Jack Welch wasn't responsible for the increased leveraging, and horrific choices made after September 2001. Jeff Immelt was. Under Welch, GE Capital was not highly leveraged into subprime mortgages; under Immelt, they took a massive hit on a $20 billion British subprime portfolio, along with junk subprime in Eastern Europe.
"For GE Capital, the business world from 2002 to 2006 was a nearly perfect environment. Executives Gary Wendt and Denis Nayden had aggressively globalized the business" ...
"During that period GE Capital levered up, growing its ratio of debt to equity from 6.6 to 8.1. Profits quadrupled to almost $11 billion, more than the profits of Procter & Gamble or Goldman Sachs."
"For example, the company had left the home mortgage business in 2000 but reentered it in 2004 when it was flying high, buying a subprime lender called WMC Mortgage from a private equity firm (the price was never announced). Home prices peaked in June 2006, yet it wasn't until a year later, with the subprime crisis on the front page of every newspaper, that GE Capital finally decided to bail out. WMC lost almost $1 billion in 2007 before GE dumped it in December."
Thanks for enlightening me. Welch's tenure ended in 2001, by which time 40% of GE's revenues were from GE Capital, who were actively engaged in derivatives markets and had large exposures that would have gone bad even if they hadn't levered up from 2002 to 2006.
There are many other criticisms of Welch's tenure that come to the conclusion that GE did well DESPITE Jack Welch, not because of him.
Here is a tasty link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Criticism
At any rate, I personally think that CEOs are figureheads of companies and the only things about a CEO that makes any difference is
a) how good a head of hair they have
b) how tall they are
c) which ivy league school they attended and if they shared a class with anyone now at Goldman Sachs
At least he was a Chemist, and not one of those idiot Physicists ;)
Well don't get me wrong, there's no reason to cover up what Welch was responsible for. He was obviously no saint (few are). And I don't doubt for a second that he played a role in the broad direction GE Capital took.
His reputation deserves to be hit for the things he actually did wrong. Immelt can take responsibility for his failures.
"In a paper published in 2008 and focused on the then latest version (v5.1a) and its plausible deniability, a team of security researchers led by Bruce Schneier states that Windows Vista, Microsoft Word, Google Desktop, and others store information on unencrypted disks, which might compromise TrueCrypt's plausible deniability. The study suggested the addition of a hidden operating system functionality; this feature was added in TrueCrypt 6.0. When a hidden operating system is running, TrueCrypt also makes local unencrypted filesystems and non-hidden TrueCrypt volumes read-only to prevent data leaks. The security of TrueCrypt's implementation of this feature was not evaluated because the first version of TrueCrypt with this option had only recently been released."
It clearly states that it did not evaluate the security plausible deniability of the 'hidden OS' feature.
This is basically saying that if you mount a hidden partition, you may leak information via things like browser cache that ends up getting saved to unencrypted areas. On the other hand, this says nothing about the case where you have the full drive encrypted and boot a different OS if you mount the hidden partition via the bootloader.
Actually, this article reads like a play book for the next group who wants to create 'MegaUpload2'.
1) Secure your servers
2) Encrypt your email
3) Keep a low profile
4) Hide your identity
5) etc
1. Register (with email) for practices - THAT INFORMATION WAS NOT PROVIDED BEFOREHAND
2. Python only - THAT INFORMATION WAS NOT PROVIDED BEFOREHAND
3. Skype required - THAT INFORMATION WAS NOT PROVIDED BEFOREHAND
-1
fail and don't send me any spam on my email addy.
About page: "Add Skype user quixeychallenge as a contact. A working microphone and speakers/headphones are required. [..] We'll Skype call you when it's your turn."
And since the registration form is required before you do anything, and it is one form needing an email address, I think that counts as 'telling you about the need for an email address before you get involved' too.
I live here. Have for 5 years, and my latest startup will keep me here for a good number more... success permitting!
Singapore has excellent food, weather and is incredibly safe & clean. You can eat $4 noodles or $400 dollar steak. Booze is too expensive. Public transport is cheap, comfortable and mostly efficient (until a couple of recent train breakdowns).
It's also a great base for traveling Asia.
From a startup perspective, a huge amount of emphasis (read: money) is currently being applied to regional entrepreneurs to base themselves in Singapore's low-tax, straightforward business environment.
