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Smart Systems Threaten More Jobs Than Outsourcing
fbform writes "A strategy consulting firm called Strategy Analytics has announced that outsourcing to India and other countries is a small threat compared to having IT jobs replaced by 'smart systems'. Quote from a different news-source: 'higher value-added jobs - involving identification, assessment, conclusions, decisions, and recommendations - will continue to be lost to systems with increasingly intelligent capabilities'." Such as this one.
Great. And who will keep these clever systems up and running 24h * 365days? And who will troubleshoot it when it malfunctions?
The more complicated the systems are the more people are needed to keep it running.
It's not too late to destroy the machines. I'm content with going back to the cave, who's with me!
Considering the fact that Computers have more sickies then people I think we're safe for the time being.
Look out for /etc/crontab
It will take your job from you!
It is not a problem that repetitive tasks are being done by a computer. That's what they're for.
In other news, factory robots are a bigger threat than outsourcing. Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic.
The article may be right about call centre jobs; there are some applications where machines do as good a job as people - though this is not true in customer service applications. A good example is the app British Airways uses for flight information - you tell it the destination and approximate time, and it tells you whether the flight is on time - and it works incredibly well. However, this is not a "customer service" application - if you are phoning up with a complex problem, no computer on earth will be able to help you.
From the perspective of the IT worker, I think that the impact on them will only be beneficial - if intelligent machines can be made to work, then they will be based on intelligent software, which someone has to write/maintain.
As an aside, I remember seeing a presentation from Oracle in about 1994-5 about clever automated database tuning technology, and that all those expensive DBAs would be a thing of the past. When I was at work last week, they were all still there, working damn hard too...
From the article:
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm for the U.S. military, is leading a project to develop a vehicle that can navigate a desert for at least 10 miles without a driver. Prototypes have gone as far as seven miles, successfully moving around cactuses, boulders and other obstacles.
Wow! These guys are right, my job is on the line. DARPA's "10 mile desert navigator" (isn't it 100?) got a whole 7 miles. So now the ONLY OBVIOUS conclusion that I'm going to be out of a job??? Geez, this author sure does seem stupid.
What a trashy article. If it's not fit for publication, why is it fit for Slashdot? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot, where we talk about articles that really aren't fit for publication....
Trying to stop technological processes in the pursuit of extra jobs is pointless, because it will hold back the economy in general. Would we be better you think haveing a blacksmith make car parts by hand in his small workshop, or can we do things better with a robot with ±0.01mm tolerance.
Jobs maintaining these creations will always exist, because they wouldn't be able to administer themselves.
"I view this in the same way as the first flight of the Wright brothers," Cohen said.
Such advancements eventually find there way into businesses, which means someday fewer jobs driving forklifts and delivery trucks.
Does this mean that the writer believes that air travel is a bad thing? Does anyone think that we should do a harder, slower, more expensive and less reliable way so that more people have jobs?
Truth is the technology threatens us computer geeks the most.
I have a book underneath a bunch of crap in the garage. "Unleashing Windows 98".
Some people spent weeks studying, learning about Windows 98 and master it. Who gives a shit about it now?
Everything you know, everything you think that you can do that is special will be done quicker and better by a 5 year old pressing a few bright buttons in a machine that you will end up designing and maintaining.
It's not so much that what you know will become obsolete, it will just get to the point were nobody gives a damn because it will become so easy to do.
Remember when ripping and playing mp3s was a hard thing to do?
Remember when people paid big bucks for a decent C compiler?! Now even MS gives them away free. Nobody cares except which compiler best suites your enviroment.
Who would pay you a hundred bucks for Emacs nowadays?
It's not that nobody cares, or your skills won't still be usefull. It's that everything you know, everything your doing on a computer today will be quant and obsolete to lusers and Grandmas everywere in 10-15 years.
People will be saying "What?! you must be joking your still using Windows XP?, Sweet jesus, Get with the program and install LinuxBSD 3.0 so we can get some real work done."
Remember when HTML coding was a skill that could get you a job on that alone?! HA.
