, it seems to me that Moore's Law has lasted a lot longer then the throng of people who keep predicting its death.
Fidel Castro must have something to do with this. It's a Communist plot, I tell you! Too important to ignore. As soon as we're done with Iraq, let's get Cuba. It's close, it's warm, and it's a great tourist destination. North Korea can wait.
You know what this reminds me of? The Blair Witch Project. It's been the same kind of effort to create buzz in the media and on the internet, with the hope that they can get everybody to shell out for something crappy (which I did for Blair Witch, because, well... I just had to see what people were talking about). Only difference is, plunking down $7 at the multiplex and wasting a couple hours is much less a waste than plunking down $3000 and getting honked at by drivers and scowled at by pedestrians.
What software goes straight from Academia to consumer? Nothing I can think of. I don't think I've ever seen (C) University of (whatever) in a retail program, except of course BSD but that's not something that most consumers have even heard of.
Way too much of the software I've seen from Academia is placed under an "Academic use only and you can negotiate rights if you want" deal. That's even worse than GPL because when you see that "call us" business it usually means they want thousands of dollars just to let you see the code. That's kept a lot of good libraries out of shareware and forced small shops to re-invent the wheel. It would be nice if these universities published some kind of royalty schedule for small developers. If they still want the big corporations to "call them" that's fine. The big corps have the $$$.
First off the number of software companies vs other sectors is really small
RMS has used this argument to further the idea that the rights of proprietary developers are unimportant. It's essentially "might makes right" or "Proprietary software company rights aren't important because they are a minority". Placed within a larger political context, this argument not only falls apart--it becomes quite dangerous. Just substitute "black people" for "proprietary developers".
(self interest argument)
I have no disagreement with this. I've held my nose and used GPL'd software at times for this very reason, but when several roughly equal alternatives exist, I shun the GPL'd one because I disagree with the long term goals of the Free Software movement.
Furthermore do I want to sit at home each night and write some code for MS so that they might be able to sell it back to me and or overcharge my company for it. No thanks I will choose the GPL!
The problem with this argument is that it places undue emphasis on the problem of "exploitation by closing the source" (EBCS) which is really not a problem at all. Why is it not a problem? Because the relicensor can't take anything from you--they can only withhold their own work. If I take BSD and repackage it without making any changes except closing the source, this will be seen for what it is: wholesale appropriation of BSD. It won't sell because it's actually less valuable than the original BSD due to not having source.
However, if I add something to a BSD distro that makes it more useful, then I can close the source and if the change is valuable enough to offset the loss of source, I will be able to sell my distro at a higher cost based on the value I've added. I could have used the OSS development model too, but it was my choice. Competitors are free to emulate my changes too and make their changes proprietary or open. The original developer loses nothing--they still have the base source.
So, that argument falls apart because there really is no such thing as EBCS unless your were planning to charge fees for the right to license your GPL'd software under a proprietary license. But then, if you are doing that, you are not really a GPL advocate.
Let us assume for a moment that EBCS is a problem. Is it the only problem? Of course not. There are many other ways to exploit somebody. The classic definition of slavery is being compelled to work without getting paid. The only thing missing with GPL coders is the compulsion, so it's more like voluntary servitude. It makes no difference whether you enjoy the work, or if the work is Open Sourced or not. The fact of the matter is that you do work, and corporations reap the benefit on all those Linux servers. The GPL doesn't protect anybody from that form of exploitation, which (if we assume that proprietary developers are a minority) is a much larger problem than EBCS. For a more succinct version of my rebuttal to your post, see my.sig.
Thank you, and if you are concerned about your God-given Slashdot rights, please join the fight to include the Lowest Scores First option
I Think You Can Hack This Yourself
Go to your Comments preferences, and use the "Reason Modifier". Set all the ones on the right to 6.
I haven't actually tried it myself, so let us know how it works.
I'm not sure when these Modifiers appeared. My ego would like to think it was in response to a suggestion I made a while back about allowing different parts of "N-dimensonal modspace" to attract different users.
