Ever consider that the real problem with the competence and work ethic of your team?
The whole premise of Agile is that teams are manager-less. In some companies it works great, in others not so much. In those it works well the devs are self-motivated and highly competent - they don't need someone to tell them what to do as they know what needs to be done - they're professionals.
To highlight the problem:
"and give us actual goals to work toward (prior to that we were just told about the project in vague terms, and started coding a bunch of stuff that we *might* use, since we had no idea what the customer wanted)."
Did all of you have some debilitating condition that prevented you speaking to the client? finding out from them in more detail what they wanted?
I sympathise if you were a team of low paid junior devs, in which case it's probably experience as much as anything that's the problem. But a team with an experienced and competent dev on it should have no problem - mostly it's common sense, it's not rocket science to realise that if you don't know what the client wants then maybe you should go and find out, but those new to the working world, junior devs - fresh graduates etc. often miss the obvious answer. Anyone beyond junior level should be able to spot the obvious solution though.
For what it's worth I'd argue I personally do have the skill for managing given that I've delivered a number of projects with high margins and high customer satisfaction, but here's the thing, if I've had to spend a lot of time managing, then I've hired the wrong devs, my teams have always consistently been able to just get on with the job without any real need for me to tell them what to do with the only exception being trainee/junior devs, but I expect that from them. I don't expect it from anyone above that level though.
For what it's worth I actually agree with you. Really, the bulk of my argument in this discussion was simply that fighters are not irrelevant like many here claim. I do agree though that that doesn't mean as much need be spent on the military as is, simply that certain pieces of equipment like fighters do matter.
Yes, I understand people can penetrate to different levels of a network, but what is black or white is whether they penetrated and got anything of value or not.
The fact is, you don't penetrate deep enough into a bank to get information of value and then only get one account's details, it just makes no sense.
If anyone has breached deep enough to be of any real matter or value, we'd hear about it, that's the point.
If you're going to risk hacking into a bank, you're going to come out with something of value whether it's for fame or money.
"If America fell, it wasn't because of the terrorists, but us."
This is absolutely true. Far more Americans lost their lives going to war in Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, than lost their lives in 9/11.
Bush took the 9/11 casualty figures, and multiplied them by three with his actions if you include Afghanistan also. That's quite a colossal fuck up of a response to the initial problem.
A breach with only an account or two stolen makes no sense. It's more likely explained by the account holder themselves. Either the hacker managed to get access to banking details or they didn't, it really makes no sense that they broke in but only got one set of details.
Which is precisely why we'd hear about it - when somewhere is really actually hacked, the fallout is big enough that it can't stay hidden.
It's a question of who they get broken into by though.
For example, Google has been hacked sure, but it's been by state actors (China) who don't give a shit about leaking everyone's personal and credit card details but are more interested in information and espionage.
No company should be allowing themselves to get hacked by a bunch of script kiddies though who do lose your details left and right like Sony was.
Further, I'm not even sure your assertion that everyone gets broken into eventually is true. In the industry I work in if we got broken into we'd go out of business overnight so we simply can't afford to let that happen to us. I can think of a number of companies such as banks that have simply never been hacked, but even outside of that has Amazon ever been hacked? eBay? (DDOS doesn't count, that's not a hack).
Really, without knowing the details of this attack it's hard to speculate reasonably as to whether they should or shouldn't have had this happen to them. If it was something trivial and stupid like an SQL injection attack then they should give up on their business now for being a bunch of incompetent dickheads. If however it was something more sophisticated then fair enough, you can somewhat sympathise with them.
But either way I think it's dangerous to try and make it acceptable that a company will get hacked by simply saying "Oh it happens to everyone, don't worry, as long as you clean up properly". That's bollocks, and it just gives companies an excuse "Yeah, we know all your credit card details got stolen because we had an open SSH port with root access available and password of 'password' but don't worry, we told you, and reset your password, consider us excused for the fact you will now be a victim of financial fraud!".
I think there's absolutely no question that many indies, certainly the succesful ones are highly innovative, but I think it's frankly impossible to argue with any degree of rationality that the big studios are some of the most innovative companies out there.
Even outside of simply looking at the product they produce, the gaming industry has historically been so backwards when it comes to newer software development practices that help improve quality of development that they don't even really have an argument that the way they do things is innovative - quite the opposite. This isn't necessarily a fault, often tried and tested is good, but it does mean you have absolutely no ability to argue that you're innovative.
Yes, the same was true in Libya. Initial cruise missile strikes from US subs, boats and British subs and Tornados were highly effective against fixed immobile targets like runways, and fixed radar stations, but you still needed Rafales and Tornados in the sky to deal with moving targets. Tornado Brimstone strikes were insanely pinpoint and insanely effective at avoiding collateral damage with only about one notable incident of thousands of sorties of more sizeable collateral damage. The Rafales were similarly highly effective and did take out a number of Libyan aircraft both on the ground and as they were scrambling.
Compare this to predators (that were also in the skies over Libya) and in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the collateral is always much higher. Having a pilot that can see a tank has driven near civilians and make the decision that it's not safe to make the kill in an instant is far more effective than a Predator pilot sat in Las Vegas with a few seconds latency and only a video feed. If a civilian appears near the target last minute a pilot can abort, whereas due to latency the chances are the drone pilot has already pulled the trigger, the command is on it's way through the comms network and it's too late.
Another example was Sierra Leone, a grouping of Paras, Ghurkas and SAS backed up by Chinooks, Lynxs and Harriers ended a 10 year period of civil war and instability in a matter of weeks. This sort of scenario was particularly relevant because hilly forested terrain is even more difficult for drones to work in - the areas they've been succesful like Afghanistan, Yemene, Iraq are probably the optimal places for current drones to operate - relatively open spaces where things like vehicle tracks can be spotted from the sky, again, you can't extrapolate that to working well in all environments as some people keep trying to do.
But if you're going to work on the premise that it's all about missiles now, then that means you're reducing to the fight about one of range, or who fires first or who can evade.
For the range argument you have two facets, detection, and missile range. Detection means having something capable of tracking, ideally that means you want something like an AWACS in the sky, but it has to be able to identify friend or foe, it needs to have an understand of the context of the battle. It's not a role that could even become close to being automated by a drone version of an AWACS right now. We just don't have the AI that can handle the situational awareness needed to perform that kind of role. The second problem of detection is what happens when you come up against stealth? or EW? suddenly firing missiles at range just isn't an option at all.
As for who fires first, who do you think that might be? The pilot in a fighter with eyes on situ and twitch reactions, or the drone operator that has to verify a target isn't friendly using video and pull the trigger over a high latency connection?