I know this because of those 20 year experianced IBM mainframe programmers, administrators, and techs working next to me struggling to get some bitch's winmodem to dial up on her WinME box over a phone for 11 bucks an hour.
And I left those poor bastards long behind and soon somebody will do the same to me once I get comfortable that I "know enough to get the job done".
I guess we'll be seeing a lot more of this shirt.
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
Never send a human to do a machine's job...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I agree since I work for a telecommunications company that has a huge call center. We're looking to implement IVR type technologies to not only cut back on the number of call center reps we need, but also to better serve the customer by providing bill information, trouble reporting/status, automated payments, and other information that would normally occur via a CSR.
These IVR type technologies still require an IT person to set up and manage them, so I don't see the loss of IT jobs being threatened as much as I do the call center jobs themselves.
My first civilian job, I worked with a tech writer
who would make technical illustrations by *manually*
deleting centerlines and such from AutoCAD drawings
before exporting the images. Said it was great
mindless work to rest his brain.
When I showed him how to turn off layers, his eyes
got huge. "Don't tell anybody that! We'll lose our
overtime!"
It used to be that a computers 'usefulness' was measured not in terms of MIPS, or Desktop Dominance, or "user base", but in terms of Decisions made.
Any successful branch of a computer program, determined by its Logic Design, is a "Decision".
Think "Yes" or "No" trees in any flow diagram: this was a "Decision".
IBM used to promote their machines as having "made 150,000 decisions a day". These weren't just program branches, but real business decisions - e.g. "Is this account overdue?" - Yes == one successful Decision. No == a Decision, etc.
I still think this is a pretty useful metric, since it equates to actual business use, not just "performance"...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The fight over technology vs. jobs has been playing out for 300+ years, since the invention of the Jacquard loom in the early 1800's.
Joseph Marie Jacquard's invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers, who feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labor, would deprive them of their livelihood. However, its advantages secured its general adoption, and by 1812 there were 11,000 looms in use in France. The loom was declared public property in 1806, and Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each machine.
Here's another example:
Our city currently has a shortage of 300+ tax drivers particularly during graveyard shifts. The taxi drivers union has proposed that cabs could be fitted with GPS and route-planning software, but the council refuses saying that any potential taxi drivers must pass the official exams (demonstrating their ability to have memorised "The Knowledge").
Introducing technology would create more jobs, and there is no danger of loss of earnings, since the council regulates the fares that taxis can charge.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
PCs in the workplace are what Robery Cringley (I, Cringley) calls the IT dept full employment act. At my own workplace where PC techs outneumber macs techs 20:1 even though the number of macs to PCs is closer to 1:5, they once tried to force everyone to adopt a common platform and guess which one they voted on?
My mac does have sick days occasionally, but I dont envy PC users. My Linux computers are all just servers. So they really dont get much stress from constantly installing applications or doing thinks that cause them to red-line their disk usage. Thus they are as solid as a rock and never go down (same is true of my g4 mac servers). However they do get out of date on their patches and I truly worry about all the services I might have turned on that I dont know about. I'm not a good enough sys admin to trust myself to know if say Apache needs certain port maping and RPC sevices so I cant just go turning everything off. My solution is to firewall them and get a better sys admin to stay on top of the needed patches.
while my macs also have some "extra" srevices turned on I'm reasonably assured they were designed in a coherent fashion. When I turn on off a service the firewall automaticall closes those ports too. Since mac packages dont (normally) spray install files all over your system into places like /etc /usr/ /opt /bin and /sbin it makes removing things really easy and prevents cruft build up. (this by the way is why I will not install that loathsome gnu-darwin package: it for example even replaces /bin/make !!!)
Maybe this is what they meant about smart systems replacing IT techs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
We are quickly approaching a point where many jobs could be done by machines or AI systems yet governments refuse to consider what to do with the problem of mass layoffs due to this effect.
If you want to consider what would happen then think of how Saudi Araibia would handle running out of oil or a sudden technology that would allow the world to quit using oil completely. They've already asked what the world would do to help them. I doubt anyone answered though.