Note that the modifier hack (assuming it works as you desire) is not perfect because while you will perceive Trolls as being higly moderated, there is still nothing to reflect the fact that they have achieved a higher Trollish Karma or reached... dare I say... Troll Nirvana.:)
Now, I expect this to get modded way down, and show up at 6 from your point of view.
According to these guys there are several different names, one of which is babushka. Not to detract from the other poster, a babushka is also a grandmother and/or the type of scarf they wear. That's funny. I always thought they were called Kachinka dolls, but when I googled that, I only got these which look nothing like nesting dolls.
I can't remember what happens if you refuse to pay for the extension
That's too important not to know.
If they are simply notifying and *offering* additional service, that's good. OTOH, if they are *billing* additional service and the EULA and/or TOS requires you to accept the bill, that's bad.
This kind of thing sends up red flags with me for a very important reason: It's becoming a problem in the industry.
After paying for a year at an ISP, I got invoiced and provisioned without them asking me. I got pissed off with that, and went back to my old ISP, which always used to terminate if you didn't pay, but it turns out they auto-renew also and they don't offer you a non autorenewing contract. The same thing happened to me with webhosting--when my year lapsed, they converted to monthly rates even though I never explicitly authorized a purchase of additional service, and even though the credit card number was no longer valid due to the card having been compromised. That's right. They tried to bill an account with a compromised card. An account that I allowed to lapse, with the assumption that when the year was up, so was our relationship.
This royally pisses me off because if I don't pay for the service I don't want, then I run the risk of getting black marks on my credit rating.
I think somebody needs to look into this problem. Getting billed by the month is OK, but when I pay for a *year* of something that's a different story. It should not auto-renew; or at the very least they should offer you the option of not auto-renewing and under no circumstances should a company provision you with additional service unless you explicitly authorize it.
Otherwise, what we have is companies that basicly have an open-ended contract that gives you the "freedom of choice" between giving them a blank check, or having them trash your credit rating.
I understand that for some businesses, going down is a bigger problem than paying a little extra. However, for consumers like myself, I would rather go offline for a few days than pay more money. They should offer the choice of a hard transfer limit and/or explicitly spell out the maximum ammount of money that you will be charged if you get Slashdotted.
Until then, I wouldn't consider hosting with them. Actually, the fact that TOSs are so bad for consumers is one of the many reasons I took my site down.
We really are out to get you. ($3.75 hosting [75-hosting.com])
Yuck. They don't cut you off if you exceed a hard transfer limit. Instead they try to bully you into buying more service. What's funny is that they actually try to pitch that as a better deal. If I had some cool geeky site that got Slashdotted, I'd much rather hit the hard limit.
He already was flipping hamburgers at the Silver Diner on Franconia Road next to Springfield Mall; but before I could tell anybody, he quit and moved on somewhere.
Of course, I've never been in a situation where a GPL'd library was the *only* solution. If I were, what's to stop me from using it to write an "interpreter" for a "language" that uses the library, and then having all the "programs" that I write in that "language" be proprietary? For example, my language has one command, gnufu and the only program written in my language just calls gnufu. OK, a trivial case like that is obviously contrived to violate the GPL, but what about something more complicated like a Java implementation?
Yes, that's right. Good. Maybe we can stop fretting about deflation, which causes people to wait for prices to drop and can result in a vicious cycle of slowing production and layoffs.
How do I get in touch with my local Al Qaeda recruiter? I heard that if you fought the Americans, there was a chance you could win a free Caribbean vacation that included meals and accomodations. I bet they have plenty of chemistry sets for adults too.
For more background, see this. It's an opinion piece, but the facts in the case are indisputable. Long story short, they had good cause to search his PC before 9/11, but judges brainwashed by that other "PC" wouldn't allow it. The FBI was like "lemme, Lemme, LEMME" and then when 3000 people got killed the judge finally said "OK".
