'This is an offensive team that the Defense Department would use to defend the nation if it were attacked in cyberspace.'
So which one is it? Offensive or defensive? Why is it that Americans can't seem to distinguish between the two? Here's a country whose "defensive" military is used entirely to bring war to foreign soil. The "Department of Defense" has not defended actual U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
Some of the above are only possible if ALL cars were self-driving. Even 20 years after the first self-driving car becomes viable, that won't happen. Hell, we still have cars from the 1930s and 1940s (and probably earlier) on the road.
Bingo. The only thing between me and doing a start-up and/or going off and inventing something is CASH. A dummy with capital will always beat a smart person without.
Why is it when housing costs go down it's always called a "crisis"? As someone who is totally priced out of the house market, I'd welcome a 50% "correction" right about now.
Loser pays is a terrible idea, unless you can guarantee that the legal system 100% of the time accurately determines who is wrong (as opposed to who has the best/most lawyers). As a person with limited resources, I would never be able to risk suing a corporation over something, because, even if I had a 1% chance of losing, that chance would mean instant bankruptcy for me. Similarly, corporations would have even more incentive to use bogus lawsuits to extract settlement money from individuals who would never be able to afford to pay both sides' lawyers.
The "lone inventor around the corner" using his patent to fight the big corporations is kind of a myth nowadays. Patents are used to stifle innovation and protect entrenched businesses, not to prevent corporations from stealing the little guy's ideas. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of patent-holders are corporations.
+5 Insightful for this? Really? OK, I get it, Slashdotters are too cool for face to face conversations. If it gets you out of the "programmer zone" it's bad. Got it.
Here's my anecdote:
The best thing my current company did for the (software) product was to get people back in the office, working together. Before, it was a mix of people offsite, in other states, in other countries. Even inside the company, people who were supposed to be working together had cubicles all over the office, on different floors and different buildings. The result? Nobody talked to each other, requirements were mis-interpreted, and every little thing had to be documented because nobody was in the room when changes were made. Decisions (code and business) that could have been made over a 15 minute conversation instead took days of E-mail chains. Engineers, marketing people, managers, etc. locked themselves in their private little worlds and sent status reports at each other, and lo and behold, nothing was getting done.
After a great deal of convincing, we ended that shit. Every significant contributor to the project (including developers, QA, project management, architecture, art, marketing, etc.) not only needs to be in the office, but they work in the same "war room". No cube walls to hide behind, no doors to lock, no screaming kids on conference calls. If there's a question about something, the person who knows is less than 20 meters away. If you need a quick over-the-shoulder code review, it's done. What is Marketing planning on calling this feature? Answered. Status reports became unnecessary, endless meetings and conference calls started going away. No more of this, "Jim is only going to be in town for three days, so we need to cram all the meetings in while he's here!" The little petty morale-killing stuff like "Why does he get to live in Utah on a California salary, while I have to pay rent in Mountain View?" went away. I can't begin to emphasize the difference this made in terms of productivity and collaboration, and morale.
Don't underestimate the power of simply getting everyone in the same room talking. Companies that do it will have an edge over companies that don't.
The alternative is, companies simply off-shoring those jobs. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a job that pays $50,000/yr than have no job and sit at home whining about how my Americanness means I DESERVE a $100,000/yr job.
Why? Because it is inevitable. There are seven billion people in this world and many are willing to do what we do for 10% of what we make. The cat is already out of the bag.
Your experience pretty much matches mine when it came to dealing with "partners" in Western Europe. Always on some kind of holiday, short days, half days on Fridays, etc. Not worth it. Not even a remote understanding of expressions like "We're trying to kick the shit out of competitors who work 12 hour days with no vacations, guys!"
...so it IS possible to make a living on an H1-B sized wage, but westerners simply aren't willing to do it. The H1-B folks then have to fill in because the average westerner won't lower themselves to accept a lower wage and [gasp] bring in a roommate or two. This whole thread reeks of protectionism.
All this attitude does is make off-shoring look more attractive than bringing in immigrant workers. As an American, it's actually in our collective best interest to take the jobs at the prevailing wages than to forego and lose lose them to immigrant workers. And it's definitely worse to fight to keep immigrants out, because that will lead to the positions being off-shored altogether. Unless you're going to fight off-shoring, too, somehow (good luck with that).
The H1-B workers are living here, too. They pay American prices for American things too. They pay the same price for milk that you do, and the same rent that you do, and the same health care costs. AND, they often send a big chunk of change home to support their families. So, how are they able to do it making so much less, while you can't?
The cost of running your website is not Google's problem. If you don't want someone downloading something from your website, don't put it on your website.
Your example of a rare outlier does not invalidate the general rule: These positions tend to not be positions you work your way into--they tend to be positions you are born into.
C[whatever]O, VP of [whatever]. But these types of positions are almost always reserved for those with a certain pedigree, certainly not for people working their way up from the factory floor. The idea that you just might go from the mail room to the board room is a fantasy designed to motivate unprivileged people into staying on the treadmill.
Go ahead and list the astronomically rare outliers that prove me wrong. For every outlier, I'd be able to point to 100 executives who had the right last name, or went to the right prep school, Ivy League undergrad, prestigious business school, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy fits: The USA is the one that is dedicating its life to punching others in the face.
So which one is it? Offensive or defensive? Why is it that Americans can't seem to distinguish between the two? Here's a country whose "defensive" military is used entirely to bring war to foreign soil. The "Department of Defense" has not defended actual U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
The great thing about Linux is... You can simply choose to not use Ubuntu. BAM! Problem solved.
