Taking the Apple click-bait out of the equation, this sounds about right from a broad view: Tablets and "smartphones" as PCs from a decade ago or-so in terms of computing power with funny form-factors and interfaces. The Market is still trying to figure out the form factor. The mini-HDMI out on many tablets, Bluetooth keyboards and mice, styluses, and other "accessories" show this.
What do I think we're seeing? A "transformer". A tablet on-the-go, a workstation when docked. Could I be wrong? Yes. Talk to me in ten years.
The comments have been entertaining. What I read the blog as saying, over and over again, is "Hey! You no longer have an excuse to download illegal music! Songs are available for a buck a song on Amazon and iTunes! There are plenty of ways to get your digital music legitimately. Why are you ripping borrowed CDs?"
The guy sounds like every other musician I know trying to make a living. At some point, you have to sell something. This guy had the "bad luck", if you can call it that, of getting his start in the music business (by being in a signed band) before the Iternet explosion and the ability to sell his stuff direct to the public and, if his business model is good enough, make a living doing it.
In short, this guy does get it: Sell 20k people $50 worth of stuff in a year and get by on, after costs, $50k a year. The guy is also under contract to sell his existing stock at a profit (to him) of ~$0.10 a copy. That means he has to sell 20k * 500 or 1 million units. Just to get a measly $50k a year.
The biggest problem I faced was that a faction of the education bureaucracy was fiercely opposed to college prep courses (because they were elitist) and wanted to homogenize the curriculum.
This is from a pedantic point of view that truly challenging classes are a waste of resources. It's not meant to be anti-intellectual. It's meant to get students from different social classes to socially interact instead of being tracked and segregated. The idea, to paraphrase, is to get the "science geek" and the "shop flunk-out" to respect each other and help each other out, thereby raising achievement levels over-all. The problem isn't one of hard courses being elitist, but of hard courses being perceived to be taking resources from programs that are stressed. The proposed solution is one of co-mentoring. The delivery leaves much to be desired, as co-mentoring (in my opinion) only works if it's started in kindergarten and continued through-out formal schooling.
Private enterprise almost never funds something that can not be immediately turned into a product. You can more-or-less take this as an axiom.
This means that there are vanishingly few sources of funding to perform basic R that is, the basic research that discovers new knowledge that is then refined and turned into a new product. This new product leads to competitive growth, but this growth would never have happened without the initial funding. See also: NASA (in it's hey-day). It's not that Government now has less control over what can be researched is a good or bad thing. It's that there are vanishingly few other sources of funding that fill in the gap when government does not fund basic research.
Scientists and engineers have got to eat and pay the bills, too. If you want basic R&D, pay them. It just so happens that, for economic reasons, almost the only player in funding basic R&D is The State. This is much like the argument about who should pay for autopsies. Economically, no one will pay for them as the only person who benefits from the initial outlay of cash is the dead person....who's dead! Everyone else benefits from the results of the autopsy. Therefore, who should pay? The only vehicle that can do something for the common good of all is The State by definition.
The Rules say that the only thing you can do is to ceaselessly lobby your Senator and get your friends, relatives, and that weird guy who asks you for change for a dollar every time you go into Dunkin' Donuts to do the same.
See my comment below, as the damage has been halted by the same person that halted a similar bill last year, a Senator from Oregon. The only way to stop this is the raise money to buy off enough Senators to keep the bill stopped.
The damage has been halted for now.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon put a hold on the bill, meaning that the Senate leadership is on notice that he will filibusterer it if the bill moves to full debate and vote.
Makes a lot of sense to me. You answered essentially the same as I answered below: "The cloud" makes sense when you have no other infrastructure to leverage (or do not want to buy any). With growth, it becomes an interesting question: When do you move away from "the cloud"? I'd say it depends on your business model. If what you are selling is CPU-cycles and you only own the billing data, while you might never move your product out of the cloud, you just might own your billing platform and build your own gateways to the "rented" servers.
That looks more like a business decision to me: paying one hosting provider vs another. I'd also question how much data is owned by your service versus your customers. If this is a "hobby", as in you're not doing anything that you might leverage with the data, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. You simply choose the least expensive hosting operation that gives you the most services. If you do need to leverage the data, I'd at least build a periodic off-siting method to own the data. That way, when you move to another site or the "cloud" evaporates, you still have data that you can turn into cash-flow.
