"Do you realize how racist that sounds? Everybody you claim to be a good programmer is essentially from a predominantly Caucasian country."
Facts are not racist. So... as you say the causes are probably geographical and political in nature. So what? Did GP say otherwise? No. Any "racism" exists only in your own mind.
If you have been watching the international job boards, as I have, you would see the trend too. More and more employers posting jobs for "North American or European programmers only." (Unfairly, I admit, excluding Australia, which has its fair share of decent programmers.)
They do that for good reasons. And the reasons aren't racist. After all... these are the same companies that formerly hired those third-world workers in the first place.
No, the reasons are economic: turns out that when your outsourced labor produces low-quality goods and are notoriously unreliable, then they aren't so "cheap" after all.
The U.S. economy saw its most productive years when it employed almost exclusively U.S. workers and their wages were, on average, THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD.
It's last year's gripe. Lots of companies have been bringing IT (or programming in particular; for the most part IT never left) back home. For a couple of good reasons: by and large, they have discovered that the "cheap" outsourcing is unreliable (often dowsn't deliver) and of poor quality.
Being a freelancer, I have fished the international programming job boards a lot over the last few years. And a growing trend is for those hiring to post: "North American or European programmers only."
They would not be doing that if they had not been repeatedly burned by "cheap" outsourcing.
I am from a mid-sized city in the west. I took a job near a major eastern U.S. city, because it had good (so I thought) advancement opportunities and much better pay. I was not prepared for the sticker shock of actually living there. My pay went up about 75%, but my standard of living actually went down, and the people in the company treated me like a peon. I eventually saved up enough to move back west.
Today, there are LOTS of companies in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere that want to hire people like me. I see job postings all the time. And the salaries look attractive... to people who have never actually had to live in those places.
I have been saying for years now that for jobs like programming, companies need to learn how to outfit themselves to work with telecommuters. Most of them would like the experience if done properly, and they could find more talented programmers than if they insisted on them relocating to a place they do not want to live, with an outrageous cost of living to boot.
And no, telecommuting is not the same as foreign outsourcing. You are still a full employee of the company, with the same benefits as everyone else.
The guild system -- followed by early trade unions, which were an extension of the same idea -- was a horrible, abusive system. I would not wish it on anybody.
Guilds were not created to help workers. Guilds were created to keep tradecrafts secret and expensive. They drove prices up, were terribly abusive to apprentices (that was part of the point... THEY got cheap unskilled labor) and kept common workers (who would have brought prices down through competition) OUT.
If you think guilds were good, for anybody but the master craftsmen, you haven't read your history very carefully.
The whole point here is that they AREN'T cheaper. You train them, they leave. Because they want MORE money.
But for that more money, you could have hired someone with experience in the first place.
It still amounts to managers wanting to get something on the cheap... then bitching when they can't find what they want, at the rates they want to pay.
"Goverment services pays salaries to empleyees( who spends or save the), or contractors and goods for projects, so...yes...spending to influence the economy, even if it is indirectly.
And there are millions of people who gets their paycheck and thousands, tens of thousands.are added each year."
The strong implication here is that government spending somehow positively influences the economy. No, you didn't say so, in so many words. But if you weren't implying it there would have been no reason to word it this way.
"And tax cuts dosent really help the economy...as i said...TAX cuts gives more profits margins, if you didnt have tax cuts...you have less...so less profit margins means more incentive to expand."
LESS profit margin is incentive to expand??? And you are trying to say that *I* don't understand economics?
Here's a hint for you: I have been studying political and economic history for many years now. I daresay I have a bit of a clue about what goes on. And less profit is not reason for a business to expand. It doesn't work that way. I mean, that's not even in the ballpark.
Don't misunderstand me: I don't mind the mod of "funny". But the fact that it WAS modded funny just shows that people don't know their history of the Constitution.
Seriously. This is a portion of history that seems to have been neglected. But I can give you a hint: many things are probably not how you think they are. And many things the government and the news tell you are wrong.
"The constitution does not define the wording of a declaration of war. "Yeah, nuke them if you want," is a completely valid declaration of war as much as "we the whateverith Congress decide as our second unanimous act (after our first act of giving ourselves pay raises next term) to declare war on Elbonia.""
