eeeeewwwww no no no no no. Why every cute stat needs to be converted into a metric ot enslave people. Yes, I know, "because that's what managers do". But then I would argue it's in "us" (the programmers) to not let it happen. Yes, I know, "you cannot do that in big corp". Well then, there's no point in complaining either about anything, since we already assume that its a defacto situation, take it for granted and nobody can do anything about that.
Still, as a counterpoint of how this can be fun: When a fellow programmer left the company where I work, the CTO created a small video of the evolution of the services/code based on his commits during time. You could see the different repos popping up and showing his contributions to each during time and growth. Also, since he is (or was) a smoker, he got a zippo engraved with the number of commits and lines of code contributed. Does it mean he was good? He was bad? He did a lot? He did nothing? Noup. Of course, he worked for 5 years in the company, so it was a way to show to him that he contributed a lot and was part of the growth/existence of it, not if he was the most valuable programmer in the team. If you ask me, maybe many of the lines he commited doesn't exist anymore in the current code, still it was a snapshot of what he was for the team and company at that point. And the value was not on the code, but on being part of the team and the process of a company growing.
You can do whatever you want with stats, it's in you if its for good or not.
Well according to another post[0] "Breaking bad in 4k is 1.7Tb" or "star wars 200gb for first 6 movies. thats just 1080p". So I can imagine that much data being saved. Also, the subreddit is called datahoarder, so I imagine gathering bytes is important and "easy".
When I was in Germany, a group of students (who wanted to do it) were given the task to take notes in latex. Then every week they compiled the pdf and was put on the website of the faculty.
To write the latex file, they worked together (sharing the same file, same idea as google docs).
And at the end, they put the effort only because they thought it was nice to have all the notes in pdf, commitment with the class, and because it was a good idea to share it with the other students. I still have all my mathematic classes pdf's.
The thing I don't like about WhatsApp vs BBM/iMessages is that I must share my phone number (at least I don't know another way) to chat. I think sharing a phone number is more personal than a pin like in BB.
I'm spanisch native speaker. Began learning german at age of 5 for 17 years, english at 12 for 8 years, french at 15 for 3 years (barely remember something).
Sadly my written englisch is not as good as it should (altough I have no problem reading it or with conversational englisch. My father doesnt speak englisch, so when technicians from the US came to repair his machines (CNC) I was the translator).
And with german I dont have any problems, I try to read books and watch movies so I dont forget much. And of course german ebm/dark music =)
Being in a german school (Abitur) and living 2 years in Germany helped me a lot in my career =)
Should I rob every house that doesn't have an alarm or leaves the window open?
I agree with you it "helps" to care more about security and robustness. But I don't agree in the way. I have a dream that one day my website with minimum security won't be hacked for lulz and will be treated with respect. =)
Let's phrase this in another hyperbole, shall we? Should you rob every bank that doesn't have an alarm or leaves the vault open? No. But if a lot of banks had no policies in place to prevent those things from occurring, would you feel more secure that someone was walking into the bank, taking photos of their break-in, and not stealing the money?
I don't agree with their means (it's wrong, IMO, to mess with any machine you don't have permission to mess with) but their end goal aligns with mine: make the world more secure.
> I have a dream that one day my website with minimum security won't be hacked for lulz and will be treated with respect. =)
Would you rather have your site hacked for lulz, or would you rather someone go in and sell your customer's data on the black market?
But if these are just DDOSes, then (a) there's no way to steal sensitive information that way, and (b) there's no real defence against 'em anyway. So this particular argument is pointless, right?
There's an argument for whiteish-hat intrusions, but DDOSes must be intrinsically black-hat, right?
No. While I agree there's no red-team contribution in a DDOS, quite a few people regarded Anonymous DDOSes on Wikileaks detractors (MasterCard, et al) as the digital equivalent of a sit-in. That seems a bit of a stretch to me also, but certainly there's some application of DDOS that's not purely black-hat.
Should you? No. But I guarantee if you did, the publicity would educate people about locks.
A more apt analogy might be: opening a poorly locked door to a business, then walking behind the counter and grabbing full print-outs of all their customers' information that was left lying there.
I hope you don't take the same lax approach to security when it's more than your personal documents at stake.
After I found Fansadox comics, I came to the conclusion that boundries didn't exist anymore. I don't feel disgusted and everybody can buy/watch whatever they want. But this things are so common nowadays, that I wonder where the boundry should be.
At first I registered because of curiosity. Then all my friends began to have an account. And when I tried to leave, I found myself "locked" in FB because of the API Keys of my Apps. But as soon as I get rid of the Apps, I would really consider leaving.
