This is a clasic issue of business ethics and Friedman vs Freeman is typically cited. In "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" Friedman argues that companies should act in their own self interest and the interest of their share holders. Social issue are only a concern if they are in the self interest of the company. Freeman presents an almost diametrically opposing view in his article "A Stakeholder Theory of the Modern Corporation". Freeman's view is that companies have responsibility to benefit all stakeholders which includes employees, shareholders, vendors, and society in general.

You cannot manage your way to good code. Good developers write good code and bad developers write bad code. At best these processes help you mitigate some of the risk and ensure your requirements are being met. If management spent as much time working on the hiring processes as they do on managing the development process they’d see a much higher return on their investments.

All the low hanging fruit is gone. A hundred years ago you could be a scientist and know chemistry, physics, and biology and still make new discoveries. We have so many scientists and so much progress that in order to actually discover or invent something new you have to narrow your focus. Scientists stand on the shoulders of giants, but it's a very long climb to the top. You can spend many years just learning everything the people who have come before you have done in a field before you can even think about adding to it.

This is basically security through obfuscation and we all know how well that works in the long run.

This is a repost of mine from a previous conversation on this subject:
My wife got a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She did a postdoc and NIH and then started to look for job. She wanted to be a professor at a University. After talking to some of the recruiters at Universities we found out they were getting hundreds of resumes for each position. In addition, the research field is brutal. You constantly struggle for grant money and tenure is pretty much a thing of the past. Universities want you to come in with grants, they take half the money, then they boot you out if you lose your grants. It's a very stressful environment to be in. Another thing I ran into while doing research was that the number of teaching positions at Universities has gone up about 50% since 1960, however the number of Ph.D.s has gone up 500%. Of course there are commercial research positions as well, but at least in biotech there is a lot of turn over as companies come and go. She has friends that get laid off every couple years and spend six months to a year looking for a new job. There were also a lot of sales jobs where you go around and sell equipment to companies, which she didn't want to do. Do you really want to spend all that time in school to be a sales person? My wife eventually ended up with desk job with Genebank at NIH and no longer does research. Note that she was 31 by the time she got her first real job. That's a lot of time to put into education for not much reward. She is especially annoyed that she will never make as much money as I do in IT even though she has a doctorate degree and I have a master's in CS. We have encouraged our son not to go into science.

The 55 mpg speed limit was enacted by congress in 70s during the gas shortage to increase fuel economy. An unintended consequence was that traffic fatalities dropped and that was one of the reasons people were against raising it later. It went from a gas saving issue to a safety issue.

I believe he's referring to Transclusion where you can include content from other sources as part of your document. He's tends to ramble a bit, but it makes more sense if you understand where he's coming from. I read and his book and did some research on him when I was working on my master's thesis for my CS degree. He spent a lot of time studing the nature of literature and how information builds upon a foundation of information from other sources and how these information sources relate to one another. He has some interesting ideas, but many of them are hard to implement. One of the reasons the Web took off as opposed to other sharing technoliges at the time is because it is so simple.

That's amazing. He was able to turn the job market around the month he took office before he enacted any policies. The reality is that the economy collapsed and a rebound was going to happen no matter who took office. Of course had it been a Republican they would have taken credit as well. The president has a limited ability affect the economy and it takes years after policies are enacted before you see the effects. One of the big causes of the crash was the real-estate market. This was caused by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which allowed banks to shift all the mortgage risk to organizations backed by the government. Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of the Roosevelt’s New Deal. It took almost 70 years for program to implode. The funny thing is that it was created to loosen credit and make houses more affordable. It certainly loosened credit to point of ridiculousness and was also one of the factors in the constant increase in home prices over the past 70 years which actually made houses more expensive.

Are there really enterprise apps that are 15 years old? Java wasn't even a server side technology back then, the only thing you do was write applets. The applets I wrote using JDK 1.0 stopped working several versions of Java ago.

A corporation is made up of people. The livelyhood of those people depends on producing a service that other people pay for. Even in an autonomous collective you have to weight the rights of the producers against the rights of the consumers.

I managed to squeeze a Monty Python reference into a serious post.

NIST puts out some good standards. The problem is that they don't follow their own standards. There is a disconnect between the security researchers and the IT staff. Despite this, it still has better handle on technology than any other govenment agency I've worked at.

Does anyone else find it a little too convenient that Apple decided to the drop support for their JVM recently as well? Of course they may have already known this was direction things were headed and just preempted it. I’m wondering if it’s not just a war brewing in the Java world, but against open source as well. Open source projects have become competitive with commercial offerings cutting into the profits of big companies and they are taking steps to eliminate them. So far big companies have been pretty effective destroying the communities around projects which call into question the viability and therefore the adoption rate of open source software.

A good scanner would solve all your problems. Digitize everything and recycle the paper. All that paper is useless if no one has access to it. How often do people actually go down into the salt mine to retrieve a book?

They will use use the DNA to make a pure breed demon that will eventually turn on the scientists that created it and ravage the countryside.

My wife got a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She did a postdoc and NIH and then started to look for job. She wanted to be a professor at a University. After talking to some of the recruiters at Universities we found out they were getting hundreds of resumes for each position. In addition as the parent post points outs research is brutal. You constantly struggle for grant money and tenure is pretty much a thing of the past. Universities want you to come in with grants, they take half the money, then they boot you out if you lose your grants. It's a very stressful environment to be in. Another thing I ran into while doing research was that the number of teaching positions at Universities has gone up about 50% since 1960, however the number of Ph.D.s has gone up 10,000%. Of course there are commercial research positions as well, but at least in biotech there is a lot of turn over as companies come and go. She has friends that get laid off every couple years and spend six months to a year looking for a new job. There were also a lot of sales jobs where you go around and sell equipment to companies, which she didn't want to do. My wife eventually ended up with desk job with Genebank at NIH and no longer does research. Note that she was 31 by the time she got her first real job. That's a lot of time to put into education for not much reward. She is especially annoyed that she will never make as much money as I do in IT even though she has a doctorate degree and I have a master's in CS. We have encouraged our son not to into science.