Engineers have been slightly underpaid historically, but things are beginning to improve. Coupled with the low tax rate though... the main problem is expensive rental accommodation.
The government certainly is guilty of heavy-handed-ness in a variety of situations but in general it appears to be from a sense of egocentric paternalism ('we know best what is good for you') rather than cynical exploitation.
They currently have some issues in terms of redistributing the wealth fairly to locals. The perception is that competition for jobs amongst the lower middle class is hampered by economic migration from poorer countries in the region.
Happy to talk more... but I've gone on enough already.
Thanks for replying. I lived in Singapore for a year, and my experience of the place was very different from yours is, so I am interested in your perspective.
From your reply, I understand that you are running a startup in Singapore? I am particularly interested in why you find Singapore good in that regard. Apart from the low taxes, my experience of Singapore would indicate to me that it is a very difficult place for a technology startup for the following reasons (if you could refute these I would be most interested).
1. The large and ongoing diaspora of educated, intelligent engineers who find the constant censorship and nonsensical propaganda distasteful and leave for free-er pastures. Making it difficult to hire and keep technical people locally.
2. The abysmal state of internet services. I found internet to be slow, unavailable, expensive, monitored and censored.
3. Despite the low taxes, the cost of living is very high. The Lee family (through Temasek and the Government) control the supply and demand for housing and use that leverage to apply a 'rental tax' on guest workers which is a way of distributing wealth from the middle class 'migrant' workers to the local population (who receive preferential terms for loans and purchase price of Government housing. There is typically a 300 bps spread between the loan and the rental yield). Food and transport is also expensive.
4. Related to 1 & 2, the general antithetic feeling towards free speech.
5. The city is boring as hell. It has some good museums, and a couple of interesting nightspots, but generally not much goes on. Anyone doing anything interesting risks fining, caning, jailing or all three. For technical people this is a big downside.
Apart from those, there are some things I do agree with you on.
1. The city is very safe (except for Dengue fever), and very clean, something that appeals to technical people.
2. The weather is excellent if you like 28 deg Celsius @ 85% humidity 300 days of the year. (I don't, but SGP does have A/C almost everywhere.)
3. It IS a great base for travelling in SE Asia. For North Asia, I think HK is better.
And some, not so much.
1. The public transport is not particularly reliable, except in Govt. statistics. The buses are often late, are very slow and badly organised. The trains are fine as long as you don't have to change lines, then they seem to be deliberately mis-timed. I was in Singapore when the train breakdowns occurred. On the green line they did not have enough power to run the line, so they started turning the A/C off.
2. The food ranges from mediocre (and expensive) to food poisoning. How you find the food will depend on which country you arrived from. For me, it was uninspiring.
Every place has good points and bad. On balance, I personally felt that the bad outweighed the good, but there were other contributing factors to that decision. I am still curious as to why you think it is a good city for a startup.
Regards,
o2sd
- successful economic development (those born in rich countries seem to take richness for granted. It is very valuable to those being born the country for the country to be rich. Singapore is now rich. It was poor just 40 years ago)
- safe city (probably the safest large city in the world)
- nice, warm weather
- great food
- easiest country to set up a business in the world
- good educational system
- very good health results
- budget surplus (they are not creating huge debt for the next few generations to deal with)
- very good public housing
- very good mass transit (people want it better, but it still is better than most other large, rich cities)
- good parks
- emerging art scene (it doesn't beat most other rich, world class cities, but is good and growing)
- international crossroads, very multi-cultural city which is nice in many ways but also a good position to be in as the world moves in a similar the direction)
- extremely well run government, you (or citizens...) may not like everything they are trying to do, but they are very effective at what they aim to do (something many governments are not able to do). They are willing to do very interesting things. Singapore will pay for the education of excellent students from Malaysia (as one small example - Singapore does many innovative things governmentally)
- very walkable city (don't need a car - can walk and use mass transit)
...
I have lived there. I now live across strait in Malaysia. Here is my blog on Singapore
http://singapore.curiouscatnetwork.com/
I realize Singapore also have things they could do better. But this was a list of things Singapore does well.
> Singapore is now rich. It was poor just 40 years ago
Many countries, particularly in that general region, have achieved that without being police states, though. Even where they had oppressive governments (as with Taiwan and South Korea back in the day), that has generally eased.
