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How America Can Get Its Tech Mojo Back
jfruhlinger writes "The American tech industry is hobbled by a poor education system, misguided spending priorities, and a byzantine patent system. But America can still come out on top, not least because of its longstanding tradition of individuality and private R&D investment. 'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"
...That's all fine and dandy, but I'm pretty sure open distributed projects won't help America's poor education system. It's a start, and it might give way to some progress, but collaborative researching doesn't help Billy Bob Joel learn how to advance technology if they don't know shit about it.
Get our tech mojo back? Errmm, what? Last I checked, tech giants like Apple, IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Google, and Facebook --to name a few-- are all American companies staffed mostly with American citizens.
Open and Distributed just opened up the project to the whole world. That helps America specifically how?
then people won't be afraid to invent again.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
There is so much that can't be learned in a class room yet for stuff like help desk level 1 they want 4 years or more.
One of the biggest reason - the US is paying price for blind obsession with capitalism.
Money does not count for everything. Some of the cool technologies were group effort, incubated in universities around the country and not by corporates. By branding all altruistic efforts with Communism/socialism, the country has alienated a lot of creative types.
Start by counting Steve Jobs a salesman and not an innovator and that would be a good start.
The only advantage the US has is liquid capital. Unfortunately it doesn't like spending it in the US, so I say add that to the list of things to fix.
But America can still come out on top, not least because of its longstanding tradition of individuality and private R&D investment
I was kind of hoping that the over the top "Team America" proselytizing would all get done on the Fourth....
FUCK YEAH!
Three Squirrels
How does the tradition of individuality and private R&D investment" = open access and sharing? America was built on people being shameless opportunists who found a niche and quickly exploited it. Everyone for themselves, the defining characteristic of "individualist".
1. Stop being xenophobic gits and get back to the melting-pot culture that made this the best fucking country on Earth in the first place.
2. ???
3. Tech!
And why do they want the economy to crash and burn?
Because they're shorting it and stand to make a bundle.
I'm sure I'm not the only one tired of the reflexive nationalism. The benefits of science and open-source technology can be shared by everyone, everywhere, and the more wide these things are shared, the more they grow.
Sure, I'd like to see better technical education in the US, and an environment more friendly to innovation, but I'd like to see that everywhere.
We need the OPTION of "pure technology" programs with no filler and no other goals than giving the student customer as much information and training in the field of their choice.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
and they all have massive portions of their corporate bodies lying outside the jurisdiction of the united states.
Easy. Abolish patent law and copyright law. (PDF here)
Historically, those two concepts have probably been the biggest impediments to the advancement of human civilization.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Ah Kos. The bastion of fringe leftwing non-journalism. Go into debt, then try to spend your way out of it, using other people's money. Let me know how that works okie? Even loan sharks eventually break your bones for failure to pay.
Om, nomnomnom...
Having seen some of this so-called "higher education" in the US as a guest, I have to say it cannot be the envy of anyone knowing the US system. What I saw was rather pathetic, both on master level and on PhD level. Sure, there are a few good universities, but the rest of the world has them too. And, at least in the systems I know (Germany, Switzerland), the average University, is much, much better than the average in the US.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I mean, sure, maybe in the OLD days of Slashdot. But the comments are a lot different now than they were then. We've grown. Evolved! I thought we now all agreed that individuality was a bad thing, and that top-down central planning was the way of the future.
- aj
We need the OPTION of "pure technology" programs with no filler and no other goals than giving the student customer as much information and training in the field of their choice.
We have that, see trade schools, even community colleges to a degree. Expand these areas, but do not lower the bar on the university system. The point of the university is to produce a more well rounded person who also has those technical skills(*). Believe it or not, some geeks will need to be able to effectively communicate with people in business, the humanities, medicine, science, etc in order to fulfill the computer needs of these groups. They might even need to lead a group of people with diverse backgrounds representing those various fields.
(*) Whether universities are accomplishing this goal is a different conversation.
I may disagree with what you say, sir, but I will fight to the death for my right to punch you in the face for saying it.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
I don't buy that that's the problem when you have some corps paying ZERO taxes, and many even receiving money from the government despite pulling in record profits.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
It has worked for every other recession.
The only true path to debt reduction is a long term democratic president with republican's in charge of at least one house.
Under that method CLinton was forced to cut spending, but pushed for not lowering income(taxes). The first thing Bush does in Office is Hey the governments got a surplus let's give it away instead of paying off our credit cards. Which did absolutely nothing for us in long term economics'(I was predicting the housing market crash in 2005/6, I was early by 2-3 years. For the 2000's the only thing keeping the country afloat and out of a deep recession was the construction housing market. Everything else was mediocre at best.
Once that stopped it collapsed. It came down harder than i thought it would too. We should have let those banks collapse. Sued the CEO's for mismanagement with the SEC, and we would have been out of it faster. Instead we made a couple of loan payments for them so they could dig out of debt, while burying ourselves even farther.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It the republicans fault, it's the democrats fault.
It's every Americans fault! Including me!
