"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
Ayn Rand
Ah yes because every man is an island unto himself, no? A tribe does not need privacy because everybody in the tribe depends on each other for survival, you can't depend on those you don't trust, you can't trust those you do not know, you cannot know those who are private.
Civilization only requires privacy because there are far too many people to know meaning you can only trust and depend on very few people. What is more fundamentally human? We evolved to live and survive in tribes not cities, how many feel at place and purposeful in society as compared to those who live in tribes? Do you really feel that Rand was a happy fulfilled person?
We can decry the actions of these teens as stupid, naive and foolish and we would probably be correct, but consider that the things a teenager most desires above all else is autonomy, purpose, and belonging. Sharing is a primal instinct that we instinctually do and emotionally require to feel close and secure to others. Civilization is a cold bitch, and it is hard to feel like an accepted member, much easier with a clique of friends that you wish to share everything with.
If you don't mind my asking, how did that all turn out for your friend? I have seen it happen where my friends wife up and left him, sabatoged his personal accounts and siphoned off all of his money, and the courts still forced him to pay her alimony despite the fact that he didn't cheat and that she worked.
Objective-C users really had no other great public forums so StackOverflow quickly became a major hub for Objective-C information.
And therein lies one of the main problems, StackOverflow is a Q&A site, not a programming forum. This doesn't help prevent the under educated masses from flooding the site with their *"PLZ TEH CODEZ!"* cancer and letting once active contributing users like me eventually begin to give up.
I know that this isn't exclusive to Objective-C developers at all, and I don't begrudge them for not having even the most rudimentary of programming skills, I begrudge them because they don't know how to ask a damn question. If I got a dollar for every time some idiot asked what was wrong without posting their code, what they have tried, and what versions of X they are using then I could retire to the Caribbean.
Like any other bubble right now, iPhone apps will plummet in value and the disgusting amount of money invested in making apps that nobody wants based on horrible ideas will dry up, leaving a large swath of unemployable idiots paying the price. Of course those of us who what the hell we are doing will be fine. It happened after the.com crash, it will again soon with mobile apps.
You are right that the market is saturated but you are terribly wrong that it is not a worthwhile business model. It all comes down to the insanely low financial barriers to entry.
With web development tools and frameworks coming to a point where interactive web applications can be built and go live in less than 6 months, sometimes with only one developer, as well as the huge variety of open source software in existence, it has never cost less to startup a business.
The potential rewards however are staggering because if you are lucky you can earn hundreds of times your initial investment. If I start up 8 different software companies and 7 of them fail, it doesn't matter if one of them ends up making 20x what I put into it. Compare that to the enormous financial investment and similar risk of failure in starting up a car company.
Software makes even more sense if you have connections with important people because despite what people think, the software making money out there right now is not always on their A game. More than likely some clever golf-course sales with people at the CEO's country club got them that million dollar contract. If you undercut them on price, it won't matter but if you blow them away in quality you will be surprised how quickly you will get noticed.
Game development is great if you like working 80+ hours per week and getting paid half of what your friends are making writing uninspiring business apps. Do yourself a favor and make sure that you REALLY like doing this sort of thing, and I mean having a serious passion for it, or else you will either not make it or you will be miserable.
To hell with game development, because I work to live, not live to work.
it's where things end up when you ignore our constitution because its inconvenient. everyone wanted the feds to have absolute power. this is them using it.
I didn't want this... the only people that wanted this are stakeholders in Big Media.
If the RIAA and MPAA have our legislature so tightly controlled and as the ever growing boycott to their overpriced junk media starts to erode away at what little baseline they have left, how long until they use their influence to create insane laws that make it illegal to boycott their product? Don't believe that it will happen? It already happened with the new healthcare legislation that PUNISHES citizens for not purchasing overpriced health insurance from a monopoly. How is that any less insane than extradition for copyright infringement?
Of course he was a manufacturer's rep so he had the luxury of carrying three lines, one for each kind of customer. Imagine the poor bastard in your software company's sales department. He suspects your product is crap, but it's all he's got to sell. No wonder he goes out and buys a nose-hair trimmer to give himself a little confidence boost. Maybe if your work were a little better, he wouldn't be so pathetic.