Despite the fact that Singapore doesn't have North American levels of political diversity and free speech protection, I don't think it's fair to imply it is a 'police state'. It's a rich city with a powerful political establishment that uses some levers of power that are taboo in North America. But there's an elected parliament, a non-corrupt bureaucracy, and a respected legal system derived from English law. (Though, there are no jury trials and the government always wins its libel cases.)
In the economic dimension, at least, the case can be made Singapore has gone farther and faster than its other 'asian tiger' peers.
And, I'm not sure that Taiwan or South Korea would come out better in a point-by-point comparison of either economic or political/social freedoms. They're all different than US standards regarding dissent, by my understanding. (I've read the least about Taiwan's internal politics.)
I'm comparing more to Europe than to the US, but in particular, Singapore is not meaningfully democratic. The one party is enormously dominant, and there's considerable evidence that other parties are pressured not to field candidates. "The government always wins its libel cases" - sort of demonstrates that (a) the government is at least unusual (normal democratic governments do not bring libel cases, or the Daily Mail would be in a lot of trouble), and (b) the judiciary is compromised.
> And, I'm not sure that Taiwan or South Korea would come out better in a point-by-point comparison of either economic or political/social freedoms
Both are now relatively democratic, though it's a recent thing.
Singapore is obviously not the usual sort of competitive democracy with vibrant (and even celebrated) dissent like the major Western democracies.
But it's also far from a 'police state', the very loaded term you introduced. It's interesting precisely because it seems to illustrate that there's not a stark binary choice between 'democracy' and 'despotism', but rather a more multidimensional choice space, and on many scales their choices are doing very well.
It's also the case that even in impeccable liberal democracies, cities/regions/jurisdictions larger than Singapore's 4-million population can remain overwhelmingly loyal to a single party for decades, for its local officials and representatives to national legislature.
For example, Chicago has had Democratic Party mayors for almost twice as long as Singapore has existed as a country. Some unfair play by the incumbent machine is an understood factor, but it's also the case that the major alternative statewide, the Republican Party, isn't very attractive to city residents. What competition does occur happens under one party label.
Against its region, then, the noncompetitiveness of Singapore internal politics may be just as much or more an outgrowth of that same sort of local identity/satisfaction against distinct alternatives, as it is from the unfair play.
> easiest country to set up a business in the world
Could you elaborate what your base of comparison is to make such statement? How many countries have you set businesses up in?
Speaking just of Asia, I set up businesses in Singapore and Hong Kong. The latter was easier to setup and proved easier to run, with less running costs over the course of 3 years so far.
I also found Hong Kong to be way more founder-friendly when it comes to getting angel money or VC.
Regarding the police state: 1st time I spent a day in Singapore, in 2005, on a 14h stopover from a long haul flight to Australia, I wanted to take a nap on a lawn in a public park. Two police offers told me I can't and they'll have to fine me but they'd make an exception since I'm a tourist.
I was wearing a tailor-made suit btw., not some daggy traveler attire.
That was when I knew Singapore was not for me.
Don't get me wrong, I have friends living there and they like it a lot. They are a family of four and they do fit in the 'ideal standard' box of people the government there wants to have as citizens.
But be careful if you don't.
Singapore has laws that make homosexuals face legal threats. And you can be fined if someone spots you walking around in your house naked (in your own 4 walls, mind you!).
Granted most any subjective ranking has plenty of room for argument. There isn't likely truly any clearly #1 for "setting up a business" as so much depends on the situation. But Singapore consistently is ranked very highly on this measure.
> those born in rich countries seem to take richness for granted. It is very valuable to those being born the country for the country to be rich. Singapore is now rich. It was poor just 40 years ago
Most of the so called rich countries were little more than bombed-to-stone-age hellholes 50-60 years ago. Before WW2, Singapore was fairly wealtfy and important harbour state for East and West.
It's super-impressive what Singapore has built up, but I would be careful to say most people in rich countries take it any more granted than Singaporeans. E.g. Germans are still working hard to unify the country after WW2 and the Iron Curtain.
