The OP insinuated that MS was still using undocumented APIs for competitive reasons.
While I cannot authoritively refute that for all of MS past and present, I can tell you that at least for my product, we aren't doing that currently, and in fact, we are taking specific steps to not "accidentally" do it.
I cannot speak to the specific issue you mention for at least three reasons
1) i'm not authorized to talk about it 2) I am not technically familiar with those parts of those products 3) I wasn't at MS yet back in 95/96
That said, what I can tell you _now_ is that product engineering groups spend effort on complying with previous court rulings that limit our usage of APIs that aren't publicly disclosed. The specifics depend on the products and product versions in question.
As far as how my product (Visual Studio LightSwitch) is impacted directly; as part of our release process we run some tooling that makes sure our code isn't calling APIs its not supposed to be calling.
Are they expecting us to all go back and live in caves?
Main alternative is reducing power consumption
To the GP, yes. That is apparently the plan.
I think it is ethical to identify and mitigate "flagrantly wasteful" misuses of power and abuses of environmental resources. But beyond that, there are ethical and intellectual problems with some environmentalists
People need to realize a few things
The ideal amount of pollution is not "none". No pollution necessarily implies no resource usage.
To maintain a quality of life better than Ogg the caveman, we need to continue using resources to improve our comfort, safety, health, etc. Whether that is cutting down trees or burning coal, we need to continue doing both, because people want shelter, heat, and electricity.
To develop the quality of life we have now, we had to use resources and create pollution. People who advocate for sharp declines in pollution and resource use necessarily advocate stopping human progress.
Given how much suffering there is left in the world, suffering that requires our hard work, investment, and energy to address, people who ask us to stop resource consumption and power production are essentially anti-humanists. They, whether they know it or not, ask for more suffering, less comfort, and a reduced quality of life, for most people.
Perhaps there is a deeper underlying question to address.
What is the point of environmentalism? What is the goal of humanity?
Environmentalists often talk of "saving the earth". Sometimes, they say this in terms of "its the only one we have" and sometimes they are more honest and sinister when they explain that the Earth deserves to live long after humanity has died.
These latter type disgust me. We'll not discuss them further.
These former type are correct, but are missing the point.
While it is true that Earth is currently the only home we have, in my view it should be the goal of humanity to sustainably and indefinitely move beyond the earth to other worlds.
That is a significant undertaking; not everyone believes it is possible. I do.
We know that saving the earth is impossible. And our contributions to its demise are finally measurable, but are unlikely to be the fatal wound.
At some point, we will take a hit from a comet, meteor, alien race, etc, and it will end most or all human life on our home planet.
If we have not used our resources quickly and wisely enough BEFORE then to allow us to have permanently escaped the Earth, we have failed.
I think we should accelerate our usage of resources and production of energy, with a goal towards escaping this rock. Note that I said "a goal". Certainly making life better for people here who are here and alive today is ALSO a goal, and that also requires energy and resource consumption.
Obviously, building nuclear plants that are cleaner and longer lasting is a better way to do this than building more unscrubbed coal plants, but we need to accept that "more power production" is a necessary reality of the human condition, and get on with the show.
There are still people out there with no light and no heat. There are still people who die every year from flooding and basic sanitation issues.
Will you deny them new power plants when they develop enough to desire them?
It is horrendously myopic for people living the luxury of western lives to look around themselves, see that they are finally comfortable, and then demand that the world stop innovating and using resources to improve itself.
Finally, here's the bottom line about nuclear power safety: more people die _every year_ from petroleum drilling accidents than will ever get cancer from Fukushima emissions.
There has been ONE large scale nuclear incident with high loss of life, and it was in the despotic Soviet Union. How many people do you think died in the Soviet Union from coal mine collap
I'm inclined to agree with you. I have a fair bit of race track driving experience and have instructed other drivers at high performance driving schools.
I personally maintain my vehicles to a high standard and operate them according to their varying capability (I own everthing from a stripped out BMW racecar to a full-size schoolbus), and I of course vary my driving significantly based on my own mental/physical limitations and the prevailing road conditions.
But I'm not at all typical.
Once upon a time, I was told that my credit history negatively impacted my insurance premium. That's because I had no credit card usage to speak of. I had no debts of any kind, which didn't mean I was intrinsically risky, what it meant was that I fell outside of the model parameters that the actuaries and underwriters used.
So it is with my driving habits. I have reason to believe that, on the occasions when I drive 95mph, I am being at least as safe as the drivers who are going 75 but who take their vehicles and driving much less seriously than I do. I speed selectively when conditions are appropriate (high visibility, incredibly low traffic density, I'm wide awake and not otherwise mentally distracted, I know the vehicle condition/capabilities, etc).
Contrastingly, most people set the cruise at 75mph and then park in the left lane while they chat on their cell phone -- without a handsfree kit.
This little black box has no way of knowing that you just got in a fight with your spouse, or just got told bad news by your boss. Mental distractions like these are typically bigger accident factors than a naÃve measurement of vehicle speed.
So who's the bigger accident risk? An engaged me or a distracted average? I contend -- not me.
Will my insurer see things that way? Certainly not. So I'll expect to pay a higher premium because I understand I am atypical. And I'll avoid having one of these boxes as long as I can afford to do so:)
Violent, random criminals are the best kind of criminals for politicians. Thugs _make the case_ that the government needs more power to keep people safe.
People like Snowden are govt's worse nightmare. He hasn't hurt anyone at all, but he did blow the lid off of a bunch of stuff the govt was doing, which ranged from blatantly illegal to making govt look petty/incompetent.
Snowden threatens _government_ legitimacy, and that is why he is a huge priority for the Feds.
I think there's an argument to be made that people who commit assaults or other acts of violence against others are an entirely different class of individual than people who run pyramid schemes, hack web sites, etc.
There -is- an aspect of prison that says "we're going to keep this person out of society for a while as a way to protect society". Taking phones/internet away from a cracker is more than sufficient to protect society, and arguably is a significant punitive action against someone with the time/skills/interests to be successful.
