GP mentioned possible corruption of a file that is bigger than 2GB. I am not sure what he meant with this but that is certainly not a limit but a bug or limitation if you must.
Failure is not really a failure if it taught us something. There is also a possibility to discover new things even if missing the target at the same time. After all Columbus sailed out to discover the path to India.
It is cheaper to hire a bunch of lawyers instead... I wonder sometimes why such vital part of our society is used mostly for profiteering. There was an article in the economist few weeks back: they compared the avoidable deaths due to problems in health care system and costs of the system in various developed countries. The result was interesting: US was in vary bad shape - the highest investment and poorest record. One may ask why but I think the answer is rather obvious - no control and focus on profit makes it not a big surprise that health system generates profit not health gains. I am not saying that this focus on profit is bad but if left without control health system will deteriorate and old and weak will be left behind.
It is interesting to see Germany where I live for number of years. There are two health insurance systems there: private and state controlled. State controlled has a costs & efficiency problem which makes them avoid certain types of cures and medicaments because they cannot afford them (or so they say). Private one is suckers choice - if you are young you pay much less than in state one, only any change of insurer is a bite in the wood - you lose part of cover for the illnesses that you had and that could leave lasting damage. On top of it you have German specifics: state controlled system covers the whole family also when only one person works and pays. Once private it is difficult or close to impossible to switch back. The whole thing is an absolute disaster of course but not for the companies and health officials. How surprising.
There is relatively simple cure for this - you can allow private companies to work on health insurance market but on licence base. It would allow licensee to operate (and profit) under condition: it is obliged to provide basic service to every citizen that asks for it. All citizen that are not on the dole have pay this basic service fee and be insured - this provides for the huge market and lets insurer hope for a massive profits in they do things right. Those on dole gets this done by the state as it is the case anyway. This could get rid of the problem described in TFA too. One can hope that the companies would be interested in prevention instead of litigation then.
Or maybe I am being naive again. I believe Holland is trying some version of such system though - anybody from NL here? But of course any change is difficult especially if one sits on money of others as is the case of current health officialdom in almost all developed countries.
It is funny to look at it from perspective especially historical. I admit I may be mistaken here but I was always convinced that the purpose of shares existing in the first place was to have a possibility of shared ownership for many indihviduals. This is not really the case anymore and it is mostly used for pure speculative purposes that hardly have anything to do with reality of anyone company making profits or not. OTOH this is the only remaining option for owners to get managers to do what they want. So here we are two corrupted sides fighting for money. How spectacular.
Every time I see these arguments I wonder where are the facts and where is the purpose. Just to systematize this: 1. this doubling argument is a nice one - do you know what M.Twain said about extrapolating? see here for guidance: http://mrkwr.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/mark-twain-on-the-perils-of-extrapolation/ 2. what is the purpose of such exercise? I see none. Simulating more gullible, aggressive and plainly stupid indihviduals of the sort that we have already is just plain pointless. Generating an intelligence of some other kind - well how do you recognize it is an intelligence - when it fires nuclear weapons at you? Or when it looks like governor of California?
they do not threat anybody they just sell. If Real's evaluation should lead it either to purchase, own fix or non action if the fault is not deemed important enough. In any case it is Real's job to protect its product and customers. They made products for 'everybody' and these customers may purchase products that are meant to enhance the original one. There were many analogies flying around so here is one to. If you buy a car do you buy protection against theft from the maker? You may if the makers provide one but you may buy it from other people that investigated the product and provide other sometimes better solutions from other producers. Do the other makers of such protective measures blackmail anybody?
This argument has certainly value. I disagree with all the software designers not being accountable for however. There are areas where not fulfilling predefined quality criteria calls for a high fine. It used to be so at least. Anybody involved in development, sale maintenance etc of telecom software can attest.
I find it ludicrous that software in a car is of such bad quality as it often is. I wonder sometimes how on earth software controlled airplanes of today do not fall on earth on regular basis. A friend of mine an engineer that stupidly went off the track and became a software developer told me once that he thinks that these are the small genies that keep airplanes flighting. When I think about all the stuff that works on software and for instance keeps heart machine in the hospital working I am convince that he was right and . there must be genies.
