Just do a google image search for "potholes of halifax nova scotia" and you can see what a 15% sales tax actually does. It produces a giant pothole for businesses trying to operate in the area so they either die or go away. You can guess what the other taxes in Nova Scotia are like which also are working together to kill the economy.

Also thanks for confirming that I was not way off base with the way that I have taught something so basic as sales tax. I don't know how many tellers have looked at me strangely when I hand them the exact change with taxes. More than once they have commented something like, "Wow that was lucky that you happened to pick out the exact amount." I don't think that they thought it was possible to work out tax in your head.

In my many years of computer consulting, I have ended up teaching many people various computer/math skills. I have no doubt that some people simply come under the category of thick headed. I will explain something simple 8 different ways and they just don't get it. While other people might not have a knack for things computery they only need to be shown something once.

The same with math. For some reason I have ended up teaching people elements of math. Some people I have shown how to calculate percentages multiple times, while others I will show something far more complex such as how to calculate a mortgage payment and it sticks. Both groups will have had roughly similar math educations.

I wonder if this is where some people choke when learning to program. There are many concepts in programming that must be mastered. There is no wiggle room with each concept such as ifs, whiles, switches, etc. You either get it or you don't, and with so many to learn they must be gotten quickly in a typical intro to programming course. Again I have helped people with their programming homework and while some would instantly absorb what I was saying there were groups to whom I might as well have been just making up words.

Maybe I am a lousy teacher but lets say I am teaching someone to do the local sales tax (15%) and I tell them to do 1 x 1.15 to get the total on a calculator. I might even explain that the 1 represents the original price and the .15 is the tax and together they get the total. But I also just say, do 1.15 and it will just work. Write it on the calculator if needed. Easy Peasy.

I hated every day I was in school, I didn't kind of hate school, I loathed it. I hated at least 50% of my teachers, with maybe 1 teacher in 10 being pretty good. I think in of the maybe 200 teachers that I had, 1 or 2 were exceptional. I hated my school buildings (run down piles of crap). I hated the textbooks, I hated the curriculum, I hated the preachy pamphlets they handed out. I hated the chairs, the piles of broken down gym equipment.

What I did like were many of the friends I made, I liked snow days, I liked weekends, and I liked holidays; but what I loved was the summer break. I barely remember school. It is mostly one indistinct blur sitting in a chair while either the teacher droned on, a movie droned on, or I did drone work. But I could write a book series about my summer adventures and fun with friends. That is where I learned the magical things that made me who I am.

One of my dreams is that online teaching will devastate the school system. That what will happen is that smart kids (let's say average and above) are able to get all they want and more from online schooling and that they are able to abandon the traditional school system. That a secondary system of "practical" courses show up where kids can go in to learn things that require some hands on activities such as engineering, chemistry, nature studies, engine repair, etc. Then these secondary school course will have to "attract" kids who have them as a wise but optional part of education.

Then the schools will be left with the kids who are either too stupid to do online courses or are just don't possess the motivation. This way the lazy teachers and the lazy kids will be a perfect match for each other.

I am not merely motivated by some sort of vengeance but that our existing system is wildly broken. There are plenty of kids who could complete many grades of education per year; while there are other kids who can't. It is silly to hold back the kids who can progress faster by averaging them in with the slower kids. But at the same time it is stupid to allow only the most exceptional kids to skip forward and be freaks. Just let the kids proceed at a pace that they are comfortable with.

As for socializing that can be done through what was traditionally thought of as "after school" programs. So have lots of clubs, sports, etc.

But the last part of the equation are the teachers. My solution is simple. Create the new system, shut down the old system, off jobs as necessary within the new system to people who are qualified.

But think of all the out of work SQL injection hackers? But I still see code where people use a bound parameters technology this way:

sql="SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE ID="+user_id;

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

Well Python 2.7 to 3.X is certainly causing a stir. But with C++ I can still compile really old code. Usually the libraries are where trouble might brew. PHP is really compatible from version to version. I wasn't around during the 4.x-5.x wars but it was 5.x features that I had to have before I would use PHP anyway. Years ago when I was doing .Net I found that every version of .net twisted my code into knots.

