rest of the world, especially Europe, with their happy-go-lucky single payer systems. We pay monopoly rates to cover the huge fixed costs of research, and you pay something lower that exceeds marginal costs but doesn't fairly carry its share of research costs. Nonetheless, you benefit from the development of new drugs by firms, European, American and otherwise, that intend to derive their most profitable revenue from the US market.
So to the Europeans out there pushing for US health care reform, be aware that ultimately this will result in companies less willing to negotiate with your single-payer health care systems and higher prices for your governments. In 10 or 15 years, I expect the US's percent of GDP spent on health care to be significantly lower and Europe's to be significantly higher, and for them to be closer to, though probably not at, parity.
My favorite part of living in New York City is getting to have all those first-generation drivers immigrate here and practice their skills as our city's taxi drivers.
My favorite story, from a good friend of mine (i.e. not a BS friend-of-a-friend tale), was a cab ride he had from a fellow who apparently didn't understand that the gas pedal is an input mechanism that can be tuned to the amount of acceleration desired - he thought it was either "on" or "off".
Hilarity ensued going down the West Side Highway as they'd accelerate up to 60, then brake sharply for the next red light. Rinse wash and repeat a dozen times over (if you've been on the West Side Highway, you'll understand).
Anyway, point is there is definitely truth to this - people who grow up around cars seem to have a better intuitive sense of how they are supposed to work and behave, and thus tend to be better drivers.
Just so you know, you did some Mac-specific stuff too. So the basics load and work in Firefox 3.5, for example, but the keymap stuff doesn't seem to work as it does in Safari 4 for Mac (i.e. the equal sign won't show up in a box). And Safari 4 for Windows doesn't seem to be passing right click events into your app properly, so it's totally non-functional.
If housing was as absurdly cheap in the rest of the country as it is in parts of Michigan, a lot of people could afford to drive Mercedes Benzes.
Look for a doctor who is willing to spend some time talking to patients and working through a diagnostic problem. Treating horses is easy, quick and profitable. Trying to figure out if you're dealing with Zimbabwean or Nigerian Zebras may be rewarding, but it's time consuming. And may or may not be a profitable enterprise.
In particular, you should go to a specialist, not just a general practitioner who deals with sniffly noses and common issues all the time. Find a pulmonologist who can scope your lungs (bronchoscopy), take chest X-rays, do a blood work-up, spirometry tests, and maybe a CT scan. Not saying you need all those tests, but they should be willing to use all those tools to diagnose a respiratory issue.
If you are using numpy you are using both Python and Fortran to do serious numerical calculations. I generally don't work with particularly large data sets, so I can't speak to that, but for the fairly serious financial number crunching I do, Python is a fantastic tool, with the help of lots of highly optimized Fortran libraries.
Any statistician will tell you that if you put enough free parameters in a model, you can calibrate it to the given data. Admittedly, string theory has some impressive parts to it, but it seems like it's just excess parameter fitting for a class of models that can all explain roughly the standard model.
But if somebody does come up with a particular string-theoretic model with new, testable implications that get verified that would be impressive - it would certainly indicate that they are barking up the right tree rather than just working on a pleasant geometric abstraction that can be set up to reduce to the messy realities of our fundamental forces and particles.
Very simple explanation - nothing in the universe builds humility like an education in physics. If you don't walk out of a physics degree feeling like you know less than you did when you started, like all you've done is build layer upon layer of model and gained only modest flashes of insight into reality after marathon sessions of math, then you've done something wrong.
I wasn't comparing New York to 100km outside of Mumbai, I was comparing New York to Houston.
And I certainly realize that Houston is nowhere near as expensive as New York, but I was baffled to hear that for less than what I pay for rent in a single year in New York, I could own an apartment in Houston.
LOL, you can't even rent a decent apartment for a year for $43 a square foot in New York.
Prices for mediocre condo buildings start around $600-$800 a square foot, and a nice/new building is going to be $1000-$1500 a square foot or more. And that's after the economic meltdown.
Removing the watermark from your installed copy of RC1 is easy. Just Google it. Took me 10 minutes to find a set of working instructions and make it happen.
Oracle is in the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems. Sun is the primary sponsor of OpenOffice, since they acquired StarDivision and their StarOffice product in 1999, and open sourced it.