People who commit mail fraud or steal long distance shouldn't share cell space with sex predators, murderers, etc. It's not in the interests of society, the individuals in question, or any efforts at reforming criminals prior to re-introduction to society.
What's going to happen to a nerd in prison is that they'll do anything possible to survive. Historically, hackers have joined up with mafia or gangs for _physical_ protection, and in exchange, provide black-hat services to the groups providing them with protection.
This is NOT how you reform geeks. This plunges them deeper into the realm of criminal enterprise, with higher stakes, and more damage to everyone.
On Autobahn I did 220kph in a 320d 6 speed wagon, and 240kph in an Astra 1.6 gasoline..
Given Tesla's aerodynamics, and 416 hp stated power, I would expect a Vmax easily of 300 kph. I am surprised about a 132mph limit. I am guessing this is set in firmware to correspond to tire limits (iirc, 130mph is a US tire speed rating)
Fantastic choice on the E34 m5, btw. I have an E28 M5 myself..
check-ins transpose lines on check out; complete failures to update to actual latest versions of code; and random check-outs of code with no local changes.
If you can reproduce any of those things, please email me.
can't unshelve to anything but the changeset that the shelf came from
This isn't really legible, but I think you meant to say "branch" or "workspace". But in any case, it isn't true. You can use tfpt.exe (tf power tools) and force all kinds of "unsafe" things, like unshelving an add/edit shelveset across branch definitions.
local workspaces can't be moved (say, in the advent of hardware failure on a development machine).
This is also false. Moving an existing enlistment on another computer is something we do frequently
I work on Visual Studio. All of Visual Studio is under TFS source control. We use it every day.
To dogfood scalability, we use a single instance for all of VS. It supports every single team within VS; thousands of simultaneous engineers with hundreds of branches across multiple sites (I'm in Fargo, and TFS is in an entirely different timezone)
Start typing to make a change, only to have all but the first character thrown away as TFS laboriously attempts to check out the file first.
Since I grew up using commandline SCC, I normally use tf.exe to open files for edit. You're referring to the feature in the code editor when you dirty a controlled file, we try to go create a pending edit. I don't know if that is still quasi-synchronous or not. In any case, there are certainly work- arounds -- like using the explicit checkout gesture in the solution explorer -- prior to typing in an editor window.
1) a vigorous, free market will cause a broad distribution of wealth and incomes
2) economic change has immediate, negative effects for some members of society
Let's talk about the rest of what you wrote.
Most people I know -- at all income levels -- _are_ better off than they were 20 years ago. As in, we have inflation-adjusted higher wages. So it's important not to extrapolate from ones own situation.
But lets unpack an assumption. You are talking about _Wages_. I am not limiting the conversation to that.
Suppose for the sake of argument that your inflation adjusted wages are lower.
Is your standard of living lower? Your wealth?
I expect the answer is "No". Most people have a larger home with a higher level of luxury than did our parents generation. The cars we have are faster, safer, more environmentally responsible, and more convenient than the cars of 20 years ago. The computing power available to us today exceeds that of 20 years ago.
We Americans -- all of us -- are much better off than were the Americans of 20 years ago. We are all "richer" in terms of the luxuries in our lives.
In some -- perhaps many cases -- this isn't measured in inflation-adjusted after-tax savings. But this could easily be explained by the other things -- we have more stuff, and it is nicer stuff, but we might have less savings or might have less disposable income.
Are we better off or not? I suppose that's a question of perspective; I hope you agree that my perspective (we have nicer stuff) is a valid one to consider.
And what about the 99% vs. the 1%? I also disagree that it is only the top 1% who are better off. I am well outside the 1% group and I am MUCH better off now than I was 20 years ago, both in "wealth", wages, and inflation-adjusted wages.
Also, I find the 99% vs 1% discussion kind of problematic. Using the either a wage scale, or certainly the all-encompassing "wealth" definition I talk about (stuff, quality of stuff, etc), the poorest of the poor in the US are still in the top 1% of humans on planet earth. And so if we want to talk about wealth or wage distribution disparity as a human rights issue, we have the large pink elephant of impoverished rural china or sub-Saharan Africa to contend with. All of us are the 1% compared to somebody else. What are "our" obligations to provide equitable wealth to people on the other side of the world? Where does that obligation come from? Etc etc.
Let's also talk about poverty level. Has the actual, overall condition of Americans declined, or has the definition of poverty been ratcheded up? Ours is the only civilization where the very "poor" die from obesity instead of famine. Ours is the only society where the "destitute" often have luxuries like air conditioning, color television, and designer shoes.
These things weren't available to the richest 0.00001% 150 years ago... the emprerors and monarchs of vast kingdoms.
This is the increase in wealth, for nearly everyone, brought about by the creation and destruction in a vigorous market, that many people ALSO overlook.
Bravo, sir. By deriding something you apparently disagree with as "religion", you discredit me and religion, and discourse in general, all in one go.
Of course, since you mentioned it, the possibility exists that one or more religions is true, and that this truth has implications upon you, even if you desperately wish this were not the case.
So it is with what I've written about economics. You can wish very hard that what I've written is wrong, but that won't make it so. Perhaps you have an intellectually rigorous argument?
Again, I don't think this is fundamentally new. The rate of innovation (and thus stagnancy) is perhaps faster than at other times -- but is that even true? And the ingress into "white collar" jobs might be higher than at other times --- but is that true also?
The assumptions that a lawyer makes about his career (long career, monotonically increasing salary, retire at age blah) may become invalid. But those assumptions have always been assumptions, and situational. Sports players can't use those assumptions, so they do things differently.
As people continue to live longer, and as technology innovation continues to accelerate, perhaps old assumptions are simply at odds -- that the idea of having a lifelong career specialization will become untenable.
I don't think this is necessarily problematic.