You hit the nail on the head right here. I started out as a manufacturers sales rep for a small boiler room accessory company, and then fell into software development later in my career. I loved my job doing sales there because the product was real, tangible, provided a great and real benefit to customers, saved them money, sometimes with an ROI of 2 years, AND it was green technology and good for the environment! I didn't even have to drink any kool-aid to believe in the product, I just naturally thought it was tops, and my organic enthusiasm helped me close deals.
I certainly never had to lie or be unethical, but at the same time if I started crunching numbers and talking figures right off the bat then nobody would listen to me. These poor saps that you describe who don't have a real product to sell are insecure, and unethical out of a need for survival and nothing more. How do you sell a product when you don't really have a real product to sell? Even if you make that sale, do you think the customer will be happy with you long term? Do you think they will upgrade? Do you think you will actually get repeat business by scamming them?
Point 1 is a very real thing but we are a large very regional country after all. Great strides are being made to improve administrative inefficiencies.
Point 3 is entirely moot as Fraud as you describe it could not exist by definition of what public healthcare would bring. The problem is that the cost that a public system would eat as a result of the homeless and poor is being pushed onto emergency rooms and healthcare providers. Running an emergency room is usually a big loss for a hospital because of this, so they charge more for procedures and visits to people who can legitimately pay, and a huge portion of this cost is paid for by insurance anyways.
Healthcare is so much more expensive than it really needs to be because of this. Hosptials can still be profitable while cutting price for procedures and visits across the board if they could operate an emergency room in the black.
Doctor salaries are high because most are required to pay for their own malpractice insurance rates. Litigation reforms then would likely not have an effect on the overall cost of the system but realistically could give a very large implicit pay boost to existing doctors as their malpractice insurance rates plummet. This likely still would not affect in lower salaries, at least for many many years in the future as downward pressure on salaries tend not to occur to grandfathered professionals but new entrants into the field.
So your solution is to force others at gunpoint to do it? I'm all for helping others but making it mandatory is evil. The ends don't justify the means.
Letting your fellow countrymen die on the street from wholly preventable conditions is a worse evil.
I've not had a ton of experience with the government supplied healthcare.
other than what I get through the military, which is GREAT
My wife had to get on Medicare because I lost my job and she was pregnant and NEEDED some type of coverage
Maybe I am missing something but both military healtchcare including the VA and Medicare are both essentially government provided healthcare. Of course the military healthcare is top-notch, our boys in uniform putting themselves in harms way deserve no less. Medicare for your wife too means it is government subsidized so while they pay out lower to providers you have the security of knowing that some scheming health insurance company isn't going to try and find a way to deny you coverage. Medicare will always be there (for the near future at least).
I am fortunate enough to have a good job which provides me private health insurance and the care I get is excellent but what really sucks about private health insurance for most people is that they live in fear of being dropped or priced out of the plan if they end up needing it too much. The appeal of a nationalized system to me is that I don't have to worry about engaging in grueling battles over the phone with insurance companies for tens of thousands of dollars when they just decide that they are not going to pay for your medical bills. Thats BS, in a civilized society I should be able to go to the hospital, leave after treatment and go on with my life. I would gladly pay higher taxes for that kind of luxury than live in fear that going to the hospital for a major problem could result in my going bankrupt.
Let me ask you a question: If this was the best way to evaluate whether someone can think critically, then why don't our finest engineering universities (e.g., MIT and Stanford) grade students by having them do all their exams at a whiteboard, while the professor or TA impatiently taps their pen on a desk while waiting for the answer?
Perhaps I should have articulated better, but since 95% of available software development jobs out there are for writing droll, technically simple business applications, the vast majority of software development jobs just have no need for an MIT or Carnegie Mellon genius. The biggest problems that most businesses face doesn't involve the need for an exceptional solution, just one that works, gets shipped out or deployed under tight deadlines, and is designed to be modified and maintained under ever changing customer needs. Whiteboarding conveys somebody who can rush through his thoughts because most of the time we have a boss breathing down our necks waiting for us to give him a technical game plan for software that needs to be out ASAFP.