Perhaps. But handing the decision-making power to the President is not a declaration of war of ANY kind. It is nothing more than abdication of responsibility.
In a usability test I read about the other day (TechCrunch I believe, but I don't remember for sure, and don't have a link saved), new users hated Gnome, did not much care for Unity, but found KDE to be "pleasantly familiar".
Among experienced users: they almost invariably hated Unity, many of them liked Gnome, but the consensus was still that KDE was pretty clearly the winner.
The Constitution does not give Congress authority to delegate their war-making powers to ANYONE else, including the President.
If this can legitimately be considered "warfare", then there is no question whatever that it is unconstitutional. The "War Powers Act" notwithstanding... it is unconstitutional, too. You can't use one unconstitutional law to justify another.
If Congress hasn't declared war, then it's not a Constitutional (legal) war. Period. And that means we haven't had a legal war in over 60 years.
But then if it has to be TOO specific, it will not (or should not, anyway) pass the obviousness test. Utter failure on the part of the Patent Office to properly enforce the obviousness test in recent years has led to no end of chaos.
When I first tried Ubuntu, years ago, I didn't like the Gnome desktop very much. I installed the Kubuntu desktop, tried switching between them a few times, and settled on the KDE. I have seen no reason to go back. Unity has nothing to offer me, and so far I have never been a big fan of Gnome.
I agree with Kjella. Ubuntu does offer a choice, and it's called Kubuntu.
And if you install regular Ubuntu with Unity and don't like it (and most people don't, I think), then install KDE and you're good to go in a few short minutes.
Of course the "laws" that make it so are themselves unconstitutional... but so what's new?
This kind of BS is precisely why we need someone like Ron Paul as President. Any of the other candidates (all of them "more of the same", despite their campaign rhetoric) would just give us... more of the same.
Didn't ANYBODY but me notice this? That the drones are apparently hangared -- and more importantly flown from -- a naval base?
The military has absolutely no place being involved in any kind of domestic surveillance at all. This is by far the MOST worrisome aspect of the whole thing! Yet nobody else yet has even mentioned it.
"The final minutes of 447 are very well documented."
Yes, they are. And if you follow those links I posted in my other replies (I am not going to post them again) you will see that the plane had been transmitting that its ADIRU was malfunctioning, and it is also known that the autopilot was not functional at the time of the crash. Whether the failing ADIRU caused that condition is a matter of speculation, but it has happened on other Airbuses, sometimes with tragic consequences. Mostly, though, on the A320, not the 330s.
I am not saying that the computer malfunction was the "proximate cause" of the crash. But the computer did malfunction. That much is also, as you say, very well-documented.
I'm afraid you are spouting pure shite - no aircraft would be certified by either the FAA or the EASA if your stance was correct
That's speculation, not a factual argument. Do you set the rules for the FAA? Is the FAA infallible? (I'll stick with them since I'm more familiar with them than the EASA.)
"There is a reason that there are so many independent power generation systems onboard a modern (1970s onwards) aircraft, and there is a reason that those systems are checked and certified - there has been zero incidents where an aircraft has completely and utterly lost power during any stage of flight."
No shit, Sherlock. Where did I state otherwise? I mentioned myself that you are SOL either way, if your power goes completely out, including the ram turbo. I guess you missed that part?
I "am *very* familiar with the Airbus control systems, and your assertion that the trim wheel is useless unless in stable horizontal flight just screams that you know fuck all about what you are talking about. You can use the trim wheel to fully control the airframe in all circumstances where you would have to do so with the elevators, because the forces you have to exert during direct mechanical linkages to the elevators would break your arms on a large civil airplane and involve leverage forces that you could not exert from the tiny control columns on modern aircraft."
Really? I won't argue with you about it, but if so, then it's unlike the trimwheel in just about every other aircraft I have ever heard about, in all of which the trimwheel controls either separate small trim surfaces, or the entire surface but only in a very small range. (Hint: that's where the name "trim" came from.) The situations I am talking about were like the one that happened some years back, in which failure of an ADIRU caused the control systems to put the plane in a 30-degree nosedive. Good luck disabling the computers and pulling out of that in time, if you aren't at altitude. You'd better be at altitude if you lost all power including the generator anyway, otherwise you'd never get the turbo deployed, and that trimwheel is all you'd have for pitch.