I know for a fact that, personally, in the time since I left university I haven't necessarily become more specialized in _technical_ matters, but I have become much more effective at soft skills, business skills, etc. IOW, if I had to change careers _right now_, away from software engineering and into something like being a hotel receptionist, I'd bring a lot more to the table than someone out of highschool (apart from energy and attractiveness, which in some fields count for a lot:)). That's not to say I wouldn't take a huge pay cut -- but it wouldn't be a "start at zero" again event.
To presume otherwise suggests that we get nothing out of the experience of our lives, both working and non-working -- which I think is demonstrably false.
The groaning of the economically illiterate, that is.
I hereby sentence everyone to "Economics in One Lesson", by Henry Hazlitt.
New technology and new production efficiencies certainly displace people who were tied to the old technologies and methods. Most people don't think too highly of the folks behind Standard Oil, but an honest assessment would suggest that they did more to save whales than anyone at Greenpeace -- by making whale oil a less cost effective heating mechanism.
This naturally caused a huge job loss for the whaling industry -- which at the time was of course a great social woe.
Whalers, buggy whip manufacturers, and people whos jobs can be trivially replaced by robots are all going to be displaced when technology improves.
What bad economics (and policy makers) repeatedly do, and what is covered in Hazlitt's book, is they focus on what is seen and ignore what is unseen.
What is easy to see when a buggy whip manufacturer loses their job is that Bob lost a job.
What is harder to see is that nearly everyone else in the society is some fractional percent wealthier. The automobile saved people time, which is why it replaced the horse. People who spend less time unproductively can create additional wealth for the rest of society to benefit from.
I think most people agree that a world where we all have handheld supercomputers that can take photos is a better world than one where the instant camera is the only cost-effective consumer device for seeing a photograph within 1 hour of having shot it.
What this analysis fails to "See" is beyond the 13 jobs at instagram. It's easy to see the loss of jobs at Kodak or polaroid. But add up all of the jobs that are tangentially related to digital photography. Flickr? People working on DSLRs? People working on Photoshop? People who write a 99 cent appstore app that is a filter for your iphone's camera?
Cast a wide net to "see" what bad economists aren't seeing.
The thing about these luddite arguments that really shows they don't hold water is that if the old way was really better, we'd go back.
We, in aggregate, like the new way better -- which is why we aren't giving up our smartphones and rushing out to buy film cameras.
Makes you wonder where we'd be now if we stopped pissing about on weapons research.
Speaking Russian, German, or Chinese.
The right amount to spend on weapons research is "as little as possible while still maintaining a deterrent capability that all known threats find credible".
Reasonable people agree that this number is larger than zero dollars.
Certainly, in the USA, we're overspending in aggregate, and probably underspending on the _right_ things.
I'm a speed junkie and I own several german cars; one of which is stripped out and caged for track use.
I have never, ever been interested in a "Green" car.
I am very interested in Tesla. Elon Musk is the real-life Iron Man, and all of the Tesla products have amazing performance numbers. They are Doing It Right.
I think electric cars are the way of the future; the motors are absolutely and completely superior to combustion engines. We have way more ways of making electricity than we do petrochemical fuels (and many of those ways are clean and unlimited), making electricity a better refactoring and future-proof design point.
The problem is that petro fuels are a better battery than any other affordable battery technology.
But once we get that figured out, I look forward to retiring my combustion engine cars to antique or historic status. Tesla has convinced me that there will be non-lame EVs for me to choose from, and that's good enough for me.
My point wasn't to be specific about their race so much as it was the "trash" part. I was attempting to convey a stereotype of someone with limited funds, who doesn't visibly take pride in ownership of their belongings, and who is likely to be interested in filing a baseless lawsuit to cash-in at the expense of someone else.
This stereotype makes sense to me and fits my observations; it may not fit yours.
Tesla has been very brilliant thus far in their product strategy.
They have made expensive, high end products that are tailored to affluent enthusiasts. They have been working their way down from "least practical" to "most practical".
Enthusiasts and early adopters are much more willing to put up with teething problems in new technologies.
These are not disposable cars that you will see filled with McDonalds wrappers.
So the typical tesla customer isn't stupid white trash looking to cash in on a lawsuit with the help of an ambulance chasing lawyer (yet).
Furthermore, consider the competition: If you believe the party line, A Mercedes Benz can randomly eject its drivetrain and burn itself to a crisp, killing the occupants.
Everyone (including the test data and real-world data) agrees that MB makes exceptionally survivable vehicles. So freak things may happen.
What we saw in this case was that the Tesla hit something, nobody was hurt, the vehicle didn't lose control, and after the driver safely stopped and exited the car, the firefighters had to deal with a slightly new type of fire situation then they are used to.
Disclaimer: I've been a Microsoft employee since 2000.
I can tell you that this is demonstrably false. I personally worked on an MSR technology transfer effort.
I won't go too much into the details, but a group at MSR had developed some tools that did some interesting binary instrumentation, and did some very interesting analysis on data you captured from using these instrumented binaries.
This toolchain needed to be integrated into the build process and test process for your codebase, but once you did that work, you could answer some highly interesting questions.
MSR had a team from their side that worked with all of the major product groups at Microsoft to educate us on what the tools did, how to use them, how to integrate them, etc. We found bugs in their code; we made suggestions based on production use of the tools; they fixed them for us during validation and deployment.
I helped integrate the tools into the process for how Visual Studio was built and tested, back in the 2001-2003 era. I know for a fact Windows and Office underwent similar efforts for their products.
This effort didn't immediately translate into a feature in a product; instead, it helped us build and test _all_ our products more effectively.
Much later, VS did ship some tooling to our customers that was superficially similar to what this stuff did, but I wasn't part of that effort, so I don't know if there was technology re-use or not.
The above account is what I had direct experience with.
Additionally, every year MSR holds an event called "tech fest" where researchers setup booths talking about what they've been working on. MS engineers are the target audience. The different research topics are in various different stages of the pipeline -- sometimes you'll see a booth where they show you the "research project" next to a real shipping product that is using it. Other times they'll show you something that Microsoft is probably never going to ship or make money from.