The point is were a mainly a capitalistic world and that type of society is incapable of comprehending a world where there's not such things as cost/profit. Europe is transitioning to a socialist type government but still it's inherently based on capitalist's who just wave the banner of socialism.
A Republican or Democrat cannot see past the people financing their elections and it's one of the biggest flaws in our democracy now that the rich and corporations are the only influence in our political system. Our forefathers never envisioned corporations or the super wealthy and thus no protections from these types of influence were built into our government. Thus until we change our ways in the end we'll be stuck with a government that wont go out of the way to help those who lose their jobs.
This is the same reaction that has been given to new technology since the start of the Industrial Revolution, if not before.
Starting in the nineteenth century, a wave of time-saving devices and new manufacturing processes allowed a few workers to complete jobs that had previously required the laborous attentions of a multitude of skilled craftsmen. For one example out of many, consider the difference between clothing that was either simple and home-made or expensively tailored by a professional seamstress and mass-produced clothing that can be sold as a commodity at Wal-Mart.
Many new advances in technology have increased efficiency and allowed machines to either leverage the effort of a few humans (allowing a few people controlling the machines to replace an entire factory-full of workers) or to replace humans entirely. An outcry (and often, calls for governmental interference) has followed each new advance in labor-saving devices. Doomsday predictions of mass unemployment and poverty have been common -- and always wrong, since increases in efficiency brought about by technology have universally brought about a higher standard of living for everyone. Some people lost their jobs, but other new jobs (and new industries) were created; it's not a zero-sum game. Additionally, higher standards of living have been promulgated across the board. For example, a standard work week used to be 10 hours * 6 days; now, in America it is 8 hours * 5, and in Europe it is even lower (albeit due to government regulation rather than market forces in the latter case).
Now, according to TFA, it is the "knowledge workers" who have their jobs on the cutting block. Boo hoo. While it sucks in the short run for the individuals who may suffer personal turmoil from being made redundant by machines, and there may be temporary economic displacements of labor, in the long run almost everybody will benefit either directly or indirectly from a growing economy where everybody has to work less for a higher standard of living.
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
Just look at how many people the steam engine put out of work! Nobody worked in mills after they were mechanised. Well, apart from all the people who tended the machines of course.
Strange really. The industrial revolution seemed to lead to more employment. Not less.
Must be a totally different situation though. It's a well known fact that the world only has a certain finite number of jobs (which is apparently the same argument used against immigration), and if you create a new piece of technology, then exactly the same work is done by fewer people. As opposed to production increasing.
I suspect outsourcing will only be a short term problem as well. Standards of living in India are going to improve over the next decade, which means that they'll have a high demand for imported consumer goods. Anyone who exploits that market will make a killing.
We have a winner! And it only took slashdot 10 minutes to to generate, in its own entropically darwinian little way, the obvious answer that technology is designed to do shit for us, and that the story submission, as written, is an obvious troll.
(Thanks for your help Mr. Hansen, there'll be a little extra karma in your account this week.)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I think someone's jumping to conclusions.
I think someone is trying to generate hits to their consulting firm's website.
It may not come in our lifetime, or not before we retire, but software creation and maintenance will be fully automated.
But think about the benefits: you can't get a job as a steam engine valve operator anymore, but you can afford a car. Every job that's lost to automation is one more job that people can get done for them at a lower cost.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic
I'll bite.
Broadly speaking, we have a society that is divided into those who 'own' and those who don't. For the majority of society, that is not the owners, life is structured around working to survive.
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
New technology has repeatedly caused a great deal of suffering as it makes people redundant. So when you say,
Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Well that's exactly true. The problem is not that society is not benefitted by new technology but that the benefit is not shared around.
Modern Western society has long since passed the point where everyone is required to work the majority of their time to survive. The model of people doing this has long since collapsed in terms of essentials and it's only kept going by mass-consumption of goods we don't really need (mostly status oriented) and services.