The only real story there is that the media is making it a story. Really. You can't channel surf without hitting the same redundant material about this chick and her claim. What I want to know is how do I start a crackpot group and get that much media exposure without any credible results at all? I also want to know where the real news is. I know it's out there somewhere. We have troops in Afghanistan, they are doing something, but they aren't telling us squat about it because the bandwidth is saturated with the SAME POINTLESS STORY being rebroadcast every 15 minutes.
Re:Let's hope this means the end of veal
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 2
If people were meant to be vegetarians, we would have teeth like horses: all flat. If people were meant to be carnivores, we'd have teeth like aligators: all pointy. Instead, we have a mix of pointy and flat teeth that allow us to tear meat as well as grind vegetables. Not only that, we also have many other systems in our bodies that allow us to digest both meat and vegetables. Simply put, we are evolved as omnivores and a small cadre of fad diet advocates aren't going to change the evolutionary course of an entire species in a few generations.
If it really bothers you that much that we eat meat, you have to create long-term conditions that prevent meat-eaters from reproducing and allow vegetarians to survive to reproductive age and proliferate. Government and/or social efforts like taxation and propoganda won't do it. The only thing that probably can is a massive die-off of human "prey species" like cows, pigs, and chickens. Then the entire human species would have to adopt to eating veggies, or other prey species (capibara and snake anyone?). If you really want to ensure vegitarian humanity, figure out a way to make all the animals poisonous. In the short-run, a lot of people will die of malnurishment, but the small segment of humanity that is vegetarian tolerant will survive and propogate. The animals may then continue to evolve, perhaps eventually becoming non-poisonous to humans at which point it will be a moot point because the humans will no longer eat animals.
Sometimes animals naturally evolve toxicity (and even evolve mimicry of the appearance of toxicity) to avoid becoming prey. So, it's also possible that human prey animals will become toxic on their own. You might even argue that cows have done this already, since too much red meat can cause a coronary.
Anyhow, you need about a million years and a lot of luck to make vegetarianism truly healthy, and then you are fighting a continuing battle to push evolution in your desired direction, which is what we are doing with genetic engineering. Of course, species that do genetic engineering may flunk Darwinian survival (perhaps they have in many far flung galaxies of which we are ignorant).
Less than 18 months old, I remember being forbidden to move (crawl? walk? I don't remember how) up the stairs. The only reason I know that this is a sub 18 month memory is that I am told at 18 months we moved to a different house that had no stairs!
Possibly earlier, I remember the smell of skunks and seeing an open-pit rock quarry. These are both things that were seen in Centerville, VA at the time. That's where the house with the stairs was.
True ongoing "sense of time and place" didn't form for me until around the time of my 4th birthday. Everything before that is "flashes and clips".
This is classic market bottom stuff. At the bottom, it always sucks to be a worker. I have very vivid memories of working a night-shift temp job in 1993-1994, when I had just graduated before the economy had really picked up. I remember thinking at the time that if I was being exploited, surely somebody was making out well--the corporations. So I was determined to get into stocks but didn't have the money. At one point, I had finally managed to scrape enough dough together to buy into the Netscape IPO. I was priced out on what I thought was a ridiculously high limit order. If I had managed to catch those shares on opening day, IIRC, the buyout came at twice that price. In retrospect, that particular pick wasn't the best. A friend had recommended AOL, but I couldn't see the value in it because I knew people who were just "cycling" their free disks, and AOL itself was also screwing people. I couldn't see the short-term value in companies and customers screwing eachother, but we all know now that it worked great--for a while.
Anyhow, this tech bubble is more severe than most ordinary recessions, but the rules don't change: At the bottom of the market, it always sucks to be an employee. So become an employer. If you have any money saved up from the last expansion, now is the time to buy in.
