Ben Slade

From an article in the journal IEEE Software, May 1996, page 37. Unfortunately, I don't have the author or title of the article and searches for the content on ieee.org don't seem to find it, so I've scanned it in below.

Although most of the software world doesn't seem to talk about OOD this way, the "lesson" below seems reasonable based on my experiences.

If the control flow is partitioned into a "separate dynamic control flow object" as mentioned below, isn't that object really not an object at all, based on the definition of an object containing data and actions modelling an entity? Stated another way, object oriented design only makes sense when the actions are centered around a piece of data. In this case, the actions are centered around coordinating control flow.

Could the whole computer science industry be so wrong about something for so long? I seems similar to the repudiation of psychoanalysis after 60 years of the dominance of the theory:

Click Read more below to see the rest of the article.

By Paul Pillar from the journal Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006):

Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

(From the NYTimes) Mr. Pillar said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.

PAUL R. PILLAR is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. Concluding a long career in the Central Intelligence Agency, he served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

Click here to see the full article.

From FreePress.net:

The companies that control the [high speed internet access from home] pipes want to discriminate in favor of their own applications, while shutting out or slowing down competing services. These companies have a business incentive to create their own affiliates to compete with the most popular applications — like search engines, voice-over-the-Internet, and streaming video archives.

They now seek to pad their pockets further by becoming gatekeepers to all things digital — deciding what content, applications and services we can use. The telco and cable giants — which dominate 98 percent of the broadband market — not only expect consumers to pay to access the Internet, but they want to charge content producers for using their wires to deliver it.

By pastor Anthony B. Robinson in SeattlePi.com:

You might not expect a West Point graduate, Vietnam vet and career soldier to come out with a book titled "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Addicted to War." But that's what Andrew Bacevich, who now directs the program in International Relations at Boston University, has done.

A self-described conservative, Bacevich argues that Americans have fallen prey to a "military metaphysic." By that he means all international problems are seen as military problems and the likelihood for finding a solution except through military means is discounted. The result is war as a permanent condition with the only acceptable plan for peace a loaded pistol. One has only to consider the relative weight given to the Pentagon and the State Department to get the point.

By British Army Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster. Published in the U.S. Army journal, Military Review. Here are some excerpts:

Few could fail to be impressed by the speed and style of the U.S.-dominated coalition victory over Saddam's forces in spring 2003. At the time, it appeared, to skeptics and supporters alike, that the most ambitious military action in the post-Cold War era had paid off, and there was an air of heady expectation of things to come.

In contrast, two years later, notwithstanding ostensible campaign successes such as the elections of January 2005, Iraq is in the grip of a vicious and tenacious insurgency. Few would suggest Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) has followed the path intended by President Bush when he committed U.S. forces.

From Republicans gone wild by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.com:

Abramoff has been an integral part of the Republican political machine that has flourished since the 1994 takeover. He has created vast slush funds at the disposal of DeLay (for example, the U.S. Family Network, financed by Russian oil tycoons), worked hand in glove with DeLay's political operatives, and supported the Republican congressional leadership with funds and favors. Abramoff's lobbying and politics are inextricable, one and the same, allowing him to simultaneously serve as a valuable member of the Republican machine and be out for himself. He was not the most significant player; nor was his tens of millions more money than bigger figures made. (Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and former senior partner of a major Washington law firm, and currently governor of Mississippi, comes to mind.) But Abramoff, more than those with more influence or wealth, has the distinction of being the culmination of the recent history of the Republican Congress.

From ComputerWorld.com (Jan 10, 2006):

Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH, takes this view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.

"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke said in an interview this week. "There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more."

An article in The Guardian talks about the not typically budgeted costs of the war such as health care for veterans and lost economic opportunities:

The real cost to America of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report written by Nobel prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert Joseph Stiglitz.

The study, which expands on traditional estimates by including such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict as well as the impact on the American economy, concludes that the U.S. Government is continuing to underestimate the cost of the war....

By Robert B. Reich on TomPaine.com:

..Although the data aren’t all in, it seems almost certain that in 2005, median incomes continued to drop

It’s been that way for four years now, since the end of the last recession. The economy keeps growing, but median incomes keep declining. Take inflation into account and you find that half of all American workers are earning less now than they did in 2001. Rarely before in history has there been such a long period of growth in the gross domestic product without most Americans sharing in that growth.

From Tompaine.com, By Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote:

The United States is currently experiencing the least competitive congressional elections in our nation's history, with nearly 99 percent incumbent re-election rates in every election since 1996. For years, FairVote has drawn attention to the problem of lack of voter choice in our congressional elections. But some of the key players interested in reform skipped over the parts of our analysis that didn't fit in with their view of what is politically practical. From our argument that the political geography of elections is the most important factor for determining winners and victory margins, they concluded that the problem could be fixed through establishing independent commissions to draw legislative districting lines. They failed to grasp that the problem of lopsided districts is largely rooted in the use of winner-take-all elections in the red and blue partisan divide that defines most of our nation.