For all you know, Einstein would have failed your interview. And then companies bemoan the fact that there's not enough talent. Bah! They scared 3/4 of the talent away.
First of all, companies always bemoan actually having to pay more than minimum wage for anybody. They will also complain that there is never enough talent for good programmers at a ridiculously low wage. That will never change.
Secondly, any business person in a position of hiring will tell you that it is always better to accidentally turn away Einstein than it is to accidentally hire a moron. What good is an Einstein going to do wasting away his talents working for some ass-clown? Why should Einstein stifle himself and put up with that. Einstein should take his brilliant ideas and form a startup that competes with some established product. Companies don't need a genius, they need somebody who is good enough technically and plays ball. Morons on a team though can be devastating in more ways than one.
Wow, you really hate whiteboarding don't you? I am so completely the opposite of you that I must respect your opinion because I can't relate to it at all.
Whiteboarding conveys a few things, a high level of spatial intelligence required for diagramming and modeling complex problems visually. It also is an accessory to communication about a complex design or process that a group of colleagues or lay people wish to know more about. If a candidate is whiteboarding a process for me and he silently doodles on the board then that is a problem. You are supposed to talk through the problem primarily and cement your ideas in on the board so that everybody can see a visual summary of your explanation.
The fact that you despise it means that you completely fail to understand why somebody wants an engineer who can whiteboard. It is a sign of an individual who can communicate and discuss problems on multiple facets, while somebody who just wants to demonstrate skill by typing in a text editor tells me that this person doesn't care about communicating or discussing complex ideas, they just want to showcase their skill.
You may be extremely productive writing software or some such engineering activity, but you seem like an extremely low-level task oriented person and that is not what most companies want. We want critical thinkers who engage in higher level design, thought, and communication. They don't want cowboy coders. They don't want a lone wolf.
Lobbying is basically people banding together and expressing their opinion with promises of campaign money. Im not sure how you intend to get rid of that without curtailing people's right to vote, or to speech, or to the press.
As you describe it is perfectly legitimate and legal, where it involves private citizens.
Where it involves, public officials, foreign governments, foreign individuals and entities of ANY kind, or private entities that are granted special privilege by US law (ya know, like Corporations), it should be completely and irrevocably illegal.
... and that will work until corporations lobby to pass a law making it illegal to communicate with offshore proxies that do not keep logs. How easy it would be for law enforcement to keep a blacklist of IP's and then based on ISP logs serve arrest warrants to people in this country who have communicated with these.
It's been a long time since a country have been self-sustainable on all point. The entire planet economy is linked, most countries aren't agriculturally self-sustaining and industrial production often require primary resource not available locally.
I highly doubt however that the US would blacklist spain, it would risk a row with the entire EU (if it can't bully or buy the whole EU into SOPA).
The only reason that self-sustainable countries are rare is because the US backed IMF and World Bank actively seek to subvert entire nations that ever achieve economic independence from the US-Centric Global Economy. The last one in recent memory was the Soviet Union and they fell because of outside economic forces not because of military conquest. The other independent non-capitalist nations that are still around have a deadly link keeping them in line, Venezuela needs to sell oil, North Korea is dependent on South Korea for food, etc...
This article is absolute crap and comes off as more of a rant from an unsuccessful entrepreneur with a lame idea than a legitimate logical article with a point.
True some people really never intend on ever purchasing something, and brand influence can play a role, however they are a small subset and not necessarily the one that should be targeted. If you have a good idea that sells itself, and can actually make you realize that with the premium features you will get so much more then the majority of people will have a price they are willing to pay for it.
Other factors to consider are coffee table/water cooler talk. Is your wife going to bitch at you for spending money on premium service for a Letter to Santa site? Maybe. How about if you pay for a premium Dropbox site because she struggles trying to send large groups of photos or other documents to her friends? Probably not if the price was reasonable.