"I'd love you to show us any cases of an Airbus crash that was attributed to computer failure - you won't find one. And I dare you to trot out the Habsheim A320 crash..."
Glad you said "attributed to" rather than proven, since the causes are often not proven.
Let's start off with Air France flight 447, which as I stated previously, had transmitted earlier that its ADIRU was malfunctioning. The only unusual thing here was that it was a 330.
The autopilot was not functioning at the time of the crash of 447 (probably due to that failed ADIRU). Guess what? That's a computer failure. Although I admit that does not prove that it was the proximate cause of the crash. It certainly DOES mean that the crash has "been attributed" to computer failure.
But ADIRU failures, while they can't be said to be "common", are not exactly what you would call extremely rare on the Airbus, either. See the FAA ruling further down. There was one failure in a Quantas flight a few years ago, in which 51 people were injured due to the computer malfunction caused by a failed ADIRU. Not a crash, though... not that time. But don't take my word for it:
Chortle, yourself. Have you ever heard of reductio ad absurdum?
"Goverment services pays salaries to empleyees( who spends or save the), or contractors and goods for projects, so...yes...spending to influence the economy, even if it is indirectly."
So if government spending is so great for the economy, why doesn't everybody work for the government, eh?
What's that you say? That would not work? Why? I see... then there would be nobody to pay taxes to the government, so the government could not hand out that paycheck.
The point is proven, man. Government spending HURTS production. It does NOT "grow" the economy. Hey, if mainstream economists were so smart, how did we get into the situation we are in? Seriously, ask yourself. They've been spending more than ever before, and it still hasn't worked. Why? Here's a hint: it never has.
"And there are millions of people who gets their paycheck and thousands, tens of thousands.are added each year."
Right. And I've already pointed out the flaw in that logic. If it were so great for the economy, why don't TWICE as many people work for the government? In fact, why not doesn't everybody? Then the economy would be really BOOMING, right?
Um... no.
The government has only 3 ways to pay somebody: (1) take money (taxes) from somebody else who worked for it, (2) borrow the money, or (3) print the money. Number 1 is anti-production and anti-jobs, and therefore hurts the economy. 2 leads to excessive debt, and 3 is inflationary. Take your pick. None of the three "help" the economy in ANY way. The government has been trying to spend its way out of recessions since nineteen-twenty-f***ing-nine and it has never worked. FDR's own Treasury Secretary thought he was a complete loon for his spending programs, and wrote in his diary about what a disaster they had been for the economy during the Depression. And they've tried it again and again and again, for 80 years now... without positive results.
"Thousands of companies big and small that...YOU GUESSED IT, makes MORE MONEY(or sometimes don't) and...unless they are happy with their current profit margins(padded by tax cuts) they will expand their operations in some way."
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! "Padded by tax cuts"??? Pardon me while I ROFL.
First, nobody's profit margin gets "padded" by tax cuts. Taxes only TAKE FROM the profit margin. If you get a tax cut, all that means is that the government is stealing LESS of your profit. "Padding" indeed. It is to laugh. Second, this assertion completely contradicts your earlier statements. If a tax cut helps the economy, then government spending can't help the economy. You are arguing out of both sides of your mouth. You simply can't have that both ways, dude. The real world doesn't work that way.
And if it weren't for government spending, those "thousands" of companies would be tens or even hundreds of thousands.
No, it doesn't. First, despite bogus GDP figures you get from government, government spending is not "the economy". Second, the real economy expands through savings, capital investment and production of goods. All 3 of which are harmed by excessive government spending.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do you realize how racist that sounds? Everybody you claim to be a good programmer is essentially from a predominantly Caucasian country."
Facts are not racist. So... as you say the causes are probably geographical and political in nature. So what? Did GP say otherwise? No. Any "racism" exists only in your own mind.
If you have been watching the international job boards, as I have, you would see the trend too. More and more employers posting jobs for "North American or European programmers only." (Unfairly, I admit, excluding Australia, which has its fair share of decent programmers.)
