Microsoft Unveils "Elevate America"

nandemoari writes "In response to the current economic crisis, Microsoft Corp. has come out with a stimulus plan of their own. Their goal is to help a large group of individuals use their computers to land employment in ways other than to generate a compelling resume. The new online initiative, Elevate America, is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in the field of technology."

Comments

Your tax dollars at work

[vonWoland]

The really brilliant part:

Elevate America has two main offerings, one available immediately and one that will be provided in partnership with state governments

Translation: MS will get money earmarked for retraining programs in order to flood the market with MS trained workers, depressing the wages of the latter and making their "TCO" so much more attractive.

You have to admire a company that is able to screw us coming and going.

Re:That's great...

[mysticgoat]

I doubt greatly that English will be a reasonable choice for trade language into the next decade.

No, I think English will be the common language for most of this century at least. Although the English that is commonly used ten years from now may be as foreign to our ears as the English of Shakespeare. English is evolving faster than it ever has before.

For over a decade, there have been more people who have learned English as a second language (ESL) than there are native speakers of English. At this point in time, there may be more ESL speakers than sum of all the native speakers of English who ever lived. If we ar not at that point yet, we soon will be.

We are also very close to the point where more communication in English is being done between ESL speakers than is being done between a native speaker of English and an ESL speaker. It is common in FOSS projects to find a Finn, a Brazilian, and a Japanese person using English in their correspondence while they fix a bug or develop a feature.

Would someone who knows how to do it propose a Slashdot poll for me? Something like this:

1. My native and only human language is English (don't count programming languages)
2. My native language is English and I am fluent in one or more other languages
3. My native language is not English, but outside of my family and friends, I use English for most of my communications
4. My native language is not English, but I use English for most of my internet communications
5. I read Slashdot in some other language than English (Babblefish is my friend)
6. I only talk to Cowboy Neal because, well, he's The Cowboy Neal

It would be neat to see this done every couple of years, see what the trend is.