Further if the free service is too restricting or hard to use then potential clients may pass it up because risking ones time evaluating a product is acceptable to most people, but god forbid we pay $2 for a month of premium access to crap software. Then you have to worry about giving them your credit card information. Then you have to worry about their customer support giving you the run around when you call in 26 days and try to cancel the subscription from automatically renewing itself. To hell with all that. Even though its only $2, and we gladly pay more for a cup of coffee without thinking, we don't have to be stuck on the phone with Starbucks in a month trying to cancel future cups of coffee that we never really wanted.
... teachers are opposed to it because the State is diverting funds from salaries to pay for it.
And so would you be in the same situation. Personally, I'd rather pay good salaries to good teachers and cut back on the technology. In my view, what they should teach students is how to access and manage information, something that could be just as easily achieved by going to the library and using paper based materials. Whether you can make a presentation with animations or similar is bloody irrelevant; when you need it, you'll pick it up in no time.
I'm no luddite - I work in IT (programming and UNIX system management) and I have worked with most of the cool technologies. What amazes me most is how little difference it makes whether you use the latest and greatest fad or some of the oldest, crustiest machinery. The really big step was when we went from no computers to the first programmable machine, and then later when networking was invented; all the rest is just glitter: nice and sometimes quite convenient, but not fundamentally important.
Shush! I don't want the powers that be to realize that almost all new technology is just glitter, because then they will stop paying for it and Americans will lose yet another large swath of jobs that just so happen to pay a living wage in this country.
Now get back to your cubicle and rewrite this entire large working web application in a slightly different programming language and framework.
PS Idaho is that state that tricked the people into approving a Sales Tax(1966) [idahoea.org] that would ALL go to education then turned around and said ohh all tax money goes into the General Fund per the State Constitution and the Legislature gets to decide how to spend it.
Vicious feedback loop. Ignorant and unaware rural farmers in Idaho don't pay attention to regional politics and elect corrupt politicians, who then play games and cut education funding, decreasing the quality of education, and thus leading to even more ignorant unaware rural farmers.
Also an early adopter of graphics calculators in the high school math class. This was well before most most math teachers and administrators realized that one could write programs on the calculator that enabled cheating on tests, and that you could link them together to distribute said programs to other students in the class.
I learned more about math and computer programming by doing this and actively cheating than by engaging in actual school work. I suppose this is only 500 times easier to do with an iPad and internet connectivity however.
... Oh man I was worried for second! I thought the summary claimed that the javascript redirected you to download Adobe Flash. I was relieved to find out that it was a fake Adobe Flash download. Far less dangerous.
I am all for people applying themselves, and I somewhat agree that we have become increasingly anti-intellectual. Intellectuals question the status quo and introduce disruptive innovation. The status quo benefits the true holders of power. True holders of power wish to protect the status quo, as this protects them, thus the true holders of power must logically be anti-intellectual.
People are people, a few will be exceptional, a sizable number super productive and industrious, some do just what it takes to get by, a good number are not predisposed to ever being productive and are perfectly content being dependent on others their entire lives. Some are just criminals and sociopaths and actively make society worse. Most people are naturally not inclined to being intellectual, so I think the premise that things are getting worse maybe a matter of perception that important decision makers and what is portrayed in media is increasingly anti-intellectual as there is a significant number of power brokers who wish anti-intellectuals to retain power in this country. It is in their best interest after all as anti-intellectuals are not forward thinking and are constantly resistant of progress and change. They don't understand progress and change, their minds are closed, and what people don't understand scares them.
Some people through all of best intentions will be leeches in life. Even if forcing them to retain some form of employment it will be menial, error prone, and with no passion or interest. One of my problems with the Libertarian ideology is that in a truly free market society these natural leeches have no place in society and might as well die in the street. It conveniently ignores and devalues an important and natural type of human personality, and thus Libertarianism is at odds with natural humanity. A free market society does nothing for these people, just casts them aside and supresses them, controls them and will create civil unrest.
Slashdot Mirror
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." Ayn Rand
Ah yes because every man is an island unto himself, no? A tribe does not need privacy because everybody in the tribe depends on each other for survival, you can't depend on those you don't trust, you can't trust those you do not know, you cannot know those who are private.
