Spaghetti programming techniques can be reimplemented with a vengeance using matryoshka techniques (named after those Russian nested dolls).
This kind of programming does violate XP tenets suggesting that interfaces should be kept shallow. Methods that reach back into the third nested doll make me just cringe.
It's like spaghetti that wasn't properly rinsed and starts sticking together together...
Decades ago we Americans would decry the authoritarian governments around the world, such as the former Soviet Union for the specific practice of requiring citizens to show papers for travel internal to their country.
If fear of terrorism and a mode of law enforcement that takes the "what's easiest for us?" mentality makes America into a police state, then the terrorist win and we'll be proven to both weak and stupid.
The magnitude of the artistic catastrophe, the drop-off in the production of great works, the cultural legacies we leave for further generations, would all suffer immeasurable and irreparable harm if the most highly-paid artists, such as Britney Spears, were to suffer getting paid like the other 95% of performers.
You're actually right, Medicare is a much more vexing problem than Social Security from a financial perspective.
IIRC, an interesting feature of our health-care cost profile is that something like 90% of the medical expenditures on people will occur during the last 6 months of their lives. For what?
Even if the threshhold age is increased where the elderly qualify for Medicare, this won't make as big an impact financially as it would for the financial integrity of the Social Security system.
These are hard problems to solve within the constraints of simultaneously showing compassion for people and fiscal responsibility. It's too easy to dismiss one or the other of those constraints and come up with an unsatisfactory solution.
Health care cost growth has been compounded by a number of "inefficiencies" in the system we have currently. Getting rid of those inefficiencies is an uphill battle against specific constituencies that rely upon them, including lawyers, doctors, medical schools, HMO's, hospital buying groups, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and health care consumers (only the best for me and mine).
For starters, free and open flow of information about costs and benefits, and some direct payment in proportion to cost could help wring out some of the distortions.
Eg, if I choose to use an RN with a track record of whatever to treat my broken thumb for a certain amount what are my risks of developing a weird complication compared to choosing expensive doctory Y who will order expensive tests to decrease his malpractice insurance premiums, etc.
Distributing the costs of liver transplants as liquor taxes, etc.
It's your children and economy that have to pay the piper. That's why the talk of "tax cuts" is so aggravating. They aren't "tax cuts", they are "tax debts and burdens" on our future generations.
Notably, future generations aren't voters in the here and now when trade-offs are being decided about future taxes supporting current benefits.
From 7 years ago, this testimony from a young person about the consequences of using an overly generous CPI to boost, for example, social security entitlement payments, seems prescient.
Entitlement payments and debt interest already eat the majority of the federal budget - so-called discretionary spending - on programs that could hardly be deemed optional - is going to come under heavy scrutiny.
As someone who is going into retirement sooner than most of the population, I think it is unconsciounable that aged Americans and politicians have taken advantage of the pay-as-you-go Social Security system to milk much more from the system than they've put in.
I know it will decrease my benefits, but the system has to be changed to preserve what society actually needs as a bare minimum essential safety net instead of a pension.
Compare the percentage of people living under the poverty threshhold of those over age 65 to those under the age of 18 and you can see what kinds of decisions we're making.
Don't get me wrong - the elderly ought not to suffer in abject poverty. But they ought to exercise the responsiblity and wisdom in their voting not to financially oppress their progeny.
Diamond has long held a special unattainable allure, not only because of its unparalleled hardness, Youngs modulus, dielectric properties and thermal conductivity (hold a big diamond in your hand and it will feel cold as it draws heat quickly - hence the moniker "ice"), but because of the possibility of making semiconductors from it.
IIRC, it has a really interesting wide band gap, but that two big practical problems exist:
growing layers of diamond that are sufficiently defect-free. Last I heard, even the best CVD process seems to put down polycrystalline diamond layers.
Americans are unable to conceive a government funded entity (directly funded or indirectly via 'license' fees) that is substantially free from Government influence.
