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http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp The point is a good one though.

You might mean most banks or big corporations have larger and more complex interrelated schemas than most developers are used to.

Well remember I said the managers in these cases are incompetent (pointy haired, Dilbert types). A random person off the street would be better. The tech guy that knows the business and the software and has been working with said software for 10 years would certainly be better.

I've been working around people from India for 17 years now. I've known guys/girls from India that came here in the US in the early 80s. I've been in tech lead positions and have given evaluations for people from India on my team that should have been moved into leadership positions and they've been overlooked. This is how I know first hand that there is some kind of bias in many work settings.

I've seen this in the medical, defense, education, financial, and utility fields on the east coast, mid west, and in the southwest. FWIW I've not seen this at software companies.

Banks are another subject entirely: www.dartmouth.edu/~blnchflr/papers/finalrestat.pdf "We conduct an econometric analysis of loan outcomes by race and find that black- owned small businesses are about twice as likely to be denied credit even after controlling for differences in credit-worthiness and other factors."

The racism that I've come in contact with (in corporate settings at least) is towards people from India. Not people born here and of Indian descent, but people from India with Indian culture. It would probably be better to call it "culturism" or bias against a culture instead of racism. When you go on a contract and you see 20 employees 50-80% of them being from India and 0% of them in management or even team lead positions, that's an indicator. It's an even bigger indicator when all of said employees have been there for 5-10 years or longer and are willing to manage. The absolute smoking gun is when current the managers bring zero to the table (completely incompetent). These positions in large companies are often obviously filled with friends with no merit, technical know how, or leadership ability. As a side note I'm black as well, and I feel I know these biases when I see them.

It's pretty hard to get the (now increased) recommended allowance for vitamin D (600 IUs ... especially as an indoor-programmer-type). You need 10 glasses of milk to get that without supplementing. http://www.docgurley.com/2008/05/18/the-greatest-drug-in-the... http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/nutrition_articles.asp?i...

The diet changed, and more then compensated for the exercise change.

My lawyer (a tax attorney) said this is rarely prosecuted on independent contractors who are themselves incorporated (along with things like actually have a contract etc). From my own experience this is true as well. Think about it, the IRS would have to give back all of the matching that the contractor (agent) did when they collect from the employer (principal).

Edit: talk to your own attorney though.

"People still need what they need and want what they want and are going to buy those things regardless of what relative prices will be in the future."

What about "investors" instead of "consumers"? Right now an investor simply makes a choice between losing money by sitting on it (through increased supply ... printing money leads to inflation) or investing. If the money supply were fixed would that not make it more attractive to investors to sit on assets?

>>Comparing the two over all domains is ridiculous as this includes mass domains such as parked domains which can easily give Apache 10s of millions of useless stat points as one registrar switches a couple of servers.

If we are counting web server use, and mass domains are an example of web server use, you would need to say more than just 'mass domains are useless'. Otherwise that is just special pleading.

On the other hand, if we are counting 'useful domains', you would need to say why you think mass domains don't count as 'useful'. You only said that they could switch often.

I would say mass domains count as a 'useful' because they still have some kind of exposure security wise. They also demonstrate provisioning costs (or lack thereof) and provisioning speed.

>>There is absolutely no way for Mozilla to get your data, even if subpoenaed

There needs to be more assurances like this in the world.

Is the EFF the most effective organization that accepts donations to fight this type of thing?

I really never had a large network of contacts. I just used DICE and the like. My technique is just do as many interviews as possible when it's time. If I wasn't so lazy I would market myself better. I have a bunch of other rules but they are for when you are already on site. I can post those too if you want to know.

Alternate between billing really high to fix really really screwed up projects and billing a bit lower but taking interesting projects that you can use to update your skillset. I've made 125kish a year contracting this way in the non-major, low cost-of-living cities. Plus these contracts typically last up to 5 years so you have better stability than contracts of 6 months. This is just one way, but its an easy way. I've been doing this since 1996 throughout the midwest and southern states.

Microsoft's strategy is to build/own the platform and then add value to the platform by harvesting what is on top (buying software/copying ideas etc). From a game-theoretic view point, GPL is a strategy that works well vs harvesting and should be kept 'on the table'. For more on this and Microsoft read: http://www.amazon.com/Keystone-Advantage-Ecosystems-Innovati...

I really don't think corporate programmers have a problem with sql but more so TSQL or pl-sql. I think they intuitively have a problem with what is essentially a wrapper language for sql that is using 30 year old language technology (procedural programming). I have been in multiple environments with several thousands of stored procedures, many of them thousands of lines long. There is so much boilerplate in tsql and pl-sql that any self respecting programmer will hate it. It doesn't help that most DBAs are really not data gurus but rather vendor gurus either :/

Count me as one from the 'services' that has gone on to well paying non-defense job(s). But you are correct in that it doesn't happen often. At least not without getting a degree somewhere along the line.