So some languages are far better than others. But a whole other part of the game is the IDE and other tools. That can be a huge problem that can really choke a version upgrade to death in any language. On the other hand the latest version of the IDE can be the thing that pushes people into an upgrade.

Then there can be whole other motivations. Many people are learning C++ purely for Arduino. I learned Objective-C purely for iOS apps, but have since switched to C++ as I can then multi mobile platform my apps with ease; not to mention that I really hated Objective-C.

With most programming languages there are 3 sorts of programmers: There are those 9-5 programmers who examine their paycheck more closely than their code; there are those programmers who have mastered the language and can do amazing things to make it dance, and there are the hard core insiders who give talks at language specific conferences and are on steering committees.

With some languages such as assembler the bulk of the programmers are in the middle category, while with a language like PowerBuilder the vast majority were in the first category. But what I have found with almost all languages there are very very few people in the steering committee category and they can be very detached from the first category.

With Java I would hazard a guess that the absolute majority of programmers are in the 9-5 category and about the only thing they want from the next version of Java is to "Please please please" don't break their code. Beyond that their needs are simple.

So Oracle can let Java Stagnate and it will probably actually please that first group for the short term. Obviously, this can be unhealthy for the language so even that first group will lose out if the language dies as they will then have to learn a whole new language when they thought they could spend a whole career in Java.

But one thing that I have also observed in many of the mega Java based projects is that they are often 1 or more versions of Java behind. Thus even newer versions of Java are totally irrelevant unless they solved some critical existing problem in the codebase of these mega projects. The real issue is that as Java moves on it becomes more and more of an effort to upgrade a mega codebase to a newer version making it eventually impossible under that company's coding management.

So if Oracle ever did want to push forward with new Java ideas then it should also push a huge program where zillions of programmers were taught to manage a version upgrade for a large codebase and given the tools to make it as painless as possible. Remember 9-5 programmers love free trips to sunny places.

The power industry can't just die, no matter how hard we try, but....

This is where it is going to get interesting. At some point (probably quite easy to graph) the combination of cheaper solar, cheaper durable deep cycle power storage, and braindead easy inverter and other power management technologies will make it feasible to switch to fully off grid with very little pain. I suspect that there will be some adjustment such as not being able to run the washer, dryer, vacuum, dishwasher, and a bunch of 55" TVs all at the same time but that the average household will be happy at some point to go off grid. But the key is that some people will go off grid as this equation approaches balance for a variety of reasons ranging from green thinking, a more consistent power bill (simply amortized payments for the capital cost), it came with the newly built house, and my favourite: a big FU to the power company.

So as this equality approaches a small number of fairly well moneyed houses will make the switch. While technically the load on the power company will marginally drop, their equipment service costs will remain steady. Thus as these customers leave the remaining customers will have to pick up the slack through rate increases. This of course will drive another handful of customers away; which is now driving a vicious cycle of rate increases. All this while the cost of the installed system will drop while the cons of having such a system will vanish. Also somewhere in this process that critical point will be crossed where it is cheaper to buy an off grid system than to stay on grid.

But there are a number of customers who can't leave. Some are simply the poor who can't obtain the credit for the capital costs, others are people in poor solar/wind locations; and then there are the high density customers who simply can't obtain a sufficient amount of renewables from their property such as tall buildings and factories.

So the rates for these remaining folks will be prohibitive if they have to carry the entirety of the power system capital costs alone. So even these folks will begin to look elsewhere for electrical power. I suspect a popular source will be natural gas generation, either through traditional generators or through some sort of fuel cell systems. This will push up the price of natural gas but will probably be much cheaper than grid power.

So my prediction is that the power companies and large power consumers will try to bend reality, they will attempt to make it illegal to go off grid, or they will charge regular fees to any house that does go off grid. I can see other tactics such as charging a tax for every KWh generated with your own power system. This will be in defence of not only the power companies but of the landlords and factory owners who don't want to pay for their own problems.