As for evading, what is more capable of evading, a low speed, low maneuverability prop drone or a stealth human controlled fighter with ability to manually pop countermeasures when needed? We don't have magical stealth drones yet that can automatically tell who to fire at and when, and that are maneuverable, and have any kind of countermeasures. Honestly, a fighter vs. modern drones right now would be a fucking turkey shoot, try a wargame like that and I'd wager the kill ratio would be on the order of 10s:1.
Again, the drone technology you seem to believe should replace fighters simply doesn't exist right now, as I say in 30 years it may be commonplace and good enough to phase fighters out, but there's still room for at least another generation or two of fighters until we get there, assuming we do.
Of course, that's not even in the last 30 years - if you include the gulf war and much of the 80s, the number is much higher. If you include air to ground kills by these fighters, it's drastically higher again.
"The Pentagon and military industrial complex likes to bring up the 'resurgent Russia' or 'China could take Taiwan, et al' scenarios to keep the money flowing, but the real chances of that happening are incredibly slim."
You're missing the point, the whole reason the real chances are incredibly slim are precisely because you have a couple of carrier air wings of fighters hovering around the area as a deterrent.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and literally the only reason they didn't roll into the capital and depose the government there and then was because the US opted to send a "monitoring force" at which point Russia withdrew straight back to it's border (well, the border of the territories of Georgia it's long occupied).
The whole reason there aren't more air to air kills is precisely because countries like the US are sat there with such effective air to air killing machines saying "No.".
It's the same reason nations like the US still have nuclear weapons, how many of those have they used in the last 20 - 30 years? None - you have to go back almost 70 years, but would it really be smart for the West to "stop spending money on them" and get rid of them all leaving India, Pakistan, Russia, China, and North Korea the only ones nuclear capable?
It's about maintaining balance of power precisely so you don't have to fight and use that equipment.
"Once you resell them, you can no longer use them. This is not the case with a video game installed to a PC's hard drive."
The same is true with a lot of things, buy a recipe book, photocopy what you want/write it down, sell it on. Hell, just about every country on the planet even institutionalises this sort of behaviour through libraries which tend to have photocopiers in them precisely so you can duplicate what you need without ever buying a book.
Rip your CDs/Movies/Bluray to file format, and sell them on.
"Once you resell them, you can no longer use them. Record labels are supposed to get compensation from blank CD-R manufacturers for the use case of buy, burn, sell."
Only in a very tiny minority of countries.
These are really poor excuses, and are demonstrably false examples as to why computer games are different, because clearly they're not. There's literally no excuse for computer games and software being different to any other product. VHS, Audio tapes before them were in exactly the same situation, yet you could still sell all of these things on.
Not to bitch at you personally, but it's a pet hate of mine seeing the tired old "These things are useless nowadays" arguments.
People were saying the same thing years ago about the Sea Harrier here in the UK, then the Falklands happened.
The point is, just because we're fighting low tech opponents hiding in mountains right now, doesn't mean we wont be fighting a completely different type of war tomorrow.
These sorts of military purposes are made not because of what's going on right at the time of development, but as a piece in the larger military puzzle that'll be expected to have a life of 20 - 30 years. A lot can happen in that time - in the last 30 years cold war style dog fighting was still a very real prospect, and manned jets were essential to missions in The Falklands, Yugoslavia, and Iraq.
Whilst we're at a point where drones could replace some functionality, the Slashdot mindset that drones can replace every manned air function is false. This wont always be the case, but right now maintaining a manned air to air presence is smart unless you want to risk being caught with your pants down.
Put simply, it doesn't really matter what type of wars we're in right now or have been for the last 10 years, the question is, can we absolutely guarantee that there will be no use for manned aircraft in the next 30 years? Is it 100% guaranteed that there wont be say, a small skirmish over disputed islands between China and it's neighbours? Can we absolutely guarantee that Russia wont attack an Eastern European state that is more strategic to the West than Georgia was requiring some intervention? The answer is no, absolutely not, we most certainly cannot guarantee these things, and whilst that remains true, these new planes serve a purpose - getting rid of them, even if they only act as a deterrent and they never actually have to be used, would only make such scenarios more likely.
The likes of Chinese pilots in their new stealth aircraft would love nothing more than a turkey shoot of pathetic drones with their lack of situational intelligence and awareness, their high latency and so forth in a combat situation in 20 years time.
Regarding your question about avoiding missiles, shoulder launched SAMs tend to have pretty limited altitude, and even more expensive systems don't necessarily seem particularly effective. Remember that Israel flew some older F15s/F16s right through some brand spanking new Russian bought Syrian SAM batteries to blow up their nuclear program and out again without incident.
It's about insuring against the unknowns over the next decades until drone technology is genuinely mature enough to completely and utterly replace it. That's what it's about.
"the (near) monopoly is contributing to the Public Good."
Not at all. The monopoly is being used to block growth of competition, retaining artificially high costs, artificially low investment and preventing rollout to many other areas.
In a truly competitive marketplace, the cost would be lower, investment in infrastructure would be higher due to competition, and they'd be fighting consistently to rollout everywhere. If there was a true competitor to BT in the UK they would be fighting each other to rollout to places that these schemes have forced BT to roll out to, and places for which no schemes exist and hence BT has opted not to rollout to.
It cannot be said by any measure that the status quo is serving the public good. This isn't like Royal Mail where as part of their monopoly on the last mile they have a universal service obligation.
Further, it's false to assume BT aren't using their friends in government. A number of attempts at competition in the fibre market by companies such as Fujitsu resulted in them pulling out of the tendering process, publicly complaining that the whole tender process had been set up for BT to win. A large part of this is the result of OFCOM (and formerly OFTEL) properly ensuring BT is forced to accept as part of it's monopoly other providers to link up to it's network and equipment at a fair cost. When you have government institutions writing tender processes that prevent big competitors that have the clout to go it alone competing, and small competitors that would need to hook into BT's backbone competing, it doesn't exactly smell good.
Well we would learn something, whether humans can cope with such a long mission knowing that on the way there they will at least be the first humans to set eyes on the planet. That's quite different to testing whether people can spend the same amount of time bored to death with no real such excitement ahead for them just orbiting the earth or whatever. Humans aren't simple creatures, simple things like the hope of getting to see a different planet with your own eyes may well be enough to get you through such a mission.
But there's more to it than that, this is clearly intended as a first step - just as we didn't send people straight to the moon, we sent them up into orbit first, we first need to see if we can get people to Mars and back, once we've done that we can think about trying again but this time actually landing them on Mars, and what's more, for a privately funded initiative like this, a successful first mission would all but guarantee funding for that second mission. What you wont get however, is funding to go straight to Mars and land on it from the outset because it's too risky without any evidence you can even get in the vicinity of the planet first, let alone land on it.
You say that, but in South Yorkshire the councils grouped together to create the Digital Region project because BT outright said they weren't going to roll out any fibre there deeming it not cost effective.