They do that for good reasons. And the reasons aren't racist. After all... these are the same companies that formerly hired those third-world workers in the first place.
No, the reasons are economic: turns out that when your outsourced labor produces low-quality goods and are notoriously unreliable, then they aren't so "cheap" after all.
The U.S. economy saw its most productive years when it employed almost exclusively U.S. workers and their wages were, on average, THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD.
Coincidence? I doubt it very much.
It's last year's gripe. Lots of companies have been bringing IT (or programming in particular; for the most part IT never left) back home. For a couple of good reasons: by and large, they have discovered that the "cheap" outsourcing is unreliable (often dowsn't deliver) and of poor quality.
Being a freelancer, I have fished the international programming job boards a lot over the last few years. And a growing trend is for those hiring to post: "North American or European programmers only."
They would not be doing that if they had not been repeatedly burned by "cheap" outsourcing.
Been there, done that.
I am from a mid-sized city in the west. I took a job near a major eastern U.S. city, because it had good (so I thought) advancement opportunities and much better pay. I was not prepared for the sticker shock of actually living there. My pay went up about 75%, but my standard of living actually went down, and the people in the company treated me like a peon. I eventually saved up enough to move back west.
Today, there are LOTS of companies in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere that want to hire people like me. I see job postings all the time. And the salaries look attractive... to people who have never actually had to live in those places.
I have been saying for years now that for jobs like programming, companies need to learn how to outfit themselves to work with telecommuters. Most of them would like the experience if done properly, and they could find more talented programmers than if they insisted on them relocating to a place they do not want to live, with an outrageous cost of living to boot.
And no, telecommuting is not the same as foreign outsourcing. You are still a full employee of the company, with the same benefits as everyone else.
The guild system -- followed by early trade unions, which were an extension of the same idea -- was a horrible, abusive system. I would not wish it on anybody.
Guilds were not created to help workers. Guilds were created to keep tradecrafts secret and expensive. They drove prices up, were terribly abusive to apprentices (that was part of the point... THEY got cheap unskilled labor) and kept common workers (who would have brought prices down through competition) OUT.
If you think guilds were good, for anybody but the master craftsmen, you haven't read your history very carefully.
"Resistance to learning new things often increases with age and in computer work, learning new things is always a requirement."
It's no more a problem in computer work than it is in any other industry. It's a people problem, not a profession problem.
Some people will keep learning. Some people will not.
The whole point here is that they AREN'T cheaper. You train them, they leave. Because they want MORE money.
But for that more money, you could have hired someone with experience in the first place.
It still amounts to managers wanting to get something on the cheap... then bitching when they can't find what they want, at the rates they want to pay.
"Goverment services pays salaries to empleyees( who spends or save the), or contractors and goods for projects, so...yes...spending to influence the economy, even if it is indirectly.
.are added each year."
And there are millions of people who gets their paycheck and thousands, tens of thousands
The strong implication here is that government spending somehow positively influences the economy. No, you didn't say so, in so many words. But if you weren't implying it there would have been no reason to word it this way.
"And tax cuts dosent really help the economy...as i said...TAX cuts gives more profits margins, if you didnt have tax cuts...you have less...so less profit margins means more incentive to expand."
LESS profit margin is incentive to expand??? And you are trying to say that *I* don't understand economics?
Here's a hint for you: I have been studying political and economic history for many years now. I daresay I have a bit of a clue about what goes on. And less profit is not reason for a business to expand. It doesn't work that way. I mean, that's not even in the ballpark.
Don't misunderstand me: I don't mind the mod of "funny". But the fact that it WAS modded funny just shows that people don't know their history of the Constitution.
Seriously. This is a portion of history that seems to have been neglected. But I can give you a hint: many things are probably not how you think they are. And many things the government and the news tell you are wrong.
"Fun fact: The United States has only formally declared war 5 times!
(our last one was WWII, but that's closer to 70 years now)"
Precisely my point.
"The constitution does not define the wording of a declaration of war. "Yeah, nuke them if you want," is a completely valid declaration of war as much as "we the whateverith Congress decide as our second unanimous act (after our first act of giving ourselves pay raises next term) to declare war on Elbonia.""