Nor is this progression at an end. It should be especially obvious to the
Of course, we can't hold back progress for the sake of mass employment. The only good solution is for the profits of innovation to be shared out more easily.
But in the spirit of ending this negativity, which I fully agree with, it seems to me like society might be adapting. Perhaps not in terms of the skills which you meant, but in terms of how people work. For example, people are increasingly opting for less financial rewards in their jobs, such as greater flexibility and increased holiday, and this is a great plus because it means sharing the work out wider. Many more people are working in education too, which is a plus.
I hope to live to see the three-day week become an accepted standard.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
As I sit here on this fine weekend as a computer operator...surfing the net and reading Slashdot, I know that my job could easily be wiped out if someone were to clean up the redundancy around here and place more faith in automation. The same is true with the new swipe cards making the Commissionaires (a.k.a. security guards) down the hall start to sweat, b/c their job of letting people in the building is starting to make less sense.
However it's ironic that b/c it's a government position that "they" still prefer a warm and fuzzy body around just in case something does hit the fan.
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
This is an old fallacy. It's basically the belief that there's a net loss of jobs when something more efficient than human labor replaces human labor. If you're only looking at half of the picture, it looks like there's a net loss. But the mistake is only looking at the immediate consequences and not looking at the longer term consequences. In the long term, efficiency creates more jobs. Don't believe me? Read this. Or this.
If you still believe that creating an efficiency is wrong when someone loses their job as a consequence, then you must also believe that using a computer is wrong, because you could clearly have hired someone (possibly lots of people) to deliver your communications instead of relying on automation. And for that matter, why use a car, when doing so has caused the unemployment of so many buggy drivers and horse . And for that matter, why use buggies at all. A single person can only travel so far on foot before needing rest. To get your messege to the entire world, you could employ many, many more people if you insisted that it be delivered by foot.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
"Unemployment is a benefit of any technologically advanced society." (?Robert Anton Wilson)
The sooner we realise that, and stop treating it as a problem, the better.
I'm not sure that distinction really exists
Well I'm afraid that in my attempt to avoid writing a huge treatise on economics, I used some pretty clumsy definitions.
The distinction I was trying to draw was between those who have to keep running to stay where they are, and those who can sit back and watch the money coming in. A small scale example would be landlords and tennants. Some pay rent, and some recieve it. In a very broad sense (but a real one also) we are all landlords or tennants within society. the factories and the farms are owned by groups that are small in comparison to the size of society as a whole.
And they then use that money to purchase and own things
The distinction is between buying a new pair of shoes, or investing in property or a company. Someone doing the former wasn't what I meant. Someone doing the latter is clawing their way out of the worker category and into the owner category. Although this example shows that the groups are not clear definitions that an actual person has to fall into or out of. I'm just modelling how society works at a higher level.
When you say that efficiencies benefit the owners, therefore the workers and therefore society, I disagree.
Benefiting society? Yes - you need another society to compare it with, but between one that has cars and one that has horses, you can see the disparity of power. (Of course you should consider things like quality of life etc.)
But workers? Messier. The benefit is traditionally the falling cost of goods. Plot that benefit on one line. the negative is the lowering reward for a worker's time. Plot that on another line. See where they cross? Now at what point does the balance become a bad one for the 'worker?'
I say that this point has been reached for the average person.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
But even the life of the have-nots will be better. The poorest beggar in the world today is safe from smallpox, which even the richest people died from in the past. And even a refrigerator box is better than whatever shelter a beggar could get a hundred years ago.
Do we become a socialist welfare state
Something like that. What made communism inviable was the fact that wealth is finite. When productivity increases enough, people start giving things away. We get "free" email accounts with 100Mb capacity because the investment per account is just $0.10. Food productivity is so high that the goverment must buy and stock some farming products to raise the price.
The future I see is one where few things will be valuable. Real estate is one of them. Corporations are trying to raise the value of intellectual property, but I think it's obvious they will fail in the long run. For a while, arts and sports will be valuable skills, until art becomes fully automated and anyone can become a super-athlete, thanks to medical progress. In the end, we will either have the ultimate communist state, where wealth is distributed evenly by law, or we will the ultimate feudalist state, where the only wealth is owning land, acquired by inheritance. But the poorest serf will have a much better standard of living than any of us has today.