Fine we made mistakes, now what? Polarizing each party so they are debating purely on philosophy won't help. It will make the liberals more liberal and the conservatives more conservative.
The US culture has a trait "rugged individualism" which both helps us and hinders us. Socialism will not work in the US because of it. And because of it we need government control to stop us from going to short sighted.
We need to get away from politics and blaming "the Man" for all the problems and go out and make yourself better. Take a risk start that company you wanted to start, look harder for the job that pays better. Stop worrying about those nutjobs that the news is covering. Focus on your life and then when election time come vote for who you want. After it is over get back to your life.
All this political bickering distracts us from our real lives.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The patent troll issue needs to be addressed immediately, and that can be dealt with quickly unlike education. The stench coming from that court in Texas where the patent trolls play is affecting the entire nation. Surely most of us here on Slashdot are capable of some brilliant tech that could easily be taken away by some obscure and broad patent filed a decade ago, and don't those stories play in the back of our minds when we write code? Start to revive our mojo by starting with real patent reform that works to move the industry forward.
More pay for less work. Less work is going to lead to progress?
Where do you think progress comes from? It certainly isn't from huge multinational corporations with entrenched market positions who shoot down any idea that might skewer existing cash cows. It comes from people having enough free time and available capital to develop an idea on their own time that they can start a new company without worrying about the fiscal impact on their previous employer's existing revenue streams or whether they'll still be able to eat in eighteen months if they quit their job to go after something new.
Green tech. Because regular tech never got anyone anywhere.
Green tech is just another way of saying that we have new constraints (reduced energy budgets) which creates a market for new products better adapted to those constraints. It's a thing we need but don't yet have -- necessity is the mother of invention, yes?
Coding for a cause. Feel good about going through the motions. Produce nothing of any particular value.
Idealism never got anyone anywhere. Like those GNU people with their useless GPL that nobody uses.
Hacking. I made this cool bot that does XYZ-super-geeky thing. For hacker cred. What does "productivity" mean?
Fail.
Yeah, Facebook might not require any theory, aside from it's ad placement toolkit, but they aren't a good example. Google requires theory, cryptography requires theory, chip design requires theory, all those nice advancements in materials, batteries, etc. require MAJOR theory, etc.
We need more schools that provide the European education model, i.e. most people get in, school costs almost nothing, but they slam your ass with theory until half fail out or quit. You'll have all the time in the world for learning the practical tools once your on the job, but, except for a very few remarkable & lucky people, the glass ceiling above your career is your theoretical knowledge.
Example 1. Any comp. sci. student should've written multiple homework assignments in Haskell, C, C++, Python, and yes Java, but not only Java like so many moronic programs today.
Example 2. Any comp. sci. masters student should've once worked out & proven the correctness of an approximation algorithm for some NP-complete problem and some randomized algorithm.
There aren't too many "filler" classes at the good schools like, MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, VaTech, GaTech, etc. either. And you shouldn't be attending most liberal arts collages for technical degrees.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
You know what I think?
I think the MBA suits do not want to have anyone making more than they are. It infuriates them greatly. In 1999 I remember senior Network Administrators making 120k a year! The MBA's found out and freaked and had to assure senior management that they were better by laying them off so the managers made the most amount of money.
But it is not just the tech industry. Accountants are being poorly treated as well as lawyers. To get a CPA today you need an MBA and 2 years to study for the exam. Now they say great CPA and masters in accounting ... 35k or 40k a year! Many accountants are furious, but in the end they take these jobs because it beats 17k a year working at McDonalds. Right? Be happy you have a job.
My friend realized that he is worth more but why should an employer pay him 55k a year when someone else with 5 years experience laid off who also has a CPA and is desperate for work is willing to work for cheaper?
My point is, it i snot just tech companies but the whole US economy. You can blame the suits all you want. Fact of the matter is unless we end outsourcing or lower the corporate tax rate you will see the drain continue as each dollar spent goes overseas and never comes back. Money is leaving the country every day little by little and we need to adjust to it by realizing that there is a lot less money. A good company will setup a subsidiary overseas and keep their money their with a low tax rate and hire foreigners in that country. Nothing personal against us. It is just business and Wall Street demands it. So vote for people who will lower our tax rate well below India or China and jobs will come back and so will money. It is that simple. No one wants to hire overseas. It is just cost prohibitive to hire here.
http://saveie6.com/
- I think I'll go with "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" that most influential sentence written back in 1776 by TJ.
"Pursuit of happiness" is the most dangerous, destructive idea in the history of mankind.
Happiness is a rare feeling that is produced as a response to extraordinary positive experiences. It is not an everyday, normal occurrence. It is definitely not supposed to be "pursued". A person who believes that he can somehow capture "happiness" and be permanently happy as a result of it, will lead miserable life, and will cause trouble, destruction and death to others whom he will see as an obstacle on his path to the permanently ecstatic existence that he believes to be a norm. Or, alternatively, he will achieve his dumbass goal by constantly increasing dosage of drugs -- what would be less damaging to himself and others than actual "pursuit".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.