But this reality bending will simply be dealt with by the free market. Factories will move closer to power generation sites or will move the power generation sites closer to the factories. The same with high density buildings. I suspect that they will figure out some way to buy power. An interesting one would be to have containers with massive batteries that are charged at a power generation site and then trucked to the building. This might sound bonkers but it could end up being cheaper than paying for the unwieldy infrastructure of a power grid.

On top of all that this will certainly drive a massive quest for efficiency. Right now it is stupid to have any incandescent bulbs in your house. Yet most people still do. But if these bulbs meant the difference between needing a $10,000 power system and a $20,000 power system; people would throw them out with their next trash. The same will go for nearly every appliance. People will look at the 150W 55" TV and instead and opt for the 120W 55" TV; this being something that the TV companies don't focus on much.

On top of all that this will be another opportunity for third world countries to leapfrog over another technology as they did with landlines.

Well in that case, they did a terrible job of marketing it as I would have been recommending this left and right had I known about it.

Now I want one.

My PRS-505 was great, it was a nice metal case, and it survived in my house where 3 Kindles met a cracked screen fate. Then its battery died and it is $30 for a new one.

But I could see from day one that the library that Sony was offering was pretty much an irrelevancy. I am not sure that a single book they ever offered (not that I looked more than once or twice) caught my interest. I long thought that Sony should have gone enterprise with a very large screen (close to 8 1/2 x 11 as possible) for reading legal documents, documentation, and basically the size that every PDF is aimed at. Then they could have charged quite a bit of cash per unit and banked on the Sony name to give it respectability. So here comes a paperwhite in my future as nothing beats sitting in the sun near the ocean reading a good book.

Years ago I was building an online phone bill checking system. (when this sort of thing was brand new). We were informed that a different phone company had tried to do the same thing but the public had lost their minds thinking it was insecure. Yet the security used by the other company had been quite good. So we used nearly identical security but had lots of icons of locks and vaults.

The simple reality was that had our system been insecure our pictures of locks and vaults would have still appeased the public far more than the claims the other company made about 128 bit this and that.

This is why voting systems this important need to be handed over to the public for some serious pen testing. Then the results need to be 100% available (as opposed to suppressed or sanitized versions). Otherwise their claims for security are as substantial as our pictures of locks and vaults.

While this has probably lost them some money, I have always felt that one of the reasons that the movie industry hates torrents is that it gives people such a wide choice that crappy films don't end up being downloaded. How insulting must it be when your precious darling of a film is so undesired that people won't even take it for free.

Not to mention that movies that aren't being "professionally" distributed suddenly have some traction.

I am in Halifax, Nova Scotia and we have shockingly stupid online/phone voting. In our last election it didn't make or break any elections but my trust in it is exactly zero. The software used is not open to the public, in fact almost nothing is told to the public except for sanitized versions of how secure the software is and how thoroughly they have tested it. Even many of the discussions about it were secret.

I have read a few mumblings about the dangers online voting but nobody substantial has come out and said that online voting is a clear and present danger to democracy. In Canada we had someone (never conclusively identified) who robocalled a bunch of people who were probably going to vote for one of the parties and tell them that it was "Elections Canada calling and that their voting station had been moved to a location far far away." The result was that many voters either didn't bother to vote or went far far away only to find out that they were in the wrong place and had to go way back to vote, again presumably this reduced number of voters. This was a clear and presumably effective law breaking cheat. If the person(s) behind this could have hacked an online voting system I am 100% sure that they would have. As the robocall thing turned into an actual scandal whereas a harder to detect hack would not only reduce their risk but also increasetheir chances of success to basically 100%.

I can consider myself to be somewhat expert in computer security but my simple explanation is twofold. Facebook, Google, major banks, companies like target, etc have all been solidly hacked; so how can some proprietary publicly untested system be so magically secure? Secondly how would anyone know that an election had been "adjusted" unless someone's cat bob wins with 99% the election will have results that surprise some people; just like pretty much every election.

And most importantly, anyone who wins through some sort of hacking will pretty much have failed the good citizen test at that point.