Employment is not the true goal for anyone. It is a means to an end.
For many years, I enjoyed six to nine month backpacking trips. I did thruhikes of major trails, wandered at whim through the national forests of America, and enjoyed what I considered a happy way of life. I had to work only few months over winter to finance these activities.
Others prefer overbuilt houses, accumulation of material objects, or whatever else they desire. They have made a choice, and tied their lives to the whims of their employer.
Only a few people share my tastes in living. I know there is a price to be paid for participating in our materialistic culture. Few people that I have met are aware of how much they give up.
The only jobs that computers have replaced are the crappy jobs that people don't want to do. Now I know that everyone wants a job, and wants to make good money. The jobs I'm talking about are the ones that no one would ever do for free, and only do it because it pays good money. For example if I opened up a company where I paid people to eat dog poop, but I paid them $1000 an ounce, people would line up to take the job.
These are the jobs that are being automated and replaced by machines, because people don't want to do them and its cheaper then paying people. (Repetitive, mind dulling, stinky, work)
If you enjoy doing your work, (Not the paycheck, but the work itself) no machine is going to take your job away, because no machine will do a better job.
There are of course exceptions to this, as there are to everything.
Okay... let's plot:
According to the US bureau of Economic Analysis, REAL per-capita disposable income has risen EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE 1949. Check the data yourself: http://econstats.com/grplist1.htm#nipa
So not only has our society benefited by the reduced cost of living that comes with cheaper products, it has benefited by the increased purchasing power of every citizen.
Look at the facts, not some trite manifesto printed in the 1800s.
How can you not see the irony of your whole argument? YOU ARE POSTING TO AN INTERNET SITE ABOUT THE EVILS OF TECHNOLOGY!
Any information worker in the US today who complains about the evils of technology should be sent to a third world country where they can see the benefits of living without it first hand.
This is an old argument that history keeps proving wrong.
Using machines on farms put people out of 16-18/hr/day back breaking work. Oh, no, stop the machines.
The cotton gin will put all the people picking seeds from the cotton out of work. Oh, no, stop the machines.
Using machines in manufacturing will lead to devastatingly low employment. There won't be enough employed people to buy the products. Oh, no, stop the machines.
Visual Basic/Smalltalk/Powerbuilder allows non-programmers to build their own applications. This will put all the programmers out of work.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
What you fail to see is that maintenancing a new machine that does some task is almost always more intellectually demanding than the original task. Also, it will never require as much manpower to repair the machines as it would have required to do the task without them. So if ten people are dispensing drinks to customers at some commercial location, and those ten workers are replaced by vending machines, you still need a vending machine repair person, but you don't need _ten_. Also, that person will require some increase in intellectual ability over the average seller of soft drinks, because fixing the machine is simply more complicated a task. Admittedly in this example the cognitive threshold is very low, but where you might be able to hire a borderline retard to sell drinks, you can't hire one to fix vending machines.
Let me put it this way: If the company's implementation of the machine doesn't put people out of work, why are they implementing it? If I'm already paying ten people to do a job, why should I buy a fancy robot and then still be paying ten people to go around fixing it? You can be certain that as machines replace jobs the number of human workers will go down, and the ones that are left will be the ones smart enough to be able to do things that machines can't.
Textile workeres were losing their jobs to stocking-machines that did knitting more cheaply than themselves, and indeed decided to destroy the machines. They organized into a group known as the Luddites, until England cracked down hard on them - wikipedia reporting that "at one time, there were more British troops fighting the Luddites than Napoleon Bonaparte".
This is generally true of systems humans have built in the past, but is not true of complex systems in general. For example: human bodies are some of the most complex systems that exist, and they essentially maintain themselves.
Once humans get better at designing homeostatic systems, something which major firms like IBM are working towards with their "autonomous computing" initiative, we'll see the amount of people required to maintain complex systems plummet.
