agilord

It would be great if you could share your thoughts about this earlier.

I think you should update your FAQ entry: "What are the differences between the plans you offer?"

Otherwise, looks good :)

Dart. Look for Future and Stream.

So, police forces do great job to prevent terrorism too. Hospitals have knowledge how to mitigate the casualties of a bioterror attack. By your reasoning, we might say that we already have the infrastructure to prevent the immediate dangers of terrorism too (without the defense budget monster). Oh yes, they are "not terribly targeted" :)

You haven't really visited Eastern-Europe or any post-Soviet country, have you? :)

Corruption was always high-scale, but usually with low visibility or even lower accountability (as long as you bribe the watchers too). I think the major change is the visibility of these actions, and the expectations around them: people now hope (and not just dream) for better.

Compared to the US defense budgets and what the US spends on counter-terrorism, I think all of these are effectively zero. Yes, there might be programs in the million USD range, but certainly not in the hundreds of billions.

I am bold enough to say that even 'doing nothing' would be much more effective than what the US is doing right now. At least it won't increase the number of fanatics around the world who hate the US just because of the (from-their-perspective) unjust wars.

Unfortunately, 'doing nothing' is not in the dictionary of 'serious' managers, politicians or generals.

Why do you think this is something new in Europe (or at any place on Earth)?

"We spend $0 a year on defense against meteor strike. Should I, as a citizen, be content with meteor strike happening every few years?"

"We spend $0 a year on defense against flesh-eating bacteria. Should I, as a citizen, be content with flesh-eating bacteria happening every few years?"

"We spend $0 a year on defense against maniacs going postal. Should I, as a citizen, be content with maniacs going postal happening every few years?"

Switzerland couldn't win an open war, but the intent of their army is not to win an external war, but to prevent an invasion. In other words, make an invasion as hard (and expensive) as possible.

What do you consider as a tech director role?

Outsourcing works if you have all of these:

- solid understanding what technology you are using and how the contractor party will provide you the implementation

- solid understanding what the business requirement is and how you will communicate with the contractor party

If you have a single person who is able to communicate both, the outsourcing should be OK. Another consideration is the know-how: if your services are easy to copy, handling out the implementation part to a third party might not be a good idea at all.

I completely agree with this. Only if there was a way to translate this into politics (e.g. not just the popularity should decide where we are going).

> "Automate everything. Nothing should be manual."

This mindset seems to miss the point of technology (and software development). It is the business impact, not the automation for its own sake.

E.g. we can automate the hell out of the office arrangements or whatever, if it does not have a business impact, we are just wasting our time.

Why is there no push for "the looser pays all the costs" in the US? It works in many countries around the world, and it would prevent unjustified legal bullying.

In case you got interested in machine learning and neural networks, I've found this course by Geoffrey Hinton refreshing and helpful: https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets

In theory this idea looks OK. I'd be interested if someone implemented it on Riak or Cassandra? What are the conclusions?

I've found this description so far (German): http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/OpenStack

It is a basic start, but not too much.

Any plans to support other storage backends? Postgresql and Riak comes in my mind.

There are other webmail providers, search engines and social networks too. What's your point?

Not affiliated with namecheap (except hosting domains there), but this deal seems really good (esp. since google started charging for Apps domains). Has anyone tried it?

I'd like to emphasize this approach: "a nice self-annealing approach to get into testing is to only write tests for something that has failed."

It is great for old-timer enterprises without any test, and balances the time pressures of startups. However, you need to write those test not only for prod failures, but also if that something failed in your dev environment.

Great reasoning, it certainly resonates with my experiences.

Two additional notes:

1. Working remotely demands the ability that you can assess each-other's work. Most managers are not capable to measure how SW developers work, so they fall back to measure the hours you spend in the office.

2. Moving information is much cheaper today than it was even 5 years ago. It is certainly cheaper to have a regular daily videoconf / whiteboard meeting, than move everyone in the same location. And we haven't even mentioned that moving families across the country or across countries is not cheap either. I'd really love a honest analysis on how these aspects compare to the perceived loss in office communication. My guess is that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Do you see any discount feasible for giving out? It seems to me that you just lose with discounts, no matter what percentage you share with the middle man.

Edit: later on someone pointed out the usefulness of discounts for repeated transactions. The question is for daily-deal discounts.

After visiting Singapore I've bought Lee Kuan Yew's books and it is really hard to describe his thoughts and point of view in just a few sentences, but at least I have a feel of what and why they did. Since then, I'm following the media coverage of Singapore in the western world, have friends living in Singapore, and based on various observation, I can make my judgment call about what to believe and what not to.

It is not perfect, but if you don't do any of these, and you just rely on the western media, how is it better? If you see the parent of my original post, I don't think it is better in any way.

I've visited Singapore just for a few days, but based on that experiment, the western media is overdoing this Singapore-bashing. I'd strongly suggest to visit the country, or at least get familiar with its history, its surrounding neighbors, theirs relationships, theirs relative cultural and economical differences. After that you will understand them better, and you will realize that its not that black-and-white as the media would like to suggest.

Heh, this gets downvoted for what? Oh well, feel free to stay in your bubble, and don't ask questions that will contradict your beliefs.

this made my day and ended my grumbling with quora, thank you!

That is great, and I am personally a great fan of Celts.

However, what's up with the elves, trolls, orcs...? These are well-understood races, are they free to use?

Copy infringement of movies is your choice. You could just watch it and not redistribute it.

Copy infringement of seeds is by design. You cannot plant, grow, sell or process your crop without the basic operation of replicating the original.

I start to wonder: what can we do to actively prevent such things to happen? E.g. someone can copy a blog content, set the date back by a few months, publish it, and submit the DMCA takedown. Even if it reaches the court, who and how will decide who the original author was?

I'm pretty sure that there are harmful and undesired things that activate the brain too, so I'm not sure that activating the brain is the ultimate goal.

Why not concentrate on why stories are powerful? E.g. exploring their strength of making connections and emotions...