So forget all this crap about interning because you might get your foot in the door. Work at Taco Bell if you have too, and plow whatever you can save back into the market. Live with the folks if necessary. Don't buy imported beer. Don't buy beer. How do you think the immigrants do it? Read "The Millionaire Next Door". By holding back your services until you get paid, and buying stock in industries that are reaping the benefit of free or low-cost labor, you are turning the tables on what might appear to be a bad situation! By buying into the market, you become an employer without assuming the risk of forming your own start-up. It's really a great little invention, this market thing, as long as you know how and when to use it. Finally, read my.sig. It sums it up pretty well. Don't give any significant effort to the corporate community unless you have nothing better to do. Otherwise, you are better off earning a few bucks at Taco Bell and programming when you feel like it; not trying to impress some suits who might just give you a handshake and escort you out the door whenever *they* feel like it.
Remember way back in the day, when Discovery and TLC used to be all about cool shit. Remember Connections?
Boy howdy. You know what trumps Discovery and TLC now? George Mason University classes. No fooling. Some of the professors rock. I've had good reviews of stuff I learned in physics, calculus, and even economics. It's a little slow, but it's truly educational and along with the stuff that has "production value" like physics demos and slick charts/graphs you get real education.
One of the other channels I randomly surf too was running a course where you learn French just by watching videos with very little English in them. I'm not interested in this enough to actually tune in, but when I've stumbled accross it I've found myself wanting maybe to brush up on my French (4 years in highschool, long enough ago to have forgotten most of it).
Then of course there is the ARTS channel, which shows excerpts of symphonies, ballets, etc. It's almost like teasers for the classical music business, which needs all the help it can get. Honestly; orchestras really are strapped for cash. If you napster that stuff you should be shot then drawn and quartered.
Anyhow, the point is, high culture and truly educational material really can be found on cable, just not all on one channel, and not as a hugely successful commercial business.
Now let's go build some robots and smash them to see if the Brits or the Americans will win a contest. It's educational.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read my post?
, it seems to me that Moore's Law has lasted a lot longer then the throng of people who keep predicting its death.
Fidel Castro must have something to do with this. It's a Communist plot, I tell you! Too important to ignore. As soon as we're done with Iraq, let's get Cuba. It's close, it's warm, and it's a great tourist destination. North Korea can wait.
You know what this reminds me of? The Blair Witch Project. It's been the same kind of effort to create buzz in the media and on the internet, with the hope that they can get everybody to shell out for something crappy (which I did for Blair Witch, because, well... I just had to see what people were talking about). Only difference is, plunking down $7 at the multiplex and wasting a couple hours is much less a waste than plunking down $3000 and getting honked at by drivers and scowled at by pedestrians.
What software goes straight from Academia to consumer? Nothing I can think of. I don't think I've ever seen (C) University of (whatever) in a retail program, except of course BSD but that's not something that most consumers have even heard of.
Way too much of the software I've seen from Academia is placed under an "Academic use only and you can negotiate rights if you want" deal. That's even worse than GPL because when you see that "call us" business it usually means they want thousands of dollars just to let you see the code. That's kept a lot of good libraries out of shareware and forced small shops to re-invent the wheel. It would be nice if these universities published some kind of royalty schedule for small developers. If they still want the big corporations to "call them" that's fine. The big corps have the $$$.
First off the number of software companies vs other sectors is really small
RMS has used this argument to further the idea that the rights of proprietary developers are unimportant. It's essentially "might makes right" or "Proprietary software company rights aren't important because they are a minority". Placed within a larger political context, this argument not only falls apart--it becomes quite dangerous. Just substitute "black people" for "proprietary developers".
(self interest argument)
I have no disagreement with this. I've held my nose and used GPL'd software at times for this very reason, but when several roughly equal alternatives exist, I shun the GPL'd one because I disagree with the long term goals of the Free Software movement.
Furthermore do I want to sit at home each night and write some code for MS so that they might be able to sell it back to me and or overcharge my company for it. No thanks I will choose the GPL!
The problem with this argument is that it places undue emphasis on the problem of "exploitation by closing the source" (EBCS) which is really not a problem at all. Why is it not a problem? Because the relicensor can't take anything from you--they can only withhold their own work. If I take BSD and repackage it without making any changes except closing the source, this will be seen for what it is: wholesale appropriation of BSD. It won't sell because it's actually less valuable than the original BSD due to not having source.