Civilization only requires privacy because there are far too many people to know meaning you can only trust and depend on very few people. What is more fundamentally human? We evolved to live and survive in tribes not cities, how many feel at place and purposeful in society as compared to those who live in tribes? Do you really feel that Rand was a happy fulfilled person?
We can decry the actions of these teens as stupid, naive and foolish and we would probably be correct, but consider that the things a teenager most desires above all else is autonomy, purpose, and belonging. Sharing is a primal instinct that we instinctually do and emotionally require to feel close and secure to others. Civilization is a cold bitch, and it is hard to feel like an accepted member, much easier with a clique of friends that you wish to share everything with.
If you don't mind my asking, how did that all turn out for your friend? I have seen it happen where my friends wife up and left him, sabatoged his personal accounts and siphoned off all of his money, and the courts still forced him to pay her alimony despite the fact that he didn't cheat and that she worked.
Objective-C users really had no other great public forums so StackOverflow quickly became a major hub for Objective-C information.
And therein lies one of the main problems, StackOverflow is a Q&A site, not a programming forum. This doesn't help prevent the under educated masses from flooding the site with their *"PLZ TEH CODEZ!"* cancer and letting once active contributing users like me eventually begin to give up.
I know that this isn't exclusive to Objective-C developers at all, and I don't begrudge them for not having even the most rudimentary of programming skills, I begrudge them because they don't know how to ask a damn question. If I got a dollar for every time some idiot asked what was wrong without posting their code, what they have tried, and what versions of X they are using then I could retire to the Caribbean.
Like any other bubble right now, iPhone apps will plummet in value and the disgusting amount of money invested in making apps that nobody wants based on horrible ideas will dry up, leaving a large swath of unemployable idiots paying the price. Of course those of us who what the hell we are doing will be fine. It happened after the .com crash, it will again soon with mobile apps.
You are right that the market is saturated but you are terribly wrong that it is not a worthwhile business model. It all comes down to the insanely low financial barriers to entry.
With web development tools and frameworks coming to a point where interactive web applications can be built and go live in less than 6 months, sometimes with only one developer, as well as the huge variety of open source software in existence, it has never cost less to startup a business.
The potential rewards however are staggering because if you are lucky you can earn hundreds of times your initial investment. If I start up 8 different software companies and 7 of them fail, it doesn't matter if one of them ends up making 20x what I put into it. Compare that to the enormous financial investment and similar risk of failure in starting up a car company.
Software makes even more sense if you have connections with important people because despite what people think, the software making money out there right now is not always on their A game. More than likely some clever golf-course sales with people at the CEO's country club got them that million dollar contract. If you undercut them on price, it won't matter but if you blow them away in quality you will be surprised how quickly you will get noticed.
Game development is great if you like working 80+ hours per week and getting paid half of what your friends are making writing uninspiring business apps. Do yourself a favor and make sure that you REALLY like doing this sort of thing, and I mean having a serious passion for it, or else you will either not make it or you will be miserable.
To hell with game development, because I work to live, not live to work.
it's where things end up when you ignore our constitution because its inconvenient. everyone wanted the feds to have absolute power. this is them using it.
I didn't want this... the only people that wanted this are stakeholders in Big Media.
If the RIAA and MPAA have our legislature so tightly controlled and as the ever growing boycott to their overpriced junk media starts to erode away at what little baseline they have left, how long until they use their influence to create insane laws that make it illegal to boycott their product? Don't believe that it will happen? It already happened with the new healthcare legislation that PUNISHES citizens for not purchasing overpriced health insurance from a monopoly. How is that any less insane than extradition for copyright infringement?
Of course he was a manufacturer's rep so he had the luxury of carrying three lines, one for each kind of customer. Imagine the poor bastard in your software company's sales department. He suspects your product is crap, but it's all he's got to sell. No wonder he goes out and buys a nose-hair trimmer to give himself a little confidence boost. Maybe if your work were a little better, he wouldn't be so pathetic.