I didn't say those in other rich countries take it more for granted that the currently rich Singaporeans. Kids today in Singapore have an entitled attitude similar to (probably not quite as extreme, but still...) that of kids in the USA. The current (rich) kid attitude in Singapore is not like the attitude of kids in poor countries today or Singapore in 1970.
Poverty in much of the world today means: people starving, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no clean water... Often those in rich countries (which I would imagine lots of those reading Hacker News are) don't appreciate the benefits of those things. We are not talking about poverty of not being able to get cable TV or a fancy coffee.
Malaysia and Singapore were 1 country for a short while after independence. This is also why the data can't start much earlier, Singapore wasn't its own country until 1965 (and wasn't "independent" - as part of independent Malaysia) until 1963.
People have a right to dislike some of Singapore's policies, I think. But denying that they have done a fantastic job economically I think is just contrary to the facts. They have one advantage - a good location for a port. They have very little else - no natural resources, no store of wealth to build up after WWII... Likely at least dozens of countries were in better shape to grow economically in 1970, than was Singapore. Singapore surpassed probably all of them. Even if Singapore didn't, they did about as well as any country. I can't imagine more than 10 countries could reasonably be argued had better economic performance from 1970 to 2010.
I do like what Germany took on and has accomplished.
I've visited twice, read a lot, and conversed with a number of people who've lived there.
I admire how productive and peaceful Singapore is, with high living standards, a diverse population, a large degree of economic freedom/opportunity, and continuing effective investment in infrastructure and education. And it got there from a somewhat chaotic and resource-constrained start as an independent country, less than 50 years ago.
From what I've read, its health-care system delivers results as well as any other highly-developed country, at much lower costs.
> I've visited twice, read a lot, and conversed with a number of people who've lived there.
So did I before I lived there. Once you live there for a while (a year or more), you begin to understand that much of what you thought was true is merely a thin façade.
Still, compared to it's neighbours, it has come a long way. Mostly due to importing expertise and technology from the West.
>I admire how productive and peaceful Singapore is, with high living standards
It's not particularly productive. Singapore lives off the proceeds of its port and it's oil Bourse.It IS peaceful, I'll grant you that. When you have police with automatic weapons,ready to use, in plain view it tends to chill people out.
> a large degree of economic freedom/opportunity
A 'large degree'? Sounds very Singaporean. :)
>continuing effective investment in infrastructure and education
Debatable. Certainly that is the Govt. line, but like much in SGP, the reality is very different.
> From what I've read, its health-care system delivers results as well as any other highly-developed country, at much lower costs.
I know this is a BIG issue for USians, but most developed countries don't spend much time thinking about their health care system. It's taken for granted, because it is always there, and mostly works (with exceptions).
OK. NOT TROLLING, but can I ask why anyone would want to learn C, other than to develop device drivers, kernel modules or other arcane software that is yet to be replaced by C++?
I asked this question of a younger programmer the other day, because it seemed to me, that to HIM, learning C was a rite of passage, and that he was less of a man for not knowing it.
I find macho philosophies in software development both amusing and counter-productive.(If you really want to be macho, become a lisp hacker). My amusement may be personal, but the counter-productivity of using C, when better abstractions (i.e. programming languages) already exist, is real. It creates fiefdoms and priesthoods that are counter-evolutionary and hard to maintain, and leads the death of much software.
Personally, I would rather std::string be pored over by many eyeballs and evolved than change strcpy to _strcpy or strlcpy. Unless I am working for NASA on an embedded device for a satellite, I would rather Moore's law or SMP or DSMP give me the speed I need, than give up productivity to squeeze every last CPU cycle. Developer time is a lot more expensive than hardware (except on satellites and space stations).
Apologies if it is your ambition to work for NASA on embedded devices in space stations, I just think you may as well learn C++. You get most of C, plus some really useful and productive abstractions as well.
If you want speed, learn inter-process communication and the principles of symmetric multi processing. With C++, you also get to abstract away the problems of strcpy and strlen, replace Byzantine function references with class methods, and 35 parameter functions with polymorphism.
Best of all, most of the programming world will still think you are manly if you know C++, so you get that too.
Sure, C++ has great advantages, but it also great disadvantages.
I use C for many things not because of "macho", but because C is good enough. I can work around the disadvantages using standard techniques. The result is code that is easily FFI'able from any language, quicker to compile, has a smaller footprint, sane error messages, easily debuggable in gdb, etc.