I've seen people run their research and demos from Linux boxes -- and not just because they were doing something Linux specific. The researchers in question appear to have a wide latitude to investigate what they want to investigate, and use the tools they feel most comfortable with (as it should be).
Obviously, not everything done at MSR directly translates into a tangible product. There is certainly a lot of stuff they do that I feel like SHOULD see the light of day but hasn't yet. For instance, of particular interest to me was some research on distributed file systems done by the SNR group. It's public, so you can look up the "Farsite" project.
Look how old those papers are. It's very aggravating to me that we don't just take this stuff for granted now, given how far along the research and demos were 10 years ago.
Somalia fascinates me from a free-society perspective. Usually Somalia is the punchline of some attempt to troll a libertarian, but if you actually look at what's happening there, it's quite fascinating.
This paper is one of my favorites. Take a look, you may be surprised:
Firstly, nobody who buys a Tesla cares what the battery is made of. Tesla is free to change the battery chemistry whenever they have a competing technology. They may have competing chemistries now that are not cost effective under current dynamics, but will become so when neodymium shortages change the economics of the game. But of course, rising neodymium costs will make additional mining and refining capacity profitable, and so new entrants will enter those games as well, and tend to dampen price rises.
Secondly, the analogy of computer prices shouldn't be overlooked. We have been shipping an increasing number of devices with increasing capabilities since the 1990s. No new additional raw materials have been created in that time, and yet costs have gone down.
Why?
Human ingenuity.
The battery chemistry in the Telsa wasn't relevant 20 years ago and will likely be irrelevant 20 years from now.
There is a reason that we no longer worry about "Peak Whale", even though at one time the majority of heat and light in the US came from the whale oil the rapidly diminishing supply of whales and there was no known answer to that problem. How many short years transpired between "Peak Whale" and Standard Oil?
I have issues with how teacherâ(TM)s pay is structured. The initial pay is low and most of the benefits are at the backend so it encourages marginal teachers to become entrenched and discourages middle aged people from making a career switch into the profession. (I think there is a rich vein of potential people who hold masters in math, science, or engineering who would make great teachers but donâ(TM)t want to deal with the initial low pay and would not qualify for some of the bigger retirement packages.)
I think this is pretty insightful.
I recently joined a team of other MS employees teaching Intro to CS at a local public highschool. We're bootstrapping the in-service teacher along with the students so that hopefully she can teach the class herself in the future.
htttp://www.tealsk12.org
People who have come up into CS in the "normal way" and who can do CS can make more money straight out of college in the industry than can ever be made in a lifetime of public K-12 education. And for software people who want to make the switch into K12 later in life when they are financially independent; there are a number of tiresome barriers that prevent them from really doing so.
I think you, the person you responded to, and TFA all agree: money needs to be spent more intelligently.
What people think a thing should cost is entirely subjective; it is perfectly valid for you and the OP to disagree on if the amount of education funding is too much, to little, or just right.
The OP is frustrated because there is a general sense that K-12 spending continues to increase, while K-12 performance continues to decline. If that isn't actually the reality, then addressing the perception is yet another problem that needs addressing.
I think everyone wants public K-12 performance to improve, and I think everyone wants to spend less money to get it (which is just a specific case of "Everyone wants to spend less money and still get the things they want")
So, let's not be so angry with someone who might actually agree with some of your goals -- for instance, better K-12 education -- even if they may (or may not) have a different ideology.
It could be that you're both right: it might be that K-12 really _could_ do better with more money, but that K-12 has already been showered with more money for decades and either not improved or not improved enough.
Perhaps one's point of view depends on why they think K-12 should be publicly funded: is this something that pulls on the heartstrings of people who think about obligations to society and education as a mean of equalization of opportunity?
Or is K-12 funded for pragmatic reasons -- as an investment in a better labor force and a better citizenry, making society stronger?
It's of course both, but which view you identify with may influence your funding point of view: "no amount is too much for this important mission", vs. "I need investments to show a good return or they aren't good investments".
On to the specific issue at hand:
It sounds like step 1 is widely communicating that this information source exists to people in positions to act on it.
Step 2 is to give those people a reasonable amount of time to digest this information and issue a set of findings that are specific to their circumstances, e.g. "we found that in area foo where we have poor academic outcomes, we are using methodology blah which according to the clearinghouse, ranges in effectiveness from "no effect" to "negative effect on outcome". We will stop doing blah in area foo and instead start doing baz. Based on outcomes in other settings, we would expect to see a difference in outcomes in 3 years here"
Step 3 might be to add new information from step 2 to the clearinghouse, and perhaps reward people who successfully implemented recommendations in step 2 and saw improved outcomes.
For instance, lets go and pick-up a computer-shopper from 1991. What does a 486/33 DX with 8MB of ram and 64kb of cache cost? Why, its $3000 USD.
What does a 2ghz machine cost today? Why, $300 ?
The raw materials have not become more abundant in 20 years. The cost of labor has not gone down in 20 years.
Yet somehow, despite fewer raw materials, higher labor costs, monetary debasement making everything nominally more expensive..
The computers of today are incredibly cheaper compared to the computers of 20 years ago..
The difference is human ingenuity. We have figured out how to do more with less.
In my opinion, price deflation is the natural condition of human industry; wherever man innovates the most, prices fall the quickest.
In the case of the tech sector, this price decrease has happened even in the face of monetary debasement, raw material consumption, rising labor costs, and increased regulatory pressure.
There are systems where efforts are undertaken to make the _auditing_ subsystem tamper resistant, even from system admins. Windows had made investments in this area. For instance you can configure NT machines to bugcheck when writing an audit record fails for any reason.
It is of course possible as root to replace the portions of kernel code which implement auditing with modified versions, but there is no indication that Snowden independently developed attack vectors against quasi-hardened systems. Indications were that he was a normal admin on a normal network. Such half-measures as hardened/compartmented auditing might have been effective to interdict his activities -- if they had been configured and someone else had been paying attention.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd mod you funny if I hadn't already posted.
