I may have more to say on this:

I kinda miss the days when, if my terminal went down, I simply replaced it with another. No one tried to hack my WYSE 50. Yes, communications between stations could get complex, but the administration point was at the server. I'm convinced that the advent of the desktop windows system created a lot of useless entertainment-oriented requirements into our software design. Although I've worked on a very large number of Operating Systems in the last 48 years, my favorite remains the ATT UNIX System V R3.2 simply because it worked predictably.

I have no proof that 75% of the productivity resides in 25% of the applications, but it holds true in Economics and Business, so I'm willing to accept the assumption until further evidence proves otherwise. "Cloud Computing" is really nothing more than server-based computing architecture on an international scale. IF(?) the architecture remains stable, then there should be some terrific advantages to computing in the cloud with dumber desktop systems. One of the main advantages could be that bugs and exploits are fixed and installed almost immediately, without legions of techs crawling under millions of desks and temporarily occupying millions of other peoples' chairs trying to get the system upgraded so business can resume.

First, there is the incremental cost of the software AND upgrading hardware to be compatible.

Then there is the cost of being down; idled employees, non-income-producing tech work, training, and administration costs.

Then there is the cost of not being able toservice your customers; missed orders, bad feelings, image problems, botched sales, etc.

Then there is the inconvenience and complexity associated with the upheaval and new ways of doing things. The potential interactions accellerate according to I= E(E-1)/2, so, 3 elements have 3 potential transactional interactions, 5 elements have 10, 10 have 45 and so on. Mistakes and annoyances are inevitable.

The complexity makes the process a lot more than trivial. Just in the last three months, I've seen three large companies (200+ employees) almost come to a standstill over upgrade problems.

...or decriminalize them, giving amnesty to all whose only offense was using, having, selling drugs.This should have the added effect of reducing the crime rates, and greatly reduce the costs of law enforcement wasted on the failed "War on Drugs".

Lower the age of emancipation to 13. We already prosecute 13-year-olds as adults for heinous crimes, but we don't give them the opportunity to acquire other adult skills such as working for themselves and maintaining a credit rating. If we insist on keeping publicly funded education, then we can have "recovery" educational opportunities for those emancipated people who fail on their first tries. (And, we would have more workers to pay for the social programs foisted on us by the socialists in the past.) There is no justice in imprisoning children in daytime prisons, or discriminating on the basis of age.

Revoke all federal programs having to do with welfare, education, public health. These should be considered un-Constitutional anyway. Face it, the public education system is a massive failure and the parents aren't even allowed to sue the school districts for fraud.

Abolish all laws penalizing adults for consentual acts, such as gambling and sex.

Repeal the 16th Amendment to the Constitution.Taxes are theft. You cannot steal from another person to give the proceeds to someone less fortunate, nor can you authorize someone else to commit the theft in your stead. Yet that is exactly what income taxes do.

Limit Federal spending to only those projects directly necessary to ensure National Defense, or the fair administration of Justice under the Constitution. Limit Federal spending to 10% of GDP except in case of war.

Abolish the Federal Reserve System, Central Banking, and legal tender laws. Create ONLY 100% asset-based currency or monetary instruments.

Outlaw US interference in the internal affairs of other countries, except where there is a clear threat to our national security. Respect the sovereign rights of all other countries. Create only alliances and treaties that all parties are capable of adhering to.

Re-affirm the Constituion as the highest authority for US law, and reject any entaglements that diminish our sovereignty. Interpret the Constitution strictly as it was written.

Streamline the immigration process. Don't elevate any immigrant to citizen status unless they know the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Welcome guest workers up to the limit that they can fill necessary jobs.

  Aren't you glad you asked?(I have more ideas if you want to ask again.)

It takes a certain amount of inputs to produce outputs. One of the inputs is capital (as in capital investment). Capital used to multiply the trade value of a resource (i.e., turning lumber into a table) is considered "productive", while capital used for other purposes is "consumptive". Theoretically, the more "productive" use of capital, the more robust the economy.

Sometimes it helps to remember that "Economics" and "Ecology" derived from the same root. The "Ecological balance of Economy" means that with right balance of inputs the individual economic crops grow, as analagous to having enough rain, soil and nutrients to grow the trees, which are turned into tables.... Debt is runoff; it falls on ground where nothing has been planted, and drains to other places where it may or may not be productive. Sovereign debt (public debt) diminishes the amount of inputs that can be use for economic crops, sometimes draining away to some other farmer's land.

You can only do two things with money: You can invest it or you can spend it. If you spend it, you provide jobs for the people who produce the things that you want. If you invest it, you are providing the reources to produce jobs and products that keep the economy moving. However, some investments are better than others, and if our debt gets invested in some other country, it diminishes what we can produce here. Since paying this debt depends on our economy being productive enough to provide for us and also provide a surplus, then very high sovereign debt, with interest driving the debt higher, may mean that the debt cannot be paid. You can ask the citizens of Iceland, Ireland and Cyprus if this has an effect on your daily life. Next time you will be able to ask the citizens of Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and France.

Rogoff and Cameron's book may have lost some of the predictive value due to this Excel error, but the logic of the cause and effect still has some value.

Michael Lewis wrote two interesting books that clearly describe the ruinous power of high debt, whether private or public: "The Big Short" http://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827 and, "Boomerang" http://www.amazon.com/Boomerang-Travels-New-Third-World/dp/0393343448/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366262251&sr=1-1&keywords=Boomerang . This is storytelling in the "New Journalism" style that is entertaining and informative at the same time. In "Boomerang" Lewis describes a meeting with Rogoff where he lays out the level of sovereign debt and asks about the consequences, and Rogoff replies, "I can't believe it is really this bad." See what happens when you don't leave your ivory tower?