As soon as the project started, BT suddenly decided to roll out fibre to the exact same addresses as Digital Region which has left Digital Region no longer commercially viable against the backdrop of competition from BT and so the DR project looks like it's basically going to die, then BT wont roll out to the remaining 20% of home DR didn't yet reach (because it was due to use profits to reach those places).
So BT absolutely does care, and there's good reason why - they learn their lesson from Hull, where Kingston has a monopoly and where BT cannot tred. They don't want that to ever happen again - find themselves locked out of part of the country, no matter how small, because as soon as a company gets a foothold in part of the country, they can use it as a base to then spread into BT areas where competition is allowed.
BT cares, BT cares about holding onto it's nationwide monopoly no matter what. If you want BT fibre in your area the best way to do it is to setup a scheme that will compete against BT, you'll see Openreach vans turn up with fancy new cabinets in no time. It knows full well that it's biggest long term threat is local projects that turn into competing telcos over time. I guarantee if this project in TFA starts to cover more than a handful of houses, BT will get interested all of a sudden.
Even with a recent resurgence in PC gaming, PC games sales are still at a low compared to the 90s where games like Doom and so forth easily outsold 99% of games released nowadays despite there having been an explosion in people with PCs since then. None such games had DRM, so there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that DRM is of any benefit, correlation is not causation so we can't say that DRM is the reason people have been put off PC gaming, but we can be fairly certain that it's been of absolutely no benefit.
Seriously, I know so many people who pirated Quake, yet it still outsold most modern PC games. I was one of those people but then I bought it, because it was awesome. It's not as though DRM stops piracy or anything, it's purely just an anti-consumer measure designed to control what you can and can't do with software you have legitimately purchased - i.e. deactivate your software if they decide they don't like you one day, or prevent you reselling it.
Maybe the future is to simply stop treating digital products like they're a special case, and let consumers do what they want with them, just like pretty much every other type of product on earth. I can resell my toaster, my car, my old socks, my books, my CDs, my DVDs/Blurays, my wallpaper or whatever else I can think of, yet for some reason I can't resell my computer games - they're literally the only thing I can think of that I've bought where this is true.
It's hard to judge, because a lot of the jobs don't exist in private sector, for example, the education departments tend to have advisory teachers that are supposed to advise teachers on how to improve teaching.
These don't really exist in private sector, but were paid £50k - £55k a year. The problem is that even teachers themselves used to joke how people in these posts were basically just teachers who couldn't hack teaching anymore. Further, my experience with the IT advisory teachers was shocking - they didn't even have basic IT literacy that secretarial staff paid a quarter what they got did, things like changing paper in a printer, turning the speakers on a computer on, getting to Google if the browser didn't automatically default to it as the home page were all things they called IT support for and frequently too. As such I have a hard time believing they did a role that justified their wage, they clearly didn't have the prerequisite knowledge to offer any worthwhile advice on IT teaching, and the same was true of at least the maths advisory teachers, particularly as teacher themselves said they found them less than useless. This doesn't give me confidence that even non-comparable jobs were sensibly waged. For reference the teachers they were advising would tend to get around £26k - £29k at the time and the national average wage was around £25k.
For the jobs that did have comparable private sector equivalents I definitely can't for the most part think of any examples whereby the public sector equivalent was lower- even cleaning, catering, secretarial jobs.
The only exceptions I can think of would be for example the highest echelons of managerial staff, and heads of say finance. Given the size of local government, an organisation of say around 6,000 staff they would argue that they're paid less than private sector equivalents and I think this is probably true. The issue I take here though is that number of staff isn't the only metric - our chief exec at the time for example was in charge when a preventable child abuse scandal occurred, and he took us in 3 years from £5million surplus, to £27million in debt and was paid circa £200k a year. From this role he went on to get paid £250k a year and got a CBE from the Queen for "Services to Local Government". I have a hard time believing that he could've got the perks and benefits he did given his failure to balance a budget and then gone on to get paid even more in a similar role elsewhere if he worked in private sector - in other words, whilst he may get paid a little less to manage more staff, he didn't have the burden of accountability to shareholders, the requirement to turn a profit or go bankrupt and so on and so forth for example. That's why I'm not convinced even their argument is a valid one.
So in summary, I'd argue it's actually pretty much across the board.
Note also, that the figures quoted in studies regarding an average 16% or so higher wage than private sector also don't even take into account the higher average annual leave, and much better pensions they get - that factored in I suspect you could nudge that percentage up a good few points. Certainly the common argument amongst high paid public sector staff that "they have to pay that much to attract talent" makes no sense, given there is a severe lack of talent, and immense wastage throughout it.
I don't mean to sound too negative towards public sector, as I say I do appreciate much of it, I'm a big fan of the NHS, and I'm one of those rare people who actually thinks the police don't do that bad a job for the most part, so maybe I am overgeneralising a little - my experience is more in line with the non-front line services like local government, HMRC and so forth I suspect. This said, as a result of a recent review even police starting wages are due to be cut, and the police union doesn't even seem too phased about fighting it which suggests even there pay is just too high.
Sure, but that itself is even more problematic again in public sector.
Case in point, my old boss was my boss for no other reason than that his daddy was mayor. It certainly wasn't through his competence, experience, people skills, qualifications, general managerial ability, or anything else.
To be fair, things work slightly different here in the UK, you can't really be fired in private sector even without good cause, and you can be fired for the exact same reasons in public sector. Private sector has to be able to prove it had good cause, whether that's financial reasons for requiring redundancies, or poor performance demonstrated through poor appraisal grades or whatever, and even then the employee has the right to a tribunal if they feel it was unjust (some people have won these based on claims of bullying for example saying they were pushed out just because people just outright didn't like them) so here you really do need good reason to make someone redundant.
The fundamental issue is here that public sector are apathetic - to fire someone it takes effort, you have to gather evidence, you have to be willing to put your money where your mouth is by sending staff to defend the firing at a tribunal, you have to deal with the massive public sector unions who will flood the press, protest outside your offices even when they're in the wrong (because protesting is a good excuse to get out the office) and so on. As such most public sector bosses just don't bother, it's easier to keep paying someone, and often it's braindead.
An old colleague of mine when I worked in public sector decided to play sick for 6 months, he never managed to provide a sick note or anything, he just said he was sick all that time and didn't come in - stress it was apparently, but not such that a doctor would give him a note stating that. 6 months was the point where they finally lost patience (I'd have lost patience after 6 weeks at most if I'm honest) and so they decided to "investigate" him, well to do that, they had to suspend him on full pay, and they managed to make that investigation last for a whole year, at which point he handed in his resignation. That means he got 18 months of full pay for doing absolutely nothing, not even turning up - but here's the thing, he was only eligible for 6 months full pay followed by 6 months half pay, so the environment was such that it would've cost them less to just ignore him, because if he came in before going off again to try and reset the time they could just refer him to a doctor appointed by them to determine whether he was fit to work so he was never going to do that.