However, if I add something to a BSD distro that makes it more useful, then I can close the source and if the change is valuable enough to offset the loss of source, I will be able to sell my distro at a higher cost based on the value I've added. I could have used the OSS development model too, but it was my choice. Competitors are free to emulate my changes too and make their changes proprietary or open. The original developer loses nothing--they still have the base source.
So, that argument falls apart because there really is no such thing as EBCS unless your were planning to charge fees for the right to license your GPL'd software under a proprietary license. But then, if you are doing that, you are not really a GPL advocate.
Let us assume for a moment that EBCS is a problem. Is it the only problem? Of course not. There are many other ways to exploit somebody. The classic definition of slavery is being compelled to work without getting paid. The only thing missing with GPL coders is the compulsion, so it's more like voluntary servitude. It makes no difference whether you enjoy the work, or if the work is Open Sourced or not. The fact of the matter is that you do work, and corporations reap the benefit on all those Linux servers. The GPL doesn't protect anybody from that form of exploitation, which (if we assume that proprietary developers are a minority) is a much larger problem than EBCS. For a more succinct version of my rebuttal to your post, see my .sig.
Thank you, and if you are concerned about your God-given Slashdot rights, please join the fight to include the Lowest Scores First option
I Think You Can Hack This Yourself
Go to your Comments preferences, and use the "Reason Modifier". Set all the ones on the right to 6.
I haven't actually tried it myself, so let us know how it works.
I'm not sure when these Modifiers appeared. My ego would like to think it was in response to a suggestion I made a while back about allowing different parts of "N-dimensonal modspace" to attract different users.
Note that the modifier hack (assuming it works as you desire) is not perfect because while you will perceive Trolls as being higly moderated, there is still nothing to reflect the fact that they have achieved a higher Trollish Karma or reached... dare I say... Troll Nirvana. :)
Now, I expect this to get modded way down, and show up at 6 from your point of view.
According to these guys there are several different names, one of which is babushka. Not to detract from the other poster, a babushka is also a grandmother and/or the type of scarf they wear. That's funny. I always thought they were called Kachinka dolls, but when I googled that, I only got these which look nothing like nesting dolls.
Slashdot--straight lines for scatological humor, stuff that splatters.
Why, just the other night I fired up Mozilla, X froze, and waddya know--Linux did #2 on my desktop.
Come on, join in. It's easy.
I can't remember what happens if you refuse to pay for the extension
That's too important not to know.
If they are simply notifying and *offering* additional service, that's good. OTOH, if they are *billing* additional service and the EULA and/or TOS requires you to accept the bill, that's bad.
This kind of thing sends up red flags with me for a very important reason: It's becoming a problem in the industry.
After paying for a year at an ISP, I got invoiced and provisioned without them asking me. I got pissed off with that, and went back to my old ISP, which always used to terminate if you didn't pay, but it turns out they auto-renew also and they don't offer you a non autorenewing contract. The same thing happened to me with webhosting--when my year lapsed, they converted to monthly rates even though I never explicitly authorized a purchase of additional service, and even though the credit card number was no longer valid due to the card having been compromised. That's right. They tried to bill an account with a compromised card. An account that I allowed to lapse, with the assumption that when the year was up, so was our relationship.
This royally pisses me off because if I don't pay for the service I don't want, then I run the risk of getting black marks on my credit rating.
I think somebody needs to look into this problem. Getting billed by the month is OK, but when I pay for a *year* of something that's a different story. It should not auto-renew; or at the very least they should offer you the option of not auto-renewing and under no circumstances should a company provision you with additional service unless you explicitly authorize it.
Otherwise, what we have is companies that basicly have an open-ended contract that gives you the "freedom of choice" between giving them a blank check, or having them trash your credit rating.
