Agreed. For more than one reason, and from personal experience. I've had both, a crew of code monkeys and a small but incredibly efficient team of well paid but also very good programmers. To say that the latter were vastly outperforming the former (for less money in total, too) is an understatement.

Two people doing each 50% of work will not compensate for one person who could do 100%. Simply due to a lack of information. One person has, by design, all the information that person has. This is not true for two people who should do this one person's work instead. They have to synchronize and exchange information, and that invariably fails at some level as we all know, where you either lose efficiency by having to design an interface between these people or, lacking this, lose even more efficiency when their interface just doesn't work out.

In the end, you're better off with FEWER, but BETTER people than you could ever be with a truckload of code monkeys. Yes, even if they cost a multiple of the monkeys. A billion code monkeys with keyboards will never write the better OS.

And that's what's wrong with the USA today. Working simply doesn't pay anymore. Not working and having others work for you does.

In earlier days, we called them spongers and leeches, but in today's world where everyone needs a title, it's CEO.

...to the real cyberpunk world. Megacorporations don't rule the world, they let that dirty work be handled by governments. Instead, the have found a way to corrupt our politics in such a way that we are actually subsidising megacorporations and small companies and taxpayers are footing the bill.

I just hope that the time when history looks upon this period and asks whether we were all insane isn't too far off.

BBC did a viddy on this in 1992.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AUvrPvV-KQo

Just paranoid, bullshit? Sponsored by the CIA and British intelligence, NATO operatives - under the false-front, operating as a "Marxist Terror Gang" kidnapped and murdered the Prime Minister of Italy in 1978.

This was just a single instance of organized para-national political violence including strings of European bombings and assassinations, beginning in the 1940's and continuing at least into the 1990's.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Then, after the cold war, there are no longer "Marxist Terror Gangs". They all just gave up and went home, I guess. Now, there are "Muslim Terror Gangs". Amazing.

PS. Don't look too closely at the Balkans.

You know what? I've got my convictions for sure, but to hell with the original disagreement. I've been up all night watching over my youngest daughter; she spiked a 103F fever about 12 hours ago out of nowhere, and I rushed her to the ER with my wife as soon as she called me at the office. Your last comment hits home with me in terms of examining where I can do better on some things, and I apologize for my original profanity. Email sometime if you like.

The extrajudicial killing of an American citizen is absolutely an impeachable offense. I don't care if you don't like that, it doesn't change reality. Reference previous notes regarding our political climate for why nothing is likely to be done about it in the near future. Republicans are just as much to blame for this as any Democrat.

That's hilarious. First off, Big Oil is a big problem. The practice (and it is very real) of essentially handing petroleum interests billions of USD worth of tax breaks/incentives/whatever-people-want-to-call-it-these-days is phenomenally poor policy. Second, global warming is a fact. I've never said it isn't, merely asked people running around screaming about whatever the flavor of the week pulp media talking heads are spouting off about to slow down and examine all available sources of information before adopting alarmist positions concerning outcomes and what's needed over say the next decade. That's a pretty far cry from being a global warming denier. I'd also be delighted if people would spend a little more time talking about kids starving under bridges instead of cozying up to debates on things they somehow find easier to talk about. I suppose you'd have to have reading comprehension skills to understand this, though. By the way, what's your carbon footprint, big guy?

Bitcoin, along with other novel developments in cryptocurrencies, is an interesting thing to think about and play with. I certainly do. I also care about other currencies, namely several examples that are by definition fiat. Again, you're probably just skimming some text and thinking "oh boy, I bet I can use this against him!" It didn't work out for you.

Actually, my favorite language as a kid was C. Naturally, I played around with various BASIC dialects as well, but even with those there were things you simply couldn't do without what amounted to ASM routines expressed in hex, so I had to deal with that as well. It's amazing what kids can do when their parents don't artificially limit them. Speaking of kids...

I moved out of my dad's house at 17. We couldn't get along back then, partially due to some older family history and partially due to problems between my stepmother and I at the time. Long story short, I've been working since then, and took my first professional programming position in Atlanta doing telecommunications coding for the platforms that drove VRU/IVR systems for BofA, SunTrust, etc when I was 18. It paid about 70K at the time. You're correct that I'm 32 now, and I'm happily married with a couple of beautiful kids. My total personal income is six figures, which permits my wife to stay at home with our children without us having to worry about money, which is nice. Incidentally, my military service was in the Navy, where I decided to walk away from a nice paying IT career and cut my income by about 60% in my mid twenties to serve my nation. What would you know about that?

