A con man tries to con you out of something, Turing didn't, he also was probably the biggest factor in saving everybody's bacon...
He was probably over optimistic, or just very pessimistic (realistic ?) about the level of intelligence most people use when they believe they are thinking
#!/bin/sh
a[0]=""
a[1]="whaaa"
a[2]="gurgll"
a[3]="whaaa aaa aa"
echo "=== Turin Baby 0.1 prototype ==="
while read q
do
random -e 3
echo ${a[$?]}
done
it's not 4G but works everywhere and you can roll over it in you land rover after too much scotch
www.runbo.net
http://www.runbo.net/productvi...
No, what he is saying is that it is easy to "write" sloppy code for excel and hard to write good code.
And even harder to review it.
It's similar to the reason a) people moved away from basic, and b) basic evolved to be (duck, please no flame) almost usable (I still do not like it, but recognize that it is possible to write usable code in visual basic).
If you want to criticizes him, picking on Piketty is VERY political, "excel" errors are galore in neocon publications, but of course the FT did not find anything not to love there, but saying that just maybe having a small group of people siphoning off all the cash from society is not sustainable for ever does make them nervous and very desirous to find some scab to pick at...
Nevertheless he is right, it would be very good if decision makers would be able to "read the numbers" and not just "massage the numbers".
Something like R or ADaMSoft would drive you to test ideas on datasets and learn from them whereas excel (or calc
I'm 10 years older than you and worked for a variety of startups in the last 20 years, and am just starting in a "new one" yes they are all 20 years younger than I am, but
Including BTW a large network of contacts
About the "cultural thing", you should probably discuss with your familly and negociate that you will be very late about 4 days in each month (but not necessarely friday night)... then decide what you would like to do there night, it could be going to gothic festivals, play pool or snooker, go bowling, organize Maker's event, go to steampunk events, real time go language programming, what ever
Pick stuff you like and could convince "them to do", stuff they like and you could tolerate (or even enjoy) doing... things you find interesting and that you could actually organize and be seen as a kind of leader in
Then try to find once a month an event you can tolerate and that is organized allready...
Organize once a month or every two monthes a meetup or something similar about something techy you care about and invite the rest of the company to attend
Invite everybody once a month to something you find fun (if they do not come it's their problem, just make sure it is something that they just might be interested in
And think about what the fourth "free pass" in the month could be
nb: try to find a baby sitter if necessary for these days so that your wife can do whatever she wants also...
Even if you only organize a subset of this plan you will find out that you will have more than necessary time to "network" with the team, you do not need to go clubbing all night (you allready found your wife, and if you are thinking of cheating on her doing it in front of your colleages would be the worst possible idea...)
In office happy hours are not really a problem if you remember that you can also drink a coke without rhum, just explain if somebody is jocking about it that you are going to drive home, and they both your children and the companies investors would rather see you alive tomorrow
And other "week-end", holliday activities can be fun & interesting (burning man !!
And at the end of the day, what people care the most is "code that actually works", and "answers to a couple of hard questions"
So don't worry if you stay cool you'll do great
In reality there are two issues
the first one is that the large US companies know that at some point they'll be able to get a tax holliday to rapatriate the cash they fleeced from foreign countries and stored in some tax haven.
In theory you have to pay taxes somewhere overly simplifying the issues it means you pay where you are or where your customers are, but if you can hide the money from your customers tax authorities and then wait until your own tax authorities tells you fine, bring the cash we'll make you a discount
The other issue is that in constructing the European Union we agreed to have an open market but did not (out ouf misguided nationalism) give up national taxing rights...
So a small country is happy to tax a large company for all the business they do in Europe at a discounted rate, and they can afford it because they have smaller needs for their infrastructure.
But it is not a long term sustainable system.
In the specific case of Google the tax office is doing what they should have done a very long time ago to Microsoft, Apple, HP,
it is to say: ok the system is broken and you "can" steal the revenu from your french operation to move it to some place where the tax are lower, BUT you have to do it correctly and charge a realistic amount of money for what ever "management services, IP transfert, branding cost, sales operation,
if not you are cheating
You confuse taxes on individuals and taxes on companies, BTW the US top tax rate was very close to this until you elected a movie cowboy, I guess all the rich people where fleeing the US in the 60s 70s and early 80s
The main reason BTW the government is trying to increase personal taxes is just because international (including very french ones) companies actually manage not to pay any taxes...
You forgot Microsoft who are real artists in this sport
I must confess I was hoping to learn something along the lines of "microsoft beats small children and eat their puppies"
But what he really writes is that startups are more fun than large companies
wich is "mostly" true... except when you just have trouble paying the bills because the funding dried up and the business is not quite there...
And what he writes about M$ would be true in most large companies
Well good luck to M. Molyneux anyway
The fun thing about "inteligent creation" is that the argument is "xyw is too complicated to evolve "naturally" it needs something even more complicated to "make it"...
Of course how the "more complicated stuff" was created does not need any explanation...
But a least it gives some arguments for a compationate God, since s/he does not smite them in anger for keeping on telling him, her, it how to do its job...
Although 18 years of programming is barelly adolescence
Now let's assume that you want to learn to write Fubarish code, you'll find out that there are at least five major languages/IDEs/Frameworks to Fubar...
Choose one, preferably one of the "bigger ones" and make sure it's activelly maintained...
And then take a deep breath, and know that IT WILL TAKE TIME
The issue is similar to adult learning new languages vs children learning... adults do not really learn slower than children, but they want to express themselves correctly and speak about "interesting things"...
Kid's are happy to say "see spot run, give ball me !", adults feel frustrated by this and have trouble making the initial steps...
So be patient and for instance try something like meteor or angular and try to make an ugly "hello world" app... (or what ever is relevant to what you'd like to build
then "hello world, AGAIN and I'm the best" app...
then "hello "
etc...
at some point after five time more time than you initially thought it will hit you
Good luck youngster
(and now get off my lawn
Connect a raspberry pi and configure it as a backup server and let it copy all to
Then put aside the money you would have invested in a "better" solution, put it in a safe bank (under your mattress)
and wait until you need to restore something..
Most probably you'll enjoy the money more
He does not really trust them, and if you put him together with people like this http://www.grain.org/ or that http://www.semencespaysannes.o... (in French)
You'll find that they have lots in common...
Of course he (and other Free Software activists) also use things like planes for instance that are full of "non free" stuff, the position is to use
free software when ever it's possible (and not just "convenient").
Moreover your sentence
This is why the free software movement is garbage. It makes no sense outside the world of software.
makes no sense: many useful things are only useful in their specific fields it does not make them garbage...
And transparence, independence from vendor lock-in, freedom
Obviously, of course vi(m) is almost acceptable too
or teco, but only if you need to write assembly code (or lisp)
all other IDEs are of course for sisis....
It's not so much about the reality of "intrusion" but the "legality"...
Most European citizens do not really care if the NSA knows or not what they do, they DO care if some judge in South Texas can close down their operation because it happens to be "in the US" and thus stops them from serving their European customers.
The US separated the CIA from the FBI (or at least tried) so that the "extraordinary" powers of the CIA to help the US Governement "outside" of the US do not give too much police powers "inside" of the US.
But if through "the internet" a massive ammount of people and commercial interests that are "free to look at" "outside" of the us ends up "inside" and therefore liable to police actions "inside" then there is no balance of power left...
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