Trying to see what can go wrong is a sign of healthy cautious mind. Especially if there is a chance that what can go wrong can have a major influence on us and our life (if it goes really wrong). How otherwise can you prepare yourself for the case when it really goes wrong? Things go wrong. Not all and always but they do. That is how things are. If humans are involved they do so more often because we like to err (and our managers like to save on basics).
What is interesting about this particular subject is that although we hardly know how things really work (if we did Dolly would live a bit longer I suspect) we are manipulating with a living matter which in worst case scenario can get out of control and because it is alive it may do so on big scale. As no major incident happened yet in this area and there is lots of money involved we often get this 'nothing has happened yet so nothing can ever happen' sort of BS from PR specialists of companies involved. Well if shit happens then we all will be sorry. I think such worry is just normal for any reasonable human being.
Do you think not?
Besides the fact that blocking whole countries is a bit over the top how on earth are you going to convince anybody of power to do such a thing? There are chances that USA may have to be acting alone. Even if all western countries kept together the whole world of internet is now much bigger than that. Considering the fact that Puttin or generally Russia is on a shopping spree and buy western politicians when it fails it blackmails them into submission. It does not even cost so much to buy say a german chancellor - previous one was relatively cheap and not ashamed of this so we know that he got 300kE/year from Russia on top of what he got from German state after the nation decommissioned him.
I disagree with the low bar (to enter software developer heaven/hell). It is like with anything else: some can do it, some dare do it, some dare not do it and there are some that actually can do it well. ALl these groups may overlap somewhat in different areas of expertise. One can argue that to do pishing etc the bar is low - I can agree with that. Low standards, lack of understanding of basic principles by users and organisations one trusts or has to trust(banks or gov. agencies come to mind) and availability of tools that do the job maybe not well but well enuff makes it all possible to enter the 'hacker' arena for anybody. This has nothing to do with actual engineering. One still can do things well if one wants and finds interested organisations. Of course it is not easy in times in which basic understanding of economy is: difficult and expensive then outsource it to hell and hope for the best. Still the fact that producing software is somehow exempt from any sort of responsibility for the results is a bit awkward and I think may add to lowering barriers to entry. Methinks.
I would agree with moral part of your argument but I find it hard to swallow what you say about falling sales. I observed my behaviour over the years and what I see is the following. Up to say 2001 I was buying 3..4 CDs if a week was good - in average say 6..8 a month. I did it for years and then I started having two problems: 1. CD I bought had a note explaining to me that not only I am a criminal if I make a backup of this CD but that they will actively prevent me from making this backup by introducing some 'fancy' technical method. 2. At this time I also realized that CD that had this comment was not worth a dime - I did not like the music and I brought it back to the shop. I also noticed that even while I was still buying newest stuff I listened more to music from decades ago and only occasionally there was something 'relatively' new (few years old) that was worth listening again.
Consequence of both realizations is that I stopped buying. Last year I bought one CD - as a gift to my wife. It may be that part of the CD bonanza was releasing the old stuff from Vinyl on it that caused increased sales and now people have it already. Other factors like that of price and of artistic quality play role too. I must say as soon as I had to pay copy tax on any item that can be used for copying (back up involves copying too) and when I realized I was becoming a criminal if I tried to do what I wanted with my hardware, as soon as this occurred to me I stopped having fun in buying any media in the shop.
Now you may say that copying from pirate bay or such is an immoral thing to do. The other side of the coin is at least as much immoral and unethical. I do think that we customers should pay to artists and to some extent to people that help artists produce stuff. I have no moral obligation though towards people that are trying to rip me and others off.