Easy... You use "the cloud" for speed: When you need to turn an idea into a product in a *very* short amount of time and you have no other infrastructure to leverage.
A lot of businesses have IT staff and have already sunk costs into the needed infrastructure. The sales pitch is that "the cloud" is better than owning infrastructure. And that's where the real arguments start.
I worked in Clemmer's lab at IU a few years ago as a programmer, and to be honest, what we used was a mix of proprietary, University owned, and open source software. Me? I was the person writing the University-owned software.
The real answer is that there isn't time to find open source versions of everything and, frankly, it doesn't exist for the commercial equipment. The project I was working on was building a Mass Spec (IMS^n-MS) and it used a mix of software from various sources. What matters is the reproducibility of the results, and the details of exact code versions are better left footnoted, so that when someone attempts to duplicate the results, they aren't tempted to use the exact same software. This allows gauging to see if someone didn't "cook" the software to get the results expected.
Why does Microsoft think that search is such an important thing
This goes into philosophy of how a business profits from the Internet. There are basically two ways: creating content for people to buy, or telling people how to get to content and selling the re-direction as a service be it to advertisers or any other buyer. Theoretically, someone could charge directly for Search itself.
Google built the most successful business model of telling people how to find stuff. And that is why Microsoft thinks that Search is so important. Microsoft makes money on selling people their content. That business is old-growth and stable. Which, in business, means that it is subject to atrophy and decay. To quote Ray Kroc, the man who understood business as well as anyone (He bought McDonald's from the McDonald brothers and grew it into the behemoth it is today), "When you're green you're growing. When you're not, you're not."
Microsoft has to keep trying to find ways to grow their business. Owning a piece of the search infrastructure, even if it's not being used but is available, is part of their growth strategy. Microsoft doesn't have to dominate. They just have to offer a compelling alternative to Google. Whether they do or not is beyond the scope of this comment.
I know nothing of your budget or what machines you are running, so take what I say as a "I'm running a Microsoft shop" centric answer. Bugtracker.net is a pretty good solution that will allow you, with some fiddling about a bit, to empower your users to submit requests and for you to assign tasks and priorities for little or no cost on top of what you already have invested.
If you aren't a Microsoft-centric shop, any good bug tracking platform will do. Think of them more as issue trackers. Add a wiki, if needed.
OSS (I'm not going to call it free because, cost-wise, it ain't) actually creates a Free Market in software. What OSS does is increase by orders of magnitude to a prospective buyer the amount of information available to her about the transaction of buying software. And yes, I'm saying that OSS software is bought. If by the amount of time used to implement it, if nothing else.
Therefore, OSS is even more important to the market as a device the reduces the costs of entry and increases the perfection of available information than it is as an actual good or service. The fact that much of it is of high value as a good or service is simply a bonus.
This argument also, by the way, demonstrates how OSS increases the value of a proprietary platform. The value of a proprietary platform is equivalent to (at minimum) the value of it's OSS equivalent. Therefore (using a cost example) if Microsoft Office costs $679.95 for the Ultimate Edition, that price is, in part, informed by the value of OpenOffice as a competitor.
168 comments in, probably no one is going to read this. Still, I'll say it anyway.
I wouldn't hire someone who had no interest what-so-ever programming in their spare time. That said, I also wouldn't hire someone that does nothing else but program in their spare time. I'm not looking for someone that can solve a general problem (what do I do when I'm not working?) in a specific way. I want a hint that the person I'm talking with during an interview has other interests. I don't want to know what they are. That leads to information I'm not supposed to know during an interview. I just want them to give me an assurance that they are a well-rounded person with other pursuits.
Myself? Of course I program in my spare time. I also collect books, smoke and collect tobacco pipes, play RPGs (the pen and paper kind) with my friends, play computer games, cook... the list of things I do in my spare time is endless. That's what I'm looking for, because someone who doesn't lack for things to do in their spare time most liely comes with several approaches to solving new problems and that's the type of person I'm looking to hire.
Okay... I'll see your "Expand the current program!" and counter with "Will you pay the higher taxes to expand said current program that offers services that are not available to you?"
