Here's my Axis network cam if you want to play with it:
Heh. How long did it stay up? Did it make it to the 100,000th slashdot visitor, or perish nearer the 1000 mark. Kudos for courage though...not many would dare flirt with the slashdot effect.
Honestly, I think this is a sign that anyone with any shred of dignity left should simply bid the US a fair farewell and migrate to Canada or England or any other nice, not so completely inept country.
Been there, done that. National pride/dignity/whatever played no role whatsoever.
I couldn't get much to work after reading the article, installing the plugin available then, and restarting firefox. However, when I removed and reinstalled the addon a day later, most things seem to work. There is a lot of progress being made in Linux messaging and support, and now it is quite functional.
1) Chinese is written in Kanji (pictograms). What little Kanji I learned while living in Japan worked in China as well, even though Japanese is a completely different language (and yes, I know about Hirigana, Katakana, and Romaji, but the point remains... a picture of a fish remains a picture of a fish, even if it is abstracted and has gone through a cubist phase). So being able to read the same pictograms from a thousand years ago today just means the pictogram meaning hasn't changed much, not that the language hasn't changed.
2) Even if the language hasn't changed, that doesn't mean the civilization hasn't seen its ups and downs (or even interruptions). It may mean that Mandarin is less susceptible to linguistic drift for whatever reason (cultural rigidity, writing in pictograms, grammatical self-correction, whatever). I don't speak a word of Mandarin, so I don't know one way or the other, but one thing is certain: lack of linguistic change doesn't mean a civilization hasn't ended and been rebooted, or even replaced.
In short, the culture may have endured longer than the "civilization."
Of course, all this depends on how you define civilization. 1000 years of darkness brought down upon Europe is commonly thought of as a break in civilizations, but one could argue that European civilization goes back uninterrupted to the ancient Greeks, and gloss over those little ups and downs like the sacking of Rome and the thousand years of cultural genocide that was the Christian faith.
These things are fuzzy at best, and aside from bragging rights on whichever side of Eurasia you sit, probably not worth arguing over.
What is perhaps worth considering is why, when China discovered America hundreds of years before Europe, and gunpowder thousands of years earlier, was it the European cultures that took these discoveries and turned them into spaceflight, guns, and a world empire. China wasn't any less greedy or Imperial, or any more moral, so what was it?
I suspect it was a combination of things, such as open political discourse, a move toward some form of rudimentary representative democracy, relatively wide adoption of the scientific method, and a rejection of religious political supremacy, things we often lump together under the term "the enlightenment."
Whatever "it" is, are we losing it now that we're turning our back on basic research and, more fundamentally, the scientific method (a la creationism in the US and "cultural tolerance" -- read, pandering the communicable mental illness in the form of irrational, often violent, and almost always intolerant, religions -- in Europe, and a stifling political correctness on both sides of the Atlantic that forbid people from speaking obvious truths openly, for fear of being branded racist/intolerant/islamaphobic/anti-christian/communist/socialist/whatever)...at just such a time that India and China are starting to adopted "it"?
Not sure where I come down on all this...these are probably questions that would make for several doctoral thesis for those interested, but it is interesting to ponder.
(2)Those of Linux/Firefox + ubiguity with less/no money who don't pay the browser/OS/soc network but still have their online life lived for them, so they can live in the real world
First we need decent support for Linux in Ubiquity, which doesn't seem to be immediately forthcoming. They can't seem to decide on a toolkit to use for their transparent popup window a la Mac and Windows, so those of us using a free system are, for the time being, without many of Ubiquity's features. Since I'm not going to change platforms just to try it out, that makes it a lot less interesting than it might have been.
Most of the unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux.. Linux is definately around but doesn't seem to be strong in the commercial companies.
That's so not true it makes me wonder what partisan or corporate bias you bring to the table.
I've been employed in the financial industry for some years, working for large multinational banks and hedge funds on three continents. While Solaris does have a large installed base, every employer I've worked for, without exception, is actively migrating away from Solaris to Linux. Not all third party packages are ready on Linux yet (Reuters rendezvous and Kondor+ have been culprits in the past for requiring legacy Sun systems we would otherwise have decomissioned), but just about everything UNIX in-house is written to run on Linux.
Even Virtualisation on Solaris stinks compared to Linux and even *gasp* Windows. Xen and VMWare at least allows for live migration, while Solaris virtualisation won't offer migration capabilities until "sometime mid-to-late next year" (according to the Sun rep I spoke with at a Sun Virtualisation conference in London).
I'm not saying Solaris is dead, or doesn't have a place in a corporate environment (I administer quite a few Solaris 9 and 10 servers myself), but to claim "most unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux" implies a lot of wishful thinking, or I suspect a very small, cherry picked sample base.