I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that it would be easier to just leave people like that and take no action, or that the action they took ended up costing the tax payer twice what it should have. The guy was on around £35k a year, so what could've cost the tax payer £26.25k, actually cost them £52.5k. It would actually be more than that because of income tax, pension contributions etc. but you get the idea, not to mention the cost of staff time in dealing with him and the investigation too.
Yes, that's pretty much exactly right, unless you're happy to go into upper management (i.e. chief exec of a council), and it's also why I left. The problem is though, even though for the competent you will go further faster in private sector and get paid more as a result, that doesn't really excuse public sector getting paid noticeably more for equivalent roles.
Some people are happy to not have a career, there's no justification though for them being paid more without doing anything to justify it, particularly as these people exist in private sector too. Someone doing an office admin job in private sector because they have a partner that brings in most the cash, and they have to get home to pickup kids from school etc. (i.e. they've chosen to sacrifice their career for some perfectly valid reason) will get way more in public sector, yet there's no real excuse or justification why they should- particularly when it's the private sector worker that's generating the tax income to fund that public sector worker in the first place.
In recent years government has put a pay freeze on public sector, which would go part way to resolving the issue, but private sector wages aren't growing much now either so the danger is by the time they are, government will remove the freeze leaving the issue unresolved. Also, public sector jobs are nearly always on sliding scales - i.e you're employed at say 23k - 28k, you start at 23k but get a guaranteed 1k rise every year for your first 5 years of employment until you hit cap- these aren't covered by the freeze (the freeze only covers the inflationary rise which is usually a 1 - 3% rise each year on top), so many public sector workers are actually seeing pretty hefty wage increases despite being in a so-called freeze, whilst private sector is suffering a genuine freeze a lot of the time. I'm rather concerned that this means things might actually get worse, rather than better - which doesn't suggest our debt problem will be solved any time soon.
I do sympathise with not wanting to do the roof job, that's always going to be the most awkward bit. Did you consider satellite though for Freesat at all? They're always much easier to mount yourself, though if I'm honest I just use the normal aerial even though we have a satellite attached to the house.
The previous owner in our house didn't do the best job of the electrics either (though thankfully no awkward cabling needed redoing- it was only the easy to reach stuff he'd buggered up). I did get an electrician to check our electrics as a result, though in part because I needed to get him out to do some outdoor cabling that by law has to be done by a qualified electrician anyway.
Did you pay someone because you were being lazy, or because you weren't sure how to do it yourself?
I ask because I'm rather taken aback that here on Slashdot, the first response wasn't simply move/extend the TV socket yourself.
Honestly, doing new cabling for TV sockets is easier than wiring a plug and there's absolutely no reason for anyone not to be able to do this beyond them missing a few limbs or something. Even if you don't want to get up on your roof to fit an aerial you can always fit a satellite lower down and use Freesat which is just the DVB-S version of Freeview with the same (more?) channels.
I have Cat6 running from my attic to most rooms in my house into cleanly finished network ports and even I don't bother with IPTV, there's literally no point in the UK precisely because it is so easy to get free to access channels through DVB-T or DVB-S sources. The only reason for it is for catchup services, or for the more obscure channels you can't get via a classic TV service.
It's one of the things we're quite lucky to have in the UK, a relatively open broadcast infrastructure which is trivial to access, and, for the most part, provides some really decent channels without subscription costs - the only cost being the TV license, which contrary to popular belief, doesn't just fund the BBC, but also funds the development and maintenance of that very broadcast infrastructure we enjoy.
"1) Government jobs often don't pay as well as their private equivalents - so it's harder for them to keep good talent."
That's not a problem here in the UK, as part of the austerity measures there has been a push for public sector pension changes and the claim from public sector unions was that public sector pay was lower and the pensions made up for this. This was however completely false, as a number of studies were done into this from a number of sources - a cross party study commissioned by Labour (who are nearly entirely Union funded) and that was completed under the Lib Dem/Conservative coalition found public sector pay was in fact quite a bit higher for equivalent roles. This finding was backed by a couple of independent studies that were done also and figures were around the 13% - 16% mark.
It's something I can attest to personally also, pay for a standard IT helpdesk technician (Job title: Technical Support Officer - there were no IT professionals lower than this grade) was in the £29k - £32k bracket when I was there, in contrast the industry rate for the same role with the same level of talent and experience was around the £18k - £22k.
This isn't to say it's all rosy, there is no career progression as it's all dead man's shoes, but certainly here in the UK it's a complete and utter myth that public sector workers get paid less, on the contrary, for the same job compared like for like, they get paid considerably more.
"2) A lot of regulation (at least where I'm at) is against corruption, and not towards efficiency - No, it doesn't always prevent the former, that's virtually impossible, but there are times where the two are mutually exclusive unless the laws start to get convoluted."
This was another oddity here in the UK, there was anti-corruption, anti-sexism, anti-racism red tape and so forth everywhere, yet the irony is I've never worked in a more sexist, ageist, homophobic, racist, corrupt place in my life.
There was a body of highly skilled competent employees there without a doubt, but they were a minority. The rest of the staff were lazy, and inept, they wanted an easy ride and they had it. They had no ambition or drive, so simply waiting for their boss to quit/die so they could get a pay rise without working for it was fine with them and it's not really surprising that this lazy cross section of the society were also the ones who were rather racist and sexist. They were, to put it nicely, the dregs of society, their existence propped up by the minority of workers who were hard working enough to do their own job, and the dregs jobs for them too.
Again, things may be different elsewhere, but this is certainly an honest appraisal from my experience in UK public sector, and friends and colleagues I've spoken to who have also worked in public sector have suggested it's pretty similar nationwide from their experiences.
This is actually one of my pet peeves in the UK too.
Local government budgets renew in April, it gets to December the busiest time of the year for traffic, and what do they do?
They blow all remaining budget on roadworks.
You know, rather than plan it throughout the year, doing a lot of it in the summer and so forth when the roads are quiet, they wait until commuters are already suffering the clusterfuck of Christmas shoppers and they then just screw it all up a bit more too by closing half the roads, lanes, and traffic control measures that exist too. This is why in December, rather than a few minutes from heavy traffic being added onto your journey, it's usually a substantial increase over here. Those works spill over until March, as stuff never gets done on time in the winter and over Christmas when weather is always at it's worst.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever consider that the real problem with the competence and work ethic of your team?
The whole premise of Agile is that teams are manager-less. In some companies it works great, in others not so much. In those it works well the devs are self-motivated and highly competent - they don't need someone to tell them what to do as they know what needs to be done - they're professionals.
