More rants of a dead man

Of course it is, you just have to decide what you mean by better.

Open source has its uses, but like everything else, it’s not the answer to all problems.

But this one thing did occur to me this morning: turnaround time on bug fixes.

If you have a software company with enough infrastructure to handle bug reports from customers and are paid service contracts to fix them, the company has incentive to fix bugs.

There’s no equivalent in the open source world except scratching an itch or possibly, the guy who wrote the code with the bug in it might be a little embarrassed about it and go in and fix it.

But I’ll take the paid way any day

So now I’m wondering if anybody has ever done a study on if open source software is actually better or worse off in terms of bug fixes. Maybe the initial quality is better, because open sourcers aren’t generally trying to beat competitors to market.

So it would be hard to compare, but I find it hard to believe the bugs get fixed in open source land faster and more completely than they do in the paid world.

And I’m not even sure of mozilla counts, they’re getting paid.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Web 4.0 is already passe.

A few weeks ago I was in traffic court to see about playing that little game of reduce-the-fine.

The judge was very up front and clear about how the game worked. He explained that there was another employee of the government who would call your name, ask you to walk outside with her, offer you a deal, and it would most likely be in your best interest to take the deal.

Then he said, this is not a money making scheme.

I somehow managed to restrain myself. This guy was obviously a wise and intelligent guy, he made no story or issue about what was going to go on in his courtroom. We were all playing this game, and this is how it goes.

But then he flat out lied to everybody by saying this was not a money making scheme.

There is a $85 surcharge that new york state tacks on to nearly every ticket and summons it passes out.  Does the state feel the need to extra-punish us? Or does it just want more money.

I am reminded of a time a few years ago when I was getting off the exit of a highway and there was a checkpoint. You know, where the cops look at the inspection and registration of every car looking for expiration problems.

He took one look at my car and pulled me over.

He pointed out the my registration had expired. Interesting, I thought I very distinctly remember going to the dmv website and renewing my registration and paying. But I looked at the sticker in the window and sure enough it had expired.

So I got a ticket.

It seems to me this is a money making scheme. If the nice police man really wanted to help, he might have said “Your registration has expired, is everything okay?” And we could have discussed the situation, and I would have thanked him for pointing out the problem to me.

In fact what had happened, was I used a state government website to renew my registration. The state government either failed to mail me the new registration sticker or the federal government’s postal system failed to deliver it to my house. Either way, I did everything right, the government’s system failed, and for this, I get fined $60.

Of course you can say it’s my car it’s my responsibility to make sure everything is in  order, and I agree it is. I will take responsibility (the issue of being forced to register my car is another matter entirely) for my actions. But did they have to fine me or could they just have pointed out to me the problem so I could take care of it.

No, this is not a moneymaking scheme.

If anybody’s looking for reasons why the revolution has failed, here’s a good example.

There are arguments that the democrats tax and spend and that the republicans want smaller government and give tax brakes to the rich making them richer.

Half the population says taxing and spending is bad, and the republicans are lying. The government is bigger and they pissed quite a bit of money away on the war. Wars. Sorry.

So while Obama is going to spend lots and lots of money we don’t have, lately, the republicans have been spending plenty too, and while war is good for business, it’s bad for inter-country relations, so better we spend the money on businesses and infrastructure where we actually gain something than crazy wars that kill people get everybody pissed at us, and yield us no long term benefit.

So while the war money was spent on some US businesses, a lot of it went to resources that were just
pissed away like ammunition and Humvees and armor that got wrecked and helicopters that don’t fly anymore.
At least when you build a road, it’s there for 20-30 years.

So whether you agree with tax and spend or not, all the government really is, is another player in the economy.
They happen to be a really really big player, but so is wall street.

Wall street gets its money from the same place and people the government gets it taxes from, and one way or another they spend it.
Arguably, the wall street money ends up in relatively few hands, at least the government money ends up
spread out to a lot of people.

It’s really all the same thing, I don’t see why everybody gets so upset taking sides.

It’s almost darwin’s 200th birthday, and reading articles about his fame made me realize something.

In the previously mentioned book Ishmael, it’s pretty obvious that man is not the culmination of evolution. It’s the point at which evolution created a being that is self aware can make computers and read bogs.

At some point, the humans will kill themselves off and nature can go back to evolving the way it did before we showed up.

So if you think about it, there’s a long highway on which time goes by and things evolve, and we, the humans, are a pitstop. We mess things up, we kill other species and don’t evolve naturally (“Society killed darwin.”)

So after we’re done with our lunch at the pitstop, the humans will go away, and the trip on the highway will continue again leading to something even greater than ourselves.

For the next generation of intelligent beings will be able to look back and see that we were here and took ourselves out of the gene pool.