The OP insinuated that MS was still using undocumented APIs for competitive reasons.
While I cannot authoritively refute that for all of MS past and present, I can tell you that at least for my product, we aren't doing that currently, and in fact, we are taking specific steps to not "accidentally" do it.
I cannot speak to the specific issue you mention for at least three reasons
1) i'm not authorized to talk about it
2) I am not technically familiar with those parts of those products
3) I wasn't at MS yet back in 95/96
That said, what I can tell you _now_ is that product engineering groups spend effort on complying with previous court rulings that limit our usage of APIs that aren't publicly disclosed. The specifics depend on the products and product versions in question.
As far as how my product (Visual Studio LightSwitch) is impacted directly; as part of our release process we run some tooling that makes sure our code isn't calling APIs its not supposed to be calling.
This box can only measure accelerations and velocities, throttle angle, etc.
I look very bad to an insurer by those factors.
This box cannot measure how mentally distracted I am, and that is a larger factor than absolute velocity for negligent driving.
To the GP, yes. That is apparently the plan.
I think it is ethical to identify and mitigate "flagrantly wasteful" misuses of power and abuses of environmental resources. But beyond that, there are ethical and intellectual problems with some environmentalists
People need to realize a few things
The ideal amount of pollution is not "none". No pollution necessarily implies no resource usage.
To maintain a quality of life better than Ogg the caveman, we need to continue using resources to improve our comfort, safety, health, etc. Whether that is cutting down trees or burning coal, we need to continue doing both, because people want shelter, heat, and electricity.
To develop the quality of life we have now, we had to use resources and create pollution. People who advocate for sharp declines in pollution and resource use necessarily advocate stopping human progress.
Given how much suffering there is left in the world, suffering that requires our hard work, investment, and energy to address, people who ask us to stop resource consumption and power production are essentially anti-humanists. They, whether they know it or not, ask for more suffering, less comfort, and a reduced quality of life, for most people.
Perhaps there is a deeper underlying question to address.
What is the point of environmentalism? What is the goal of humanity?
Environmentalists often talk of "saving the earth". Sometimes, they say this in terms of "its the only one we have" and sometimes they are more honest and sinister when they explain that the Earth deserves to live long after humanity has died.
These latter type disgust me. We'll not discuss them further.
These former type are correct, but are missing the point.
While it is true that Earth is currently the only home we have, in my view it should be the goal of humanity to sustainably and indefinitely move beyond the earth to other worlds.
That is a significant undertaking; not everyone believes it is possible. I do.
We know that saving the earth is impossible. And our contributions to its demise are finally measurable, but are unlikely to be the fatal wound.
At some point, we will take a hit from a comet, meteor, alien race, etc, and it will end most or all human life on our home planet.
If we have not used our resources quickly and wisely enough BEFORE then to allow us to have permanently escaped the Earth, we have failed.
I think we should accelerate our usage of resources and production of energy, with a goal towards escaping this rock. Note that I said "a goal". Certainly making life better for people here who are here and alive today is ALSO a goal, and that also requires energy and resource consumption.
Obviously, building nuclear plants that are cleaner and longer lasting is a better way to do this than building more unscrubbed coal plants, but we need to accept that "more power production" is a necessary reality of the human condition, and get on with the show.
There are still people out there with no light and no heat. There are still people who die every year from flooding and basic sanitation issues.
Will you deny them new power plants when they develop enough to desire them?
It is horrendously myopic for people living the luxury of western lives to look around themselves, see that they are finally comfortable, and then demand that the world stop innovating and using resources to improve itself.
Finally, here's the bottom line about nuclear power safety: more people die _every year_ from petroleum drilling accidents than will ever get cancer from Fukushima emissions.
There has been ONE large scale nuclear incident with high loss of life, and it was in the despotic Soviet Union. How many people do you think died in the Soviet Union from coal mine collap
I'm inclined to agree with you. I have a fair bit of race track driving experience and have instructed other drivers at high performance driving schools.
I personally maintain my vehicles to a high standard and operate them according to their varying capability (I own everthing from a stripped out BMW racecar to a full-size schoolbus), and I of course vary my driving significantly based on my own mental/physical limitations and the prevailing road conditions.
But I'm not at all typical.
Once upon a time, I was told that my credit history negatively impacted my insurance premium. That's because I had no credit card usage to speak of. I had no debts of any kind, which didn't mean I was intrinsically risky, what it meant was that I fell outside of the model parameters that the actuaries and underwriters used.
So it is with my driving habits. I have reason to believe that, on the occasions when I drive 95mph, I am being at least as safe as the drivers who are going 75 but who take their vehicles and driving much less seriously than I do. I speed selectively when conditions are appropriate (high visibility, incredibly low traffic density, I'm wide awake and not otherwise mentally distracted, I know the vehicle condition/capabilities, etc).
Contrastingly, most people set the cruise at 75mph and then park in the left lane while they chat on their cell phone -- without a handsfree kit.
This little black box has no way of knowing that you just got in a fight with your spouse, or just got told bad news by your boss. Mental distractions like these are typically bigger accident factors than a naÃve measurement of vehicle speed.
So who's the bigger accident risk? An engaged me or a distracted average? I contend -- not me.
Will my insurer see things that way? Certainly not. So I'll expect to pay a higher premium because I understand I am atypical. And I'll avoid having one of these boxes as long as I can afford to do so :)
I screwed up and posted, so I can't mod you up.
One needs to understand the motives of the state
Violent, random criminals are the best kind of criminals for politicians. Thugs _make the case_ that the government needs more power to keep people safe.
People like Snowden are govt's worse nightmare. He hasn't hurt anyone at all, but he did blow the lid off of a bunch of stuff the govt was doing, which ranged from blatantly illegal to making govt look petty/incompetent.
Snowden threatens _government_ legitimacy, and that is why he is a huge priority for the Feds.
I think there's an argument to be made that people who commit assaults or other acts of violence against others are an entirely different class of individual than people who run pyramid schemes, hack web sites, etc.