Only Americans that don't listen to NPR are under that misconception.
There was a transition in public thinking in America from the 1960's to the 1980's (Reagan was a big force in this movement) that government could do good for the public to a belief that anything the government does could only do things badly (inefficient, red tape, bureaucracy, fraud-infested).
As usual, the truth is never so simple: government is capable of doing good or evil just as much as the people that comprise it.
The reasoning was that since the farmer grew his own wheat, he affected interstate commerce; otherwise, he might have purchased wheat that had moved in interstate commerce.
That's an ugly travesty of a precedent, deserving to be overturned.
Next thing you know, bands won't be able to do cover songs because the audience might otherwise have purchased recorded music of said songs that were part of interstate commerce.
You can tell that even in the 1940's, people were willing to come up with contorted reasoning to justify a commercial policy based on entirely different premises.
It looks to me as if the EFF has a nice technicality based case.
But it could be "fixed" by legislation mandating the expansion of the FCC's regulatory powers into any electronic device dealing with encryption, probably under some omnibus Patriot Terrorism/Hacker-Prevention Pedophile Spammer Slammer Act. Such legislation would sail through Congress.
A Linux migration, genuine or merely made as a threat in negotiations with Microsoft to obtain lower licensing fees, is also a bold cost-cutting measure.
Cost-cutting isn't limited to companies in trouble, though, and as Linux becomes more mature and companies begin to accumulate successful track records using Linux, such announcments will become common. Companies will move to Linux as a competitive manoeuvre and, for that reason, may choose not to disclose how they're cutting costs.
Linux will probably be ready sooner than most people expect - it has no comparibly heavily-funded marketing drive to trumpet its most recent successes and largely relies on word of mouth, snippets of news articles, and occassional bits of advertising from IBM and Novell. I'm a Linux user and I don't keep up with the latest best features of Linux.
Not only will Linux be ready sooner, its move to broader prominence in the market will take the general public by surprise (even though the party faithful that have been proclaiming Linux RSN since 199x will wonder what took so long).
Sounds just like what happenned earlier at Microsoft, when employees could, after a few years, tell their superiors FYIFV.
Really, as much as I think brilliant people should herd together once in a while to exchange ideas, they ought to circulate among the mortals to give us some inspiration and ideas, too.
Hey! One of these guys (Politzer) was my Phys 1 prof when I was a frosh at Caltech *cough* 27 years ago
I remember taking "Track B" with Politzer and Gomez back about that time, with class notes distributed on pink paper, brutal take-home quizzes on relativity, etc.
Politzer is a pretty good and patient prof, answering questions, explaining basic physics points, etc. although one time he did get annoyed at a cocky youngster (I don't think it was you - this was 26 years ago) slouched up in the front row.
Cocky youngster: "I don't see why you just don't use Stoke's Theorem."
Politzer: "I could just do this, too! (writes down what I later learned was manifestly covariant form for Maxwell's equations), but I'm teaching the class (erases equations) and this is how I want to do it."
The silenced cocky youngster sitting up front
was spared the further embarrassment of seeing his classmates behind smiling at his long overdue comeuppance.
I agree - Caltech can't be beat for pure science education. It helps, too, that the freshman year is graded Pass/Fail and that they have an honor system, unlike most any other school, actually trusts you to take a closed-book, limited-time,take-homeexamination.
I love to pick on MS as much as anyone and they certainly get enough money to accept the brickbats thrown at the them, but this is just another demonstration of how monopoly position puts them into a situation where MS simply cannot win from criticism of unfair market manipulation.
If they write anti-spyware software after the others in the market, they'll be accused of using their insider position unfairly.
If MS wrote anti-spyware software first, any use of their OS position in any way whatsoever to promote deployment would be considered unfair.
The only way for MS to free itself from accusations of unfairness is to submit a complete, free and open specification of the win32 API to a standards body. And to promise that any version of MS application for x years will run on any implemenation conforming to the API.