Note: I'm not saying what I think the solution is. I'm just poking holes in your solution. I'll concede your point that health care is a clusterfuck and that the real solution is to take down the 60+ year built-out infrastructure, replacing it with different efficiencies. The US has the best rescue care in the world. If you need an organ transplant or you have cancer; if you can pay for it; you can get the best possible care in the world. Maybe we need to instead leave that infrastructure alone (you buy insurance for the big stuff) and figure something else out for the rest.
Real Research
on
Robotic Mold
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You bored me. And if that's the face you show to an employer, you bored him, too.
First of all, go ahead and sit for the certifications. If you are at all good at what you do, you'll pass them.
Second, you don't have to lie, but you do have to tell a story; a compelling narrative. I am not interested, as an employer, in whinny stories of how hard you worked, or how you worked for depressed wages and unpaid overtime. In fact, that that does tell me as an employer is that if I need cheap help,you're probably going to be a pushover for the job. What you have to tell me is what you did. What you accomplished.
I was recently unemployed for five months. I learned to get good at telling my story. I went through countless drafts of my c.v. and presentation. I learned to adapt to fit in whatever situation I was in. And I knew my worth. It is possible to succeed, but you have to be diligent and compelling.
And finally, forget about this "dream job" thing. Unless you are in business for yourself and successful. You will never find a "dream job" working for someone else.
Government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation. Deep-throat said it in the 70s. Just follow the money.
Milton was right. We've gotten the government we deserve. One ruled by corporations the use acts of Congress to gain competitive advantage.
Interesting... but isn't what this really means is that we have two arguments here? The first is technical: What can the equipment do? The second is entirely content-driven. Who gets to control the content?
I have no trouble with letting the technology determine what can be done with the equipment. If the capacity is there, it will be used. The entire problem, and the whole point of Network Neutrality as far as I'm concerned is that argument over content.
I think that it's a matter of Freedom to keep the barriers to being able to place your personal creative content on the Internet. I should not have to contact with, say, Time-Warner to put up a web page. I should be able to use the free market and find a host with terms that I like, where ever said host might be.
So maybe what is needed here is a language delineation of the debate. Let's call int "Net Neutral Access", and let the technical problems and engineering work themselves out without laws hindering them.
Seems to me that any given community can come up with enough volunteers using a minimum two-person rule to get the counts correct. I'm aiming for "good enough", as any counting will have accuracy problems. Elected governments are the very most expensive form of government, period. THe better question that you should be asking is "Do I care about the cost?" I believe in a republican (small-r) democracy, so no. I do not care about the cost. I want the will of the represented to be done. Period. However, in terms of tax-payer cost (and let's face it, that's the only cost that counts), the dollar sum can be effectively minimized through the actors of volunteering and public self-interest.
Question is, why am I arguing a point on Slashdot? Arguing on any Internet site is like masturbation. It only serves to make one feel good. It produces nothing but waste.
Election staffers are a minimum 2/3 volunteers. One clerk from each party supervises the vote, with the final arbitrator being the single paid person who signs off on the vote. At least, that's how things work here. The counting isn't expensive in any sense but time.
This is how votes were counted before machines. Simple, and with the exception of a corrupt set of counter (hence the large number of volunteers), foolproof.
In a nutshell, this has nothing to do with which party is in power. The political price for access has been paid and the corporate masters want legislation that gives them a competitive advantage. The *IAA both know that there is nothing they can do about overseas duplication, and that, in the end, there is nothing they can do about "copy sharing piracy" (Notice the quotes, all you literalists. I quote because semantically you're right. It's copyright infringement. Piracy involves theft of actual goods. Now go troll someone else's post.)
This law is all about the horse-trading that goes on in Congress, and political party makes no difference. Members of Congress need enormous amounts of money to effectively run for their offices. Here, in Indiana, I would need $15 dollars to mount a plausible bid against my Congressman. I'd need twice that much to run for Senate. That level of fund raising comes at a cost. Namely access and quid pro quo. I need the same amounts to keep my office as I spent to get it, adjusted for inflation. And I can't do anything politically without seniority, so I have to stick around in Congress for a while.