Bitcoin is not "legal tender" nor is it a government-backed currency. It is a contract for trade based on a nearly secure system. If you can buy discount coupons or tokens and trade them for goods and services, why not Bitcoins? Not only is this virtual currency helpful, but the purchase price changes to reflect the relative risk and combined value of the purchasing currency. Apparently the value of a non-regulated currency has appreciated about $40 per unit over the last month.

After cleaning off malware that has damaged some clients' systems and destroyed data, I am fully in favor of finding any system intruder and cutting off their hands. Government sanctioned intruders don't warrant an exception. If you don't have sword, a Sidewinder missle will see the job done.

I suppose Goldenberg is only reporting research compiled by Greenpeace, and I'm sure that Greenpeace certainly is an organization populated with unbiased researchers, right?

It's regrettable that this seems to have happened. It is not surprising. In fact, I'm SURE that influence is exerted on all side of the question by people and organizations who have political and economic interests in the outcomes of these debates. And I'm also sure that Goldenberg has her own bone to pick and didn't neutrally research the amount of influence exerted by all parties.

Yup, and Logic parsers, and decision tree diagrams, and appended tutorial tools for those who want or need them.

I was impressed with the idea that I could link to an authoritative source and it wold be integrated into the post. Good Math tools and statistics easily at hand might make it better. I still think there is a gap in the ability to FIND relevant info on subjects.

That's a philosophical question. I personally think any serious discusion where opinion is expressed ought to have some Proof, Information or Example for each serious statement of Opinion. Arguments should be cogent and valid. However, not every discussion is serious enough to warrant the effort involved. I think Discourse might be better if the option to carry out serious conversation without distraction or undue influence were included in the architecture.

(Of course, I think most programmers could improve their programs considerably if they programmed in LISP, so I may not be the best person to model an opinion.)

Another thing about forums like /. that tick me off: I have seen some references to articles and links that have interested me, and even though I've bookmarked lots of them, the bookmarks have sometimes disappeared due to computer crashes, software changes or updates or other reasons, and then I can't find the original article again. Marking it "Interested" on the forum host itself would be great, an adequate search engine behind the forum is better, and both would be terrific! I can go to Microsofts tech forums and find out which topics I researched 10 years ago. (Comes in handy when an old fart like me starts thinking, "Didn't I have to solve a similar problem back in...")

Sorry for the typos...I was in a hurry to see if I could get the first post. This would be unnecessary if /. was using Discourse as an engine.

I just found the link to Discourse on Coding Horror by accident about 20 minutes ago. Then I see it mentioned on /.

Well, Discourse should get rid of some of my favorite annoyances about forums like /.

For instance, today there were four good articles that I'd like to comment on, but by the time I get my arguments together, the people who could contribute the most to a meaning ful discussion will have moved on and been drowned out in a flood of idiocy. continuing a thread or an interest ove longer periods of time would acutally contibute to our mutual benefit.

A couple of things are missing:

Technical articles and opinions should have a level of proof and logic behind them. Incomplete arguments should be noted, and invalid arguments should be immediately identifiable. Furthermore, authors should be forced to stand on the merits of their arguments rather than some alleged claim to authority such as, "I've been a teacher at a major University for 15 years..." And they should be forced to create psudonyms that don't imply and opinion. (For instance, no one named "Alexander Hamilton" should be allowed on the forum, and certainly not to comment on the Federal Budget.)

Any other ideas?

To teach good programming, SIMPLIFY!

80% of the programmers I've associated with in the last 10 years rely on "cut and paste" operations. They look up how to do a task (on the internet) cut the code, modify the code for their environment, and think they're done. The most common languages where I see this is .Net and PHP, but there are lots of other examples.

Weinberg made a statement in one of his books that once a programming problem has been solved, it need never be solved again. (Just translated from one language implementation to another?) The idea of re-usable code and standard objects and patterns has led to code full of crap that nobody understands, yet they depend on it on a daily basis. (Some of the algorithms that Excel used for years were incorrect. For years competent programmers new that the floating point algorithms on 286, 386 and 486 math processors were not right, yet the everyday programmer would be ignorant of that fact.) The "reusable code", the "standard objects", the "libraries", the API's and almost everything else has made developers dependent on a multitude of code segments for which they have no understanding. Furthermore, the environment is so complex, that just finding the right code segment is enough to drive us crazy.

So, if you want to teach people to develop systems, teach them how to find and use the tools, but if you want to teach them to be competent programmers, go back to basics; work from the machine level up to higher-level tools.

A program is a set of instructions that work on data. Once you identify the data, it can be processed using only three methods; sequence, alternation and repetition. Teaching beginners how to transform data using these structures using logic gates and/or assembly language will build programming skills. Using decision tables, Warnier-Orr diagrams, or pseudocode to abstract the instructions from the language teaches them how to solve the problems, assembly language teaches them to implement the solution. After they can solve those problems, then they can build "objects" by writing code that contains it's own data.

After assembly I would have them advance to C or Pascal, and after they learn imperative programming languages they should go to something like LISP and Haskell.

Incidentally, sequence, alternation and repetition have thier own counterpart in Mathematical Logic, so, theoretically, it should be possible to prove the code correct (logically) and build correct code from provably correct components. And then, theoretically, it should be possible to generate provably correct programs from Hier level descriptions of the type of tasks that have to be performed on the data.

You get to decide at which point a "beginner" is no longer a beginner.

What the heck! It sn't like spying requires you to be open and honest at all times. Mybe he is over-qualified for the position.