Now this affects you as a game writer. I am sorry. The way it works is that entertainment sucks today because there is hardly any quality there at all. I doubt this has much to do with piracy.
the relationship between the amount of energy PC consumes and price of this energy makes a difference. If the consumption is high enough and the price too then there is enough technical solutions for the willing to keep the machines down when they are not used. This should matter for any organisation like the one from original poster where thousands of machines are warming up the air at nights. Obviously energy is still cheap. Something that I am surprised to learn - my bills at home are horrendous.
There is also another thing I am surprised here: many people seem to work in an environment where they are dependant on one particular machine instead of using server/terminal solutions and be mobile. But who am I to criticize.
no it does not. The reality is that it depends on your vocabulary and that in your machine (whether pc or ipod is irrelevant). In majority of cases it does not work for me at all. On top of it there is also this: I txt in three different languages and switching the bloody thing all the time is just bloody annoying. Maybe it means that Japanese youngsters are more and more hmmmm simple? Or maybe they use more advanced software than we do (something that I actually sometimes think is true - after all their toilets are much more advanced than ours too:)
that is actually very interesting - after I think 50 generations there have been 4 groups of which one was of liars. I suppose in direct combination with the rest it would win just as it was the case with humans...
I suppose ppl should ask what they want and how they want it.
It is often forgotten by proponents of the free market that business is not there to serve and protect but to make profit. Thus a control is needed. It is also forgotten that not all business is bad - in my home country it was the industrialists that built first hospitals and it was the state that ruined the system with its corruption and inefficiency. Alas privatized health care does not work properly either and in US is more expensive than anywhere else without giving the benefits as elsewhere in other words it is expensive badly run business. Something needs to change. US is not the only one that has a problem either. Germany where I live at the moment politicians boast about common public health care but they do not mention that there are hundreds thousands if not millions of people that do not have insurance because private sector to which they have been forcibly moved will not provide it.
The public services are a must for social animals - otherwise we could not cope with issues concerning huge groups of people and their conflicting interests. This is an issue for fire fighting, policing, defence as well as health care. As for any of them it is not private business that is evil. It is privatizing the profits and using the state to force people in using the service and nationalizing the costs if business does not run as it was hoped for. There is also small problem of massive discrepancy in power between insurance companies etc or health business in general and Joe Doe which makes the state intrusion necessary. The forces of a free market can still be of benefit to all though.
I can imagine the following system in health care: 1. market entry for businesses on licence basis
- if one wants to enter hospital business must hire certified professionals and provide standard service to all that has the right of service. Part of hospital duties is provision of emergency service.
- If one wants to enter insurance market one must provide basic service to anybody without restriction under condition of paying the fees. 2. support of the poor is through tax system not through health system - if people decide to do such support they can pay for it. I think it is only fair to do so this way. 3. everybody has the right to chose whichever insurance company he wants. 4. licence holders must accept every client and offer basic service 5. additional service subject to open market with restriction on safety 6. safety of measures controlled by licence owners i.e. state
I guess this could be for starters. Free market with protection for the people when it is needed and balance of power enforced by the state. The state is then free not to engage in providing the services at least not there where industry is strong enough.
I can imagine similar situation in any area of social services. State does not have to provide but has to enable and control. One cannot also forget that this does not have to be true for developing countries where even is state provided the framework the actors are not existent so the state must start up the service itself.
there was an article about that in previous issue of the economist - the free market is not that good for you after all it seems. Not in US at least. OC their claim is based on one single study and a matter of dispute: they used 'avoidable deaths factor' against investment in healthcare for most developed nations. The results were bad for US with its 'innovative' private sector. Mind me - I do not advocate the state run system which is just as corrupt (vide germany where gov. bursts your ass without mercy and honestly tells you that it is for your own good). Private sector is needed - competing companies can decrease the price, regulation is needed so that none of the following occurs: 1. monopoly, duopoly etc 2. safety is ensured
depending on what your principles are you can add 3. help the poor in getting medical assistent
Till now I know no system that can go only private and succeed. There is also no system that can do it only through the state agencies. These are the facts.
The whole statement goes like this: "This section is for news relevant to United States government politics. It was created primarily to cover the 2004 US Presidential Election, but today exists for occasional stories that fit the bill."
