92 karma · joined January 4, 2012
Judge people on their success/failure. Not on what other people think of them.
Loopt was a flawed, quickly obsoleted idea. That was pretty obvious from the outset.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/12058/School-Visits...
Looks like they do some really good stuff with schools etc.
Elphaba, Where I Come From, We Believe All Sorts Of Things
That Aren't True. We Call It History.
A Man's Called A Traitor
Or Liberator. A Rich Man's A Thief
Or Philanthropist. Is One A Crusader
or ruthless invader? It's all in which label
is able to persist.
There Are Precious Few At Ease
With Moral Ambiguities, So We Act As Though They Don't Exist.The amount of exposure they get is extremely out of proportion to what they are and do. They do have it down to a fine art. Even this blog post is designed to get people talking about them - which it's succeeded in doing.
They created ruby on rails, which a few people use, and they make a few webapps. They're not a startup. They give (IMHO) fairly poor startup advice, most of which would only work if you're them.
The 37 signals fanboyism all just gets a little bit too much sometimes. Best to ignore and move on though...
I fundamentally believe that it is NOT and should not be the task of the government to "create" jobs.
We should toughen up benefits, which the current government is already doing, to ensure people out of work don't just sit on their arses all day.
You cannot do what the past socialist governments have done - create tons of unnecessary public sector jobs paid for by debt. That is unfair to everyone and just has to be paid for later.
For what it's worth, the book isn't really filled with opinions, more than it's filled with facts from the time.
eg "We were spending X on British Steel, and the Unions wanted us to spend Y, wanted pay raises of Z, despite falling productivity" etc.
It was a mistake for me to include the book I was currently reading as it instantly isolates half the political spectrum unfortunately.
She had to privatise industries because they became ridiculously uncompetitive and expensive to run.
During the previous socialist government the number of public sector workers increased drastically.
British steel was haemorrhaging money. And the unions response? Demand pay increases and strike. Same with the coal industry.
Would you rather she kept us paying billions in ever increasing public sector wage demands?
"Full employment" should not be a policy. You don't spend public money employing unproductive workers in useless public sector jobs just for the hell of it.
Full employment is something that happens naturally when individuals take responsibility for themselves.
The UK economy is a mess because of drastic overspending by socialist governments. Something we're having to put right (again). Shame the lessons of the 70s/80s weren't learnt.
It's called an autobiography.
I've heard the left wing excuses and arguments and find them thoroughly unconvincing.
> b. look at the data.
I have.
This doesn't make the facts she cites, or arguments she presents any less compelling.
It's not really that far fetched to say that "most of our stuff is made in countries with abundant cheap labour".
Investing in R&D would not have solved the fundamental issue - workers in the UK are expensive. Workers in poor countries are cheap.
You can either have great working conditions and pay, or a good manufacturing industry. Can't have both. Some other poorer country will just treat their workers worse, and so be more productive.
(I'm reading "Thatcher - the downing street years" at the moment - a great read).
Surely a better analogy then would be that kids don't need to learn how to build things out of metal (Unless they particularly want to).
Welding and metalwork is for some people. Just as programming is for some people and not others.
Personally, I don't think we have fallen behind at all. Kids are still learning to program, just as they used to. Being taught in schools is (I guess) a nice to have, but not necessary.
It's easy for programmers to think that programming is the only thing that matters and it's crucial everyone learn it. But it's really not. All that matters is that people who wish to learn it, can.
Can't imagine every tab having a load of workers in the background, ending well.
One of the pleasant things about javascript is that there are no threads. It's a shame some people have pushed for this API.
After all, it's not rocket science for a competent developer to split a long running task into chunks which are periodically run via a timeout, keeping the UI responsive.
Whether he knows what his service is used for or not is surely irrelevant though. The ISPs know that piracy goes on over the internet, so why aren't they equally liable?
Computer manufacturers know that computers are used to download copyrighted content. So why not go after computer makers as well. They're enabling piracy!
In fact, based on advertising trends, they actually find it useful and respond well to it - adverts that show you products that you've recently been browsing for etc.
Check your browser at http://panopticlick.eff.org/
Basically, using useragent, plugins, time zone, language, screen size, etc etc etc, you can fingerprint a user pretty reliably without using cookies.
Cookies are just an easy way to track users client side, but if there is an 'assault' on cookies, then people will just start relying more on server side tracking of users instead.
Disabling 3rd party cookies etc really achieves nothing.
Also, there's numerous methods you can use to store "cookies" in the browser these days, (localstorage api, http cookies, flash, cache etc)
If you really don't want to be tracked for some reason, disable javascript, clear out your user-agent, and use TOR.
Is the large hadron collider really worth the money?
Can someone highlight some real world advances that this sort of thing provides? eg will it make holographic TVs possible or hoverboards?
It's a matter of cost vs hassle as you say though I guess. For me, if I have 10 electronic gadgets and one blows up, it's not really a big deal, because I can buy a new one with the money I saved by not having extended warranties on all 10 items.
That should raise a giant red flag. Unless you're extremely careless and don't look after things, you're paying for other peoples carelessness.