For that matter, and I guess this goes back to the earlier points regarding the fossil fuels bit, I've spent quite a bit of time trying to help in local communities with things like volunteering at homeless shelters and other work. We have millions of people living in poverty in this nation, but folks like you are absolutely okay with yammering on about things that may or may not be an immediate issue for a hundred years. Have you ever held an infant that hadn't eaten for three days because his mom was homeless? I have, and it's not pretty. I guess it's too much to ask that people put some serious effort into looking at the problems we have right now in our society. It requires work and genuinely giving a shit about others instead of just saying you do, and many people don't generally seem terribly interested in either.

I know your type. You like to try to put people into nice little cliche boxes when they stand up to your idiocy. You're having serious trouble understanding how someone can possibly fail to view politics as the usual "favorite sports team" deal, and you're having an awfully hard time dealing with being called out on your games and cowardice. In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter if you carry on being an idiot? I suppose it doesn't. The bigger problem hits when it's a hundred million people walking around in virtually complete apathy, happy with their little notions about how simple things are and becoming increasingly willing to ignore massive civil liberties abuses because it isn't affecting them at the moment. You have a choice in that. Maybe you'll change.

If you're still interested in continuing this discussion, let's take it off list, since it's already horribly offtopic. You can reach me at philip.paradis@gmail.com.

HTTPS means that you have a securely encrypted connection with the remote server. Not that the people who own the remote server are going to keep your privacy sacred.

Or explained even easier. It's profitable.

It's much more likely to be a coup from within, reason being "your kind" are also humans. The bit that "your kind" haven't worked out yet is that the ability to discern the folly of humans in large groups does not imply the ability to avoid it.

"My kind" get the hyper-organism thing, it's not created by "my kind", it spontaneously forms whenever a human society grows past a handful of related individuals. It's only when "your kind" fully realize "your kind" are not immune that "your kind" will start to understand why society 'doesn't work'.

Many people on slashdot holding those kind of opinions self-label as libertarian, but you're correct in that it is not part of the libertarian "platform". However like "flower power" in the 60's, the libertarian movement tends to attract people under 25 who are well-meaning but very naive about the human condition. They tend to believe all people are basically decent people and will naturally "get along withe each other" if only government would stop doing "stuff". This is simply false, without larger societies humans will revert to their natural tribalism, the alpha male in each extend family will rise (sink?) to the status of warlord. What both groups are really asking for is a self governing society, what they fail to see is that we already have one. I'm not sure what it says about the US but both movements arose and are strongest in the US.

During the late 60's, early 70's the hippies leaving the city to join communes in the country was one of the largest, if not the largest, internal US mass migrations of all time. Most of the communes fell apart quickly, people simply walked/ran away when the alpha members of the group turned it into a personality cult and started using and abusing everyone else for pleasure and profit. Very few lasted more than 2yrs, about the time it takes to truly realize that living with other people, (even like minded people), entails copious amounts of compromise + confrontation (politics).

Simply put evolution has designed our minds to live in tribal societies numbering between 100-200, all other tribes (even tribes of chimps) were universally seen as sub-human, xenophobia is still alive and kicking today because in geological terms evolution is still just playing with the idea of civilization for primates.

I don't know about anyone else but my utopia is simple, it's a tropical island with plenty of fresh water, fruit, and fish, the rest of you can get the fuck off my Island.

It's because they can sense electromagnetic fields, which all electronics give off. Of course, the solution for dealing with these new ants is simple, but counterintuitive -- spray everything with this 'alarm' pheremone. If ants navigate by scent trail, and that's how they rebuild their nests, and it's too challenging to remove the scent trails... then you are left with only one option:

Blind the little bastards by coating everything in it. It's my understanding that, without those trails, they'll be helpless to organize to find food, each other, or even the way home. Everything depends on those trails... so if you overload their sense organs and blind them, they'll perish. After they're dead, the pheremones sprayed will slowly dissipate, but importantly... the trails they've laid down will dissipate faster, so the area is then chemically neutral again.

It is, quite literally, chemical warfare. (-_-)

Seems like it will continue - despite any ruling. Look at the overall indicators and trend, not just one specific ruling or data point.

Those cool, adventurous science-fiction dystopias in Bladerunner and the like. Well, they aren't so cool for most people to live in. They certainly aren't cool for the people who witness the transitions - from the 70s to post 2001...

It's a long way from the top, now. And we didn't tie a rope to climbe back.

Over 100 posts and not a single Super Mario reference...

Hiring price fighters to aid you in arguments with your !"$%# neighbor is more expensive, and if the neighbor hires their own fraught with high risks for YOU.

I think I prefer lawyers, after thinking about this for a few seconds.