As we can see the part you quoted is just historical.
according to articles in polish press the junctions lacked protection against switching (accidental or otherwise) during the time the trams were passing them. This had nothing to do with naivety but with money - the company owning the tracks and trams said that they (the devices protecting against said switching) are to expensive. It is then not design problem but management one.
Malpractice at management level, typically and not only in Poland thinks in terms of bonuses assigned due to saving programs instead of security, quality and last but not least efficiency. Thus they save to get the bonus instead of save to get efficiency etc.
From my experience it is not that important whether the argument is valid or not. Whether something is qualified as stinkin horse-shit or as drops of wisdom depends mainly but not only on two factors:
1. authority of who is saying it - if my boss is saying it it is horse-shit only during conversation with my colleagues, if CEO of the company does that we do not talk about its it is too dangerous.
2. how it is said - well presented horse shit may be sold for good money. This sometimes changes the stink of it into perfume. Alas until that happens care is needed.
This need to be noted: from my experience people do not buy msOffice - they either get it in 'free' packets together with their hw or they have the choice made for them by mighty admins (or whoever that is that makes decision about purchase of this or that software for big organisations).
Fortunately there are alternatives one can use if ms products fail - the results may not be ideal but better than nothing. I do not understand why all this fuss about such policy then.
I donno if they did or not unite to do copy. I know only that if youtry to build something really unique without copying a single bit of somebody else's work is an exercise in futility.
Usually the question is - copy (i.e. search and copy) or DIY. In any case argument about something being bad or unoriginal 'cause parts of it have been copied or having design base is a stupid as you can get. But I guess the whole argument about _all_ free software or _all_ closed source or _all_ open source is bound to go wrong - the range on which you oparate is just to wide.
But I did not read all the posts here so I do not know:)
Slashdot Mirror
GP mentioned possible corruption of a file that is bigger than 2GB. I am not sure what he meant with this but that is certainly not a limit but a bug or limitation if you must.
Failure is not really a failure if it taught us something. There is also a possibility to discover new things even if missing the target at the same time. After all Columbus sailed out to discover the path to India.
It is cheaper to hire a bunch of lawyers instead...
I wonder sometimes why such vital part of our society is used mostly for profiteering. There was an article in the economist few weeks back: they compared the avoidable deaths due to problems in health care system and costs of the system in various developed countries. The result was interesting: US was in vary bad shape - the highest investment and poorest record. One may ask why but I think the answer is rather obvious - no control and focus on profit makes it not a big surprise that health system generates profit not health gains. I am not saying that this focus on profit is bad but if left without control health system will deteriorate and old and weak will be left behind.
It is interesting to see Germany where I live for number of years. There are two health insurance systems there: private and state controlled. State controlled has a costs & efficiency problem which makes them avoid certain types of cures and medicaments because they cannot afford them (or so they say). Private one is suckers choice - if you are young you pay much less than in state one, only any change of insurer is a bite in the wood - you lose part of cover for the illnesses that you had and that could leave lasting damage. On top of it you have German specifics: state controlled system covers the whole family also when only one person works and pays. Once private it is difficult or close to impossible to switch back.
The whole thing is an absolute disaster of course but not for the companies and health officials. How surprising.
There is relatively simple cure for this - you can allow private companies to work on health insurance market but on licence base. It would allow licensee to operate (and profit) under condition: it is obliged to provide basic service to every citizen that asks for it. All citizen that are not on the dole have pay this basic service fee and be insured - this provides for the huge market and lets insurer hope for a massive profits in they do things right. Those on dole gets this done by the state as it is the case anyway. This could get rid of the problem described in TFA too. One can hope that the companies would be interested in prevention instead of litigation then.
Or maybe I am being naive again. I believe Holland is trying some version of such system though - anybody from NL here?
But of course any change is difficult especially if one sits on money of others as is the case of current health officialdom in almost all developed countries.
are you saying rocks do not work? I heard something different on the telly the other day...
