Some of you may remember the Presidential debate only 6 days ago. As soon as I saw this story, I recalled McCain's argument for lowering business taxes. He used a very specific example...Ireland.

You can see the video here with the Ireland remark highlighted.

I took the liberty of transcribing McCain's words. Not to go totally partisan up in here....but you gotta give him props for calling this one:

The business tax. Right now, United States of America business pays the second highest business taxes in the world, 35%. Ireland pays 11%. Now, if you're a business person, and you can locate any place in the world, then obviously if you go to the country where it's 11% tax versus 35, you'll be able to create jobs, increase your business, make more investment, etc. I want to cut that business tax. I want to cut it so that businesses remain in America and create jobs.

It's rather a lot of work to prove that 2+2=4 if you start from basics by hand too.

The link you provided looks like it's the LONGEST path they could find. Not the shortest. Plus, from a quick reading, it looks like they were actually proving that (2+0i) + (2+0i) = (4+0i), which is a little bit different.

The worst part is, the government encouraged those risky loan practices in the first place.

They weren't as risky then.

• The value of the dollar was higher. People didn't need to spend as much of their income on food, heating, electricity, gas and similar necessary expenses.
• The job market was not nearly as volatile. The risk of losing your job was much smaller. (And when looking at unemployment figures, remember that a few years ago, the statistics were changed so many long-term unemployed are no longer counted as unemployed.)
• The interest rates have gone up. With little faith in the dollar, it costs more for banks to borrow the money to lend you.
• Related to the last point, the trade deficit has skyrocketed, meaning that there is an abundance of dollars abroad, but not in the US. Which means that it's difficult to borrow in the domestic market, and while there's a surplus of US funds abroad, the faith in the future of the dollar is so low that the foreign companies are more interested in exchanging the dollars for something else than borrowing it and get paid back in dollars.

• In other words, the playing field has changed completely, causing loans that were quite manageable a few years ago to become unmanagable. This can not be blamed on the loan takers, but on those who changed the playing field.

  It's also worth noting that the current government did not change the recommendations for loan requirements back to what they were before Clinton, something that they had all the time in the world to do. So complaining about what the Clinton administration did only underlines their own inability to see problems until they become too big to ignore.

  Each and every family in the US now owes $150,000 dollars that the government has borrowed, in addition to whatever loans they themselves may have. A substantial part of this is to foreign investors, meaning that paying it back won't even cause any secondary benefits of money circulation. Just to service the interest on existing loans if the government immediately cuts all services and expenses to the bone and imposes an extra tax would cost most families far more than they can possibly afford.

  For all practical purposes, the US is now bankrupt, but is continuing to live on IOUs. The only reason outside financial companies and governments are still willing to lend the US money is because when they stop, the IOUs they already have will become worthless. As long as everybody pretends that the US is solvent, the loans still have paper value. But sooner or later, this bubble must burst, and then there are no-one around to bail us out. The Chinese have the most to lose, and the greatest interest in prolonging the agony. Once the bubble bursts, exports to the US will stop, and all the dollars they sit on will become essentially worthless. Already, Chinese companies are working to switch primary markets from the US to other countries, which raises prices for US consumers, who can ill afford that right now.

  Back to Fannie May and Freddie Mac, as I see it, the problem started back when they were privatized. In good years, public companies will suck out any profits and distribute them to the investors, and not feed them back into the company, nor use them for rainy day funds. This was not in the interest of the loan takers, which the companies were funded to help. We Americans abhor strong government control like if it was the plague, but sometimes it really is needed to avoid corporate abuse.

Just for fun, try the exact same post in a topic about Bill Gates and Microsoft, see what response you get ;)

What are the other countries doing accepting the waste? USA shouldn't be responsible for other countries' not acting responsibly.

Having solved all other problems within their country, Israel turns it's attention and taxpayer dollars towards the onerous problem of DOG SHIT.

As I said, you've got to be kidding me. Isn't DNA analysis still kind of expensive?

PS. yes, that sort of whining about health expenditure makes me really angry and anti-american. It is amazing how so many Americans believe that their system is superior and the only morally defensible system. Empirically, it is more expensive and less effective than other Western systems. People die because of your theoretical whining about 'socialised health systems.'