To highlight the problem:
"and give us actual goals to work toward (prior to that we were just told about the project in vague terms, and started coding a bunch of stuff that we *might* use, since we had no idea what the customer wanted)."
Did all of you have some debilitating condition that prevented you speaking to the client? finding out from them in more detail what they wanted?
I sympathise if you were a team of low paid junior devs, in which case it's probably experience as much as anything that's the problem. But a team with an experienced and competent dev on it should have no problem - mostly it's common sense, it's not rocket science to realise that if you don't know what the client wants then maybe you should go and find out, but those new to the working world, junior devs - fresh graduates etc. often miss the obvious answer. Anyone beyond junior level should be able to spot the obvious solution though.
For what it's worth I'd argue I personally do have the skill for managing given that I've delivered a number of projects with high margins and high customer satisfaction, but here's the thing, if I've had to spend a lot of time managing, then I've hired the wrong devs, my teams have always consistently been able to just get on with the job without any real need for me to tell them what to do with the only exception being trainee/junior devs, but I expect that from them. I don't expect it from anyone above that level though.
For what it's worth I actually agree with you. Really, the bulk of my argument in this discussion was simply that fighters are not irrelevant like many here claim. I do agree though that that doesn't mean as much need be spent on the military as is, simply that certain pieces of equipment like fighters do matter.
Yes, I understand people can penetrate to different levels of a network, but what is black or white is whether they penetrated and got anything of value or not.
The fact is, you don't penetrate deep enough into a bank to get information of value and then only get one account's details, it just makes no sense.
If anyone has breached deep enough to be of any real matter or value, we'd hear about it, that's the point.
If you're going to risk hacking into a bank, you're going to come out with something of value whether it's for fame or money.
"If America fell, it wasn't because of the terrorists, but us."
This is absolutely true. Far more Americans lost their lives going to war in Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, than lost their lives in 9/11.
Bush took the 9/11 casualty figures, and multiplied them by three with his actions if you include Afghanistan also. That's quite a colossal fuck up of a response to the initial problem.
A breach with only an account or two stolen makes no sense. It's more likely explained by the account holder themselves. Either the hacker managed to get access to banking details or they didn't, it really makes no sense that they broke in but only got one set of details.
Which is precisely why we'd hear about it - when somewhere is really actually hacked, the fallout is big enough that it can't stay hidden.
It's a question of who they get broken into by though.
For example, Google has been hacked sure, but it's been by state actors (China) who don't give a shit about leaking everyone's personal and credit card details but are more interested in information and espionage.
No company should be allowing themselves to get hacked by a bunch of script kiddies though who do lose your details left and right like Sony was.
Further, I'm not even sure your assertion that everyone gets broken into eventually is true. In the industry I work in if we got broken into we'd go out of business overnight so we simply can't afford to let that happen to us. I can think of a number of companies such as banks that have simply never been hacked, but even outside of that has Amazon ever been hacked? eBay? (DDOS doesn't count, that's not a hack).
Really, without knowing the details of this attack it's hard to speculate reasonably as to whether they should or shouldn't have had this happen to them. If it was something trivial and stupid like an SQL injection attack then they should give up on their business now for being a bunch of incompetent dickheads. If however it was something more sophisticated then fair enough, you can somewhat sympathise with them.
But either way I think it's dangerous to try and make it acceptable that a company will get hacked by simply saying "Oh it happens to everyone, don't worry, as long as you clean up properly". That's bollocks, and it just gives companies an excuse "Yeah, we know all your credit card details got stolen because we had an open SSH port with root access available and password of 'password' but don't worry, we told you, and reset your password, consider us excused for the fact you will now be a victim of financial fraud!".
I think it's a question of indie vs. big studios.
I think there's absolutely no question that many indies, certainly the succesful ones are highly innovative, but I think it's frankly impossible to argue with any degree of rationality that the big studios are some of the most innovative companies out there.
Even outside of simply looking at the product they produce, the gaming industry has historically been so backwards when it comes to newer software development practices that help improve quality of development that they don't even really have an argument that the way they do things is innovative - quite the opposite. This isn't necessarily a fault, often tried and tested is good, but it does mean you have absolutely no ability to argue that you're innovative.
Yes, the same was true in Libya. Initial cruise missile strikes from US subs, boats and British subs and Tornados were highly effective against fixed immobile targets like runways, and fixed radar stations, but you still needed Rafales and Tornados in the sky to deal with moving targets. Tornado Brimstone strikes were insanely pinpoint and insanely effective at avoiding collateral damage with only about one notable incident of thousands of sorties of more sizeable collateral damage. The Rafales were similarly highly effective and did take out a number of Libyan aircraft both on the ground and as they were scrambling.
Compare this to predators (that were also in the skies over Libya) and in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the collateral is always much higher. Having a pilot that can see a tank has driven near civilians and make the decision that it's not safe to make the kill in an instant is far more effective than a Predator pilot sat in Las Vegas with a few seconds latency and only a video feed. If a civilian appears near the target last minute a pilot can abort, whereas due to latency the chances are the drone pilot has already pulled the trigger, the command is on it's way through the comms network and it's too late.
Another example was Sierra Leone, a grouping of Paras, Ghurkas and SAS backed up by Chinooks, Lynxs and Harriers ended a 10 year period of civil war and instability in a matter of weeks. This sort of scenario was particularly relevant because hilly forested terrain is even more difficult for drones to work in - the areas they've been succesful like Afghanistan, Yemene, Iraq are probably the optimal places for current drones to operate - relatively open spaces where things like vehicle tracks can be spotted from the sky, again, you can't extrapolate that to working well in all environments as some people keep trying to do.
But if you're going to work on the premise that it's all about missiles now, then that means you're reducing to the fight about one of range, or who fires first or who can evade.
For the range argument you have two facets, detection, and missile range. Detection means having something capable of tracking, ideally that means you want something like an AWACS in the sky, but it has to be able to identify friend or foe, it needs to have an understand of the context of the battle. It's not a role that could even become close to being automated by a drone version of an AWACS right now. We just don't have the AI that can handle the situational awareness needed to perform that kind of role. The second problem of detection is what happens when you come up against stealth? or EW? suddenly firing missiles at range just isn't an option at all.
As for who fires first, who do you think that might be? The pilot in a fighter with eyes on situ and twitch reactions, or the drone operator that has to verify a target isn't friendly using video and pull the trigger over a high latency connection?
As for evading, what is more capable of evading, a low speed, low maneuverability prop drone or a stealth human controlled fighter with ability to manually pop countermeasures when needed? We don't have magical stealth drones yet that can automatically tell who to fire at and when, and that are maneuverable, and have any kind of countermeasures. Honestly, a fighter vs. modern drones right now would be a fucking turkey shoot, try a wargame like that and I'd wager the kill ratio would be on the order of 10s:1.