The only thing that looked good about the olympics is the slogan of "1 World 1 Dream".
Yeah, but whose dream, and what happens to those of us who don't share it?
At the risk of running afoul Godwin, this reminds me of "One God, One Nation, One Race" (assorted White Supremacist villages in Idaho) and "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!" (You can probably guess where that one comes from).
I'm amazed more people don't find that slogan just a little chilling.
At this time, it is the pubs who have all but destroyed us.
I wouldn't go that far. A couple of pints never hurt anyone, and the pubs in my neighbourhood are centres of creative thought and insightful discourse.
Oh, you mean republicans. I think you need a better nickname than the word most of the English speaking world outside of the US uses to refer to a bar. And while your first paragraph makes some very good points, you lose a lot of credibility in the 2nd ("sold nuke secrets" and "their usual sex parties" needs a whole lot more evidence to back up those rather extraordinary claims than you've provided). Not that I don't think its possible... I was the lone voice among all I knew who thought "Reichstag" on 9/11, while most everyone else was screaming "Pearl Harbor", and the last 7 years have certainly borne me out... but you lose all credibility making such wild claims with no evidence, links to allegations, etc. And I say this as one who wouldn't pub much at all past this president, or the current crop of neocons running the republican party.
I believe you mean freedom # -1
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...the tivo makers would switch to using BSD, or something else with a license that doesn't infringe freedom 2 (freedom to redistribute).
The GPL doesn't inhibit freedom 2 at all, unless you wish to use it to remove freedoms 0-n from everyone else.
What you're thinking about is freedom -1: The freedom to take someone else's work for free, modify it, and put onerous restrictions on everyone further along the distribution change. Or more succinctly put: the freedom to fuck your neighbour. Which yes, the GPL v2 tries to prevent, and the GPL v3 prevents more successfully.
If you are able to do a lot of abstraction and to adjust yourself to the semantics of that particular business, you just need to pick up the money from the pavement, because your competition usually consists of accenture material and generally lacks of common sense and pragmatism which is stuff that your BS should have taught you.
Exactly (and by the way, that's not an ad--those courses are free and they're useful. I did them just to learn to trade for myself, and its paid off nicely). We have the critical thinking skills, math skills, and logic skills... but IT is not where the big bucks are. Oh yes, you can make a nice living, but as you said, there's much more to be made applying our skills to other aspects of business, and one key rule of thumb is this:
The closer you are to the money, the more you make. IT is often rather distant from the money (less so if you develop or work on the trading desk, but still further away than a trader, accountant, or CEO).
Seriously, I wouldn't let the current Bear market put you off of the idea of getting into trading. Start out as a clerk or runner for a good trading firm, learn the ropes and everything you can about the markets, balanced portfolio strategies and options trading, and ride the next Bull market to the top.
If I'd known in my twenties what I know now, I would have done that. Contrary to popular myth you don't have to know exactly when to get in and get out, you just need to know how to spot opportunities and exploit them, understanding risk and how to minimize it, so that your inevitable losses are consistently dwarfed by your equally inevitable gains.
And who knows, you may find yourself honing those programming skills getting a good model put together to increase your earnings.
Frankly, as one whose made a very good living over the years as a programmer, system administrator, and project manager in the financial world, if I had it to do over again I'd go into trading. Same amount of work, similar levels of stress, similar math skills, and far greater financial rewards, the current economic troubles notwithstanding. Why make around $100k - $200k per annum when you can quite readily earn $300k - several million, and no, I'm not exaggerating.
I don't see any reason why Saudis would want to sell two barrels of oil for the price of one (that they ask - and get - today.) If the demand goes down they'd rather lower the production.
The Saudis (and others) are concerned about higher oil prices for several reasons, among them (1) the developed world is likely to develop alternative energy sources, putting them out of business sooner rather than later and (2) the world economy going into a recession (or worse) puts many of their investments at risk and reduces their wealth. Remember, most of these sheiks have long since invested years of oil profits very heavily in America, Europe, and Asia. Seeing their stocks decline to a fraction of their former value makes them a whole lot poorer than this months $130/barrel oil makes them richer.
Long term, high oil prices hurts the oil producers even more than it hurts us. Once we're weaned off oil, we won't go back, even if half their oil reserves remain in the ground. If prices go high enough, China, India, and other emerging markets will fall into this category as well, leaving OPEC no one to sell to when their oil drops back to sane levels.
