stuki
All "programming" really is, is formulating what you want done precisely. A compiler can take it from there. Where a specialist in "computers" comes in, is he can optimize your algorithms to run more efficiently. But in more cases than not, what "programmers" are tasked with, is to "just make it work", with little more specificity than that. And then the garbage inputer gets upset because he gets garbage back out.
SQL was originally, back when clarity of thought was still considered fashionable in executive suites, intended to be used by decision makers. "Specialist" IBM "programmers" provided the code that accessed and processed the relevant records efficiently, but the person who wanted an answer, often a C level, was the one tasked with specifying what he wanted done. With enough precision that his question made sense.
Instead of flushing out the stagnant resource pools, so they could be put to better use doing something less wasteful.
Financial transactions are pretty much the poster child for atomic, multi update transactions and pessimistic locking.
I'm imagining a protocol for less tightly coupled endpoints could be written to, while the "switches" merely translate traffic to route it on current infrastructure. A more application agnostic version of mixmaster or TOR, so to speak. The important part, is really to get enough of a variety of end user apps written to it, to prevent anyone from knowing much about the traffic simply due to the protocol spoken. Then, over time, to optimize away more and more crud, until we've got dedicated hardware. It may still be a bit utopian, but the current mess isn't really serving people all that well anymore, either.
Current high level languages make so few concessions to the underlying execution engine, that all they really are, are convenient notation for clear and logical thought. The only reason they seem needlessly hard to your average Newsweek hack, is because of his/her own shortcomings in the clear and logical arena.
English, as well as other "human" languages, are (perhaps)good for making highly concrete grunts to ones hunting party, and for making jokes to impress chicks. They were never well suited for describing complex processes and procedures. And complex processes and procedures is what defines an advanced economy. Every area of advanced economy endeavor suffers from having too much of it's workings half assedly and imprecisely "described" in a "human" language. And honestly, for no other reason than that too many "stakeholders" are too bloody dense and lazy to learn anything better suited.
But I guess there are those who think mathematics would be better off without all that weird, difficult notation as well. With mathematicians instead hand waving and counting on fingers, in front of calculators "smart" enough to learn from humans......
Practically, a good start is to recognize that not all valuable communication mechanisms benefit all that much from minimizing latency of packet delivery. IOW, not all, in fact not even most, means of communication really need the kind of "apparently real time" performance that telephony requires.
Moving services that don't, to a protocol where the focus is on making mixing and anonymizing simple, reliable and robust; rather than simply max throughput and min latency, would make end user security and anonymity guarantees much easier to make. And, for many types of channels, this can be done without much at all in the way of negative side effects, given how fast the underlying switching infrastructure has gotten.
Current protocols were necessary for any kind of usability when hardware was slow and expensive. And good enough privacy and security vise, when even the NSA didn't really have the means to do much wide net spying at the network level. But neither of those realities of the original internet is true anymore. Instead, sorry for the pompousness, the new environment is so different as to require, or at least recommend, something almost akin to a "new internet." Built with the "new" threats to communication in mind.
I'm not working anywhere, at a startup nor anywhere else, that could conceivably "profit" from any of the above ramble. If what I'm saying makes no sense, it's because I'm a moron (or at least misinformed), not because I'm a scumbag.
In the era before the omnibox, I personally can't see much in the way of "breaking things" on account of OpenDNS. Doesn't mean you and others can't disagree with that, but it's not as cut and dried as your statement seems to imply.
The tech eco system itself is one thing, and largely populated by people who can afford a bit of a hit. But nowadays, everything is priced and organized around ever more millionaires being minted in tech every day, and the spending these generate. Take even some of that away, say by making money less artificially cheap, and there is potential for plenty of pain and dislocation across the area.
Much like Finance in NYC, the tech boom/bubble is driving costs so high in the Bay Area, that the only remaining jobs are either in tech, or jobs providing highly paid, localized and personalized services to tech workers able to afford paying thousands to have their toenails clipped, lips kissed and walls decorated with Van Goghs. Leaving those providing the latter, highly vulnerable to any slowdown in the increasingly monocultural spigot from which almost all funds here now flow.
Anonymous comments really ought to be hosted anonymously and in a distributed fashion, preventing them from being taken down or "used against you." The "fire in a crowded theater" supposed exception, is simply not relevant wrt internet comments.
In the web era, the most important job a publisher has to ensure his site is a good one, is to write and edit content in such a way that he attracts an audience of interesting readers. Who will in turn, offer interesting comments. It is not, as may have been the case earlier, to hire the "best" journalists, to write their version of the truth. Sites that still use the latter approach, rarely, if ever, reach the level of truly interesting, simply because no one, or small group of, writer(s) will ever cover all bases, the way a whole community of interested and interesting commenters will.
Otherwise, this childishness is just another act by the clueless to try grabbing some attention for themselves, while doing something of no practical value. While simultaneously flaunting how little they know, about how the world really works.
Good to hear Sweden has as good, (perhaps better?) access to such facilities.
If you have the ability to insert backdoors on widely used hardware with no realistic alternative implementations, without anyone other than a very select few (who all have plenty to lose if they reveal anything) knowing about it; AND the only thing you'll use it for is National Security (preventing someone from building a nuke to drop on your country), why would you NOT go through with it?
If true, and I have a hard time believing it is not, either this is done at the design level (and not just on router chips), or only for big ticket backbone and/or enterprise equipment.