Also, there are some advantages in the abstractions that C encourages you to use. For example, lack of templates pushed C programmers to discover intrusive data structures, and those are better in many ways than templated containers ala STL.
Another example: "virtual" methods may fail to override a base class method if you make a typo - resulting in potentially cryptic bugs. Using a simple macro in C:
I can make vtables that are safer than C++, and require no more boilerplate than C++ code. The compiler will guarantee that I implement all of the required vtable methods.
If I want to get speed via multi-core rather than pure uniprocessor speed, why use C++? I can use Haskell and get much easier and safer parallelism with many other advantages.
I know, but you are the first I've encountered to quantify it.
> The result is code that is easily FFI'able from any language
I agree that this is a big advantage for interoperability. While it's possible to build an interface in C++ with 'extern C', it means maintaining two call APIs rather than one. Still I see this as a current limitation of C++ rather than an advantage of C.
> Using a simple macro in C:
Is generally a pain as the macro is expanded at compile time and causes difficulties debugging. Your point about VTABLEs is well taken however and I have encountered subtle bugs with virtual member functions in C++.
> If I want to get speed via multi-core rather than pure uniprocessor speed, why use C++? I can use Haskell and get much easier and safer parallelism with many other advantages.
You would need to enumerate those advantages for me to answer. Why then wouldn't you use Haskell instead of C?
For the same reasons he listed above, eg you want to use an ffi etc. This is not a temporary issue with c++ as you imply, there are really hard issues about the c++ programming model, eg exceptions and classes, being really hard to interface with other languages that work differently.
The question is not why Haskell not C, sure if you can use Haskell why not, but for most use cases you cannot. But most languages can be used instead of c++, Haskell or Java or whatever, with many advantages.
>> OK. NOT TROLLING, but can I ask why anyone would want to learn C, other than to develop device drivers, kernel modules or other arcane software that is yet to be replaced by C++?
Why does a medical doctor have to learn a little bit of Latin? After all, you should be able to find all the books and material you need in your native language or at least English.
C is to computing what Latin is to medicine. There's just so much history and important code written in C, that it's an important skill to master. Or at least know a little about.
These days you can spend your entire career in the comfort of a high level language working on a virtual machine and make a fortune. However, if you don't know C (and the fundamentals of how computers work) you'll be standing on a foundation that you cannot understand like a living in a cargo cult.
If you're passionate about computing and software engineering, you'll have a natural interest in how things work under the hood. Learning C is almost mandatory if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole is. Knowing it will certainly help when exploring the intricacies of processors and operating systems.
Learning C++, on the other hand, I think is optional. I'm pretty seasoned with C++ but these days I prefer plain old C for low-level tasks. In theory, it may be possible to learn C++ without knowing C, but in practice it's not. If you try to write anything with C++, it will be inevitable that you'll have to interface with C code. std::string and std::map are very nice but there's a ton of tasks that require using a C API (maybe through a wrapper layer).
Embedded and other low-level tasks are often written in C because in order to run C++, you need runtime support for exceptions, static & global constructors, etc. Porting the C++ standard library is even more painful. C++ without exceptions has very little advantage over plain C.
> If you're passionate about computing and software engineering, you'll have a natural interest in how things work under the hood.
When I was 12, I learned 6502 assembly language. The computer I had did not have a C compiler, only BASIC or assembler (you could also enter hex into memory locations, which was hardcore). Learning assembly is actually a LOT easier than people make out. Assembly is basically mnemonics for the underlying machine code, plus named locations. Assembly has everything a language needs for Turing completeness. Assign, Add, Subtract, Compare, Branch. And THAT is how the computer works 'under the hood'. C is one level of abstraction above that, and while it's true that a LOT of software has been historically written in C, before C came along, most software was written in assembler or BASIC (which is older than C, for the historians).
> Learning C is almost mandatory if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole is.
Not really. I know what is going on 'down there', regardless of which language was used to compile the machine code. What is REALLY useful is to have really succinct, powerful, high-level abstractions to build software quickly and with as little code as possible.
> Knowing it will certainly help when exploring the intricacies of processors and operating systems.
If that's what you want to do, then fine. I'm too much of a utilitarian for that kind of exploration. I want to build stuff.