You hit the nail on the head right here. I started out as a manufacturers sales rep for a small boiler room accessory company, and then fell into software development later in my career. I loved my job doing sales there because the product was real, tangible, provided a great and real benefit to customers, saved them money, sometimes with an ROI of 2 years, AND it was green technology and good for the environment! I didn't even have to drink any kool-aid to believe in the product, I just naturally thought it was tops, and my organic enthusiasm helped me close deals.
I certainly never had to lie or be unethical, but at the same time if I started crunching numbers and talking figures right off the bat then nobody would listen to me. These poor saps that you describe who don't have a real product to sell are insecure, and unethical out of a need for survival and nothing more. How do you sell a product when you don't really have a real product to sell? Even if you make that sale, do you think the customer will be happy with you long term? Do you think they will upgrade? Do you think you will actually get repeat business by scamming them?
Point 1 is a very real thing but we are a large very regional country after all. Great strides are being made to improve administrative inefficiencies. Point 3 is entirely moot as Fraud as you describe it could not exist by definition of what public healthcare would bring. The problem is that the cost that a public system would eat as a result of the homeless and poor is being pushed onto emergency rooms and healthcare providers. Running an emergency room is usually a big loss for a hospital because of this, so they charge more for procedures and visits to people who can legitimately pay, and a huge portion of this cost is paid for by insurance anyways. Healthcare is so much more expensive than it really needs to be because of this. Hosptials can still be profitable while cutting price for procedures and visits across the board if they could operate an emergency room in the black.
Doctor salaries are high because most are required to pay for their own malpractice insurance rates. Litigation reforms then would likely not have an effect on the overall cost of the system but realistically could give a very large implicit pay boost to existing doctors as their malpractice insurance rates plummet. This likely still would not affect in lower salaries, at least for many many years in the future as downward pressure on salaries tend not to occur to grandfathered professionals but new entrants into the field.
I just ran out mod points but PLEASE MOD PARENT UP!
can't afford their own healthcare
So your solution is to force others at gunpoint to do it? I'm all for helping others but making it mandatory is evil. The ends don't justify the means.
Letting your fellow countrymen die on the street from wholly preventable conditions is a worse evil.
I've not had a ton of experience with the government supplied healthcare.
other than what I get through the military, which is GREAT
My wife had to get on Medicare because I lost my job and she was pregnant and NEEDED some type of coverage
Maybe I am missing something but both military healtchcare including the VA and Medicare are both essentially government provided healthcare. Of course the military healthcare is top-notch, our boys in uniform putting themselves in harms way deserve no less. Medicare for your wife too means it is government subsidized so while they pay out lower to providers you have the security of knowing that some scheming health insurance company isn't going to try and find a way to deny you coverage. Medicare will always be there (for the near future at least).
I am fortunate enough to have a good job which provides me private health insurance and the care I get is excellent but what really sucks about private health insurance for most people is that they live in fear of being dropped or priced out of the plan if they end up needing it too much. The appeal of a nationalized system to me is that I don't have to worry about engaging in grueling battles over the phone with insurance companies for tens of thousands of dollars when they just decide that they are not going to pay for your medical bills. Thats BS, in a civilized society I should be able to go to the hospital, leave after treatment and go on with my life. I would gladly pay higher taxes for that kind of luxury than live in fear that going to the hospital for a major problem could result in my going bankrupt.
Let me ask you a question: If this was the best way to evaluate whether someone can think critically, then why don't our finest engineering universities (e.g., MIT and Stanford) grade students by having them do all their exams at a whiteboard, while the professor or TA impatiently taps their pen on a desk while waiting for the answer?
Perhaps I should have articulated better, but since 95% of available software development jobs out there are for writing droll, technically simple business applications, the vast majority of software development jobs just have no need for an MIT or Carnegie Mellon genius. The biggest problems that most businesses face doesn't involve the need for an exceptional solution, just one that works, gets shipped out or deployed under tight deadlines, and is designed to be modified and maintained under ever changing customer needs. Whiteboarding conveys somebody who can rush through his thoughts because most of the time we have a boss breathing down our necks waiting for us to give him a technical game plan for software that needs to be out ASAFP.