>>>>I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific.

>>This falsifiability criterion is what determines whether a theory is scientific, but there is a larger category of theories which are not all empirically testable yet are subject to rational criticism, and are therefore rational, though we must generally hold them with a lower degree of confidence than we do our scientific theories.

The essence of anti-intellectualism is when we say that there are subjects that are too deep or too laborious to discuss. Suppose we say that (1) empiricism is not empirically testable, and then say that (2) empiricism is true, and then say that (3) everything that is true must be testable. Now suppose someone were to come along and say that (4) It is the case that (1) and (3) are mutually exclusive. The shying away from statements/discussions like (4) is the essence of anti-intellectualism which spawns from all manner of modern philosophical beliefs. You'll notice a shying away of this type of discussion in the article. Not inspecting your true core beliefs is what anti-intellectualism is.

The company(s) mentioned in the book still exist, but they no longer try to 'play market'. The more incentive you give people/subgroups to compete with one another, the more incentive they have to not share information(best practices) with one another. Managers see this and reallocate resources. Groups feel alienated that their resources are taken away from their idea to fund someone else's idea and then they go back to keeping their real ideas to themselves and/or starting a separate business outside of the parent firm. Innovation in the mentioned companies increased dramatically when the 'play market' strategy was initially adopted though.

Theres a view in economics that you 'can not play market' within the boundaries of the firm. That is to say if there is an overseeing committee that can end a project prematurely then you are not really having market forces operate 'within' the firm and are doomed to failure. There have been a couple of companies that have tried to do this. It is documented in the following book by Nicolai Foss:

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Economic-Organization-Knowled...

If you love what you do you will rarely find someone that can compete with you. That being said I am a non-degreed programmer of 14 years experience. Having researched this topic many times I believe Michael Spence has cornered why and how a degree is useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Spence

To summarize a degree or certification is a signal of private information from an agent to a principal. Nothing more, nothing less. If you can replace that signal with another kind of signal (ie experience/references/monument made in your name) you don't need it.

The spam has historically been a problem with this but how about an OCR capable component where the contributor is able to upload a picture of their check (not available to the public) thereby becominge 'confirmed'. That might keep out the riff raff enough to get good results.

Doctor Who has a real name, but Paul Graham encrypted it.

A degree in Philosophy = the same value as a degree in computer science. You come out knowing about as much as someone with 2 to 12 months of real life experience depending on how much you applied yourself. You shouldn't expect anyone who 'majored' in something to actually have applied it.

To get that experience I would challenge PG to go around the internet and debate something like universalism vs nominalism. You would have to take the nominalism side if you think 'math' is 'science' and not philosophy. Remember though, that bertrand russel was a universalist .. you know .. that strange believe that numbers exist outside of the human mind and are not physical, sort of like what Plato believed.

PS forget Wittgenstein. To quote him: 'My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless'.

The main purpose of philosophy is to find truth without exceptions. There are people, like descarte, that spend their lives trying to find something that is true, and then measure everything else within that truth

Metaphysics: What is true, without exceptions, about things that are not physical or on the boundary of being physical. Ontology: What is true, without exceptions, about existence (being) Epistemology: What is true, without exceptions, about how you know what you know Ethics: What is true about the way things ought to be, without exceptions.

Epistemology/Ontology/Metaphysics have provided lots of value for those that love truth without exceptions.

If you read philosophers and try to see the problems they want to solve within those branches of philosophy, ask yourself what are the exceptions. When you try to battle with them, you will have the feeling of thinking you are the first one to climb a large mountain, only to find a whole city at the top with a lot of people saying, 'What took you so long to get here? PS here are the real mountains for you to climb!'

Is there anything that is true (epistemology)? If false, why have an essay? If true, what is it?

A simple start, can a self refuting statement be true? Well the vast majority of philosophers would tell you no. That is to say they would believe the following statement to be true:

1) Self refuting statements are false or inscrutable.

So you have plenty of people in the world that deny (1). Philosophy allows the Descarte types to relax when dealing with these people.

So lets take a Descarte truth based on (1). That would be:

2) I cannot doubt doubting.

Or in other words I do not have the ability to doubt my ability to doubt. Then when someone says something like this:

4) If I am multiple pieces, I do not exist (?!) 5) Empirical data has shown that I am multiple pieces (cells) 6) Therefore I do not exist

a descarte type doesn't waste brain energy on either (4) or (5) (or both).

To sum this up, philosophy is the domain of what is necessarily the case. Science (positivism) has nothing to say about this. That is what philosophy brings to the table. But only a descarte type would enjoy this.

For programmers, an analogy could be said as lisp programmers laugh at the 'pattern circus' and the 'aspect oriented design' of other languages (which basically fix what should not have been broken in the first place), philosophers laught 10X as much at people that say things like 'I don't exist' and 'there are no true statements' and wish that they could help them, but know that some people love their circus so they let them have their fun.