But I think they'll elect to suffer the accusations for the money they get by holding the specifications closed.
Since image and perception on TV play such an important role in influencing many voters, the kinds of events extend beyond the economic and geopolitical.
An unguarded, unrehearsed moment, caught in the wrong light, for any candidate can be fatal to their chances for election.
Professional, well-trained actors stand the best chances under that kind of scrutiny.
Excellent analogy of a typical dysfunctional relationship. You know, where "I know all my relatives complain that Freddie is a shiftless, lazy ex-con and he'll use me, but we love each other and my love will change him." Likewise, the Internet and the U.N.
IIRC, the Internet worked well under the benevolent dictatorship model. It's gotten so important to commerce and power that such a model isn't possible anymore.
The next best thing to governence, IMHO, is to combine the principle of least government and distributed responsibility.
Blocking services partially and even outright to abusers seems like it should flow naturally from the edge of the network onto the big carriers and service providers if the end-users (unpatched zombie boxes) and ISP's (spam relay) don't do their jobs.
I've heard of shifting profits overseas to avoid US federal taxes, but hadn't heard of this interesting state shifting for tax purposes.
It's the free market at work - increase revenue and reduce expenses by whatever means are possible. You can't fault businesses for neglecting their fiduciary responsibilities in this matter.
Incorporate in Delaware, get your ship registered in Liberia or Panama, get taxed in the Bahamas, get revenue from sales in the US or EU.
Having seen how many of the most-qualified and best people for running the government do not run for office, I've wondered if there's a way to do multiple distillation passes to increase the quality of the officeholders at the highest levels.
That is, lump citizens in groups of, say, 5, and have each group elect a "representative" who gets sent as a delegate to the next groups of 5, etc, until you end up with a single leader.
My hypothesis is that you end up with a different kind of leader than if you used the more direct method.
IIRC, the Chinese imperial government used to have a system of meritocracy, where civil servants were given jobs of increasing authority, increasing prestige and salary based on what they got on their tests.
This is why their proliferation is so frowned upon by the powers that already have them; because it would dilute their usefulness as weapons of pure terror.
Terror isn't a zero-sum game with a finite supply that is diluted by more participants.
More nuclear proliferation means more living in more fear.
The existing nuclear powers fear proliferation for the same reason everyone else does - there are more independent, uncontrolled sources of potential nuclear damage. It's a risk that increases with the number of players, pure and simple, just like running across the freeway at 3:30am or at 7:30am.
A democratic country is one that has control over its own resources.
Let me know when the expressed will of the voters in the United States influences policy on natural resources.
You probably meant that sovereign countries have control over their own natural resources.
Even then, the issue of exactly what entity is exercising sovereignty in a country and with whose help can be argued, but most agree that Halliburton plays some role both in Iraq and in the United States.
IIRC, there was a correlation someone did once comparing, state by state, the federal tax revenues received and federal spending applied - the sparsely-populated states did much better, as you might expect with Senate representation being independent of population.
Slashdot Mirror
This was described as a kind of 'computer dating service' for deciding which of the remaining presidential candidates match your views most closely.
Easy - whichever presidential candidate has the most cute chicks as fans match my views the best.
Microsoft's entire success is due solely to protectionist schemes
Those schemes are self protection of Microsoft's own business.
Protecting customers and competitorsM-D partners is a different matter.
I don't see the Media PC booming into a brisk holiday sales season; the TiVo has much stronger word-of-mouth advertising.
Where the TiVo falters, IMHO, is in providing friendly HDTV recording capabilities.
Seems related to my favorite pet peeve in OOP.
Spaghetti programming techniques can be reimplemented with a vengeance using matryoshka techniques (named after those Russian nested dolls).
This kind of programming does violate XP tenets suggesting that interfaces should be kept shallow. Methods that reach back into the third nested doll make me just cringe.
It's like spaghetti that wasn't properly rinsed and starts sticking together together...