Yes, yours is a great country and all, but it's got a few damned ugly patches, and the worst of it is that so many of you don't have the ability to criticise yourselves and actually change something.

Please, go forward, patch yourselves up, be strong, be good, get back to being the envy of the world. I would like to revisit the USA one day, but first, I need to want to be there. End rant.

It's not always as hard as you make it out to be, either. Small changes in shape that don't really even impact style or cost can make a huge difference. For example, SUVs are made with body-on-frame construction, not unibody. This makes it easier to churn out a couple new models every year, but makes them heavier and less safe. For another example, the Hummer H2 and Scion xB are both boxy vehicles, but the Hummer has a drag coefficient of 0.57 while the Scion has a drag coefficient of 0.35 (and I'm talking about drag *coefficient*, not drag area; this is *before* you consider changes to the cross-sectional area). It's almost a willful disregard for efficiency. And we haven't even gotten into things that have a price point but pay off rather quickly, such as more efficient drivetrains (higher efficiency engine layout, IMA or other stop/start, diesel, HCCI, etc), aluminum in places where steel isn't needed for structural integrity, higher efficiency accessories, and so on, or more radical streamlining.

That said, consumers probably are mostly to blame, namely for insisting that their vehicles look like a brick and drive like armored tanks, complete with the high weight, low visibility and lack of maneuverability that entails. But automakers are not blameless.

Anyways, my primary hope is that the fuel crunch (which seems to be going away fast, IMHO) will help change consumer style preferences to more aerodynamic shapes and lighter bodies, as well as increasing the awareness that a higher upfront cost can pay off down the road.

Too much leisure time is one thing, but most people blow some time on pursuits that are purely pleasure, and WoW is no better or worse than most of those. I used to play WoW; I played a lot during a period where I was freelancing and doing contract work. Played a lot less when I started in on a full time job. Less still when my first kid came along.

If I can find time to play WoW, have a full time job, a kid, and a social life, what's the problem? People always treat it like there is some character flaw in playing an MMO, but they ignore the fact that the person'd be playing some other game, reading a trashy novel, or slacking in front of the TV.

We have had presentations from both Coverity and Klocwork at my workplace. I'm not entirely fond of them, but they're wayyyyy better than 'lint'. :) I much prefer using "Purify" whenever possible, since run-time analysis tends to produce fewer false-positives.

My comments would be:

(1) Klockwork & Coverity tend to produce a lot of "false positives". And by a lot, I mean, *A LOT*. For every 10000 "critical" bugs reported by the tool, only a handful may be really worth investigating. So you may spend a fair bit of time simply weeding through what is useful and what isn't.

(2) They're expensive. Coverity costs $50k for every 500k lines of code per year... We have a LOT more code than this. For the price, we could hire a couple of guys to run all of our tools through Purify *and* fix the bugs they found. Klocwork is cheaper; $4k per seat, minimum number of seats.

(3) They're slow. It takes several days running non-stop on our codebase to produce the static analysis databases. For big projects, you'll need to set aside a beefy machine to be a dedicated server. With big projects, there will be lots of bug information, so the clients tend to get bogged down, too.

In short: It all depends on how "mission critical" your code is; is it important, to you, to find that *one* line of code that could compromise your system? Or is your software project a bit more tolerant? (e.g., If you're writing nuclear reactor software, it's probably worthwhile to you to run this code. If you're writing a video game, where you can frequently release patches to the customer, it's probably not worth your while.)

My experience has been that while in the hands of people who know what they're doing, they're a nice tool to have, well, beware managers using their output as metrics. And beware even more a consultant with such a tool that he doesn't even understand.

The thing is, these tools produce

A) a lot of "false positives", code which is really OK and everyone understand why it's ok, but the tool will still complain, and

B) usually includes some metrics of dubious quality at best, to be taken only as a signal for a human to look at it and understand why it's ok or not ok.

E.g., ne such tool, which I had the misfortune of sitting through a salesman hype session of, seemed to be really little more than a glorified grep. It really just looked at the source text, not at what's happening. So for example if you got a database connection and a statement in a "try" block, it wanted to see the close statements in the "finally" block.

