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s/risk of bad/certainty of worst/



On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 08:14:15AM -0700, Jerry Jackson wrote:
> Until... one of our competitors started telling the customer that they 
> were becoming dangerously dependent on us.  If we failed, they'd be 
> stuck with this code in a "proprietary language".  Plus, they could 
> never hire anyone to write in this language.  Etc., etc.
> 
> So, they payed through the nose to translate their applications to Java, 
> even though we were willing to put all source code in escrow in case we 
> failed and they clearly could get people to write the code as they were 
> already doing so with people who had no particular applicable (or 
> applicative :-) background.

Hey -- that's called "escaping the risk of some evil
by embracing the certainty of the greatest possible evil".

For the very same reason, people accept total submission to a monopoly of
force (aka goverment) or of anything else (aka government-run agencies)
because they fear the possibility of one among competing law-enforcement
agencies (or other service provider) to force them into submission.

Since the argument is woven so deep in the structure of our societies,
you can expect it to be very hard to fight indeed.

Makes you feel like the precondition to the success of the Right Thing(tm)
technically is that people should understand the Right Thing(tm) economically.
Anyone else here feels like becoming a consultant in common sense?

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Imagine algebra in XML: instead of (sin (+ x y)), sin(x+y) or x y + sin,
you just use <apply><sin/><apply><plus/><ci>x</ci><ci>y</ci></apply></apply>.