All harassing publicly famous entities will achieve, is to make obtaining available information more difficult for regular people. While those with deeper pockets and better connections, will simply pay niche providers for deeper searches and indexing.
From a privacy POV, you would WANT this kind of White Hat demonstrations of where your privacy weak points are. That way, you are aware of them and can make accommodations. While third party services can spring up to address the most widespread concerns. Rather than show up for a job interview, and have the interviewer "know" something about you, that you have no idea is available to them at all.
In other words, the corporate culture of their coffee operation is not greedy, as often assumed, but specifically sadistic. Happy to suffer lost sales and revenue, higher legal fees, and a shattered reputation, just for the pleasure of burning people?
It would be interesting to see the kind of interview processes that managed to maintain that kind of a corporate culture despite all the churn inherent in minimum wage job environments.
Heck, even someone rendering services as conceptually involuntary as a will executor, can have a reputation fr being good or bad. Despite you not necessarily having much choice on the matter when the headline service is being rendered.
Did we really have cases like this, back when the Bills' authors were still alive? Otherwise, doesn't all this brouhaha look like it boils down to little more than someone getting paid very well to conveniently misunderstand what the Bills were intended to mean? Paid better, in fact, than if instead of harassing others, they simply went out and solved the problem they perceive exist, by selling perfect temperature coffee themselves.
What McDonald's did have, however, was a way to estimate what temperature it's customers in general prefer their coffee served at. Roadside Coffee is, after all, a pretty competitive market. If you're too far off temperature wise, people go elsewhere.
Hence, by the standards of "the community", or whatever you wish to call them, McDonald's served coffee at the right temperature. Or at least close enough not to offend enough of them to lose measurable business.
Out of curiosity, did McDonald's manage to poor milk into the cup, and still have it end up that hot? Maybe I have weird ideas about coffee, but for someone all too used to lukewarm coffee once milk is added, that actually sounds quite impressive for such a decidedly low rent establishment.
I would honestly be very, very surprised if they didn't end up working substantially better for medical doctors than for most other service providers. As, at least in my experience, very few people who decide to though the effort of becoming a doctor, do so with the express intent of scamming their way to riches, the way many Ebay and Amazon sellers do.
I am sure that in some selected cases, an aggressive tort system could be construed to have provided a better outcome, but at what systemic cost? Massive over treatment of every conceivable low probability condition, to stave off grounds for lawsuits. Doctors scared of going with their hunches, and instead of doing what they feel is the best for the patient, doing what they expect will be easiest to defend if the outcome should be less than ideal.....
Doesn't forcefully injecting an expensive and completely unconcerned outside party, into an arrangement between two parties that are outcome concerned, strike you as an inefficient use of resources? Why not, instead, try to find ways to make the two concerned parties understand each other better?
There's nothing magical about the medical field, that makes approaches developed elsewhere somewhat irrelevant there. It's just another fee for service arrangement. Although many Doctors do like to fancy themselves as special snowflakes.
Trains beat individual cars efficiency wise, largely because they are long and have low frontal areas, hence air resistance, for their size and carrying capacity. Get rid of the air, and why not go whole hog with lightning fast cars?
Heck, put in place mechanisms to charge e-cars' batteries when in tunnel, and you can not only shoot someone to Europe in an hour, but allow him to drive out of the airlock and to his final destination pretty much interruption free as well. With Elon Musk being the latest hawker of vacuum tunnel hype, maybe we'll finally get to see a Tesla with no need to apologize for limited range.....
More realistically, before even contemplating doing a passenger version, someone should at least do a preliminary, by soundly and reliably beating FedEx Overnight Air between New York and LA/SF. Then plan on going from there with acquired learnings.
I am pretty sure that when granny makes coffee herself at home, she makes it at least as hot as McDonalds serves it. Whistling kettles and all.
In a country of millions of people doing stuff, sometimes the stars align wrong for someone, and they get hurt. It doesn't have to, and in fact rarely is, someones "fault." It wasn't granny's "fault" that this one time she fumbled the lid and spilled coffee. Given enough tries, sooner or later anyone would, as it is a positive probability outcome. But neither is the probability of it happening large enough to say McDonald's was "at fault" of something. Stuff happens. Sometimes nice stuff, sometime less so. No need to feed a lawyer army either way.
It's the same silly obsession with finding who's "at fault" that underpins the enormously inefficient (except for, again, for lawyers) "at fault" car accident insurance schemes in place in most states. Despite most accidents and other mishaps being the result of all manners of complicated, best modeled as random, factors. None of which are a specific party's "fault."
But of course, there's the old adage about most people ending up in law school, do so because they couldn't hack math well enough to ever get into the complex systems classes....:)
Reliance on civil courts may sound attractive to the naive, but the lawyers and institutions involved, are just as single mindedly focused on their own personal gains, financial and in prestige, as either party to the original dispute. It's not that they are necessarily systemically partial to one side or the other, but rather that they are partial to making the fight as acrimonious and expensive as possible. As that is, after all, their "side."
Otherwise, you'd think there would be a huge market for tiny little companies that happened to have a "site license" for some expensive software.
I still think the judge, or some other authority, should put a cap on the price Complex Systems could charge, rather than leaving RBS completely at the mercy of their vendor. Perhaps the appeals court will.
That's not to say that OO is necessarily the ideal language paradigm, but it has certainly been the most dominant in the era Python has existed.