There -is- an aspect of prison that says "we're going to keep this person out of society for a while as a way to protect society". Taking phones/internet away from a cracker is more than sufficient to protect society, and arguably is a significant punitive action against someone with the time/skills/interests to be successful.
People who commit mail fraud or steal long distance shouldn't share cell space with sex predators, murderers, etc. It's not in the interests of society, the individuals in question, or any efforts at reforming criminals prior to re-introduction to society.
What's going to happen to a nerd in prison is that they'll do anything possible to survive. Historically, hackers have joined up with mafia or gangs for _physical_ protection, and in exchange, provide black-hat services to the groups providing them with protection.
This is NOT how you reform geeks. This plunges them deeper into the realm of criminal enterprise, with higher stakes, and more damage to everyone.
Yep.
On Autobahn I did 220kph in a 320d 6 speed wagon, and 240kph in an Astra 1.6 gasoline..
Given Tesla's aerodynamics, and 416 hp stated power, I would expect a Vmax easily of 300 kph. I am surprised about a 132mph limit. I am guessing this is set in firmware to correspond to tire limits (iirc, 130mph is a US tire speed rating)
Fantastic choice on the E34 m5, btw. I have an E28 M5 myself..
If you can reproduce any of those things, please email me.
This isn't really legible, but I think you meant to say "branch" or "workspace". But in any case, it isn't true. You can use tfpt.exe (tf power tools) and force all kinds of "unsafe" things, like unshelving an add/edit shelveset across branch definitions.
This is also false. Moving an existing enlistment on another computer is something we do frequently
tfpt workspace /updatecomputername workspace
(ref: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/shair/archive/2008/09/03/using-tfpt-command-line-tool.aspx)
I work on Visual Studio. All of Visual Studio is under TFS source control. We use it every day.
To dogfood scalability, we use a single instance for all of VS. It supports every single team within VS; thousands of simultaneous engineers with hundreds of branches across multiple sites (I'm in Fargo, and TFS is in an entirely different timezone)
Since I grew up using commandline SCC, I normally use tf.exe to open files for edit. You're referring to the feature in the code editor when you dirty a controlled file, we try to go create a pending edit. I don't know if that is still quasi-synchronous or not. In any case, there are certainly work- arounds -- like using the explicit checkout gesture in the solution explorer -- prior to typing in an editor window.
Well, a few places where we agree
1) a vigorous, free market will cause a broad distribution of wealth and incomes
2) economic change has immediate, negative effects for some members of society
Let's talk about the rest of what you wrote.
Most people I know -- at all income levels -- _are_ better off than they were 20 years ago. As in, we have inflation-adjusted higher wages. So it's important not to extrapolate from ones own situation.
But lets unpack an assumption. You are talking about _Wages_. I am not limiting the conversation to that.
Suppose for the sake of argument that your inflation adjusted wages are lower.
Is your standard of living lower? Your wealth?
I expect the answer is "No". Most people have a larger home with a higher level of luxury than did our parents generation. The cars we have are faster, safer, more environmentally responsible, and more convenient than the cars of 20 years ago. The computing power available to us today exceeds that of 20 years ago.
We Americans -- all of us -- are much better off than were the Americans of 20 years ago. We are all "richer" in terms of the luxuries in our lives.
In some -- perhaps many cases -- this isn't measured in inflation-adjusted after-tax savings. But this could easily be explained by the other things -- we have more stuff, and it is nicer stuff, but we might have less savings or might have less disposable income.
Are we better off or not? I suppose that's a question of perspective; I hope you agree that my perspective (we have nicer stuff) is a valid one to consider.
And what about the 99% vs. the 1%? I also disagree that it is only the top 1% who are better off. I am well outside the 1% group and I am MUCH better off now than I was 20 years ago, both in "wealth", wages, and inflation-adjusted wages.
Also, I find the 99% vs 1% discussion kind of problematic. Using the either a wage scale, or certainly the all-encompassing "wealth" definition I talk about (stuff, quality of stuff, etc), the poorest of the poor in the US are still in the top 1% of humans on planet earth. And so if we want to talk about wealth or wage distribution disparity as a human rights issue, we have the large pink elephant of impoverished rural china or sub-Saharan Africa to contend with. All of us are the 1% compared to somebody else. What are "our" obligations to provide equitable wealth to people on the other side of the world? Where does that obligation come from? Etc etc.
Let's also talk about poverty level. Has the actual, overall condition of Americans declined, or has the definition of poverty been ratcheded up? Ours is the only civilization where the very "poor" die from obesity instead of famine. Ours is the only society where the "destitute" often have luxuries like air conditioning, color television, and designer shoes.
These things weren't available to the richest 0.00001% 150 years ago... the emprerors and monarchs of vast kingdoms.
This is the increase in wealth, for nearly everyone, brought about by the creation and destruction in a vigorous market, that many people ALSO overlook.
Bravo, sir. By deriding something you apparently disagree with as "religion", you discredit me and religion, and discourse in general, all in one go.
Of course, since you mentioned it, the possibility exists that one or more religions is true, and that this truth has implications upon you, even if you desperately wish this were not the case.
So it is with what I've written about economics. You can wish very hard that what I've written is wrong, but that won't make it so. Perhaps you have an intellectually rigorous argument?
I don't know what the world will look like _if_ we reach a post-labor world. I won't speculate. Many people have.
However, the above article isn't talking about a post-labor world, and nobody seems to think a post-labor world is just around the corner.
I still think there are plenty of unsolved problems in the world.
Again, I don't think this is fundamentally new. The rate of innovation (and thus stagnancy) is perhaps faster than at other times -- but is that even true? And the ingress into "white collar" jobs might be higher than at other times --- but is that true also?
The assumptions that a lawyer makes about his career (long career, monotonically increasing salary, retire at age blah) may become invalid. But those assumptions have always been assumptions, and situational. Sports players can't use those assumptions, so they do things differently.