This could be an irreversible trend if the US, Europe, and Japan develop other affordable energy sources... depending on the technology, China and India might choose to adopt it sooner rather than later, instead of suffering through another spike on oil costs. This may or may not happen, but one thing is certain: Saudi Arabia is damn afraid it *might* happen.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
Life requires labor. Civilized life requires even more labor. Most of that labor is unpleasant in some way. We face the grind anyway, day after day, because it keeps the ball rolling, and because it gives us the money we need to do the things we actually like doing.
Very true. And if graduates are choosing jobs other than in IT, despite their expertise, then presumably it is because industry isn't paying enough. Double the salaries offered and see how many of those graduates you attract. Eventually, if the pay is good enough, people will condescend to doing those "boring" jobs.
As things stand, IT is woefully underpaid in comparison to those MBA and middle-management hacks who bring a lot less value to the enterprise and earn a great deal more. Perhaps today's graduates recognize this, and figure if they're going to be underpaid, why not be underpaid to do something you find fulfilling instead?
Seems like they're arguably smarter than we were when we received our BS and MS degrees.
Another data point to back this up is general aviation. With rare exceptions, pilots are extremely polite to each other when determining who gets to use the runway first (and no, it's not always a given who has "right of way" when two aircraft approach the airfield from slightly different directions intending to do a straight in approach).
Now, some of that is perhaps due to a higher threshold of training and skill required before you're allowed to pilot a plane, and some is undoubtedly due to a pilot's awareness that planes touching in the air generally means death for everyone in both aircraft, but a large part is also down to the ability to communicate, and say "excuse me" or "go ahead Romeo Juliet, I'll be number two to land". The same option doesn't exist for car drivers (which is perhaps an argument for bringing CB radios back from the dead).
The sad truth is that the Americans who do realize what's happened and are just too apathetic to mount any kind of protest.
That's just not true. When Baby Bush decided to invade Iraq, tens of thousands protested in the streets of Chicago, shutting down traffic on State Street and Michigan Avenue for a time. Anyone working or living downtown in the Loop (which I did at that time) saw the protest and marvelled at its size--a sea of people stretching a dozen blocks or more filling our streets, peacefully protesting.
They got almost no mention in the news. A brief page 13 story that there had been small protests against the war in Chicago and other cities. Nary a mention on the evening news (local or national).
Why, when we have a free press that loves a big, dramatic story? Well, draw your own conclusions, or form your own conspiracy theories as you will. I don't know why. I only know it happened, as I witnessed it with my own eyes.
People do protest. The problem in America has become that most of these protests seem to go unreported or underreported. Since the whole point of protesting is to make your cause known and get media attention, the protest is thus emasculated and rendered impotent. And of course, the more impotent protests become, the less people are inclined to go out and do it.
Americans do care. In their millions. The problem is, short of armed violence, there seems little chance of making those concerns known to the wider country, much less world. And frankly, most of us don't have the stomach for armed violence, and with the Bush Interregnum coming to an end at last, most of us don't think it's necessary.
So, right or wrong, we've chosen to have our voices silenced rather than start an insurrection, and until you're willing to see your own streets burn because your media muzzles your protests, I don't think you have any place criticising us for choosing to not burn our streets.
Not that things can't get bad enough that that becomes necessary (and without a voice, the odds of that have certainly gone up), but I don't think they're anywhere near that bad yet.
Hmm...Jeremiah Wright espouses racism and anti-american hatred from the pulpit. John Hagee espouses anti-semetism, say's hitler was sent to us by God to punish the Jews and send them back to their homeland (in preparation to be destroyed in the Battle of Armageddon), refers to the catholic church as "the great Whore", and espouses hatred from the pulpit. Pope John Paul II refers to Buddhism as a stupid religion and puts the current pope in charge of shuffling pedophiles one-step ahead of the law (anyone else, in just about any jurisdiction, would be serving time for perverting the course of justice) and preaches that homosexuals are evil.
Oh yeah, "goodwill and love thy neighbor" alright.
If a cult is defined as an organization that manages to suppress all critical thought and subvert all reason, such that the cult becomes the center of it's follower's lives to the exclusion of all else, then Mormonism (LDS, FLDS, et. al.), $cientology, most forms of Islam, the Moonies, etc. certainly qualify, and what is more telling, every religion that isn't a cult aspires to become a cult.
Indeed, one might argue that religions are failed cults, and cults merely successful religions.
Anyone who has ever meditated knows that religion is hardly a prerequisite for spirituality. If there were a God, a deeper meaning to the universe, or a spiritual dimension to reality we as human beings could connect to, it is difficult if not impossible to find any organized religion, of any genre, that isn't a barrier to people establishing such a connection, as they all insist on placing themselves as the middle-man or broker of any such relationship, claiming that they (and they alone) can bring you closer to that (god|deeper meaning|spiritual connection), but of course, only if you are sufficiently obedient to whatever they say.