Decades ago we Americans would decry the authoritarian governments around the world, such as the former Soviet Union for the specific practice of requiring citizens to show papers for travel internal to their country.
If fear of terrorism and a mode of law enforcement that takes the "what's easiest for us?" mentality makes America into a police state, then the terrorist win and we'll be proven to both weak and stupid.
it's hard to imagine how artists will be paid
I agree.
The magnitude of the artistic catastrophe, the drop-off in the production of great works, the cultural legacies we leave for further generations, would all suffer immeasurable and irreparable harm if the most highly-paid artists, such as Britney Spears, were to suffer getting paid like the other 95% of performers.
You're actually right, Medicare is a much more vexing problem than Social Security from a financial perspective.
IIRC, an interesting feature of our health-care cost profile is that something like 90% of the medical expenditures on people will occur during the last 6 months of their lives. For what?
Even if the threshhold age is increased where the elderly qualify for Medicare, this won't make as big an impact financially as it would for the financial integrity of the Social Security system.
These are hard problems to solve within the constraints of simultaneously showing compassion for people and fiscal responsibility. It's too easy to dismiss one or the other of those constraints and come up with an unsatisfactory solution.
Health care cost growth has been compounded by a number of "inefficiencies" in the system we have currently. Getting rid of those inefficiencies is an uphill battle against specific constituencies that rely upon them, including lawyers, doctors, medical schools, HMO's, hospital buying groups, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and health care consumers (only the best for me and mine).
For starters, free and open flow of information about costs and benefits, and some direct payment in proportion to cost could help wring out some of the distortions.
Eg, if I choose to use an RN with a track record of whatever to treat my broken thumb for a certain amount what are my risks of developing a weird complication compared to choosing expensive doctory Y who will order expensive tests to decrease his malpractice insurance premiums, etc. Distributing the costs of liver transplants as liquor taxes, etc.
It's your children and economy that have to pay the piper. That's why the talk of "tax cuts" is so aggravating. They aren't "tax cuts", they are "tax debts and burdens" on our future generations.
Notably, future generations aren't voters in the here and now when trade-offs are being decided about future taxes supporting current benefits.
From 7 years ago, this testimony from a young person about the consequences of using an overly generous CPI to boost, for example, social security entitlement payments, seems prescient.
Entitlement payments and debt interest already eat the majority of the federal budget - so-called discretionary spending - on programs that could hardly be deemed optional - is going to come under heavy scrutiny.
As someone who is going into retirement sooner than most of the population, I think it is unconsciounable that aged Americans and politicians have taken advantage of the pay-as-you-go Social Security system to milk much more from the system than they've put in.
I know it will decrease my benefits, but the system has to be changed to preserve what society actually needs as a bare minimum essential safety net instead of a pension.
Compare the percentage of people living under the poverty threshhold of those over age 65 to those under the age of 18 and you can see what kinds of decisions we're making.
Don't get me wrong - the elderly ought not to suffer in abject poverty. But they ought to exercise the responsiblity and wisdom in their voting not to financially oppress their progeny.
Diamond has long held a special unattainable allure, not only because of its unparalleled hardness, Youngs modulus, dielectric properties and thermal conductivity (hold a big diamond in your hand and it will feel cold as it draws heat quickly - hence the moniker "ice"), but because of the possibility of making semiconductors from it.
IIRC, it has a really interesting wide band gap, but that two big practical problems exist:
If these barriers could be surmounted, diamond devices would become a more widespread and useful technology.
Americans are unable to conceive a government funded entity (directly funded or indirectly via 'license' fees) that is substantially free from Government influence.
Only Americans that don't listen to NPR are under that misconception.
There was a transition in public thinking in America from the 1960's to the 1980's (Reagan was a big force in this movement) that government could do good for the public to a belief that anything the government does could only do things badly (inefficient, red tape, bureaucracy, fraud-infested).