Again, the drone technology you seem to believe should replace fighters simply doesn't exist right now, as I say in 30 years it may be commonplace and good enough to phase fighters out, but there's still room for at least another generation or two of fighters until we get there, assuming we do.
"Exactly how many adversaries have US F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18s killed in the past 20-30 years?"
FWIW, a few:
http://www.rjlee.org/air/page19/index.html
Of course, that's not even in the last 30 years - if you include the gulf war and much of the 80s, the number is much higher. If you include air to ground kills by these fighters, it's drastically higher again.
"The Pentagon and military industrial complex likes to bring up the 'resurgent Russia' or 'China could take Taiwan, et al' scenarios to keep the money flowing, but the real chances of that happening are incredibly slim."
You're missing the point, the whole reason the real chances are incredibly slim are precisely because you have a couple of carrier air wings of fighters hovering around the area as a deterrent.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and literally the only reason they didn't roll into the capital and depose the government there and then was because the US opted to send a "monitoring force" at which point Russia withdrew straight back to it's border (well, the border of the territories of Georgia it's long occupied).
The whole reason there aren't more air to air kills is precisely because countries like the US are sat there with such effective air to air killing machines saying "No.".
It's the same reason nations like the US still have nuclear weapons, how many of those have they used in the last 20 - 30 years? None - you have to go back almost 70 years, but would it really be smart for the West to "stop spending money on them" and get rid of them all leaving India, Pakistan, Russia, China, and North Korea the only ones nuclear capable?
It's about maintaining balance of power precisely so you don't have to fight and use that equipment.
"Once you resell them, you can no longer use them. This is not the case with a video game installed to a PC's hard drive."
The same is true with a lot of things, buy a recipe book, photocopy what you want/write it down, sell it on. Hell, just about every country on the planet even institutionalises this sort of behaviour through libraries which tend to have photocopiers in them precisely so you can duplicate what you need without ever buying a book.
Rip your CDs/Movies/Bluray to file format, and sell them on.
"Once you resell them, you can no longer use them. Record labels are supposed to get compensation from blank CD-R manufacturers for the use case of buy, burn, sell."
Only in a very tiny minority of countries.
These are really poor excuses, and are demonstrably false examples as to why computer games are different, because clearly they're not. There's literally no excuse for computer games and software being different to any other product. VHS, Audio tapes before them were in exactly the same situation, yet you could still sell all of these things on.
Not to bitch at you personally, but it's a pet hate of mine seeing the tired old "These things are useless nowadays" arguments.
People were saying the same thing years ago about the Sea Harrier here in the UK, then the Falklands happened.
The point is, just because we're fighting low tech opponents hiding in mountains right now, doesn't mean we wont be fighting a completely different type of war tomorrow.
These sorts of military purposes are made not because of what's going on right at the time of development, but as a piece in the larger military puzzle that'll be expected to have a life of 20 - 30 years. A lot can happen in that time - in the last 30 years cold war style dog fighting was still a very real prospect, and manned jets were essential to missions in The Falklands, Yugoslavia, and Iraq.
Whilst we're at a point where drones could replace some functionality, the Slashdot mindset that drones can replace every manned air function is false. This wont always be the case, but right now maintaining a manned air to air presence is smart unless you want to risk being caught with your pants down.
Put simply, it doesn't really matter what type of wars we're in right now or have been for the last 10 years, the question is, can we absolutely guarantee that there will be no use for manned aircraft in the next 30 years? Is it 100% guaranteed that there wont be say, a small skirmish over disputed islands between China and it's neighbours? Can we absolutely guarantee that Russia wont attack an Eastern European state that is more strategic to the West than Georgia was requiring some intervention? The answer is no, absolutely not, we most certainly cannot guarantee these things, and whilst that remains true, these new planes serve a purpose - getting rid of them, even if they only act as a deterrent and they never actually have to be used, would only make such scenarios more likely.
The likes of Chinese pilots in their new stealth aircraft would love nothing more than a turkey shoot of pathetic drones with their lack of situational intelligence and awareness, their high latency and so forth in a combat situation in 20 years time.
Regarding your question about avoiding missiles, shoulder launched SAMs tend to have pretty limited altitude, and even more expensive systems don't necessarily seem particularly effective. Remember that Israel flew some older F15s/F16s right through some brand spanking new Russian bought Syrian SAM batteries to blow up their nuclear program and out again without incident.
It's about insuring against the unknowns over the next decades until drone technology is genuinely mature enough to completely and utterly replace it. That's what it's about.
"the (near) monopoly is contributing to the Public Good."
Not at all. The monopoly is being used to block growth of competition, retaining artificially high costs, artificially low investment and preventing rollout to many other areas.
In a truly competitive marketplace, the cost would be lower, investment in infrastructure would be higher due to competition, and they'd be fighting consistently to rollout everywhere. If there was a true competitor to BT in the UK they would be fighting each other to rollout to places that these schemes have forced BT to roll out to, and places for which no schemes exist and hence BT has opted not to rollout to.
It cannot be said by any measure that the status quo is serving the public good. This isn't like Royal Mail where as part of their monopoly on the last mile they have a universal service obligation.
Further, it's false to assume BT aren't using their friends in government. A number of attempts at competition in the fibre market by companies such as Fujitsu resulted in them pulling out of the tendering process, publicly complaining that the whole tender process had been set up for BT to win. A large part of this is the result of OFCOM (and formerly OFTEL) properly ensuring BT is forced to accept as part of it's monopoly other providers to link up to it's network and equipment at a fair cost. When you have government institutions writing tender processes that prevent big competitors that have the clout to go it alone competing, and small competitors that would need to hook into BT's backbone competing, it doesn't exactly smell good.
Well we would learn something, whether humans can cope with such a long mission knowing that on the way there they will at least be the first humans to set eyes on the planet. That's quite different to testing whether people can spend the same amount of time bored to death with no real such excitement ahead for them just orbiting the earth or whatever. Humans aren't simple creatures, simple things like the hope of getting to see a different planet with your own eyes may well be enough to get you through such a mission.
But there's more to it than that, this is clearly intended as a first step - just as we didn't send people straight to the moon, we sent them up into orbit first, we first need to see if we can get people to Mars and back, once we've done that we can think about trying again but this time actually landing them on Mars, and what's more, for a privately funded initiative like this, a successful first mission would all but guarantee funding for that second mission. What you wont get however, is funding to go straight to Mars and land on it from the outset because it's too risky without any evidence you can even get in the vicinity of the planet first, let alone land on it.
You say that, but in South Yorkshire the councils grouped together to create the Digital Region project because BT outright said they weren't going to roll out any fibre there deeming it not cost effective.