Which once again reinforces the point, cults are the logical culmination of religion.
Any modern day cult that builds a compound in the middle of nowhere could be said to tolerate other's views, but they don't really fit in so well when we find that they are like to marry 14 year old girls to 45 year old men. But out in the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't really bother us anymore. Or would it?
If the FLDS (or worse, the LDS Mormons who may not practice polygamy today and have a slick PR campaign that has succeeded in making them appear benign to many people, but nevertheless still plan on bringing polygamy back when their political power is sufficiently strong, and believe they'll all be practicing it in heaven, but I digress) were to establish such a colony (or be sent there by us as "undesirables", and if such a colony were to be even remotely as successful as the United States (or Australia), the world would have a serious problem. A political power (perhaps a superpower) whose philosophies are antithetical to the enlightenment much of the rest of the world takes for granted.
There are some memes you don't want to allow to fester, no matter how far away from our population centers they're located. Pedophelia, polygamy, racism, and women-as-chattel-by-God's-word, are just a few (and that's just the Mormons... how do you think the world would fare with an emergent $cientology superpower?)
Flamebait? I was BORN here [Australia] and I would have modded it funny if I had points!
It's also true. Undesirables were shipped to the Americas (where I was born) before we rebelled (and we're still stuck with the damn puritans to this day), and criminals were shipped off to Australia.
It is debatable how effective that policy was for England, but one historical lesson should be considered before we blithely start founding prison colonies elsewhere, be they in the middle of the ocean, on the moon, or wherever.
The United States grew far more prosperous and powerful than the nation which emptied itself of those "undesirables", and along some measures, Australia arguably has as well.
So be careful what you wish for. Today's seafaring colony of prisoners/intolerant jerks/religious fanatics/whatevers might be tomorrow's superpower, and we there satellite state. I shudder to think what kind of a world that would be if it were the $cientologists, Mormons, White Supremacists, Obamites, or (insert whoever you find undesirable here).
OTOH if these libertarians want to found their idea of an Ayn Randian paradise in the middle of the Pacific, I say let them. If they succeed and prosper, then they have a point we should all take note of. If they fail, we can all learn from their lessons.
[ As most of us know, Microsoft's behavior goes much further back than just this year, but this year has enough examples to make the point ]
2008:
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to ensure passage of OOXML as a "standard", in many cases overriding overwhelming votes to the contrary to railroad the standard through a corrupt and now discredited process.
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to demand monopolist's products rather than free alternative (Sugar, OS X), railroading their OS onto what was an open, educational platform to which many had donated a great deal of time and money, subverting and discrediting the project.
Recently, Blender has received overtures from Microsoft on how they might "help the project". Anyone who dares mention Microsoft's behavior these last few months, particularly with the OOXML debacle, is labeled a Microsoft basher, hothead, etc., with Microsoft proponents then labeling themselves "cooler heads" which "prevail."
Interestingly, the historical points of Microsoft's behavior are never addressed, rebutted (though in their initial contact they did reference OOXML as an open standard of the type "to which [Microsoft] is moving"). It's a clever if disgusting ad-hominem attack, aimed to smear open source and free software supporters for daring to point out these kind of unethical and destructive behaviors.
It's been a bad week. I'm starting to worry about the future of free software and open source projects, and wonder how many are going to be approached in the way blender has, and how many Microsoft might quietly absorb, subvert and sabotage from within, etc. It is certainly a strategy to gain influence over the direction and priorities of free and open source software projects, and I worry if it might not be something more... perhaps the embrace/extinguish protocol taken to a whole new, much more personal, level.
We may find ourselves particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing in economically distressed times like these, where a chunk of money (or gratis software, or sponsorship) from a large corporation might appear to be the answer to a project's difficulties, to the point where we might not even notice the strings that come attached.
So, why would Negroponte take $3/license for Microsoft's OS over $0/license for OS X? For the same reason he dumped sugar--because it gets his product through the bureaucratic doors Microsoft paid to have shut in his face otherwise. The project has been subverted and made meaningless, just as the ISO standards process has been, just as other standards have been, which has been Microsoft's intention all along.
Expect to see some of the flagship free software and open source projects "engaged" in similar ways, with "sugar" (money/support) when they deem it appropriate, and with legal and bureaucratic sticks when bribery and embracing fail. This is just getting started, folks.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my Axis network cam if you want to play with it:
Heh. How long did it stay up? Did it make it to the 100,000th slashdot visitor, or perish nearer the 1000 mark. Kudos for courage though...not many would dare flirt with the slashdot effect.