As people continue to live longer, and as technology innovation continues to accelerate, perhaps old assumptions are simply at odds -- that the idea of having a lifelong career specialization will become untenable.
I don't think this is necessarily problematic.
I know for a fact that, personally, in the time since I left university I haven't necessarily become more specialized in _technical_ matters, but I have become much more effective at soft skills, business skills, etc. IOW, if I had to change careers _right now_, away from software engineering and into something like being a hotel receptionist, I'd bring a lot more to the table than someone out of highschool (apart from energy and attractiveness, which in some fields count for a lot :)). That's not to say I wouldn't take a huge pay cut -- but it wouldn't be a "start at zero" again event.
To presume otherwise suggests that we get nothing out of the experience of our lives, both working and non-working -- which I think is demonstrably false.
The groaning of the economically illiterate, that is.
I hereby sentence everyone to "Economics in One Lesson", by Henry Hazlitt.
New technology and new production efficiencies certainly displace people who were tied to the old technologies and methods. Most people don't think too highly of the folks behind Standard Oil, but an honest assessment would suggest that they did more to save whales than anyone at Greenpeace -- by making whale oil a less cost effective heating mechanism.
This naturally caused a huge job loss for the whaling industry -- which at the time was of course a great social woe.
Whalers, buggy whip manufacturers, and people whos jobs can be trivially replaced by robots are all going to be displaced when technology improves.
What bad economics (and policy makers) repeatedly do, and what is covered in Hazlitt's book, is they focus on what is seen and ignore what is unseen.
What is easy to see when a buggy whip manufacturer loses their job is that Bob lost a job.
What is harder to see is that nearly everyone else in the society is some fractional percent wealthier. The automobile saved people time, which is why it replaced the horse. People who spend less time unproductively can create additional wealth for the rest of society to benefit from.
I think most people agree that a world where we all have handheld supercomputers that can take photos is a better world than one where the instant camera is the only cost-effective consumer device for seeing a photograph within 1 hour of having shot it.
What this analysis fails to "See" is beyond the 13 jobs at instagram. It's easy to see the loss of jobs at Kodak or polaroid. But add up all of the jobs that are tangentially related to digital photography. Flickr? People working on DSLRs? People working on Photoshop? People who write a 99 cent appstore app that is a filter for your iphone's camera?
Cast a wide net to "see" what bad economists aren't seeing.
The thing about these luddite arguments that really shows they don't hold water is that if the old way was really better, we'd go back.
We, in aggregate, like the new way better -- which is why we aren't giving up our smartphones and rushing out to buy film cameras.
Speaking Russian, German, or Chinese.
The right amount to spend on weapons research is "as little as possible while still maintaining a deterrent capability that all known threats find credible".
Reasonable people agree that this number is larger than zero dollars.
Certainly, in the USA, we're overspending in aggregate, and probably underspending on the _right_ things.
I'm a speed junkie and I own several german cars; one of which is stripped out and caged for track use.
I have never, ever been interested in a "Green" car.
I am very interested in Tesla. Elon Musk is the real-life Iron Man, and all of the Tesla products have amazing performance numbers. They are Doing It Right.
I think electric cars are the way of the future; the motors are absolutely and completely superior to combustion engines. We have way more ways of making electricity than we do petrochemical fuels (and many of those ways are clean and unlimited), making electricity a better refactoring and future-proof design point.
The problem is that petro fuels are a better battery than any other affordable battery technology.
But once we get that figured out, I look forward to retiring my combustion engine cars to antique or historic status. Tesla has convinced me that there will be non-lame EVs for me to choose from, and that's good enough for me.
Fair enough.
My point wasn't to be specific about their race so much as it was the "trash" part. I was attempting to convey a stereotype of someone with limited funds, who doesn't visibly take pride in ownership of their belongings, and who is likely to be interested in filing a baseless lawsuit to cash-in at the expense of someone else.
This stereotype makes sense to me and fits my observations; it may not fit yours.
Tesla has been very brilliant thus far in their product strategy.
They have made expensive, high end products that are tailored to affluent enthusiasts. They have been working their way down from "least practical" to "most practical".
Enthusiasts and early adopters are much more willing to put up with teething problems in new technologies.
These are not disposable cars that you will see filled with McDonalds wrappers.
So the typical tesla customer isn't stupid white trash looking to cash in on a lawsuit with the help of an ambulance chasing lawyer (yet).
Furthermore, consider the competition: If you believe the party line, A Mercedes Benz can randomly eject its drivetrain and burn itself to a crisp, killing the occupants.
Everyone (including the test data and real-world data) agrees that MB makes exceptionally survivable vehicles. So freak things may happen.
What we saw in this case was that the Tesla hit something, nobody was hurt, the vehicle didn't lose control, and after the driver safely stopped and exited the car, the firefighters had to deal with a slightly new type of fire situation then they are used to.
Disclaimer: I've been a Microsoft employee since 2000.
I can tell you that this is demonstrably false. I personally worked on an MSR technology transfer effort.
I won't go too much into the details, but a group at MSR had developed some tools that did some interesting binary instrumentation, and did some very interesting analysis on data you captured from using these instrumented binaries.
This toolchain needed to be integrated into the build process and test process for your codebase, but once you did that work, you could answer some highly interesting questions.
MSR had a team from their side that worked with all of the major product groups at Microsoft to educate us on what the tools did, how to use them, how to integrate them, etc. We found bugs in their code; we made suggestions based on production use of the tools; they fixed them for us during validation and deployment.
I helped integrate the tools into the process for how Visual Studio was built and tested, back in the 2001-2003 era. I know for a fact Windows and Office underwent similar efforts for their products.
This effort didn't immediately translate into a feature in a product; instead, it helped us build and test _all_ our products more effectively.
Much later, VS did ship some tooling to our customers that was superficially similar to what this stuff did, but I wasn't part of that effort, so I don't know if there was technology re-use or not.
The above account is what I had direct experience with.