I live in Mexiko. The corruption here is enourmous, from top to bottom. Wikileaks has showed this corruption.
The problem IMHO with corruption is that nobody can/want to do something about it. It doesn't matter (at least here) if you collect all the proofs necessary, because the people that can do something about it are corrupt as well.
And I don't think it's that easy to denounce bribes and send to jail the guilty ones.
There was a case against ABB (http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-175.htm), ABB was charged of paying bribes to Mexican government. There are two ways to make bussiness here, pay a bribe or to leave. ¿Who is more guilty, who pays the bribe (and get no income at all) or the one who receives it? I don't think companies have any moral. So the option is to follow a corruption scheme.
And I'm not saying I agree with that or that I'm happy with it. I'm only saying that it doesn't serve a purpose to denounce bribes, if there's no one to punish them.
Moral values can go by percentiles. What you do is punish officials in the lowest percentiles of legality and thank and reward the officials in the highest percentiles of legality. Over time, there will be a shift toward the higher percentiles, and then you can raise standards.
I believe if there is a public uprising against the government and the authorities, they will be forced to answer these issues. Wikileaks faclites this by publishing the documents through all types of medium which cannot be censored by the government.
As a citizen you can also contribute by spreading it more and more.. My best bet would be to spread it in schools and colleges as they seem to be fearless lot. An uprising is what we need.
I'm Romanian. We're not as bad as Mexic, in the sense we don't have drug lords and piles of bodies, but we definitely don't lose in corruption.
I've spent not a little time thinking about what can be done. I know the problem (pretty much everybody knows the problem) - politicians suck. They're either corrupt and incompetent, or just corrupt. Problem is, we really really don't have any alternatives. There is absolutely no party, not even a small youth one that's not the same. We can barely trust non-political watchdog organizations - hell, after the last elections we don't really trust them either.
The media is... ok. Private for the most part, and so heavily politicized (yes, it makes sense here), but they don't pull punches when it comes to criticizing the government. They're pretty open with both obvious mistakes and obvious cases of corruption - but the problem is, nothing ever comes out of it.
In a working democracy this would be a case for the justice system. Well, we have two problems. First, the whole system is also corrupt as hell. Second, it's also (probably on purpose) extremely inefficient. All the reforms in the past years, including a ridiculously publicized new constitution a few years back only made things worse.
So yes, I know what we need. We need:
* to respect the now largely ignored law saying that public institutions, education and health are non-politic;
* justice system reform
* new and fresh options for the next elections
* untainted public organizations
It's no mystery, really. The only problem is... how do we do it? It it my personal conviction that solving this chicken and egg problem is the next greatest challenge. A generic solution would be extremely useful for most developing countries, i.e. half the world right now.
In India for example, I think everyone pays a bribe to get a passport. If we don't, then passport will be stuck somewhere for months and months without coming out. Even for knowing why it is not getting processed, you have to pay bribe. So finally, everyone has stopped questioning and started giving money to agents to get the things done.
The problem is no one is responsible if the citizen is not getting the promised services. We cannot see the status about why it is pending online, we don't know whom to contact online, no helpdesks. You just have to go to the office and wait and wait for turn only to be turned away without even getting a chance to speak.
If one person is made responsible for citizen satisfaction for services and he is like the manager in the office whose compensation is dependent on the rating the citizen gives for the services, then I think this will change.
How to make government officials answerable to the people?
This is difficult, because a government is voted for a period of 5 yrs into power and they have 5 yrs to loot without doing anything and then bribe their way into power again.
If this vicious cycle can be broken by clear communication about the government performance, so clear that people can't ignore, then they may vote for another government which is not much better than this. But by consistently projecting these metrics about corruption and government performance, we might give a chance for some party to fight on the plank of eliminating corruption.
Long answer.. hopefully there is some juice in it.
Entering the European Union did some good for us. A lot of public services have to adhere to European standards, and it works. For example there is a set period in which you must get your passport/identity card/driver's licence and they respect it.
The corruption mostly moved higher. I had a coffee with a friend who works in a public institution a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about EU funds absorption. I'm a software guy, and I'd love to do projects for his institution (or any other). There's a huge need for software projects at every level - national and local. And there are lots of money available for this, provided by the EU. So why am I not working with the government (nor is anybody I know)?
Because things go like this. Say my friend wants to put something online in his institution. He has to get about 3 signatures, the last of which is pretty high in the ministry. And the guy in the ministry will invariably think something like: "if it's am idea worth doing, then we'll file it for when we can do it on a bigger scale with our boys".