In Halifax, Nova Scotia the two main reasons given for the online voting were: to increase voter participation, and to reduce costs. Participation was basically at the same anaemic levels of the past; and nobody in their right mind would sacrifice the security of our democracy to save a few bucks. On top of that the election results were unusually slow to come in anyway, and I don't understand the money saving as they have just as many traditional polling stations as ever. The electronic voting does cost a bundle, plus I really hope the city is spending money auditing it which should be some serious auditing thus costing even more. Plus the extensive education campaign couldn't have been free. So if it somehow magically cost less than it would just be accounting magic, not reality.

On a personal opinion level, the reason for the anaemic participation levels is that government doesn't listen to us. We throw one set of bums out and the next bunch act identically to the last. If they genuinely wanted participation we would have referendums to approve the council "decisions". The voting would be fast and furious on a fair number of issues.

Lastly from what I have read, ever single different electronic voting system that security researchers have ever gotten their hands on has easily and completely been hacked. Often in many many different ways. The voting technology companies almost always have a similar line. "That was a previous model and our present systems have been proven to be 100% secure." yet they said that the easily hacked system had been totally secure when it had been released.

So if you figure out a way to have a ground swell political movement that shuts down your local online voting please PM me and I will try that here.

This failure is quite simple: The Tivo solved a problem This QPlay did not.

I am actually writing a book on managing large projects that have gone to crap, and can say that you are being trapped in a classical routine where they will deliver what you ask for but not what you need. Then they will nail you when you realize that it wasn't what you wanted and will again deliver what you ask for but not what you need. Companies like this often will cultivate a great relationship with the most dysfunctional aspects of your organization who will ask for the most useless things.

The key is that you can never sue them as they will deliver exactly and contractually what you asked for. It doesn't matter that you asked for a Toyota Corolla with a trailer hitch to pull a full sized tractor-trailer sized load. That is what they will deliver. Then they will deliver an engine upgrade, a frame upgrade, a transmission upgrade, tire upgrades, etc. When they could have just delivered a truck as what you wanted was not what you asked for.

So the first thing is not to think about how to get this project back on track. What you want to do is to figure out where you are, and where you want to be. Then draw a straight line to there. What you might discover is that what you want is actually close to where you are, thus continuing with this debacle might be the answer. Or you might find that it is actually a shorter path to success from basically nothing.

Going mostly or entirely in-house is a good idea except that you might find that you have gone from depending on one bunch who don't seem to get things done to another who also don't get things done. So make sure to chunk up the project into pretty separate chunks. Then see who gets things done and who doesn't.

Needless to say the whole process has many more steps and more decisions (hence a whole book) but at least you don't need to feel bad about it going to crap; most projects do. But of all the discoveries that I have made simply using logic and common sense is a massively powerful tool. If something doesn't seem right then it probably isn't. If they say, "You need this 1 million dollar solution for this tiny bit." think about what is similar and how much that cost. Also be prepared to trim functionality if fairly useless things are holding things up. I have seen people build systems that could have been done in a day or two in Excel except for later unused features that required that some poor group of programmers basically had to build their own excel like application from scratch. So here was a project that cost millions that literally could have been done in house by an accountant over a weekend. At the same time I have seen people try to short-cut by using a tool like excel which resulted in a huge mess of worthless crap when it should have been done in something more like C++ in less than half the time. So there is no one answer.

So while getting it right can be hard at the best of times; it becomes nearly impossible if your development company is incented to work against you. Thus be prepared for an interesting battle merely sorting that aspect out.

I don't think that I have ever seen a female sysadmin, ever. But the job jumping is critical for paycheck success; but only for those that are good. Just about every programmer thinks that the company would fail without them but when they leave it is usually easy to fill their spot with someone equal or better. But when the really good ones go suddenly the company realizes that the company can't replace them with a single person or that they will need to massively pay more to fill the positiion. The result is that the new person benefits from this pay jump; except that the person who left has a good chance of jumping into the exact same situation; that is a company that has realized that they need to pay more for the vacant position.

I know one person (not a programming position) where the person left a after 35 years and a salary of $130,000 and after 6 months of searching they hired 3 people the top of the 3 is being paid $280,000 ($190,000 +plus massive benefits). But I guarantee that they would never been able to negotiate half of that raise short of something underhanded if they had tried to stay.