I understand that for some businesses, going down is a bigger problem than paying a little extra. However, for consumers like myself, I would rather go offline for a few days than pay more money. They should offer the choice of a hard transfer limit and/or explicitly spell out the maximum ammount of money that you will be charged if you get Slashdotted.
Until then, I wouldn't consider hosting with them. Actually, the fact that TOSs are so bad for consumers is one of the many reasons I took my site down.
We really are out to get you. ($3.75 hosting [75-hosting.com])
Yuck. They don't cut you off if you exceed a hard transfer limit. Instead they try to bully you into buying more service. What's funny is that they actually try to pitch that as a better deal. If I had some cool geeky site that got Slashdotted, I'd much rather hit the hard limit.
He already was flipping hamburgers at the Silver Diner on Franconia Road next to Springfield Mall; but before I could tell anybody, he quit and moved on somewhere.
You mean the thing was watchable and should be watchable again as soon as this story is off the front page.
Of course, I've never been in a situation where a GPL'd library was the *only* solution. If I were, what's to stop me from using it to write an "interpreter" for a "language" that uses the library, and then having all the "programs" that I write in that "language" be proprietary? For example, my language has one command, gnufu and the only program written in my language just calls gnufu. OK, a trivial case like that is obviously contrived to violate the GPL, but what about something more complicated like a Java implementation?
Yes, that's right. Good. Maybe we can stop fretting about deflation, which causes people to wait for prices to drop and can result in a vicious cycle of slowing production and layoffs.
I already told ya. Move to Texas or Oklahoma, wait for Spring.
Which is exactly what it was. I bet the guys in the bunker who run Echelon print this out and tape it up in the lunchroom for laughs.
How do I get in touch with my local Al Qaeda recruiter? I heard that if you fought the Americans, there was a chance you could win a free Caribbean vacation that included meals and accomodations. I bet they have plenty of chemistry sets for adults too.
OK, before somebody else corrects me, it was agents in a Minessota field office that wanted the warrant, and higher-ups within the FBI that denied it.
For more background, see this. It's an opinion piece, but the facts in the case are indisputable. Long story short, they had good cause to search his PC before 9/11, but judges brainwashed by that other "PC" wouldn't allow it. The FBI was like "lemme, Lemme, LEMME" and then when 3000 people got killed the judge finally said "OK".
What would happen if garbage men took the whole Summer off?
The only real story there is that the media is making it a story. Really. You can't channel surf without hitting the same redundant material about this chick and her claim. What I want to know is how do I start a crackpot group and get that much media exposure without any credible results at all? I also want to know where the real news is. I know it's out there somewhere. We have troops in Afghanistan, they are doing something, but they aren't telling us squat about it because the bandwidth is saturated with the SAME POINTLESS STORY being rebroadcast every 15 minutes.
If people were meant to be vegetarians, we would have teeth like horses: all flat. If people were meant to be carnivores, we'd have teeth like aligators: all pointy. Instead, we have a mix of pointy and flat teeth that allow us to tear meat as well as grind vegetables. Not only that, we also have many other systems in our bodies that allow us to digest both meat and vegetables. Simply put, we are evolved as omnivores and a small cadre of fad diet advocates aren't going to change the evolutionary course of an entire species in a few generations.
If it really bothers you that much that we eat meat, you have to create long-term conditions that prevent meat-eaters from reproducing and allow vegetarians to survive to reproductive age and proliferate. Government and/or social efforts like taxation and propoganda won't do it. The only thing that probably can is a massive die-off of human "prey species" like cows, pigs, and chickens. Then the entire human species would have to adopt to eating veggies, or other prey species (capibara and snake anyone?). If you really want to ensure vegitarian humanity, figure out a way to make all the animals poisonous. In the short-run, a lot of people will die of malnurishment, but the small segment of humanity that is vegetarian tolerant will survive and propogate. The animals may then continue to evolve, perhaps eventually becoming non-poisonous to humans at which point it will be a moot point because the humans will no longer eat animals.