As soon as the project started, BT suddenly decided to roll out fibre to the exact same addresses as Digital Region which has left Digital Region no longer commercially viable against the backdrop of competition from BT and so the DR project looks like it's basically going to die, then BT wont roll out to the remaining 20% of home DR didn't yet reach (because it was due to use profits to reach those places).
So BT absolutely does care, and there's good reason why - they learn their lesson from Hull, where Kingston has a monopoly and where BT cannot tred. They don't want that to ever happen again - find themselves locked out of part of the country, no matter how small, because as soon as a company gets a foothold in part of the country, they can use it as a base to then spread into BT areas where competition is allowed.
BT cares, BT cares about holding onto it's nationwide monopoly no matter what. If you want BT fibre in your area the best way to do it is to setup a scheme that will compete against BT, you'll see Openreach vans turn up with fancy new cabinets in no time. It knows full well that it's biggest long term threat is local projects that turn into competing telcos over time. I guarantee if this project in TFA starts to cover more than a handful of houses, BT will get interested all of a sudden.
Well there is another way.
Just drop DRM.
Even with a recent resurgence in PC gaming, PC games sales are still at a low compared to the 90s where games like Doom and so forth easily outsold 99% of games released nowadays despite there having been an explosion in people with PCs since then. None such games had DRM, so there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that DRM is of any benefit, correlation is not causation so we can't say that DRM is the reason people have been put off PC gaming, but we can be fairly certain that it's been of absolutely no benefit.
Seriously, I know so many people who pirated Quake, yet it still outsold most modern PC games. I was one of those people but then I bought it, because it was awesome. It's not as though DRM stops piracy or anything, it's purely just an anti-consumer measure designed to control what you can and can't do with software you have legitimately purchased - i.e. deactivate your software if they decide they don't like you one day, or prevent you reselling it.
Maybe the future is to simply stop treating digital products like they're a special case, and let consumers do what they want with them, just like pretty much every other type of product on earth. I can resell my toaster, my car, my old socks, my books, my CDs, my DVDs/Blurays, my wallpaper or whatever else I can think of, yet for some reason I can't resell my computer games - they're literally the only thing I can think of that I've bought where this is true.
It's hard to judge, because a lot of the jobs don't exist in private sector, for example, the education departments tend to have advisory teachers that are supposed to advise teachers on how to improve teaching.
These don't really exist in private sector, but were paid £50k - £55k a year. The problem is that even teachers themselves used to joke how people in these posts were basically just teachers who couldn't hack teaching anymore. Further, my experience with the IT advisory teachers was shocking - they didn't even have basic IT literacy that secretarial staff paid a quarter what they got did, things like changing paper in a printer, turning the speakers on a computer on, getting to Google if the browser didn't automatically default to it as the home page were all things they called IT support for and frequently too. As such I have a hard time believing they did a role that justified their wage, they clearly didn't have the prerequisite knowledge to offer any worthwhile advice on IT teaching, and the same was true of at least the maths advisory teachers, particularly as teacher themselves said they found them less than useless. This doesn't give me confidence that even non-comparable jobs were sensibly waged. For reference the teachers they were advising would tend to get around £26k - £29k at the time and the national average wage was around £25k.
For the jobs that did have comparable private sector equivalents I definitely can't for the most part think of any examples whereby the public sector equivalent was lower- even cleaning, catering, secretarial jobs.
The only exceptions I can think of would be for example the highest echelons of managerial staff, and heads of say finance. Given the size of local government, an organisation of say around 6,000 staff they would argue that they're paid less than private sector equivalents and I think this is probably true. The issue I take here though is that number of staff isn't the only metric - our chief exec at the time for example was in charge when a preventable child abuse scandal occurred, and he took us in 3 years from £5million surplus, to £27million in debt and was paid circa £200k a year. From this role he went on to get paid £250k a year and got a CBE from the Queen for "Services to Local Government". I have a hard time believing that he could've got the perks and benefits he did given his failure to balance a budget and then gone on to get paid even more in a similar role elsewhere if he worked in private sector - in other words, whilst he may get paid a little less to manage more staff, he didn't have the burden of accountability to shareholders, the requirement to turn a profit or go bankrupt and so on and so forth for example. That's why I'm not convinced even their argument is a valid one.
So in summary, I'd argue it's actually pretty much across the board.
Note also, that the figures quoted in studies regarding an average 16% or so higher wage than private sector also don't even take into account the higher average annual leave, and much better pensions they get - that factored in I suspect you could nudge that percentage up a good few points. Certainly the common argument amongst high paid public sector staff that "they have to pay that much to attract talent" makes no sense, given there is a severe lack of talent, and immense wastage throughout it.
I don't mean to sound too negative towards public sector, as I say I do appreciate much of it, I'm a big fan of the NHS, and I'm one of those rare people who actually thinks the police don't do that bad a job for the most part, so maybe I am overgeneralising a little - my experience is more in line with the non-front line services like local government, HMRC and so forth I suspect. This said, as a result of a recent review even police starting wages are due to be cut, and the police union doesn't even seem too phased about fighting it which suggests even there pay is just too high.
Sure, but that itself is even more problematic again in public sector.
Case in point, my old boss was my boss for no other reason than that his daddy was mayor. It certainly wasn't through his competence, experience, people skills, qualifications, general managerial ability, or anything else.
To be fair, things work slightly different here in the UK, you can't really be fired in private sector even without good cause, and you can be fired for the exact same reasons in public sector. Private sector has to be able to prove it had good cause, whether that's financial reasons for requiring redundancies, or poor performance demonstrated through poor appraisal grades or whatever, and even then the employee has the right to a tribunal if they feel it was unjust (some people have won these based on claims of bullying for example saying they were pushed out just because people just outright didn't like them) so here you really do need good reason to make someone redundant.
The fundamental issue is here that public sector are apathetic - to fire someone it takes effort, you have to gather evidence, you have to be willing to put your money where your mouth is by sending staff to defend the firing at a tribunal, you have to deal with the massive public sector unions who will flood the press, protest outside your offices even when they're in the wrong (because protesting is a good excuse to get out the office) and so on. As such most public sector bosses just don't bother, it's easier to keep paying someone, and often it's braindead.
An old colleague of mine when I worked in public sector decided to play sick for 6 months, he never managed to provide a sick note or anything, he just said he was sick all that time and didn't come in - stress it was apparently, but not such that a doctor would give him a note stating that. 6 months was the point where they finally lost patience (I'd have lost patience after 6 weeks at most if I'm honest) and so they decided to "investigate" him, well to do that, they had to suspend him on full pay, and they managed to make that investigation last for a whole year, at which point he handed in his resignation. That means he got 18 months of full pay for doing absolutely nothing, not even turning up - but here's the thing, he was only eligible for 6 months full pay followed by 6 months half pay, so the environment was such that it would've cost them less to just ignore him, because if he came in before going off again to try and reset the time they could just refer him to a doctor appointed by them to determine whether he was fit to work so he was never going to do that.