Honestly, I think this is a sign that anyone with any shred of dignity left should simply bid the US a fair farewell and migrate to Canada or England or any other nice, not so completely inept country.
Been there, done that. National pride/dignity/whatever played no role whatsoever.
I couldn't get much to work after reading the article, installing the plugin available then, and restarting firefox. However, when I removed and reinstalled the addon a day later, most things seem to work. There is a lot of progress being made in Linux messaging and support, and now it is quite functional.
On x86 yes, not on sparc.
This may be true. But two points:
1) Chinese is written in Kanji (pictograms). What little Kanji I learned while living in Japan worked in China as well, even though Japanese is a completely different language (and yes, I know about Hirigana, Katakana, and Romaji, but the point remains ... a picture of a fish remains a picture of a fish, even if it is abstracted and has gone through a cubist phase). So being able to read the same pictograms from a thousand years ago today just means the pictogram meaning hasn't changed much, not that the language hasn't changed.
2) Even if the language hasn't changed, that doesn't mean the civilization hasn't seen its ups and downs (or even interruptions). It may mean that Mandarin is less susceptible to linguistic drift for whatever reason (cultural rigidity, writing in pictograms, grammatical self-correction, whatever). I don't speak a word of Mandarin, so I don't know one way or the other, but one thing is certain: lack of linguistic change doesn't mean a civilization hasn't ended and been rebooted, or even replaced.
In short, the culture may have endured longer than the "civilization."
Of course, all this depends on how you define civilization. 1000 years of darkness brought down upon Europe is commonly thought of as a break in civilizations, but one could argue that European civilization goes back uninterrupted to the ancient Greeks, and gloss over those little ups and downs like the sacking of Rome and the thousand years of cultural genocide that was the Christian faith.
These things are fuzzy at best, and aside from bragging rights on whichever side of Eurasia you sit, probably not worth arguing over.
What is perhaps worth considering is why, when China discovered America hundreds of years before Europe, and gunpowder thousands of years earlier, was it the European cultures that took these discoveries and turned them into spaceflight, guns, and a world empire. China wasn't any less greedy or Imperial, or any more moral, so what was it?
I suspect it was a combination of things, such as open political discourse, a move toward some form of rudimentary representative democracy, relatively wide adoption of the scientific method, and a rejection of religious political supremacy, things we often lump together under the term "the enlightenment."
Whatever "it" is, are we losing it now that we're turning our back on basic research and, more fundamentally, the scientific method (a la creationism in the US and "cultural tolerance" -- read, pandering the communicable mental illness in the form of irrational, often violent, and almost always intolerant, religions -- in Europe, and a stifling political correctness on both sides of the Atlantic that forbid people from speaking obvious truths openly, for fear of being branded racist/intolerant/islamaphobic/anti-christian/communist/socialist/whatever)...at just such a time that India and China are starting to adopted "it"?
Not sure where I come down on all this...these are probably questions that would make for several doctoral thesis for those interested, but it is interesting to ponder.
Or he lives somewhere other than the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland, and has never travelled to either of those places.
Plc is somewhat analogous to GmbH or LLC elsewhere.
(2)Those of Linux/Firefox + ubiguity with less/no money who don't pay the browser/OS/soc network but still have their online life lived for them, so they can live in the real world
First we need decent support for Linux in Ubiquity, which doesn't seem to be immediately forthcoming. They can't seem to decide on a toolkit to use for their transparent popup window a la Mac and Windows, so those of us using a free system are, for the time being, without many of Ubiquity's features. Since I'm not going to change platforms just to try it out, that makes it a lot less interesting than it might have been.
Most of the unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux.. Linux is definately around but doesn't seem to be strong in the commercial companies.
That's so not true it makes me wonder what partisan or corporate bias you bring to the table.
I've been employed in the financial industry for some years, working for large multinational banks and hedge funds on three continents. While Solaris does have a large installed base, every employer I've worked for, without exception, is actively migrating away from Solaris to Linux. Not all third party packages are ready on Linux yet (Reuters rendezvous and Kondor+ have been culprits in the past for requiring legacy Sun systems we would otherwise have decomissioned), but just about everything UNIX in-house is written to run on Linux.
Even Virtualisation on Solaris stinks compared to Linux and even *gasp* Windows. Xen and VMWare at least allows for live migration, while Solaris virtualisation won't offer migration capabilities until "sometime mid-to-late next year" (according to the Sun rep I spoke with at a Sun Virtualisation conference in London).
I'm not saying Solaris is dead, or doesn't have a place in a corporate environment (I administer quite a few Solaris 9 and 10 servers myself), but to claim "most unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux" implies a lot of wishful thinking, or I suspect a very small, cherry picked sample base.