Perhaps. But handing the decision-making power to the President is not a declaration of war of ANY kind. It is nothing more than abdication of responsibility.
In a usability test I read about the other day (TechCrunch I believe, but I don't remember for sure, and don't have a link saved), new users hated Gnome, did not much care for Unity, but found KDE to be "pleasantly familiar".
Among experienced users: they almost invariably hated Unity, many of them liked Gnome, but the consensus was still that KDE was pretty clearly the winner.
The Constitution does not give Congress authority to delegate their war-making powers to ANYONE else, including the President.
If this can legitimately be considered "warfare", then there is no question whatever that it is unconstitutional. The "War Powers Act" notwithstanding... it is unconstitutional, too. You can't use one unconstitutional law to justify another.
If Congress hasn't declared war, then it's not a Constitutional (legal) war. Period. And that means we haven't had a legal war in over 60 years.
But then if it has to be TOO specific, it will not (or should not, anyway) pass the obviousness test. Utter failure on the part of the Patent Office to properly enforce the obviousness test in recent years has led to no end of chaos.
When I first tried Ubuntu, years ago, I didn't like the Gnome desktop very much. I installed the Kubuntu desktop, tried switching between them a few times, and settled on the KDE. I have seen no reason to go back. Unity has nothing to offer me, and so far I have never been a big fan of Gnome.
No, according to Canonical themselves, the "whole reason" they went with Unity is that they didn't like the new Gnome.
I agree with Kjella. Ubuntu does offer a choice, and it's called Kubuntu.
And if you install regular Ubuntu with Unity and don't like it (and most people don't, I think), then install KDE and you're good to go in a few short minutes.
Of course the "laws" that make it so are themselves unconstitutional... but so what's new?
This kind of BS is precisely why we need someone like Ron Paul as President. Any of the other candidates (all of them "more of the same", despite their campaign rhetoric) would just give us... more of the same.
Fine... but the article didn't say "Coast Guard", it said naval base.
Didn't ANYBODY but me notice this? That the drones are apparently hangared -- and more importantly flown from -- a naval base?
The military has absolutely no place being involved in any kind of domestic surveillance at all. This is by far the MOST worrisome aspect of the whole thing! Yet nobody else yet has even mentioned it.
Slashdot, what has happened to you?
"The final minutes of 447 are very well documented."
Yes, they are. And if you follow those links I posted in my other replies (I am not going to post them again) you will see that the plane had been transmitting that its ADIRU was malfunctioning, and it is also known that the autopilot was not functional at the time of the crash. Whether the failing ADIRU caused that condition is a matter of speculation, but it has happened on other Airbuses, sometimes with tragic consequences. Mostly, though, on the A320, not the 330s.
I am not saying that the computer malfunction was the "proximate cause" of the crash. But the computer did malfunction. That much is also, as you say, very well-documented.
Please see my other replies. I'm simply quoting other people who are supposed to know much more about this stuff than I do.
I'm afraid you are spouting pure shite - no aircraft would be certified by either the FAA or the EASA if your stance was correct
That's speculation, not a factual argument. Do you set the rules for the FAA? Is the FAA infallible? (I'll stick with them since I'm more familiar with them than the EASA.)
"There is a reason that there are so many independent power generation systems onboard a modern (1970s onwards) aircraft, and there is a reason that those systems are checked and certified - there has been zero incidents where an aircraft has completely and utterly lost power during any stage of flight."
No shit, Sherlock. Where did I state otherwise? I mentioned myself that you are SOL either way, if your power goes completely out, including the ram turbo. I guess you missed that part?
I "am *very* familiar with the Airbus control systems, and your assertion that the trim wheel is useless unless in stable horizontal flight just screams that you know fuck all about what you are talking about. You can use the trim wheel to fully control the airframe in all circumstances where you would have to do so with the elevators, because the forces you have to exert during direct mechanical linkages to the elevators would break your arms on a large civil airplane and involve leverage forces that you could not exert from the tiny control columns on modern aircraft."