Does anyone think that we should do a harder, slower, more expensive and less reliable way so that more people have jobs?
--
No matter how hard it is for me, being a technology freak myself, I think I am going to have to answer this affirmatively.
Technologists, mea culpa, always have the urge to make 'things' more efficient. 'Efficiency' in the traditional meaning however could be translated, roughly, as 'Try real hard to use as many resources that we CANNOT miss (oil, energy, materials in some cases) to do as much work as possible so resources that we have PLENTY of (people) can be replaced'.
This definition is something that's grown in, but it is not neccesarily the proper definition. I believe that efficiency should include the term 'meaningfully' somewhere. Somehow, we should seek an equilibrium that's not focussed only on automating things at the expense of other things. The SUM of the results should be positive.
Don't forget that having a job, no matter how trivial such a job might be, could give somebody lesser than yourself a very good feeling about himself, being able to support his family, his children. If obsoleting one computer could create 10 such trivial jobs, feed 10 families, increase the wellfare and feelgood factor of 10 or more income earners because they don't have to depend on social services, oil products that get put into that computer's manufacturing get saved, energy bills do not have to be paid, hmmmmmmm, I don't know man.... Perhaps I'd say that computer deserves being obsoleted, no matter how efficient it was.
I'm aware that this is a recursive issue; the worker's employer would no longer be as competitive, couldn't price his articles as low, would eventually go under, the electricity company wouldn't need to employ so many people, the oil business as a whole would suffer etc. etc.
Give the definition some thought though. I think it can be done somehow. We technologists and scientists COULD lead the way into a more sensible society.
Everytime someone tries to implement something that is going to automate or improve things you get resistance from a lot of people at different levels who are all paranoid about losing their jobs. Usually these are the same people who are paranoid about losing their jobs in the first place. The same people who do their best to accentuate their strengths and do whatever they can to cut the experts out of the picture completely.
Our company is moving forward with their ideas, but management has decided to cut people like me out of the picture. Not because they don't like my ideas or even that they understand them. They are trying to take their thing and run with it. Everyone has the "look at me syndrome".
The truth is, most people don't look at the big picture or care about saving money or doing what is best technically. Most people just care about taking care of their families. As much as I hate this conflict, I really don't see how you can blame either side for the way they think. Whichever side you may be on, its the guys with the expensive three story houses and sportscars that win in the end. Most companies don't reward talent. They reward management. This is why you have budget incentives and things like that. Management can give you no support whatsoever, sit on their lazy butt and make a bonus. In the meantime you fight to get the job done, often spending your own time or using your own resources to do the job. Is it fair? Hell no. Will it change. Hell F no. Not while the boomers are still in power.
We have all become so innundated with the career path mythos that we forget that the reason that most people work is to pay the bills. Given the choice, most people would much rather sit on the beach than answer phones.
If machines are able to decrease the amount of mundane work that we need to do to generate wealth is a good thing in general. True, in our present system, the people who are displaced by the machines lose financially. But the solution is not to cut off the head of the goose laying the golden eggs but to develop a new model to distribute the wealth more equitably so that we can all spend as much time as we want in front of our PS-2's...
I would like to see whether incomes follow a standard Bell curve - I imagine they do, but if not then incomes for such as Gates and Allen, et al. might be skewing the median up
Take a statistics class. The incomes of Gates and Allen would severely skew the mean, but they wouldn't skew the median any more than if they made only half of what they were making.
For the sake of illustration, let's consider a series of numbers and pretend they represent the incomes of everyone in the Unites States: 7500, 12,000, 20,000, 34,000, 34,000, 36,000, 52,000, 52,000. 53,000, 53,000, 76,000, 76,000, 120,000, 300,000, 400,000,000. The mean of that set of numbers is going to be around 27 million, so that income of 400 million severely skewed the mean. However, the median is going to be 52,000. If that 400,000,000 figure was merely 52,000 that median income would be exactly the same .
This is the purpose of using the median. Outliers may skew the mean, but they don't unduly influence the median.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199