I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that it would be easier to just leave people like that and take no action, or that the action they took ended up costing the tax payer twice what it should have. The guy was on around £35k a year, so what could've cost the tax payer £26.25k, actually cost them £52.5k. It would actually be more than that because of income tax, pension contributions etc. but you get the idea, not to mention the cost of staff time in dealing with him and the investigation too.
Yes, that's pretty much exactly right, unless you're happy to go into upper management (i.e. chief exec of a council), and it's also why I left. The problem is though, even though for the competent you will go further faster in private sector and get paid more as a result, that doesn't really excuse public sector getting paid noticeably more for equivalent roles.
Some people are happy to not have a career, there's no justification though for them being paid more without doing anything to justify it, particularly as these people exist in private sector too. Someone doing an office admin job in private sector because they have a partner that brings in most the cash, and they have to get home to pickup kids from school etc. (i.e. they've chosen to sacrifice their career for some perfectly valid reason) will get way more in public sector, yet there's no real excuse or justification why they should- particularly when it's the private sector worker that's generating the tax income to fund that public sector worker in the first place.
In recent years government has put a pay freeze on public sector, which would go part way to resolving the issue, but private sector wages aren't growing much now either so the danger is by the time they are, government will remove the freeze leaving the issue unresolved. Also, public sector jobs are nearly always on sliding scales - i.e you're employed at say 23k - 28k, you start at 23k but get a guaranteed 1k rise every year for your first 5 years of employment until you hit cap- these aren't covered by the freeze (the freeze only covers the inflationary rise which is usually a 1 - 3% rise each year on top), so many public sector workers are actually seeing pretty hefty wage increases despite being in a so-called freeze, whilst private sector is suffering a genuine freeze a lot of the time. I'm rather concerned that this means things might actually get worse, rather than better - which doesn't suggest our debt problem will be solved any time soon.
I do sympathise with not wanting to do the roof job, that's always going to be the most awkward bit. Did you consider satellite though for Freesat at all? They're always much easier to mount yourself, though if I'm honest I just use the normal aerial even though we have a satellite attached to the house.
The previous owner in our house didn't do the best job of the electrics either (though thankfully no awkward cabling needed redoing- it was only the easy to reach stuff he'd buggered up). I did get an electrician to check our electrics as a result, though in part because I needed to get him out to do some outdoor cabling that by law has to be done by a qualified electrician anyway.
Did you pay someone because you were being lazy, or because you weren't sure how to do it yourself?
I ask because I'm rather taken aback that here on Slashdot, the first response wasn't simply move/extend the TV socket yourself.
Honestly, doing new cabling for TV sockets is easier than wiring a plug and there's absolutely no reason for anyone not to be able to do this beyond them missing a few limbs or something. Even if you don't want to get up on your roof to fit an aerial you can always fit a satellite lower down and use Freesat which is just the DVB-S version of Freeview with the same (more?) channels.
I have Cat6 running from my attic to most rooms in my house into cleanly finished network ports and even I don't bother with IPTV, there's literally no point in the UK precisely because it is so easy to get free to access channels through DVB-T or DVB-S sources. The only reason for it is for catchup services, or for the more obscure channels you can't get via a classic TV service.
It's one of the things we're quite lucky to have in the UK, a relatively open broadcast infrastructure which is trivial to access, and, for the most part, provides some really decent channels without subscription costs - the only cost being the TV license, which contrary to popular belief, doesn't just fund the BBC, but also funds the development and maintenance of that very broadcast infrastructure we enjoy.
"1) Government jobs often don't pay as well as their private equivalents - so it's harder for them to keep good talent."
That's not a problem here in the UK, as part of the austerity measures there has been a push for public sector pension changes and the claim from public sector unions was that public sector pay was lower and the pensions made up for this. This was however completely false, as a number of studies were done into this from a number of sources - a cross party study commissioned by Labour (who are nearly entirely Union funded) and that was completed under the Lib Dem/Conservative coalition found public sector pay was in fact quite a bit higher for equivalent roles. This finding was backed by a couple of independent studies that were done also and figures were around the 13% - 16% mark.
It's something I can attest to personally also, pay for a standard IT helpdesk technician (Job title: Technical Support Officer - there were no IT professionals lower than this grade) was in the £29k - £32k bracket when I was there, in contrast the industry rate for the same role with the same level of talent and experience was around the £18k - £22k.
This isn't to say it's all rosy, there is no career progression as it's all dead man's shoes, but certainly here in the UK it's a complete and utter myth that public sector workers get paid less, on the contrary, for the same job compared like for like, they get paid considerably more.
"2) A lot of regulation (at least where I'm at) is against corruption, and not towards efficiency - No, it doesn't always prevent the former, that's virtually impossible, but there are times where the two are mutually exclusive unless the laws start to get convoluted."
This was another oddity here in the UK, there was anti-corruption, anti-sexism, anti-racism red tape and so forth everywhere, yet the irony is I've never worked in a more sexist, ageist, homophobic, racist, corrupt place in my life.
There was a body of highly skilled competent employees there without a doubt, but they were a minority. The rest of the staff were lazy, and inept, they wanted an easy ride and they had it. They had no ambition or drive, so simply waiting for their boss to quit/die so they could get a pay rise without working for it was fine with them and it's not really surprising that this lazy cross section of the society were also the ones who were rather racist and sexist. They were, to put it nicely, the dregs of society, their existence propped up by the minority of workers who were hard working enough to do their own job, and the dregs jobs for them too.
Again, things may be different elsewhere, but this is certainly an honest appraisal from my experience in UK public sector, and friends and colleagues I've spoken to who have also worked in public sector have suggested it's pretty similar nationwide from their experiences.
I'm from the UK.
Which is probably, why in part, I do have more socialist views than most Americans.
I've only ever been to America on holiday a few times.
This is actually one of my pet peeves in the UK too.
Local government budgets renew in April, it gets to December the busiest time of the year for traffic, and what do they do?
They blow all remaining budget on roadworks.
You know, rather than plan it throughout the year, doing a lot of it in the summer and so forth when the roads are quiet, they wait until commuters are already suffering the clusterfuck of Christmas shoppers and they then just screw it all up a bit more too by closing half the roads, lanes, and traffic control measures that exist too. This is why in December, rather than a few minutes from heavy traffic being added onto your journey, it's usually a substantial increase over here. Those works spill over until March, as stuff never gets done on time in the winter and over Christmas when weather is always at it's worst.