As usual, the truth is never so simple: government is capable of doing good or evil just as much as the people that comprise it.
The FCC only has power to regulate transmissions.
That's enough for the whole ball of wax.
What with wave particle duality, the FCC has regularity oversight over all matter.
The reasoning was that since the farmer grew his own wheat, he affected interstate commerce; otherwise, he might have purchased wheat that had moved in interstate commerce.
That's an ugly travesty of a precedent, deserving to be overturned.
Next thing you know, bands won't be able to do cover songs because the audience might otherwise have purchased recorded music of said songs that were part of interstate commerce.
You can tell that even in the 1940's, people were willing to come up with contorted reasoning to justify a commercial policy based on entirely different premises.
It looks to me as if the EFF has a nice technicality based case.
But it could be "fixed" by legislation mandating the expansion of the FCC's regulatory powers into any electronic device dealing with encryption, probably under some omnibus Patriot Terrorism/Hacker-Prevention Pedophile Spammer Slammer Act. Such legislation would sail through Congress.
AT&T is implementing several measures to cut costs dramatically, purportedly including job cuts.
A Linux migration, genuine or merely made as a threat in negotiations with Microsoft to obtain lower licensing fees, is also a bold cost-cutting measure.
Cost-cutting isn't limited to companies in trouble, though, and as Linux becomes more mature and companies begin to accumulate successful track records using Linux, such announcments will become common. Companies will move to Linux as a competitive manoeuvre and, for that reason, may choose not to disclose how they're cutting costs.
Linux will probably be ready sooner than most people expect - it has no comparibly heavily-funded marketing drive to trumpet its most recent successes and largely relies on word of mouth, snippets of news articles, and occassional bits of advertising from IBM and Novell. I'm a Linux user and I don't keep up with the latest best features of Linux.
Not only will Linux be ready sooner, its move to broader prominence in the market will take the general public by surprise (even though the party faithful that have been proclaiming Linux RSN since 199x will wonder what took so long).
Sounds just like what happenned earlier at Microsoft, when employees could, after a few years, tell their superiors FYIFV.
Really, as much as I think brilliant people should herd together once in a while to exchange ideas, they ought to circulate among the mortals to give us some inspiration and ideas, too.
A little brilliance can do a lot at one company.
Hey! One of these guys (Politzer) was my Phys 1 prof when I was a frosh at Caltech *cough* 27 years ago
I remember taking "Track B" with Politzer and Gomez back about that time, with class notes distributed on pink paper, brutal take-home quizzes on relativity, etc.
Politzer is a pretty good and patient prof, answering questions, explaining basic physics points, etc. although one time he did get annoyed at a cocky youngster (I don't think it was you - this was 26 years ago) slouched up in the front row.
Cocky youngster: "I don't see why you just don't use Stoke's Theorem."
Politzer: "I could just do this, too! (writes down what I later learned was manifestly covariant form for Maxwell's equations), but I'm teaching the class (erases equations) and this is how I want to do it."
The silenced cocky youngster sitting up front was spared the further embarrassment of seeing his classmates behind smiling at his long overdue comeuppance.
I agree - Caltech can't be beat for pure science education. It helps, too, that the freshman year is graded Pass/Fail and that they have an honor system, unlike most any other school, actually trusts you to take a closed-book, limited-time,take-homeexamination.
The ambient temperature in my office was about 85F/29C
If the ambient temperature in my office were that high I'd be looking furiously for a lower-power chip, too.
Why do they chose to leave so many doors open?
To create a market for products?
I love to pick on MS as much as anyone and they certainly get enough money to accept the brickbats thrown at the them, but this is just another demonstration of how monopoly position puts them into a situation where MS simply cannot win from criticism of unfair market manipulation.
If they write anti-spyware software after the others in the market, they'll be accused of using their insider position unfairly.
If MS wrote anti-spyware software first, any use of their OS position in any way whatsoever to promote deployment would be considered unfair.