The solution is a mix of term limits, public funding of elections, and a shorter election season. None of these will happen because the political will simply isn't there. In the meantime, corporations will just buy market advantage in legislature. The *IAA want you to buy their product. They aren't above forcing you by getting their pets to enact laws.
"You'd be called a fool if you suggested that we could make BLAS progress faster by taking the people off developing calculators and put them on BLAS"
Actually, that's where you are wrong. Calculators are considered a "teeth cutting" application. They're small and teach basic concepts like stacks, memory management, and sorting algorithms. Taking people off of developing calculators and building BLAS libraries would, in fact, create more BLAS libraries. Better isn't assured, but more is. A good example is the number of protein identification packages that keep getting developed every year in the Mass Spec community. There is no reason the same efforts couldn't be put towards BLAS....except funding.
Of course, I'm biased. This time last year found me helping to create an SBIR proposal that would create yet another in-silico protein identification (okay... peptide identification) platform using some solid-state components that are specialized for the task. The proposal wasn't funded, but it got a pretty high score.
Don't just think "it might be fun to..." Get yourself a copy of "The Little Schemer" and get started learning pure recursion. I cut my teeth on scheme (it's a derivation of LISP) and consider it to be a fantastic foundation to understanding how to efficiency use C/C++/Java/Perl/Ruby... I use a lot of different programming languages, depending upon the problem and languages available to me.
From my POV, functional programming gives a solid groundwork for understanding object orientation, parallel logic, concurrency, and working around system limitations.
*shrug* I've known about this match for a while. I even recognize some of the suiters in the publicity photo from friends I have in Atlanta. As usual,/. picks up with good (and not so good-natured) flames. Amazing how a set that jokingly admits to using the Internet for porn gets all squeamish just because the porn in question is not necessarily heterosexual.
For the record, it's a bowling match in a public place. It would make a great charity fund-raiser. It will probably be a lot of fun for everyone in attendance. This is a positive thing and to crack jokes about Furries being perverts does nothing more than show a narrow mind and a fear of being different that a grown adult should grow out of.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking the Apple click-bait out of the equation, this sounds about right from a broad view: Tablets and "smartphones" as PCs from a decade ago or-so in terms of computing power with funny form-factors and interfaces. The Market is still trying to figure out the form factor. The mini-HDMI out on many tablets, Bluetooth keyboards and mice, styluses, and other "accessories" show this.
What do I think we're seeing? A "transformer". A tablet on-the-go, a workstation when docked. Could I be wrong? Yes. Talk to me in ten years.
The comments have been entertaining. What I read the blog as saying, over and over again, is "Hey! You no longer have an excuse to download illegal music! Songs are available for a buck a song on Amazon and iTunes! There are plenty of ways to get your digital music legitimately. Why are you ripping borrowed CDs?"
The guy sounds like every other musician I know trying to make a living. At some point, you have to sell something. This guy had the "bad luck", if you can call it that, of getting his start in the music business (by being in a signed band) before the Iternet explosion and the ability to sell his stuff direct to the public and, if his business model is good enough, make a living doing it.
In short, this guy does get it: Sell 20k people $50 worth of stuff in a year and get by on, after costs, $50k a year. The guy is also under contract to sell his existing stock at a profit (to him) of ~$0.10 a copy. That means he has to sell 20k * 500 or 1 million units. Just to get a measly $50k a year.
The biggest problem I faced was that a faction of the education bureaucracy was fiercely opposed to college prep courses (because they were elitist) and wanted to homogenize the curriculum.
This is from a pedantic point of view that truly challenging classes are a waste of resources. It's not meant to be anti-intellectual. It's meant to get students from different social classes to socially interact instead of being tracked and segregated. The idea, to paraphrase, is to get the "science geek" and the "shop flunk-out" to respect each other and help each other out, thereby raising achievement levels over-all. The problem isn't one of hard courses being elitist, but of hard courses being perceived to be taking resources from programs that are stressed. The proposed solution is one of co-mentoring. The delivery leaves much to be desired, as co-mentoring (in my opinion) only works if it's started in kindergarten and continued through-out formal schooling.
Private enterprise almost never funds something that can not be immediately turned into a product. You can more-or-less take this as an axiom.