It is funny to look at it from perspective especially historical. I admit I may be mistaken here but I was always convinced that the purpose of shares existing in the first place was to have a possibility of shared ownership for many indihviduals. This is not really the case anymore and it is mostly used for pure speculative purposes that hardly have anything to do with reality of anyone company making profits or not. OTOH this is the only remaining option for owners to get managers to do what they want.
So here we are two corrupted sides fighting for money.
How spectacular.
Every time I see these arguments I wonder where are the facts and where is the purpose. Just to systematize this:
1. this doubling argument is a nice one - do you know what M.Twain said about extrapolating? see here for guidance:
http://mrkwr.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/mark-twain-on-the-perils-of-extrapolation/
2. what is the purpose of such exercise? I see none. Simulating more gullible, aggressive and plainly stupid indihviduals of the sort that we have already is just plain pointless. Generating an intelligence of some other kind - well how do you recognize it is an intelligence - when it fires nuclear weapons at you? Or when it looks like governor of California?
they do not threat anybody they just sell.
If Real's evaluation should lead it either to purchase, own fix or non action if the fault is not deemed important enough. In any case it is Real's job to protect its product and customers. They made products for 'everybody' and these customers may purchase products that are meant to enhance the original one.
There were many analogies flying around so here is one to. If you buy a car do you buy protection against theft from the maker? You may if the makers provide one but you may buy it from other people that investigated the product and provide other sometimes better solutions from other producers. Do the other makers of such protective measures blackmail anybody?
This argument has certainly value. I disagree with all the software designers not being accountable for however. There are areas where not fulfilling predefined quality criteria calls for a high fine. It used to be so at least. Anybody involved in development, sale maintenance etc of telecom software can attest.
I find it ludicrous that software in a car is of such bad quality as it often is. I wonder sometimes how on earth software controlled airplanes of today do not fall on earth on regular basis. A friend of mine an engineer that stupidly went off the track and became a software developer told me once that he thinks that these are the small genies that keep airplanes flighting. When I think about all the stuff that works on software and for instance keeps heart machine in the hospital working I am convince that he was right and . there must be genies.
who is going to make vibrators if man is going extinct?
Trying to see what can go wrong is a sign of healthy cautious mind. Especially if there is a chance that what can go wrong can have a major influence on us and our life (if it goes really wrong). How otherwise can you prepare yourself for the case when it really goes wrong? Things go wrong. Not all and always but they do. That is how things are. If humans are involved they do so more often because we like to err (and our managers like to save on basics). What is interesting about this particular subject is that although we hardly know how things really work (if we did Dolly would live a bit longer I suspect) we are manipulating with a living matter which in worst case scenario can get out of control and because it is alive it may do so on big scale. As no major incident happened yet in this area and there is lots of money involved we often get this 'nothing has happened yet so nothing can ever happen' sort of BS from PR specialists of companies involved. Well if shit happens then we all will be sorry. I think such worry is just normal for any reasonable human being. Do you think not?
Besides the fact that blocking whole countries is a bit over the top how on earth are you going to convince anybody of power to do such a thing?
There are chances that USA may have to be acting alone. Even if all western countries kept together the whole world of internet is now much bigger than that. Considering the fact that Puttin or generally Russia is on a shopping spree and buy western politicians when it fails it blackmails them into submission. It does not even cost so much to buy say a german chancellor - previous one was relatively cheap and not ashamed of this so we know that he got 300kE/year from Russia on top of what he got from German state after the nation decommissioned him.
I disagree with the low bar (to enter software developer heaven/hell). It is like with anything else: some can do it, some dare do it, some dare not do it and there are some that actually can do it well. ALl these groups may overlap somewhat in different areas of expertise. One can argue that to do pishing etc the bar is low - I can agree with that. Low standards, lack of understanding of basic principles by users and organisations one trusts or has to trust(banks or gov. agencies come to mind) and availability of tools that do the job maybe not well but well enuff makes it all possible to enter the 'hacker' arena for anybody. This has nothing to do with actual engineering. One still can do things well if one wants and finds interested organisations. Of course it is not easy in times in which basic understanding of economy is: difficult and expensive then outsource it to hell and hope for the best. Still the fact that producing software is somehow exempt from any sort of responsibility for the results is a bit awkward and I think may add to lowering barriers to entry.