So yeah. Like I said, main problems are 1. politicians up high and 2. the fact that institutions are now completely political, to the level where I can bet there's a doorman somewhere who's been hired just because his brother in law is in the right party.
I disagree that everyone in India pays a bribe for a passport. A handful of my friends applied for their passport while in college and none of them paid, neither did I. In fact my passport got stolen while I was in US and it was kind of urgent that I get a replacement, but I managed to get one without bribing. It took time though.
I think sometimes we hastily assume that a bribe is needed and are proactive about it. But I have to say that it still tickles me no end to think about the policeman who had come to our college for the express purpose of collecting bribes from us. He had come all the way from Lucknow to Kanpur a good 3 hour journey expecting to make a killing.
Just the look on his face when my friends refused...priceless !!
But a lot of the lack of transparency that you mention can now be tackled thanks to instruments like RTI (the Indian analogue of FOIA).
I saw a great film that came out this year called Kapitalism: Our Improved Formula that paints an really dire picture of the current state of Romanian corruption, and if any country has had a public uprising against the state of their government, Romania qualifies.
Yeap. The current state of affairs is no secret to anybody. The problem is a complete lack of realistic solutions.
We won't get out in the streets. We're not hungry enough, and we don't have a culture of protesting. We pretty much think the French are uncivilized when they burn cars in the street - civilized peoples solve their problems otherwise. But how?
It's be easier if the press was somehow keeping silent, but they're not. They're scathingly vocal, if somehow distracting. The future definitely looks a lot more like Brave New World then 1984...
The movie had an interview with a Jerry Springer style talk show host guy, and his take on it was that most of the people who took to the streets during the revolution left the country when they realised that in the new capitalism would be owned by the old ex-Securitate(sp?) types. The people who were left were the fearful keep-your-head-down types that watched everything on tv, the people from the countryside who wouldn't even have good enough roads to make it to a protest, and the people who weren't that dissatisfied with the way it was.
So basically, he said that the culture of protest got a train ticket and left.
Neh, not so many people left. Plus it's been 20 years already, that's a full generation. I was 10 when it happened. Plenty of time to replace them.
It's just that protesting wouldn't do any good. Say the current government falls... what do you replace it with? We tried it. We actually had something which looked like a "turning the tide" a few years ago. We voted in a completely new regime (including a new president), much preferred by the younger people, including myself. It started great... In the first 3 weeks they lowered and standardized taxes, and put a minister of justice straight from the NGOs. Dream come true. About a year later, the opposition got together, broke off a piece from the current government, and together tried to (rather illegally ) impeach the president with no good reason.
(you think you guess the rest of the story? guess again). The president managed to force a referendum on the issue, and proved he had the overwhelming support of the population. The impeachment failed. The parliamentary majority belonged to the opposition now, but somehow the good guys managed to name their own Prime Minister, and so in effect hold most of the power.
Fast forward to present time. The NGO Justice Minister is long gone, taxes are at a record high, the president is unanimously vilified, and his party is doing the hiring in every public institution and a few private companies as well. Plus they turned out to be much more incompetent then the previous guys.
Instead of more laws, tougher rules or oversight authorities, it may be worthwhile to just reduce the number of regulations, papers, fees, approvals, stamps or 'adeverințe' needed to function. Tougher rules won't work when the rulers are inherently corrupt; rules are the very thing that justify their power.
Although I'm pro-legalization/pro-decriminalization I don't think it's a good idea for Mexico.
"Instead, they're referred to a panel comprised of a drug-treatment specialist, a lawyer and a civil servant, who usually recommend treatment -- and pay for it, too." is something that won't happen here. And I think that's a fundamental part for legalization to work.
Still, as a counterpoint of how this can be fun: When a fellow programmer left the company where I work, the CTO created a small video of the evolution of the services/code based on his commits during time. You could see the different repos popping up and showing his contributions to each during time and growth. Also, since he is (or was) a smoker, he got a zippo engraved with the number of commits and lines of code contributed. Does it mean he was good? He was bad? He did a lot? He did nothing? Noup. Of course, he worked for 5 years in the company, so it was a way to show to him that he contributed a lot and was part of the growth/existence of it, not if he was the most valuable programmer in the team. If you ask me, maybe many of the lines he commited doesn't exist anymore in the current code, still it was a snapshot of what he was for the team and company at that point. And the value was not on the code, but on being part of the team and the process of a company growing.
You can do whatever you want with stats, it's in you if its for good or not.