We frequently exceed this level of spec for an average size house.. by a long way. However, simple commercial work can often get away with lesser levels of specification as they are generally dealing with typical construction methods and 'volume' contractors and consultants.
Using the standard construction methods is kind of like including stdio.h. The better the knowledge and experience of the contractor, the more advanced the library, but the more complex the docs. In a typical set of docs, it is probably 50/50/50 legal vs contractual vs actual description of the building.
"with modern CAD systems it is entirely analogous to generating a new report from a database" (not analogous - they are actually databases with a cadd layer on top)
But I would love for this to be true! It is amazing how much is still done manually, or even by hand in the construction industry. There are very few firms who have attempted to fully integrate automation into their processes.
"I still end up having to explain eom half the time.. kind of kills the intended brevity."
this is why i posed the question. how many people can the author honestly expect to reach through hn and twitter or blog to make this new acronym widespread enough to actually save time. if you want a short reply just add it to your signature, "please reply briefly"
That's curious, my need for instantaneous news has been waning. This past few weeks events (local and international) have really been the proverbial straw.
If the pop-ups infect your computer and write spurious code into all your saved work thereby taking ownership of them and then sue your sorry arse into the ground for theft.. then yes, pop-ups are equally evil.
If pop ups increased the amount of data my hard drive could store they'd be equally good... Monsanto is an evil corporation but GMOs are pretty much the only reason there's going to be enough food for "your sorry arse" to eat in 10 years. The farmers have to pay for the seeds, yes, but their yield is much higher than without them. Sounds like the guy knew what he was doing when he bought the second hand seeds. Why don't you spend billions of dollars on a piece of software, sell it to me cheap and allow me to sell knock offs for 1/2 your asking price; lets see how you feel about it then...
First, my comment was facetiously poking fun at the idea of some benign first-world annoyance being evil.. lighten up eh?
Second, the argument about GMO (or any other high-tech way to increase farming yields) being a 'solution' to food supply shortages is thrown around a lot without any evidence.. nor, as far as I can see, any actual basis in fact.
The drive to increase yields is a drive to increase profit / hectare, which has only resulted in actually driving other farmers out of the business which reduces food production stability, and ultimately overall yield. In every objective measure, this process also produces inferior product.
Monsanto has been profiting from the large-scale destruction of many decades of careful seed adaptation in regional areas. They have driven seed sellers and savers out of business in order to monopolise the markets. They sue / threaten / cajole farmers into using their product or effectively run them out of business.
Third, if I spent billions creating a piece of software whose sole purpose was to replicate its source code and upload it randomly to surrounding networks (along with some by-product) and did this by only changing a couple of lines in an existing piece of open source code, so that no one could really tell the difference... and got pissed that people were using that code. Well, I would just be a bit of a dick now, wouldn't I.
Spending more money on something does not give you any more rights, just more risk.
Really good point about symptoms / causes (I do not entirely agree that it is automatically follows to make the gov not worth buying.. a bit like smashing up your car so no-one steals it). And I do not disagree with your comments about the US voting.
WRT Australian voting, in 2010 the voter turnout was around 92/93%, with a further 5.5% informal (donkey). Around 20% of the electorate voted for the minor parties / independents.
All this translated to.. 90% of the seats to the two major parties. Nope, no corruption here. In a very real sense the system is designed by the parties that run it. I mean, we all remember what happened in Tassie in the late 90's?
a bit like smashing up your car so no-one steals it
More like not putting all your server room and home entertainment system equipment (televisions, ipads, etc.) in your car, sitting on the front seat with the doors unlocked.
Your car needs to get you places. If you make it the central storage location for all the cool/expensive stuff in your life - don't be surprised when people open your doors or break your windows to take it. If in the process of storing all your junk and having it broken into - don't be too surprised when your car is no longer functioning as simple transport.
The US Government spends more money than any entity in history. You think that isn't valuable to all those who wish to obtain some of that money for themselves?