Now we know whose dream it is.
cultists don't get payed
But they do get matching outfits and killer group discounts.
Best of all, drinks are on the house.
This was all over the BBC News yesterday. What took so long?
The only thing that looked good about the olympics is the slogan of "1 World 1 Dream".
Yeah, but whose dream, and what happens to those of us who don't share it?
At the risk of running afoul Godwin, this reminds me of "One God, One Nation, One Race" (assorted White Supremacist villages in Idaho) and "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!" (You can probably guess where that one comes from).
I'm amazed more people don't find that slogan just a little chilling.
At this time, it is the pubs who have all but destroyed us.
I wouldn't go that far. A couple of pints never hurt anyone, and the pubs in my neighbourhood are centres of creative thought and insightful discourse.
Oh, you mean republicans. I think you need a better nickname than the word most of the English speaking world outside of the US uses to refer to a bar. And while your first paragraph makes some very good points, you lose a lot of credibility in the 2nd ("sold nuke secrets" and "their usual sex parties" needs a whole lot more evidence to back up those rather extraordinary claims than you've provided). Not that I don't think its possible ... I was the lone voice among all I knew who thought "Reichstag" on 9/11, while most everyone else was screaming "Pearl Harbor", and the last 7 years have certainly borne me out ... but you lose all credibility making such wild claims with no evidence, links to allegations, etc. And I say this as one who wouldn't pub much at all past this president, or the current crop of neocons running the republican party.
...the tivo makers would switch to using BSD, or something else with a license that doesn't infringe freedom 2 (freedom to redistribute).
The GPL doesn't inhibit freedom 2 at all, unless you wish to use it to remove freedoms 0-n from everyone else.
What you're thinking about is freedom -1: The freedom to take someone else's work for free, modify it, and put onerous restrictions on everyone further along the distribution change. Or more succinctly put: the freedom to fuck your neighbour. Which yes, the GPL v2 tries to prevent, and the GPL v3 prevents more successfully.
If you are able to do a lot of abstraction and to adjust yourself to the semantics of that particular business, you just need to pick up the money from the pavement, because your competition usually consists of accenture material and generally lacks of common sense and pragmatism which is stuff that your BS should have taught you.
Exactly (and by the way, that's not an ad--those courses are free and they're useful. I did them just to learn to trade for myself, and its paid off nicely). We have the critical thinking skills, math skills, and logic skills ... but IT is not where the big bucks are. Oh yes, you can make a nice living, but as you said, there's much more to be made applying our skills to other aspects of business, and one key rule of thumb is this:
The closer you are to the money, the more you make. IT is often rather distant from the money (less so if you develop or work on the trading desk, but still further away than a trader, accountant, or CEO).
How good are you at math?
Seriously, I wouldn't let the current Bear market put you off of the idea of getting into trading. Start out as a clerk or runner for a good trading firm, learn the ropes and everything you can about the markets, balanced portfolio strategies and options trading, and ride the next Bull market to the top.
If I'd known in my twenties what I know now, I would have done that. Contrary to popular myth you don't have to know exactly when to get in and get out, you just need to know how to spot opportunities and exploit them, understanding risk and how to minimize it, so that your inevitable losses are consistently dwarfed by your equally inevitable gains.
And who knows, you may find yourself honing those programming skills getting a good model put together to increase your earnings.
Frankly, as one whose made a very good living over the years as a programmer, system administrator, and project manager in the financial world, if I had it to do over again I'd go into trading. Same amount of work, similar levels of stress, similar math skills, and far greater financial rewards, the current economic troubles notwithstanding. Why make around $100k - $200k per annum when you can quite readily earn $300k - several million, and no, I'm not exaggerating.
A good place to start, including free courses (normally $50/course): http://cboe.com/LearnCenter/default.aspx
Good luck with whatever career you choose.
and I most emphatically include Obama, McCain and Clinton in that assessment.
I don't see any reason why Saudis would want to sell two barrels of oil for the price of one (that they ask - and get - today.) If the demand goes down they'd rather lower the production.
The Saudis (and others) are concerned about higher oil prices for several reasons, among them (1) the developed world is likely to develop alternative energy sources, putting them out of business sooner rather than later and (2) the world economy going into a recession (or worse) puts many of their investments at risk and reduces their wealth. Remember, most of these sheiks have long since invested years of oil profits very heavily in America, Europe, and Asia. Seeing their stocks decline to a fraction of their former value makes them a whole lot poorer than this months $130/barrel oil makes them richer.
Long term, high oil prices hurts the oil producers even more than it hurts us. Once we're weaned off oil, we won't go back, even if half their oil reserves remain in the ground. If prices go high enough, China, India, and other emerging markets will fall into this category as well, leaving OPEC no one to sell to when their oil drops back to sane levels.