Some of the above are only possible if ALL cars were self-driving. Even 20 years after the first self-driving car becomes viable, that won't happen. Hell, we still have cars from the 1930s and 1940s (and probably earlier) on the road.
Bingo. The only thing between me and doing a start-up and/or going off and inventing something is CASH. A dummy with capital will always beat a smart person without.
Why is it when housing costs go down it's always called a "crisis"? As someone who is totally priced out of the house market, I'd welcome a 50% "correction" right about now.
They're both bad employees, for different reasons.
Loser pays is a terrible idea, unless you can guarantee that the legal system 100% of the time accurately determines who is wrong (as opposed to who has the best/most lawyers). As a person with limited resources, I would never be able to risk suing a corporation over something, because, even if I had a 1% chance of losing, that chance would mean instant bankruptcy for me. Similarly, corporations would have even more incentive to use bogus lawsuits to extract settlement money from individuals who would never be able to afford to pay both sides' lawyers.
The "lone inventor around the corner" using his patent to fight the big corporations is kind of a myth nowadays. Patents are used to stifle innovation and protect entrenched businesses, not to prevent corporations from stealing the little guy's ideas. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of patent-holders are corporations.
+5 Insightful for this? Really? OK, I get it, Slashdotters are too cool for face to face conversations. If it gets you out of the "programmer zone" it's bad. Got it.
Here's my anecdote:
The best thing my current company did for the (software) product was to get people back in the office, working together. Before, it was a mix of people offsite, in other states, in other countries. Even inside the company, people who were supposed to be working together had cubicles all over the office, on different floors and different buildings. The result? Nobody talked to each other, requirements were mis-interpreted, and every little thing had to be documented because nobody was in the room when changes were made. Decisions (code and business) that could have been made over a 15 minute conversation instead took days of E-mail chains. Engineers, marketing people, managers, etc. locked themselves in their private little worlds and sent status reports at each other, and lo and behold, nothing was getting done.
After a great deal of convincing, we ended that shit. Every significant contributor to the project (including developers, QA, project management, architecture, art, marketing, etc.) not only needs to be in the office, but they work in the same "war room". No cube walls to hide behind, no doors to lock, no screaming kids on conference calls. If there's a question about something, the person who knows is less than 20 meters away. If you need a quick over-the-shoulder code review, it's done. What is Marketing planning on calling this feature? Answered. Status reports became unnecessary, endless meetings and conference calls started going away. No more of this, "Jim is only going to be in town for three days, so we need to cram all the meetings in while he's here!" The little petty morale-killing stuff like "Why does he get to live in Utah on a California salary, while I have to pay rent in Mountain View?" went away. I can't begin to emphasize the difference this made in terms of productivity and collaboration, and morale.
Don't underestimate the power of simply getting everyone in the same room talking. Companies that do it will have an edge over companies that don't.
Careful what you wish for, Slashdotters, if your job can be done from home it can be done from India.
So who would do my job while I'm wasting time reading 1000 resumes?
The alternative is, companies simply off-shoring those jobs. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a job that pays $50,000/yr than have no job and sit at home whining about how my Americanness means I DESERVE a $100,000/yr job.
Why? Because it is inevitable. There are seven billion people in this world and many are willing to do what we do for 10% of what we make. The cat is already out of the bag.
Your experience pretty much matches mine when it came to dealing with "partners" in Western Europe. Always on some kind of holiday, short days, half days on Fridays, etc. Not worth it. Not even a remote understanding of expressions like "We're trying to kick the shit out of competitors who work 12 hour days with no vacations, guys!"
...so it IS possible to make a living on an H1-B sized wage, but westerners simply aren't willing to do it. The H1-B folks then have to fill in because the average westerner won't lower themselves to accept a lower wage and [gasp] bring in a roommate or two. This whole thread reeks of protectionism.
All this attitude does is make off-shoring look more attractive than bringing in immigrant workers. As an American, it's actually in our collective best interest to take the jobs at the prevailing wages than to forego and lose lose them to immigrant workers. And it's definitely worse to fight to keep immigrants out, because that will lead to the positions being off-shored altogether. Unless you're going to fight off-shoring, too, somehow (good luck with that).
The H1-B workers are living here, too. They pay American prices for American things too. They pay the same price for milk that you do, and the same rent that you do, and the same health care costs. AND, they often send a big chunk of change home to support their families. So, how are they able to do it making so much less, while you can't?
So, use robots.txt to remove yourself from their search listings. Problem solved.
The cost of running your website is not Google's problem. If you don't want someone downloading something from your website, don't put it on your website.
$ curl http://www.cyberciti.biz/deep/link/path/yourimage.jpg -o yourimage.jpg
Am I the only person amused by the concept of "stealing" something from a website that makes it publicly available?
What's "Bing"?
It doesn't "beg the question". It "raises the question". Try harder to sound smart.
Your example of a rare outlier does not invalidate the general rule: These positions tend to not be positions you work your way into--they tend to be positions you are born into.
C[whatever]O, VP of [whatever]. But these types of positions are almost always reserved for those with a certain pedigree, certainly not for people working their way up from the factory floor. The idea that you just might go from the mail room to the board room is a fantasy designed to motivate unprivileged people into staying on the treadmill.
Go ahead and list the astronomically rare outliers that prove me wrong. For every outlier, I'd be able to point to 100 executives who had the right last name, or went to the right prep school, Ivy League undergrad, prestigious business school, etc.