Methinks.
I would agree with moral part of your argument but I find it hard to swallow what you say about falling sales. I observed my behaviour over the years and what I see is the following. Up to say 2001 I was buying 3..4 CDs if a week was good - in average say 6..8 a month. I did it for years and then I started having two problems:
1. CD I bought had a note explaining to me that not only I am a criminal if I make a backup of this CD but that they will actively prevent me from making this backup by introducing some 'fancy' technical method.
2. At this time I also realized that CD that had this comment was not worth a dime - I did not like the music and I brought it back to the shop. I also noticed that even while I was still buying newest stuff I listened more to music from decades ago and only occasionally there was something 'relatively' new (few years old) that was worth listening again.
Consequence of both realizations is that I stopped buying. Last year I bought one CD - as a gift to my wife.
It may be that part of the CD bonanza was releasing the old stuff from Vinyl on it that caused increased sales and now people have it already. Other factors like that of price and of artistic quality play role too. I must say as soon as I had to pay copy tax on any item that can be used for copying (back up involves copying too) and when I realized I was becoming a criminal if I tried to do what I wanted with my hardware, as soon as this occurred to me I stopped having fun in buying any media in the shop.
Now you may say that copying from pirate bay or such is an immoral thing to do. The other side of the coin is at least as much immoral and unethical. I do think that we customers should pay to artists and to some extent to people that help artists produce stuff. I have no moral obligation though towards people that are trying to rip me and others off.
Now this affects you as a game writer. I am sorry. The way it works is that entertainment sucks today because there is hardly any quality there at all. I doubt this has much to do with piracy.
the relationship between the amount of energy PC consumes and price of this energy makes a difference. If the consumption is high enough and the price too then there is enough technical solutions for the willing to keep the machines down when they are not used.
This should matter for any organisation like the one from original poster where thousands of machines are warming up the air at nights. Obviously energy is still cheap. Something that I am surprised to learn - my bills at home are horrendous.
There is also another thing I am surprised here: many people seem to work in an environment where they are dependant on one particular machine instead of using server/terminal solutions and be mobile. But who am I to criticize.
no it does not. The reality is that it depends on your vocabulary and that in your machine (whether pc or ipod is irrelevant). In majority of cases it does not work for me at all. On top of it there is also this: I txt in three different languages and switching the bloody thing all the time is just bloody annoying. :)
Maybe it means that Japanese youngsters are more and more hmmmm simple? Or maybe they use more advanced software than we do (something that I actually sometimes think is true - after all their toilets are much more advanced than ours too
that is actually very interesting - after I think 50 generations there have been 4 groups of which one was of liars. I suppose in direct combination with the rest it would win just as it was the case with humans...
I suppose ppl should ask what they want and how they want it.
It is often forgotten by proponents of the free market that business is not there to serve and protect but to make profit. Thus a control is needed. It is also forgotten that not all business is bad - in my home country it was the industrialists that built first hospitals and it was the state that ruined the system with its corruption and inefficiency. Alas privatized health care does not work properly either and in US is more expensive than anywhere else without giving the benefits as elsewhere in other words it is expensive badly run business. Something needs to change. US is not the only one that has a problem either. Germany where I live at the moment politicians boast about common public health care but they do not mention that there are hundreds thousands if not millions of people that do not have insurance because private sector to which they have been forcibly moved will not provide it.
The public services are a must for social animals - otherwise we could not cope with issues concerning huge groups of people and their conflicting interests. This is an issue for fire fighting, policing, defence as well as health care.
As for any of them it is not private business that is evil. It is privatizing the profits and using the state to force people in using the service and nationalizing the costs if business does not run as it was hoped for.