This could be an irreversible trend if the US, Europe, and Japan develop other affordable energy sources ... depending on the technology, China and India might choose to adopt it sooner rather than later, instead of suffering through another spike on oil costs. This may or may not happen, but one thing is certain: Saudi Arabia is damn afraid it *might* happen.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
Life requires labor. Civilized life requires even more labor. Most of that labor is unpleasant in some way. We face the grind anyway, day after day, because it keeps the ball rolling, and because it gives us the money we need to do the things we actually like doing.
Very true. And if graduates are choosing jobs other than in IT, despite their expertise, then presumably it is because industry isn't paying enough. Double the salaries offered and see how many of those graduates you attract. Eventually, if the pay is good enough, people will condescend to doing those "boring" jobs.
As things stand, IT is woefully underpaid in comparison to those MBA and middle-management hacks who bring a lot less value to the enterprise and earn a great deal more. Perhaps today's graduates recognize this, and figure if they're going to be underpaid, why not be underpaid to do something you find fulfilling instead?
Seems like they're arguably smarter than we were when we received our BS and MS degrees.
Another data point to back this up is general aviation. With rare exceptions, pilots are extremely polite to each other when determining who gets to use the runway first (and no, it's not always a given who has "right of way" when two aircraft approach the airfield from slightly different directions intending to do a straight in approach).
Now, some of that is perhaps due to a higher threshold of training and skill required before you're allowed to pilot a plane, and some is undoubtedly due to a pilot's awareness that planes touching in the air generally means death for everyone in both aircraft, but a large part is also down to the ability to communicate, and say "excuse me" or "go ahead Romeo Juliet, I'll be number two to land". The same option doesn't exist for car drivers (which is perhaps an argument for bringing CB radios back from the dead).
The sad truth is that the Americans who do realize what's happened and are just too apathetic to mount any kind of protest.
That's just not true. When Baby Bush decided to invade Iraq, tens of thousands protested in the streets of Chicago, shutting down traffic on State Street and Michigan Avenue for a time. Anyone working or living downtown in the Loop (which I did at that time) saw the protest and marvelled at its size--a sea of people stretching a dozen blocks or more filling our streets, peacefully protesting.
They got almost no mention in the news. A brief page 13 story that there had been small protests against the war in Chicago and other cities. Nary a mention on the evening news (local or national).
Why, when we have a free press that loves a big, dramatic story? Well, draw your own conclusions, or form your own conspiracy theories as you will. I don't know why. I only know it happened, as I witnessed it with my own eyes.
People do protest. The problem in America has become that most of these protests seem to go unreported or underreported. Since the whole point of protesting is to make your cause known and get media attention, the protest is thus emasculated and rendered impotent. And of course, the more impotent protests become, the less people are inclined to go out and do it.
Americans do care. In their millions. The problem is, short of armed violence, there seems little chance of making those concerns known to the wider country, much less world. And frankly, most of us don't have the stomach for armed violence, and with the Bush Interregnum coming to an end at last, most of us don't think it's necessary.
So, right or wrong, we've chosen to have our voices silenced rather than start an insurrection, and until you're willing to see your own streets burn because your media muzzles your protests, I don't think you have any place criticising us for choosing to not burn our streets.
Not that things can't get bad enough that that becomes necessary (and without a voice, the odds of that have certainly gone up), but I don't think they're anywhere near that bad yet.
Hmm...Jeremiah Wright espouses racism and anti-american hatred from the pulpit. John Hagee espouses anti-semetism, say's hitler was sent to us by God to punish the Jews and send them back to their homeland (in preparation to be destroyed in the Battle of Armageddon), refers to the catholic church as "the great Whore", and espouses hatred from the pulpit. Pope John Paul II refers to Buddhism as a stupid religion and puts the current pope in charge of shuffling pedophiles one-step ahead of the law (anyone else, in just about any jurisdiction, would be serving time for perverting the course of justice) and preaches that homosexuals are evil.
Oh yeah, "goodwill and love thy neighbor" alright.
If a cult is defined as an organization that manages to suppress all critical thought and subvert all reason, such that the cult becomes the center of it's follower's lives to the exclusion of all else, then Mormonism (LDS, FLDS, et. al.), $cientology, most forms of Islam, the Moonies, etc. certainly qualify, and what is more telling, every religion that isn't a cult aspires to become a cult.
Indeed, one might argue that religions are failed cults, and cults merely successful religions.