I think if you want to understand what's going on 'down there' in the 'rabbit hole', learn assembly language. There are only seven to ten basic instructions and you can learn them in a couple of days. You can build anything you want in assembly language, if you have an eternity to do it in.
> Assembly has everything a language needs for Turing completeness. Assign, Add, Subtract, Compare, Branch. And THAT is how the computer works 'under the hood'.
While what you say about Assembly is true, there's more to computer internals than doing arithmetic and control flow in the CPU. Virtual memory, DMA and IO are equally important, and the code that deals with that stuff is usually C code.
> > Learning C is almost mandatory if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole is.
> Not really. I know what is going on 'down there', regardless of which language was used to compile the machine code. What is REALLY useful is to have really succinct, powerful, high-level abstractions to build software quickly and with as little code as possible.
You can book-learn what's going on under the hood but that's no replacement for getting your hands dirty. If you want to actually write code that uses memory and pointers (e.g. memory mapped files), runs in kernel mode or twiddles with page tables and virtual memory, C is the best language you can do it with.
> I think if you want to understand what's going on 'down there' in the 'rabbit hole', learn assembly language.
Learning Assembly language(s) is a very useful skill for everyone. But doing anything practical with Assembly is a futile effort, it's best to stick to C in low level stuff and resort to Assembly only when you absolutely have to. For example when you have to change between processor modes or write an interrupt handler routing, there must be some (inline) Assembly involved. But if you want to get stuff done and work with the interesting stuff, going all-assembly is not worth the effort.
I wrote a tiny multitasking operating system in Assembly. While it worked very well initially, as soon as the complexity went above one screenful of assembly, it started becoming very unwieldy. I moved on to C and got more stuff done. I could focus on the interesting stuff like scheduling algorithms and virtual memory when I didn't have the mental overhead of having to make register allocations manually or whipping up my own control structures.
Any time you want to provide libraries, you'll likely use C: all languages have C FFI, and it's not possible to have a C++ FFI. So you'd have to rely on `extern C`, and then you have to build a bunch of stuff over your OO code so it can be used procedurally.
Often not worth it, C is the lowest common denominator of languages, if you want to be accessible to all languages... you'll probably use C.
> Often not worth it, C is the lowest common denominator of languages, if you want to be accessible to all languages... you'll probably use C.
Personally I see that not so much as a feature of C, but as a limitation of other languages. Interoperability is a Hard Problem(tm) which deserves more thought and effort than it currently receives.
It's easy to say 'If you want interoperability, use C' because that's the current state of affairs. It would be better if interop was a solved problem.
Also the GNU utilities, Apache and nginx, and the odd interpreter (Perl, Python, Ruby) or runtime system (Haskell), OpenSSL, qmail, Emacs' and vim's core, etc.
But yeah, apart from that stuff, C is hardly used.
If I wanted to do iOS/Cocoa programming, I would go straight to Objective-C, bypassing C without stopping, but that's me.
I learned C++ without ever learning C. Although, one could make the argument that in learning C++, I learned about 80% of C anyway. I can debug and fix C code, but I don't enjoy it, and avoid it if possible.
C is interesting, in the same way that Cuneiform is interesting. Personally I just find the Roman alphabet a lot more productive.
I am currently writing part of a web application in C++, the other part of the web application is being developed by another programmer in Ruby On Rails.
In a single request, the RoR part 'does' about a two dozen 'things', which takes it around 2 seconds to complete.
The C++ part 'does' around 1.2 million 'things' which takes it between 0.1 to 0.2 seconds to complete. Building the the component that does 1.2 million 'things' is simply impractical in Ruby.
Admittedly, very few web applications have this type of requirement, but perhaps in the future many more will. The two dozen or so 'things' the RoR does would take a LOT of code in C++. Well, compared to RoR it would be a lot of code. And the 1.2 million 'things' that the C++ application does would be absurdly difficult to program in Ruby, and as mentioned, would take an absurdly long time to execute.
So at the risk of sounding cliché, perhaps it is less a matter of Ruby vs C++, and more one of using the right tool for the job. Once that decision has been made, programmer productivity has more to do with the programmer than the language. I am extremely productive in C++, even though I have to write a lot of code to be productive. If I was a LISP expert, I would be ridiculously productive, but only after 10 years[1] of learning and gaining experience in LISP. Most projects don't have 10 years for you to become productive in the language of choice.