...who's dead! Everyone else benefits from the results of the autopsy. Therefore, who should pay? The only vehicle that can do something for the common good of all is The State by definition.
This means that there are vanishingly few sources of funding to perform basic R that is, the basic research that discovers new knowledge that is then refined and turned into a new product. This new product leads to competitive growth, but this growth would never have happened without the initial funding. See also: NASA (in it's hey-day). It's not that Government now has less control over what can be researched is a good or bad thing. It's that there are vanishingly few other sources of funding that fill in the gap when government does not fund basic research.
Scientists and engineers have got to eat and pay the bills, too. If you want basic R&D, pay them. It just so happens that, for economic reasons, almost the only player in funding basic R&D is The State. This is much like the argument about who should pay for autopsies. Economically, no one will pay for them as the only person who benefits from the initial outlay of cash is the dead person.
The Rules say that the only thing you can do is to ceaselessly lobby your Senator and get your friends, relatives, and that weird guy who asks you for change for a dollar every time you go into Dunkin' Donuts to do the same.
See my comment below, as the damage has been halted by the same person that halted a similar bill last year, a Senator from Oregon. The only way to stop this is the raise money to buy off enough Senators to keep the bill stopped.
The damage has been halted for now. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon put a hold on the bill, meaning that the Senate leadership is on notice that he will filibusterer it if the bill moves to full debate and vote.
Makes a lot of sense to me. You answered essentially the same as I answered below: "The cloud" makes sense when you have no other infrastructure to leverage (or do not want to buy any). With growth, it becomes an interesting question: When do you move away from "the cloud"? I'd say it depends on your business model. If what you are selling is CPU-cycles and you only own the billing data, while you might never move your product out of the cloud, you just might own your billing platform and build your own gateways to the "rented" servers.
That looks more like a business decision to me: paying one hosting provider vs another. I'd also question how much data is owned by your service versus your customers. If this is a "hobby", as in you're not doing anything that you might leverage with the data, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. You simply choose the least expensive hosting operation that gives you the most services. If you do need to leverage the data, I'd at least build a periodic off-siting method to own the data. That way, when you move to another site or the "cloud" evaporates, you still have data that you can turn into cash-flow.
Easy... You use "the cloud" for speed: When you need to turn an idea into a product in a *very* short amount of time and you have no other infrastructure to leverage. A lot of businesses have IT staff and have already sunk costs into the needed infrastructure. The sales pitch is that "the cloud" is better than owning infrastructure. And that's where the real arguments start.
I worked in Clemmer's lab at IU a few years ago as a programmer, and to be honest, what we used was a mix of proprietary, University owned, and open source software. Me? I was the person writing the University-owned software. The real answer is that there isn't time to find open source versions of everything and, frankly, it doesn't exist for the commercial equipment. The project I was working on was building a Mass Spec (IMS^n-MS) and it used a mix of software from various sources. What matters is the reproducibility of the results, and the details of exact code versions are better left footnoted, so that when someone attempts to duplicate the results, they aren't tempted to use the exact same software. This allows gauging to see if someone didn't "cook" the software to get the results expected.
Why does Microsoft think that search is such an important thing
This goes into philosophy of how a business profits from the Internet. There are basically two ways: creating content for people to buy, or telling people how to get to content and selling the re-direction as a service be it to advertisers or any other buyer. Theoretically, someone could charge directly for Search itself.
Google built the most successful business model of telling people how to find stuff. And that is why Microsoft thinks that Search is so important. Microsoft makes money on selling people their content. That business is old-growth and stable. Which, in business, means that it is subject to atrophy and decay. To quote Ray Kroc, the man who understood business as well as anyone (He bought McDonald's from the McDonald brothers and grew it into the behemoth it is today), "When you're green you're growing. When you're not, you're not."
Microsoft has to keep trying to find ways to grow their business. Owning a piece of the search infrastructure, even if it's not being used but is available, is part of their growth strategy. Microsoft doesn't have to dominate. They just have to offer a compelling alternative to Google. Whether they do or not is beyond the scope of this comment.
I know nothing of your budget or what machines you are running, so take what I say as a "I'm running a Microsoft shop" centric answer. Bugtracker.net is a pretty good solution that will allow you, with some fiddling about a bit, to empower your users to submit requests and for you to assign tasks and priorities for little or no cost on top of what you already have invested.