Anyone who has ever meditated knows that religion is hardly a prerequisite for spirituality. If there were a God, a deeper meaning to the universe, or a spiritual dimension to reality we as human beings could connect to, it is difficult if not impossible to find any organized religion, of any genre, that isn't a barrier to people establishing such a connection, as they all insist on placing themselves as the middle-man or broker of any such relationship, claiming that they (and they alone) can bring you closer to that (god|deeper meaning|spiritual connection), but of course, only if you are sufficiently obedient to whatever they say.
Which once again reinforces the point, cults are the logical culmination of religion.
Any modern day cult that builds a compound in the middle of nowhere could be said to tolerate other's views, but they don't really fit in so well when we find that they are like to marry 14 year old girls to 45 year old men. But out in the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't really bother us anymore. Or would it?
... how do you think the world would fare with an emergent $cientology superpower?)
If the FLDS (or worse, the LDS Mormons who may not practice polygamy today and have a slick PR campaign that has succeeded in making them appear benign to many people, but nevertheless still plan on bringing polygamy back when their political power is sufficiently strong, and believe they'll all be practicing it in heaven, but I digress) were to establish such a colony (or be sent there by us as "undesirables", and if such a colony were to be even remotely as successful as the United States (or Australia), the world would have a serious problem. A political power (perhaps a superpower) whose philosophies are antithetical to the enlightenment much of the rest of the world takes for granted.
There are some memes you don't want to allow to fester, no matter how far away from our population centers they're located. Pedophelia, polygamy, racism, and women-as-chattel-by-God's-word, are just a few (and that's just the Mormons
Flamebait? I was BORN here [Australia] and I would have modded it funny if I had points!
It's also true. Undesirables were shipped to the Americas (where I was born) before we rebelled (and we're still stuck with the damn puritans to this day), and criminals were shipped off to Australia.
It is debatable how effective that policy was for England, but one historical lesson should be considered before we blithely start founding prison colonies elsewhere, be they in the middle of the ocean, on the moon, or wherever.
The United States grew far more prosperous and powerful than the nation which emptied itself of those "undesirables", and along some measures, Australia arguably has as well.
So be careful what you wish for. Today's seafaring colony of prisoners/intolerant jerks/religious fanatics/whatevers might be tomorrow's superpower, and we there satellite state. I shudder to think what kind of a world that would be if it were the $cientologists, Mormons, White Supremacists, Obamites, or (insert whoever you find undesirable here).
OTOH if these libertarians want to found their idea of an Ayn Randian paradise in the middle of the Pacific, I say let them. If they succeed and prosper, then they have a point we should all take note of. If they fail, we can all learn from their lessons.
[ As most of us know, Microsoft's behavior goes much further back than just this year, but this year has enough examples to make the point ]
... perhaps the embrace/extinguish protocol taken to a whole new, much more personal, level.
2008:
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to ensure passage of OOXML as a "standard", in many cases overriding overwhelming votes to the contrary to railroad the standard through a corrupt and now discredited process.
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to demand monopolist's products rather than free alternative (Sugar, OS X), railroading their OS onto what was an open, educational platform to which many had donated a great deal of time and money, subverting and discrediting the project.
Recently, Blender has received overtures from Microsoft on how they might "help the project". Anyone who dares mention Microsoft's behavior these last few months, particularly with the OOXML debacle, is labeled a Microsoft basher, hothead, etc., with Microsoft proponents then labeling themselves "cooler heads" which "prevail."
Interestingly, the historical points of Microsoft's behavior are never addressed, rebutted (though in their initial contact they did reference OOXML as an open standard of the type "to which [Microsoft] is moving"). It's a clever if disgusting ad-hominem attack, aimed to smear open source and free software supporters for daring to point out these kind of unethical and destructive behaviors.
It's been a bad week. I'm starting to worry about the future of free software and open source projects, and wonder how many are going to be approached in the way blender has, and how many Microsoft might quietly absorb, subvert and sabotage from within, etc. It is certainly a strategy to gain influence over the direction and priorities of free and open source software projects, and I worry if it might not be something more
We may find ourselves particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing in economically distressed times like these, where a chunk of money (or gratis software, or sponsorship) from a large corporation might appear to be the answer to a project's difficulties, to the point where we might not even notice the strings that come attached.
So, why would Negroponte take $3/license for Microsoft's OS over $0/license for OS X? For the same reason he dumped sugar--because it gets his product through the bureaucratic doors Microsoft paid to have shut in his face otherwise. The project has been subverted and made meaningless, just as the ISO standards process has been, just as other standards have been, which has been Microsoft's intention all along.
Expect to see some of the flagship free software and open source projects "engaged" in similar ways, with "sugar" (money/support) when they deem it appropriate, and with legal and bureaucratic sticks when bribery and embracing fail. This is just getting started, folks.