For all you know, Einstein would have failed your interview. And then companies bemoan the fact that there's not enough talent. Bah! They scared 3/4 of the talent away.
First of all, companies always bemoan actually having to pay more than minimum wage for anybody. They will also complain that there is never enough talent for good programmers at a ridiculously low wage. That will never change.
Secondly, any business person in a position of hiring will tell you that it is always better to accidentally turn away Einstein than it is to accidentally hire a moron. What good is an Einstein going to do wasting away his talents working for some ass-clown? Why should Einstein stifle himself and put up with that. Einstein should take his brilliant ideas and form a startup that competes with some established product. Companies don't need a genius, they need somebody who is good enough technically and plays ball. Morons on a team though can be devastating in more ways than one.
Wow, you really hate whiteboarding don't you? I am so completely the opposite of you that I must respect your opinion because I can't relate to it at all.
Whiteboarding conveys a few things, a high level of spatial intelligence required for diagramming and modeling complex problems visually. It also is an accessory to communication about a complex design or process that a group of colleagues or lay people wish to know more about. If a candidate is whiteboarding a process for me and he silently doodles on the board then that is a problem. You are supposed to talk through the problem primarily and cement your ideas in on the board so that everybody can see a visual summary of your explanation.
The fact that you despise it means that you completely fail to understand why somebody wants an engineer who can whiteboard. It is a sign of an individual who can communicate and discuss problems on multiple facets, while somebody who just wants to demonstrate skill by typing in a text editor tells me that this person doesn't care about communicating or discussing complex ideas, they just want to showcase their skill.
You may be extremely productive writing software or some such engineering activity, but you seem like an extremely low-level task oriented person and that is not what most companies want. We want critical thinkers who engage in higher level design, thought, and communication. They don't want cowboy coders. They don't want a lone wolf.
"A good technical foot soldier can extrapolate the reasons behind good high-level technical decisions"
You mean that someone did business while golfing?
Most of the the business agreements that keep you employed occur because of golf course politics and salesmanship.
Lobbying is basically people banding together and expressing their opinion with promises of campaign money. Im not sure how you intend to get rid of that without curtailing people's right to vote, or to speech, or to the press.
As you describe it is perfectly legitimate and legal, where it involves private citizens.
Where it involves, public officials, foreign governments, foreign individuals and entities of ANY kind, or private entities that are granted special privilege by US law (ya know, like Corporations), it should be completely and irrevocably illegal.
... and that will work until corporations lobby to pass a law making it illegal to communicate with offshore proxies that do not keep logs. How easy it would be for law enforcement to keep a blacklist of IP's and then based on ISP logs serve arrest warrants to people in this country who have communicated with these.
It's been a long time since a country have been self-sustainable on all point. The entire planet economy is linked, most countries aren't agriculturally self-sustaining and industrial production often require primary resource not available locally.
I highly doubt however that the US would blacklist spain, it would risk a row with the entire EU (if it can't bully or buy the whole EU into SOPA).
The only reason that self-sustainable countries are rare is because the US backed IMF and World Bank actively seek to subvert entire nations that ever achieve economic independence from the US-Centric Global Economy. The last one in recent memory was the Soviet Union and they fell because of outside economic forces not because of military conquest. The other independent non-capitalist nations that are still around have a deadly link keeping them in line, Venezuela needs to sell oil, North Korea is dependent on South Korea for food, etc...
This article is absolute crap and comes off as more of a rant from an unsuccessful entrepreneur with a lame idea than a legitimate logical article with a point.
True some people really never intend on ever purchasing something, and brand influence can play a role, however they are a small subset and not necessarily the one that should be targeted. If you have a good idea that sells itself, and can actually make you realize that with the premium features you will get so much more then the majority of people will have a price they are willing to pay for it.
Other factors to consider are coffee table/water cooler talk. Is your wife going to bitch at you for spending money on premium service for a Letter to Santa site? Maybe. How about if you pay for a premium Dropbox site because she struggles trying to send large groups of photos or other documents to her friends? Probably not if the price was reasonable.