There is also small problem of massive discrepancy in power between insurance companies etc or health business in general and Joe Doe which makes the state intrusion necessary. The forces of a free market can still be of benefit to all though.
I can imagine the following system in health care:
1. market entry for businesses on licence basis
- if one wants to enter hospital business must hire certified professionals and provide standard service to all that has the right of service. Part of hospital duties is provision of emergency service.
- If one wants to enter insurance market one must provide basic service to anybody without restriction under condition of paying the fees.
2. support of the poor is through tax system not through health system - if people decide to do such support they can pay for it. I think it is only fair to do so this way.
3. everybody has the right to chose whichever insurance company he wants.
4. licence holders must accept every client and offer basic service
5. additional service subject to open market with restriction on safety
6. safety of measures controlled by licence owners i.e. state
I guess this could be for starters. Free market with protection for the people when it is needed and balance of power enforced by the state. The state is then free not to engage in providing the services at least not there where industry is strong enough.
I can imagine similar situation in any area of social services. State does not have to provide but has to enable and control. One cannot also forget that this does not have to be true for developing countries where even is state provided the framework the actors are not existent so the state must start up the service itself.
there was an article about that in previous issue of the economist - the free market is not that good for you after all it seems. Not in US at least. OC their claim is based on one single study and a matter of dispute: they used 'avoidable deaths factor' against investment in healthcare for most developed nations. The results were bad for US with its 'innovative' private sector.
Mind me - I do not advocate the state run system which is just as corrupt (vide germany where gov. bursts your ass without mercy and honestly tells you that it is for your own good).
Private sector is needed - competing companies can decrease the price, regulation is needed so that none of the following occurs:
1. monopoly, duopoly etc
2. safety is ensured
depending on what your principles are you can add
3. help the poor in getting medical assistent
Till now I know no system that can go only private and succeed. There is also no system that can do it only through the state agencies. These are the facts.
the drive for more efficiency in its excess may affect efficiency negatively. //
If I could I would mod you up.
The whole statement goes like this:
"This section is for news relevant to United States government politics.
It was created primarily to cover the 2004 US Presidential Election, but today exists for occasional stories that fit the bill."
As we can see the part you quoted is just historical.
according to articles in polish press the junctions lacked protection against switching (accidental or otherwise) during the time the trams were passing them. This had nothing to do with naivety but with money - the company owning the tracks and trams said that they (the devices protecting against said switching) are to expensive. It is then not design problem but management one.
Malpractice at management level, typically and not only in Poland thinks in terms of bonuses assigned due to saving programs instead of security, quality and last but not least efficiency. Thus they save to get the bonus instead of save to get efficiency etc.
From my experience it is not that important whether the argument is valid or not. Whether something is qualified as stinkin horse-shit or as drops of wisdom depends mainly but not only on two factors:
1. authority of who is saying it - if my boss is saying it it is horse-shit only during conversation with my colleagues, if CEO of the company does that we do not talk about its it is too dangerous.
2. how it is said - well presented horse shit may be sold for good money. This sometimes changes the stink of it into perfume. Alas until that happens care is needed.
This need to be noted: from my experience people do not buy msOffice - they either get it in 'free' packets together with their hw or they have the choice made for them by mighty admins (or whoever that is that makes decision about purchase of this or that software for big organisations).
Fortunately there are alternatives one can use if ms products fail - the results may not be ideal but better than nothing. I do not understand why all this fuss about such policy then.
I donno if they did or not unite to do copy. I know only that if youtry to build something really unique without copying a single bit of somebody else's work is an exercise in futility. Usually the question is - copy (i.e. search and copy) or DIY. In any case argument about something being bad or unoriginal 'cause parts of it have been copied or having design base is a stupid as you can get. But I guess the whole argument about _all_ free software or _all_ closed source or _all_ open source is bound to go wrong - the range on which you oparate is just to wide. But I did not read all the posts here so I do not know :)
You must have purchased a special model for people allergic to eggs.