Didn't Slashdot run an article a few weeks ago about a paper that apparently proved the Alcubierre-style FTL drive was basically impossible? Ah, I found it: here. At least unstable from a quantum perspective.
Just beware that Watson has become well-known as a bit of a self-promoter, determined to snare more credit than Francis Crick for their discovery of the structure of DNA in the public media. You could also just argue that because Crick was a more private individual focused on other scientific exploits throughout his career, he simply didn't do as much hyping around as Watson did.
So Double Helix may be a great read, but it should be taken with a small grain of salt for completeness of picture.
This is great, until one of the drunk idiots on the plane happens to have a gun and starts shooting things up.
The whole problem with the Armed Populace solution to crime is that so many members of our populace are prone to drunk and/or irrational behavior, and the more guns are around, the more likely something really stupid or deadly will happen.
But yeah, most "rational", planned crime will be deterred and certain terrorist acts will be implausible.
I'm just not sure if we'd be safer overall.
Obviously, in rural areas people do tend to have guns for protection/hunting/etc. and you would be an idiot to try to rob them. It just doesn't work so well in highly populated, packed in areas like New York City. I just can't imagine with all the drunk fucks walking around the East Village on a Friday night how many shootings there would be if everybody was armed. As it is now, they tend to just piss on buildings and get thrown out of bars by bouncers.
Hah, at first I thought you must have been on my team, but there were only three of us, and none were named Johannes (and there were no cigars)
Similar setup to your story -
At customer site. There was a major contractual dispute from day 1, AND the CTO who had signed the deal on the project was fired the week before we arrived. Everybody at the company from the QA guys, to the engineers, to top management hated our guts (they hadn't deployed our software yet, so it was mostly out of fear for their own jobs for the IT guys, and from management it was because they thought they'd been fucked for paying half a million dollars for a system that we had only half-built - because of course, our sales guy had lied flagrantly to them and refused to let me meet with them before the project started).
The Chairman of the company would regularly walk into our office (shared by our entire team) and re-task my engineer with re-writing our entire Java software platform in C# (which he described as ".NET") - because he had read that .NET was much better than Java. This engineer was a skittish guy, so I then would have to spend a half hour straightening him out and calming him down every time this happened.
In addition, we had twice daily project status meetings staffed with a "project manager" whose only job was to send a complete transcript of the meeting to the CEO (different fellow from the Chairman, and of course, they were both in charge of the project on their end, and would regularly issue opposing instructions). After every project meeting the CEO would come barging in and start berating me for our slow progress on getting the system up and running.
Oh yeah, I was supposed to be the lead developer in addition to managing the project, which meant I was doing all my programming between 5pm and midnight every night.
Their IT staff took over 6 weeks to provision a simple test server for us (this was intentional, of course, as their IT team was trying to make us fail), so we had to sneak in our own Linux box for test purposes.
Another nice catch - we had to replicate a module of their existing system, when there was no documentation of how the module worked, and one contractor who had built it who knew how it worked - and his entire $250,000 a year consulting gig relied on him having sole possession of that knowledge. And part of our job was to extract the information from him and replicate and document this module, so they could fire him.
All of this while my mother was hospitalized for surgery for stage 4 colon cancer (she did not die while I was on this project, thank god, because it probably would have pushed me over the edge - though she did pass away several years later).
Worst 4 months of my life, I have to say. Way worse than the first summer programming job I had at the age of 18 where I had to work in the server room.
Postscript:
The VP of Engineering for this company, not surprisingly, passed away from a heart attack a few years later, I heard. He was in his mid-thirties. The contractor with the $250k a year gig was promoted to a full-time gig as VP of Research and Development, paying even more. After about a year he was fired and then sued into the ground by the company because he insisted on trying to charge them royalties for the software he wrote.
And the engineer on my team actually went off to work for the Chairman's new company in California. Apparently some people like being abused.
No, it's an ML dialect for the JVM, like F# is in the .NET universe. ML/OCaml and similar languages have been around for years and years, so it's not just a new fad.
Scala just compiles down to Java bytecode which means it can interoperate with the huge quantity of existing Java libraries with basically zero incremental effort, and allow the benefits of writing code in a modern ML-like language (functional expressiveness, static typing, etc.).