If you aren't a Microsoft-centric shop, any good bug tracking platform will do. Think of them more as issue trackers. Add a wiki, if needed.
Just to add an argument to support and abet:
OSS (I'm not going to call it free because, cost-wise, it ain't) actually creates a Free Market in software. What OSS does is increase by orders of magnitude to a prospective buyer the amount of information available to her about the transaction of buying software. And yes, I'm saying that OSS software is bought. If by the amount of time used to implement it, if nothing else.
Therefore, OSS is even more important to the market as a device the reduces the costs of entry and increases the perfection of available information than it is as an actual good or service. The fact that much of it is of high value as a good or service is simply a bonus.
This argument also, by the way, demonstrates how OSS increases the value of a proprietary platform. The value of a proprietary platform is equivalent to (at minimum) the value of it's OSS equivalent. Therefore (using a cost example) if Microsoft Office costs $679.95 for the Ultimate Edition, that price is, in part, informed by the value of OpenOffice as a competitor.
168 comments in, probably no one is going to read this. Still, I'll say it anyway.
I wouldn't hire someone who had no interest what-so-ever programming in their spare time. That said, I also wouldn't hire someone that does nothing else but program in their spare time. I'm not looking for someone that can solve a general problem (what do I do when I'm not working?) in a specific way. I want a hint that the person I'm talking with during an interview has other interests. I don't want to know what they are. That leads to information I'm not supposed to know during an interview. I just want them to give me an assurance that they are a well-rounded person with other pursuits.
Myself? Of course I program in my spare time. I also collect books, smoke and collect tobacco pipes, play RPGs (the pen and paper kind) with my friends, play computer games, cook... the list of things I do in my spare time is endless. That's what I'm looking for, because someone who doesn't lack for things to do in their spare time most liely comes with several approaches to solving new problems and that's the type of person I'm looking to hire.
Okay... I'll see your "Expand the current program!" and counter with "Will you pay the higher taxes to expand said current program that offers services that are not available to you?"
Note: I'm not saying what I think the solution is. I'm just poking holes in your solution. I'll concede your point that health care is a clusterfuck and that the real solution is to take down the 60+ year built-out infrastructure, replacing it with different efficiencies. The US has the best rescue care in the world. If you need an organ transplant or you have cancer; if you can pay for it; you can get the best possible care in the world. Maybe we need to instead leave that infrastructure alone (you buy insurance for the big stuff) and figure something else out for the rest.
Adamatzky I'm already familiar with, citing his Chemical Computer in a senior paper to finish my CS degree. This is no more crazy than using electrostatic foam to compute.
You bored me. And if that's the face you show to an employer, you bored him, too.
First of all, go ahead and sit for the certifications. If you are at all good at what you do, you'll pass them.
Second, you don't have to lie, but you do have to tell a story; a compelling narrative. I am not interested, as an employer, in whinny stories of how hard you worked, or how you worked for depressed wages and unpaid overtime. In fact, that that does tell me as an employer is that if I need cheap help,you're probably going to be a pushover for the job. What you have to tell me is what you did. What you accomplished.
I was recently unemployed for five months. I learned to get good at telling my story. I went through countless drafts of my c.v. and presentation. I learned to adapt to fit in whatever situation I was in. And I knew my worth. It is possible to succeed, but you have to be diligent and compelling.
And finally, forget about this "dream job" thing. Unless you are in business for yourself and successful. You will never find a "dream job" working for someone else.
Government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation. Deep-throat said it in the 70s. Just follow the money. Milton was right. We've gotten the government we deserve. One ruled by corporations the use acts of Congress to gain competitive advantage.
Interesting... but isn't what this really means is that we have two arguments here? The first is technical: What can the equipment do? The second is entirely content-driven. Who gets to control the content? I have no trouble with letting the technology determine what can be done with the equipment. If the capacity is there, it will be used. The entire problem, and the whole point of Network Neutrality as far as I'm concerned is that argument over content. I think that it's a matter of Freedom to keep the barriers to being able to place your personal creative content on the Internet. I should not have to contact with, say, Time-Warner to put up a web page. I should be able to use the free market and find a host with terms that I like, where ever said host might be. So maybe what is needed here is a language delineation of the debate. Let's call int "Net Neutral Access", and let the technical problems and engineering work themselves out without laws hindering them.