The only way for MS to free itself from accusations of unfairness is to submit a complete, free and open specification of the win32 API to a standards body. And to promise that any version of MS application for x years will run on any implemenation conforming to the API.
But I think they'll elect to suffer the accusations for the money they get by holding the specifications closed.
Since image and perception on TV play such an important role in influencing many voters, the kinds of events extend beyond the economic and geopolitical.
An unguarded, unrehearsed moment, caught in the wrong light, for any candidate can be fatal to their chances for election.
Professional, well-trained actors stand the best chances under that kind of scrutiny.
Then bride and groom would unite....
Excellent analogy of a typical dysfunctional relationship. You know, where "I know all my relatives complain that Freddie is a shiftless, lazy ex-con and he'll use me, but we love each other and my love will change him." Likewise, the Internet and the U.N.
IIRC, the Internet worked well under the benevolent dictatorship model. It's gotten so important to commerce and power that such a model isn't possible anymore.
The next best thing to governence, IMHO, is to combine the principle of least government and distributed responsibility.
Blocking services partially and even outright to abusers seems like it should flow naturally from the edge of the network onto the big carriers and service providers if the end-users (unpatched zombie boxes) and ISP's (spam relay) don't do their jobs.
This is often true.
The write-in option at my workplace has allowed me to donate to the FSF for several years using only its address:
and that it qualified as a 501(c)3 organization.Usually I still give about 2/3 of my donation to the local United Way - there's a lot of worthy and underfunded organizations under that umbrella.
Some corporations have matching gifts policies to leverage your donation.
For example, in 2004, the Microsoft Matching Gifts program helped someone or some people in their donation of 500-999 to the Free Software Foundation.
I've heard of shifting profits overseas to avoid US federal taxes, but hadn't heard of this interesting state shifting for tax purposes.
It's the free market at work - increase revenue and reduce expenses by whatever means are possible. You can't fault businesses for neglecting their fiduciary responsibilities in this matter.
Incorporate in Delaware, get your ship registered in Liberia or Panama, get taxed in the Bahamas, get revenue from sales in the US or EU.
Having seen how many of the most-qualified and best people for running the government do not run for office, I've wondered if there's a way to do multiple distillation passes to increase the quality of the officeholders at the highest levels.
That is, lump citizens in groups of, say, 5, and have each group elect a "representative" who gets sent as a delegate to the next groups of 5, etc, until you end up with a single leader.
My hypothesis is that you end up with a different kind of leader than if you used the more direct method.
IIRC, the Chinese imperial government used to have a system of meritocracy, where civil servants were given jobs of increasing authority, increasing prestige and salary based on what they got on their tests.
This is why their proliferation is so frowned upon by the powers that already have them; because it would dilute their usefulness as weapons of pure terror.
Terror isn't a zero-sum game with a finite supply that is diluted by more participants.
More nuclear proliferation means more living in more fear.
The existing nuclear powers fear proliferation for the same reason everyone else does - there are more independent, uncontrolled sources of potential nuclear damage. It's a risk that increases with the number of players, pure and simple, just like running across the freeway at 3:30am or at 7:30am.
A democratic country is one that has control over its own resources.
Let me know when the expressed will of the voters in the United States influences policy on natural resources.
You probably meant that sovereign countries have control over their own natural resources.
Even then, the issue of exactly what entity is exercising sovereignty in a country and with whose help can be argued, but most agree that Halliburton plays some role both in Iraq and in the United States.
US navel exercises with its allies? I don't think I want to know.
I'll tell you anyway.
Wait a minute. Do you have incriminating pictures featuring, perhaps, Duyba and Tony?
Tony Blair and George W. Bush got into this weird Iraq quagmire to install belly dancers in Baghdad.
IIRC, there was a correlation someone did once comparing, state by state, the federal tax revenues received and federal spending applied - the sparsely-populated states did much better, as you might expect with Senate representation being independent of population.