Further if the free service is too restricting or hard to use then potential clients may pass it up because risking ones time evaluating a product is acceptable to most people, but god forbid we pay $2 for a month of premium access to crap software. Then you have to worry about giving them your credit card information. Then you have to worry about their customer support giving you the run around when you call in 26 days and try to cancel the subscription from automatically renewing itself. To hell with all that. Even though its only $2, and we gladly pay more for a cup of coffee without thinking, we don't have to be stuck on the phone with Starbucks in a month trying to cancel future cups of coffee that we never really wanted.
... teachers are opposed to it because the State is diverting funds from salaries to pay for it.
And so would you be in the same situation. Personally, I'd rather pay good salaries to good teachers and cut back on the technology. In my view, what they should teach students is how to access and manage information, something that could be just as easily achieved by going to the library and using paper based materials. Whether you can make a presentation with animations or similar is bloody irrelevant; when you need it, you'll pick it up in no time.
I'm no luddite - I work in IT (programming and UNIX system management) and I have worked with most of the cool technologies. What amazes me most is how little difference it makes whether you use the latest and greatest fad or some of the oldest, crustiest machinery. The really big step was when we went from no computers to the first programmable machine, and then later when networking was invented; all the rest is just glitter: nice and sometimes quite convenient, but not fundamentally important.
Shush! I don't want the powers that be to realize that almost all new technology is just glitter, because then they will stop paying for it and Americans will lose yet another large swath of jobs that just so happen to pay a living wage in this country.
Now get back to your cubicle and rewrite this entire large working web application in a slightly different programming language and framework.
PS Idaho is that state that tricked the people into approving a Sales Tax(1966) [idahoea.org] that would ALL go to education then turned around and said ohh all tax money goes into the General Fund per the State Constitution and the Legislature gets to decide how to spend it.
Vicious feedback loop. Ignorant and unaware rural farmers in Idaho don't pay attention to regional politics and elect corrupt politicians, who then play games and cut education funding, decreasing the quality of education, and thus leading to even more ignorant unaware rural farmers.
Also an early adopter of graphics calculators in the high school math class. This was well before most most math teachers and administrators realized that one could write programs on the calculator that enabled cheating on tests, and that you could link them together to distribute said programs to other students in the class.
I learned more about math and computer programming by doing this and actively cheating than by engaging in actual school work. I suppose this is only 500 times easier to do with an iPad and internet connectivity however.
... Oh man I was worried for second! I thought the summary claimed that the javascript redirected you to download Adobe Flash. I was relieved to find out that it was a fake Adobe Flash download. Far less dangerous.
I am all for people applying themselves, and I somewhat agree that we have become increasingly anti-intellectual. Intellectuals question the status quo and introduce disruptive innovation. The status quo benefits the true holders of power. True holders of power wish to protect the status quo, as this protects them, thus the true holders of power must logically be anti-intellectual.
People are people, a few will be exceptional, a sizable number super productive and industrious, some do just what it takes to get by, a good number are not predisposed to ever being productive and are perfectly content being dependent on others their entire lives. Some are just criminals and sociopaths and actively make society worse. Most people are naturally not inclined to being intellectual, so I think the premise that things are getting worse maybe a matter of perception that important decision makers and what is portrayed in media is increasingly anti-intellectual as there is a significant number of power brokers who wish anti-intellectuals to retain power in this country. It is in their best interest after all as anti-intellectuals are not forward thinking and are constantly resistant of progress and change. They don't understand progress and change, their minds are closed, and what people don't understand scares them.
Some people through all of best intentions will be leeches in life. Even if forcing them to retain some form of employment it will be menial, error prone, and with no passion or interest. One of my problems with the Libertarian ideology is that in a truly free market society these natural leeches have no place in society and might as well die in the street. It conveniently ignores and devalues an important and natural type of human personality, and thus Libertarianism is at odds with natural humanity. A free market society does nothing for these people, just casts them aside and supresses them, controls them and will create civil unrest.