Additionally, every year MSR holds an event called "tech fest" where researchers setup booths talking about what they've been working on. MS engineers are the target audience. The different research topics are in various different stages of the pipeline -- sometimes you'll see a booth where they show you the "research project" next to a real shipping product that is using it. Other times they'll show you something that Microsoft is probably never going to ship or make money from.
I've seen people run their research and demos from Linux boxes -- and not just because they were doing something Linux specific. The researchers in question appear to have a wide latitude to investigate what they want to investigate, and use the tools they feel most comfortable with (as it should be).
Obviously, not everything done at MSR directly translates into a tangible product. There is certainly a lot of stuff they do that I feel like SHOULD see the light of day but hasn't yet. For instance, of particular interest to me was some research on distributed file systems done by the SNR group. It's public, so you can look up the "Farsite" project.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/farsite/
Look how old those papers are. It's very aggravating to me that we don't just take this stuff for granted now, given how far along the research and demos were 10 years ago.
Actually, do you know which country in Africa has the cheapest cell phone providers?
Somalia.
(ref: http://www.economist.com/node/5328015)
Somalia fascinates me from a free-society perspective. Usually Somalia is the punchline of some attempt to troll a libertarian, but if you actually look at what's happening there, it's quite fascinating.
This paper is one of my favorites. Take a look, you may be surprised:
http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
I'm not missing the point.
Firstly, nobody who buys a Tesla cares what the battery is made of. Tesla is free to change the battery chemistry whenever they have a competing technology. They may have competing chemistries now that are not cost effective under current dynamics, but will become so when neodymium shortages change the economics of the game. But of course, rising neodymium costs will make additional mining and refining capacity profitable, and so new entrants will enter those games as well, and tend to dampen price rises.
Secondly, the analogy of computer prices shouldn't be overlooked. We have been shipping an increasing number of devices with increasing capabilities since the 1990s. No new additional raw materials have been created in that time, and yet costs have gone down.
Why?
Human ingenuity.
The battery chemistry in the Telsa wasn't relevant 20 years ago and will likely be irrelevant 20 years from now.
There is a reason that we no longer worry about "Peak Whale", even though at one time the majority of heat and light in the US came from the whale oil the rapidly diminishing supply of whales and there was no known answer to that problem. How many short years transpired between "Peak Whale" and Standard Oil?
I think this is pretty insightful.
I recently joined a team of other MS employees teaching Intro to CS at a local public highschool. We're bootstrapping the in-service teacher along with the students so that hopefully she can teach the class herself in the future.
htttp://www.tealsk12.org
People who have come up into CS in the "normal way" and who can do CS can make more money straight out of college in the industry than can ever be made in a lifetime of public K-12 education. And for software people who want to make the switch into K12 later in life when they are financially independent; there are a number of tiresome barriers that prevent them from really doing so.
I think you, the person you responded to, and TFA all agree: money needs to be spent more intelligently.
What people think a thing should cost is entirely subjective; it is perfectly valid for you and the OP to disagree on if the amount of education funding is too much, to little, or just right.
The OP is frustrated because there is a general sense that K-12 spending continues to increase, while K-12 performance continues to decline. If that isn't actually the reality, then addressing the perception is yet another problem that needs addressing.
I think everyone wants public K-12 performance to improve, and I think everyone wants to spend less money to get it (which is just a specific case of "Everyone wants to spend less money and still get the things they want")
So, let's not be so angry with someone who might actually agree with some of your goals -- for instance, better K-12 education -- even if they may (or may not) have a different ideology.
It could be that you're both right: it might be that K-12 really _could_ do better with more money, but that K-12 has already been showered with more money for decades and either not improved or not improved enough.
Perhaps one's point of view depends on why they think K-12 should be publicly funded: is this something that pulls on the heartstrings of people who think about obligations to society and education as a mean of equalization of opportunity?
Or is K-12 funded for pragmatic reasons -- as an investment in a better labor force and a better citizenry, making society stronger?
It's of course both, but which view you identify with may influence your funding point of view: "no amount is too much for this important mission", vs. "I need investments to show a good return or they aren't good investments".
On to the specific issue at hand:
It sounds like step 1 is widely communicating that this information source exists to people in positions to act on it.
Step 2 is to give those people a reasonable amount of time to digest this information and issue a set of findings that are specific to their circumstances, e.g. "we found that in area foo where we have poor academic outcomes, we are using methodology blah which according to the clearinghouse, ranges in effectiveness from "no effect" to "negative effect on outcome". We will stop doing blah in area foo and instead start doing baz. Based on outcomes in other settings, we would expect to see a difference in outcomes in 3 years here"
Step 3 might be to add new information from step 2 to the clearinghouse, and perhaps reward people who successfully implemented recommendations in step 2 and saw improved outcomes.
But there can be offsetting developments as well.
For instance, lets go and pick-up a computer-shopper from 1991. What does a 486/33 DX with 8MB of ram and 64kb of cache cost? Why, its $3000 USD.
What does a 2ghz machine cost today? Why, $300 ?
The raw materials have not become more abundant in 20 years. The cost of labor has not gone down in 20 years.
Yet somehow, despite fewer raw materials, higher labor costs, monetary debasement making everything nominally more expensive..
The computers of today are incredibly cheaper compared to the computers of 20 years ago..
The difference is human ingenuity. We have figured out how to do more with less.
In my opinion, price deflation is the natural condition of human industry; wherever man innovates the most, prices fall the quickest.
In the case of the tech sector, this price decrease has happened even in the face of monetary debasement, raw material consumption, rising labor costs, and increased regulatory pressure.
There are systems where efforts are undertaken to make the _auditing_ subsystem tamper resistant, even from system admins. Windows had made investments in this area. For instance you can configure NT machines to bugcheck when writing an audit record fails for any reason.
It is of course possible as root to replace the portions of kernel code which implement auditing with modified versions, but there is no indication that Snowden independently developed attack vectors against quasi-hardened systems. Indications were that he was a normal admin on a normal network. Such half-measures as hardened/compartmented auditing might have been effective to interdict his activities -- if they had been configured and someone else had been paying attention.