Really? I won't argue with you about it, but if so, then it's unlike the trimwheel in just about every other aircraft I have ever heard about, in all of which the trimwheel controls either separate small trim surfaces, or the entire surface but only in a very small range. (Hint: that's where the name "trim" came from.) The situations I am talking about were like the one that happened some years back, in which failure of an ADIRU caused the control systems to put the plane in a 30-degree nosedive. Good luck disabling the computers and pulling out of that in time, if you aren't at altitude. You'd better be at altitude if you lost all power including the generator anyway, otherwise you'd never get the turbo deployed, and that trimwheel is all you'd have for pitch.
"I'd love you to show us any cases of an Airbus crash that was attributed to computer failure - you won't find one. And I dare you to trot out the Habsheim A320 crash..."
Glad you said "attributed to" rather than proven, since the causes are often not proven.
Let's start off with Air France flight 447, which as I stated previously, had transmitted earlier that its ADIRU was malfunctioning. The only unusual thing here was that it was a 330.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/air-france-crash-pits-pilot-brains-against-computers-taking-over-cockpits.html
The autopilot was not functioning at the time of the crash of 447 (probably due to that failed ADIRU). Guess what? That's a computer failure. Although I admit that does not prove that it was the proximate cause of the crash. It certainly DOES mean that the crash has "been attributed" to computer failure.
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280090068/Air-France-Airbus-crash-system-pitot-sensors-a-factor
But ADIRU failures, while they can't be said to be "common", are not exactly what you would call extremely rare on the Airbus, either. See the FAA ruling further down. There was one failure in a Quantas flight a few years ago, in which 51 people were injured due to the computer malfunction caused by a failed ADIRU. Not a crash, though... not that time. But don't take my word for it:
"Goverment services pays salaries to empleyees( who spends or save the), or contractors and goods for projects, so...yes...spending to influence the economy, even if it is indirectly."
So if government spending is so great for the economy, why doesn't everybody work for the government, eh?
What's that you say? That would not work? Why? I see... then there would be nobody to pay taxes to the government, so the government could not hand out that paycheck.
The point is proven, man. Government spending HURTS production. It does NOT "grow" the economy. Hey, if mainstream economists were so smart, how did we get into the situation we are in? Seriously, ask yourself. They've been spending more than ever before, and it still hasn't worked. Why? Here's a hint: it never has.
"And there are millions of people who gets their paycheck and thousands, tens of thousands .are added each year."
Right. And I've already pointed out the flaw in that logic. If it were so great for the economy, why don't TWICE as many people work for the government? In fact, why not doesn't everybody? Then the economy would be really BOOMING, right?
Um... no.
The government has only 3 ways to pay somebody: (1) take money (taxes) from somebody else who worked for it, (2) borrow the money, or (3) print the money. Number 1 is anti-production and anti-jobs, and therefore hurts the economy. 2 leads to excessive debt, and 3 is inflationary. Take your pick. None of the three "help" the economy in ANY way. The government has been trying to spend its way out of recessions since nineteen-twenty-f***ing-nine and it has never worked. FDR's own Treasury Secretary thought he was a complete loon for his spending programs, and wrote in his diary about what a disaster they had been for the economy during the Depression. And they've tried it again and again and again, for 80 years now... without positive results.
"Thousands of companies big and small that...YOU GUESSED IT, makes MORE MONEY(or sometimes don't) and...unless they are happy with their current profit margins(padded by tax cuts) they will expand their operations in some way."
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! "Padded by tax cuts"??? Pardon me while I ROFL.
First, nobody's profit margin gets "padded" by tax cuts. Taxes only TAKE FROM the profit margin. If you get a tax cut, all that means is that the government is stealing LESS of your profit. "Padding" indeed. It is to laugh. Second, this assertion completely contradicts your earlier statements. If a tax cut helps the economy, then government spending can't help the economy. You are arguing out of both sides of your mouth. You simply can't have that both ways, dude. The real world doesn't work that way.
And if it weren't for government spending, those "thousands" of companies would be tens or even hundreds of thousands.
No, it doesn't. First, despite bogus GDP figures you get from government, government spending is not "the economy". Second, the real economy expands through savings, capital investment and production of goods. All 3 of which are harmed by excessive government spending.