Seems to me that any given community can come up with enough volunteers using a minimum two-person rule to get the counts correct. I'm aiming for "good enough", as any counting will have accuracy problems. Elected governments are the very most expensive form of government, period. THe better question that you should be asking is "Do I care about the cost?" I believe in a republican (small-r) democracy, so no. I do not care about the cost. I want the will of the represented to be done. Period. However, in terms of tax-payer cost (and let's face it, that's the only cost that counts), the dollar sum can be effectively minimized through the actors of volunteering and public self-interest. Question is, why am I arguing a point on Slashdot? Arguing on any Internet site is like masturbation. It only serves to make one feel good. It produces nothing but waste.
Bullshit.
Election staffers are a minimum 2/3 volunteers. One clerk from each party supervises the vote, with the final arbitrator being the single paid person who signs off on the vote. At least, that's how things work here. The counting isn't expensive in any sense but time.
This is how votes were counted before machines. Simple, and with the exception of a corrupt set of counter (hence the large number of volunteers), foolproof.
In a nutshell, this has nothing to do with which party is in power. The political price for access has been paid and the corporate masters want legislation that gives them a competitive advantage. The *IAA both know that there is nothing they can do about overseas duplication, and that, in the end, there is nothing they can do about "copy sharing piracy" (Notice the quotes, all you literalists. I quote because semantically you're right. It's copyright infringement. Piracy involves theft of actual goods. Now go troll someone else's post.)
This law is all about the horse-trading that goes on in Congress, and political party makes no difference. Members of Congress need enormous amounts of money to effectively run for their offices. Here, in Indiana, I would need $15 dollars to mount a plausible bid against my Congressman. I'd need twice that much to run for Senate. That level of fund raising comes at a cost. Namely access and quid pro quo. I need the same amounts to keep my office as I spent to get it, adjusted for inflation. And I can't do anything politically without seniority, so I have to stick around in Congress for a while.
The solution is a mix of term limits, public funding of elections, and a shorter election season. None of these will happen because the political will simply isn't there. In the meantime, corporations will just buy market advantage in legislature. The *IAA want you to buy their product. They aren't above forcing you by getting their pets to enact laws.
"You'd be called a fool if you suggested that we could make BLAS progress faster by taking the people off developing calculators and put them on BLAS"
...except funding.
Actually, that's where you are wrong. Calculators are considered a "teeth cutting" application. They're small and teach basic concepts like stacks, memory management, and sorting algorithms. Taking people off of developing calculators and building BLAS libraries would, in fact, create more BLAS libraries. Better isn't assured, but more is. A good example is the number of protein identification packages that keep getting developed every year in the Mass Spec community. There is no reason the same efforts couldn't be put towards BLAS.
Of course, I'm biased. This time last year found me helping to create an SBIR proposal that would create yet another in-silico protein identification (okay... peptide identification) platform using some solid-state components that are specialized for the task. The proposal wasn't funded, but it got a pretty high score.
Don't just think "it might be fun to..." Get yourself a copy of "The Little Schemer" and get started learning pure recursion. I cut my teeth on scheme (it's a derivation of LISP) and consider it to be a fantastic foundation to understanding how to efficiency use C/C++/Java/Perl/Ruby... I use a lot of different programming languages, depending upon the problem and languages available to me.
From my POV, functional programming gives a solid groundwork for understanding object orientation, parallel logic, concurrency, and working around system limitations.
Good Luck.
*shrug* I've known about this match for a while. I even recognize some of the suiters in the publicity photo from friends I have in Atlanta. As usual, /. picks up with good (and not so good-natured) flames. Amazing how a set that jokingly admits to using the Internet for porn gets all squeamish just because the porn in question is not necessarily heterosexual.
For the record, it's a bowling match in a public place. It would make a great charity fund-raiser. It will probably be a lot of fun for everyone in attendance. This is a positive thing and to crack jokes about Furries being perverts does nothing more than show a narrow mind and a fear of being different that a grown adult should grow out of.