[1] Yes, I am exaggerating. It would only take 9 years to become highly productive in LISP.
I've done basically exactly the same thing. Much of the webapp is written in python, but the core performance critical part is written in C++. There basically wouldn't be any other way to make that particular app work, and this approach worked really well.
That being said, I never felt particularly inclined to write the whole things in C++.
> That being said, I never felt particularly inclined to write the whole things in C++.
Agreed, however one of the problems we are encountering is passing messages efficiently between RoR and the C++ components. Currently using XML until another method that is more efficient, but no less flexible, presents itself.
Personally I think the debate should be less focused on which language to write your web application in, and more on improving the glue between different languages so in developing web applications we can have the best of all possible worlds.
Noam Chomsky once noted that the problem of the soundbite age is that some questions don't have simple answers that fit inside 30 seconds or 2 minutes.
The main problem with SOPA is that it is not possible to solve a market problem with legislation. Copyright infringement is a market problem, and markets are a lot more effective in delivering solutions than Governments. Consequently, SOPA will utterly fail to prevent copyright infringement, resulting in even MORE draconian laws sometime in the future.
Specific to the problem of music and film is that these markets are highly regulated oligopolies that use their market power to engage in price fixing. Unlike efficient markets, in which there are a range of different prices, the music and film markets only have two prices: Idiotically expensive and free (illegal).
Personally, I would LOVE to pay $1 per episode to watch my favourite HBO series at a time, and in a place of my own choosing. Sadly I cannot. Hence, I either don't watch it at all, or I obtain it by 'other' means. Monopolies/oligopolies only offer one price, and they are free to gouge their customers as long as they can prevent any competition in the market.
In other words, SOPA is NOT about preventing piracy (because that is a hopeless cause, much like the war on drugs), but about protecting the music and film industries illegal, anti-competitive price fixing practices (by way of preventing any other production/distribution of that type of media). Illegal price fixing is a small price that all Governments will gladly pay, as music and film support the propaganda/mythology creation industry of Government.
The simplest solution to prevent piracy would be to open the music and film markets to competition, but that is exactly what the RIAA and MPAA are trying to prevent.
Too ambiguous and vague. IP legislation that was written at the time of the constitution is perfectly suitable for the modern age without the need to extend forever.
> It's perfectly reasonable for IP holders to want to have legal recourse against the bad guys.
What is reasonable is a LIMITED monopoly on the copying of an artistic medium as long as it 'promotes the arts and sciences'. The goal of copyright and patent law is to maximise the benefits of art and technology TO SOCIETY, not to some corporation. The method of doing this is to grant a LIMITED TIME monopoly over a creation as an incentive to create, not to make corporations more profitable. Once that LIMITED TIME has passed, the creation enters the public domain and society as a whole accrues the benefits.
Having infinitely extendable copyrights/patents, copyrights owned by corporations renders the purpose of copyright/patents NULL AND VOID, because society never accrues the benefit associated with the cost (i.e. the monopoly).
> There are lots of people making a lot of money selling a lot of illegal merchandise online.
No, there isn't. There are some, always have been, always will be, because when a market for goods or services is inefficient, it changes the risk/reward ratio for 'cheaters'.
Look at the market for drugs for example. The risks are huge, but the rewards are ridiculously higher in proportion. As long as the risk/reward ratio is skewed (i.e. the market is inefficient), there will always be 'cheaters' or 'criminals' in that market. Turning your country into a police state might be one way to stop that, but it may also kill the market you are trying to protect.
I think this Bill will be good for the world. By the 'world', I mean anywhere that is not the United States of America.
The US has outsourced it's manufacturing, rationalized retail into behemoth monopolies and completely destroyed it's capital markets with rampant corruption and incompetence.
The ONLY area in which the US still is a leader and an innovator is in the internet/web, and now the US government is planning to destroy that as well.
Soon the rest of the world will be providing all kinds of services to US citizens behind the silicon curtain, to allow them to illicitly access information without fear of censorship or imprisonment.
Alternative DNS, proxies, darknets will spring up in the free world, giving the disenfranchised and repressed USians a voice and access to otherwise subversive websites that have forums with comments.