The point of my analogy was that government has some specific functions spelled out by the Constitution. If we stuck to government's main functions rather than trying to have it do everything for everyone - we would make it less of a target for corruption.
1. The issue here is not broadening or weakening or diluting the term corrupt. US government corruption is concentrated at the top. The other examples you gave have low level and high level corruption, but they are different things. Washington corruption is structural, but no less real. Where I live (oz) the state gov. as one of it's first acts was to restructure the crime and corruption commission (effectively taking it out of action for 18 months). Then they promptly rezoned a bunch of land owned by people who donated to the party coffers. Would you regard that as corrupt?
2. People agree with corporations because corporations frame the question, the debate and the answer. Same thing happens here in oz, where murdoch owns 70% of the papers. People are so content with their gov in the US that they vote in ever increasing numbers?
People don't care and are not engaged by politics because they are taught from a very young age to accept that they can have no effect on the system. You can choose between tweedledum or tweedledee (or kang and kodos, if you prefer). This was lessig's point. Money has corrupted the process before you even get to a choice.
"More regulation or less regulation?"
People are always going to disagree over process. Especially if you frame it in such oversimplified terms. Regulation on disallowing a company to pump cyanide* into the water supply? Find someone who disagrees with this!
This illustrates the core argument for conservatism (in the burkean sense.. as commented below). You have to move slow to make sure you don't break things that were working (as in.. if it ain't broke). There is no such thing as tight deadlines in conservatism.
As with all things, I disagree with applying a rule to unforeseen situations. Sometimes you need to adjust your rule and sometimes you just have to break stuff.
(the situation, not the reaction.. I would have asked him to leave (and have in similar situations), though I realise not everyone is as comfortable as with confrontation as I ;)
I would encourage people to name names in these situations. Group humiliation is a very good catalyst for change, if it comes to that.
"Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities."
This is a very positive way of looking at this. I would argue that we have a fairly good sense of how much more (a lot) and that this informs the tendency for entrenched meritocracies to restrict access rather than open the floodgates, so to speak. People are generally overprotective of their position or status, the past and what they have built for themselves.
I wholly agree that "communities can thrive", and I believe gain a lot more, by being open and welcoming to people not (just) on the basis of merit, but on the basis of curiosity / interest / engagement.
That sounds really interesting. I deliberately avoid high volume RSS feeds due to the difficulty of finding the things I actually want to read.
I get the feeling though that the issue with RSS was not altogether an issue of uptake or ux.. but more an issue of sites wanting to track their users. If RSS could allow for some sort of phone home (opt out / anonymisable of course) then maybe there might be more of a push from content creators.
Back in the day when RSS was all new and shiny there were quite a few people that saw RSS as the mechanism that would help blogs become conversations (structurally speaking). Somewhat like on USENET, RSS would be the thing that made it possible to have discussions across blogs and for a reader to be able to follow these discussions. I never quite bought this, but I was willing to entertain the idea.
Of course, this never really materialized. What we got was ... well, a mess. I think mainly because a lot of people tried to reinvent the wheel and did so badly.
I never saw RSS as something portals would be interested in. (And any time a site's business idea is to keep someone on their site for as long as possible, what you have is, in my opinion, a traditional, late 90s portal).
(Back in the early 00s I worked on web crawlers and to me RSS was interesting because it could have been used to aid us in finding fresh content. I talked to a few site owners back then about why they were so reluctant to add it and the sentiment was largely "we want people to find our content from our front page")
Using the standard construction methods is kind of like including stdio.h. The better the knowledge and experience of the contractor, the more advanced the library, but the more complex the docs. In a typical set of docs, it is probably 50/50/50 legal vs contractual vs actual description of the building.
"with modern CAD systems it is entirely analogous to generating a new report from a database" (not analogous - they are actually databases with a cadd layer on top)
But I would love for this to be true! It is amazing how much is still done manually, or even by hand in the construction industry. There are very few firms who have attempted to fully integrate automation into their processes.