Well, applied to an actual project, there was a method which just closed the connection and the statements supplied as an array. Just because, you know, it's freaking stupid to copy-and-paste cute little "if (connection != null) { try { connection.close(); } catch (SQLException e) { // ignore }}" blocks a thousand times over in each "finally" block, when you can write it once and just call the method in your finally block. This tool had a trouble understanding that it _is_ all right. Unless it saw the "connection.close()" right there, in the finally block, it didn't count.

Other examples include more mundane stuff like the tools recommending that you synchronize or un-synchronize a getter, even when everyone understands why it's OK for it to be as it is.

E.g., a _stateless_ class as a singleton is just an (arguably premature and unneded) speed optimization, because some people think they're saving so much by a singleton instead of the couple of cycles it takes to do a new on a class with no members and no state. It doesn't really freaking matter if there's exactly one of it, or someone gets a copy of it. But invariably the tools will make an "OMG, unsynchronized singleton" fuss, because they don't look deep enough to see if there's actually some state that must be unique.

Etc.

Now taken as something that each developper understands, runs on his own when he needs it, and uses his judgment of each point, it's a damn good thing anyway.

Enter the clueless PHB with a metric and chart fetish, stage left. This guy doesn't understand what those things are, but might make it his personal duty to chart some progress by showing how much fewer warnings he's got from the team this week than last week. So useless man-hours are spent on useless morphing perfectly good code, into something that games the tool. For each 1 real bug found, there'll be 100 harmless warnings that he makes it his personal mission to get out of the code.

Enter the snake-oil vendor's salesman, stage right. This guy only cares about selling some extra copies to justify his salary. He'll hype to the boss exactly the possibility to generate such charts (out of mostly false positives) and manage by such charts. If the boss wasn't already in a mind to do that management anti-pattern, the salesman will try to teach him to. 'Cause that's usually the only advantage that his expensive tool has over those open source tools that you mention.

I'm not kidding. I actually tried to corner one into;

Me: "ok, but you said not everything it flags there is a bug, right?"

Him: "Yes, you need to actually look at them and see if they're bugs or not."

Me: "Then what sense does it make to generate charts based on wholesale counting entities which may, or may not be bugs?"

Him: "Well, you can use the charts to see, say, a trend that you have less of them over time, so the project is getting better."

Me: "But they may or may not be actual bugs. How do you know if this week's mix has more or less actual bugs than last weeks, regardless of what the total there is?"

Him: "Well, yes, you need to actually look at them in turn to see which are actual bugs."

Me: "But that's not what the tool counts. It counts a total which includes an unknown, and likely majority, number of false positives."

Him: "Well, yes."

Me: "So what use is that kind of a chart then?"

Him: "Well, you can get a line or bar graph that shows how much progress is made in removing them."

Lather, rinse, repeat, give up.

Or enter the consultant with a tool. Now while I'll be the first to say that a lot of projects do end up needing a good consultant to get the code to perform right, I'll also warn about the thousands of parasites posing as one. There are more than enough guys who don't actually have any clue, and all they do is run the code through such a tool, and expect miracles to happen. They don't see the big fat SQL query that causes the delay, or the needless loop it's in, but they'll advise blind compliance to the 1 microsecond saving tips of their tool. And of course, again, try to justify his fee by reducing such a total of harmless warnings.

And I guess the moral of the story is that you also need to train the people to understand those tools, and understand what they can ignore and what not. It might mean a bit more expense than just downloading the tools. Especially training some managers what _not_ to do with them.

And while meditating their IP is 127.0.0.1 for "Truth lies within".

Homeboy ought to move to where you live. However, as he lives where he lives, the laws of where he lives were enforced, not the laws where you live. That, unfortunately, is the Way Things Are.

Don't forget people, Blizzard is evil.

They were one of the early abusers of the DMCA hammer, and they used it to shut down reverse engineering of the server protocol that would have allowed widespread modifications of the Diablo 2 engine.

Blizzard does not allow mods like Valve does.

"... start looking for a new challenge and a less happy candy colored world"

What about the real world?

(said with a bit of sarcasm and a tad seriousness)

If the only reason to leave WoW is to play another MMO game, then, maybe... Have you have played WoW for several years and still want more "challenges" why not "Get a life"? *sigh*
Seriously!