Sometimes animals naturally evolve toxicity (and even evolve mimicry of the appearance of toxicity) to avoid becoming prey. So, it's also possible that human prey animals will become toxic on their own. You might even argue that cows have done this already, since too much red meat can cause a coronary.
Anyhow, you need about a million years and a lot of luck to make vegetarianism truly healthy, and then you are fighting a continuing battle to push evolution in your desired direction, which is what we are doing with genetic engineering. Of course, species that do genetic engineering may flunk Darwinian survival (perhaps they have in many far flung galaxies of which we are ignorant).
Bon Apetit.
Less than 18 months old, I remember being forbidden to move (crawl? walk? I don't remember how) up the stairs. The only reason I know that this is a sub 18 month memory is that I am told at 18 months we moved to a different house that had no stairs!
Possibly earlier, I remember the smell of skunks and seeing an open-pit rock quarry. These are both things that were seen in Centerville, VA at the time. That's where the house with the stairs was.
True ongoing "sense of time and place" didn't form for me until around the time of my 4th birthday. Everything before that is "flashes and clips".
This is classic market bottom stuff. At the bottom, it always sucks to be a worker. I have very vivid memories of working a night-shift temp job in 1993-1994, when I had just graduated before the economy had really picked up. I remember thinking at the time that if I was being exploited, surely somebody was making out well--the corporations. So I was determined to get into stocks but didn't have the money. At one point, I had finally managed to scrape enough dough together to buy into the Netscape IPO. I was priced out on what I thought was a ridiculously high limit order. If I had managed to catch those shares on opening day, IIRC, the buyout came at twice that price. In retrospect, that particular pick wasn't the best. A friend had recommended AOL, but I couldn't see the value in it because I knew people who were just "cycling" their free disks, and AOL itself was also screwing people. I couldn't see the short-term value in companies and customers screwing eachother, but we all know now that it worked great--for a while.
Anyhow, this tech bubble is more severe than most ordinary recessions, but the rules don't change: At the bottom of the market, it always sucks to be an employee. So become an employer. If you have any money saved up from the last expansion, now is the time to buy in.
So forget all this crap about interning because you might get your foot in the door. Work at Taco Bell if you have too, and plow whatever you can save back into the market. Live with the folks if necessary. Don't buy imported beer. Don't buy beer. How do you think the immigrants do it? Read "The Millionaire Next Door". By holding back your services until you get paid, and buying stock in industries that are reaping the benefit of free or low-cost labor, you are turning the tables on what might appear to be a bad situation! By buying into the market, you become an employer without assuming the risk of forming your own start-up. It's really a great little invention, this market thing, as long as you know how and when to use it. Finally, read my .sig. It sums it up pretty well. Don't give any significant effort to the corporate community unless you have nothing better to do. Otherwise, you are better off earning a few bucks at Taco Bell and programming when you feel like it; not trying to impress some suits who might just give you a handshake and escort you out the door whenever *they* feel like it.
Remember way back in the day, when Discovery and TLC used to be all about cool shit. Remember Connections?
Boy howdy. You know what trumps Discovery and TLC now? George Mason University classes. No fooling. Some of the professors rock. I've had good reviews of stuff I learned in physics, calculus, and even economics. It's a little slow, but it's truly educational and along with the stuff that has "production value" like physics demos and slick charts/graphs you get real education.
One of the other channels I randomly surf too was running a course where you learn French just by watching videos with very little English in them. I'm not interested in this enough to actually tune in, but when I've stumbled accross it I've found myself wanting maybe to brush up on my French (4 years in highschool, long enough ago to have forgotten most of it).
Then of course there is the ARTS channel, which shows excerpts of symphonies, ballets, etc. It's almost like teasers for the classical music business, which needs all the help it can get. Honestly; orchestras really are strapped for cash. If you napster that stuff you should be shot then drawn and quartered.
Anyhow, the point is, high culture and truly educational material really can be found on cable, just not all on one channel, and not as a hugely successful commercial business.
Now let's go build some robots and smash them to see if the Brits or the Americans will win a contest. It's educational. :)