So why do you continue to shoot your mouth off about it, using your qualifications in one field in which you have a valid claim to earned authority in an attempt to promote a non-scientific opinion in another field in which you can stake no legitimate claim ?
Do science like everyone else does - conduct research, publish your findings in legitimate peer reviewed journals and publicly answer your critics to the scientific community's satisfaction- or shut the fuck up.
Yeah but the boomers won't be alive then. Hell, the Koch brothers won't be alive in 10 years. What do they care? I got mine while I was alive, fuck you all, suckers.
I have a dream.
I have a dream where one day the people who today, in editorials and online, deny science, deny global warming will be forced to personally, individually, away from and distinct from the rest of the population be forced to directly bear the consequences of their beliefs. I have a dream .
I have a dream that one day the people who deny evolution will also be systematically and permanently denied the medicine and treatments which exists only because doctors and researchers applied evolutionary theory to the problems of diseases . I have a dream.
I have a dream that each individual, no matter who or how small, will be given the opportunity to live out in full the consequences of what they today advocate for the rest of us and the rest of us will live out the consequences of our own decisions, unencumbered by the science deniers who used to live freely amongst us.
Please. Institutions are about as humorless and paranoid as it gets. I am surprised the mental health professionals at NASA didn't read the lyrics to that song and conclude that they had to remotely put this guy down.
I must say though, anonymous person posting over tor does leave a little credibility to be desired
Just the opposite. Few people can afford to tell the truth the The Machine That Never Forgets and also sign their real name to it. It's amazing to me that people don't understand the genuine social utility of real anonymity. That's where what is unsayable gets said. That's where the truth gets told.
It's just a recognition that immigration can be used as a tool in class warfare. It's a very old story- consider the Chinese brought here to work on the railroads by the robber barons.
*Your* cognitive dissonance comes from the fact that *you* think liberals are all for unlimited immigration . The facts are just the opposite. It's the right wing / libertarian CATO Institute and their mouthpiece Dan Griswold who are constantly pushing for- in their own words "unlimited free flow of people, services and goods across borders". Because you know, people are just another good.
Sorry but the party line in liberal-land is that multinational corporations want to dissolve the borders in order to create a sense of rootlessness in the population thereby disenfranchising them from the politics of the nation. A constantly moving, migrant population of workers whose only constant is the corporation which deigns to employ them is their target, final state.
This is why corporations move young families around so much, especially when the kids are young. That's when young parents will bond with other young parents and set down roots and form post-college, lifelong friendships . You join the PTA, get involved in church, get involved with the community you live in etc etc etc.
Oh no no no, none of that serves the corporate interest. They want the only constant thing in your life to be them and your only allegiance to be to them. They have consciously done this for decades now. They want company men, not citizens.
What liberals want is to export labor and environmental standards so that immigration is curtailed because Mexico, say is prosperous instead of the NAFTA -created fucking failed narco state it is. I wonder where all the NAFTA cheerleaders are, you know, the ones who said that NAFTA would turn Mexico and central America into this wonderful place of 1st world prosperity within a generation. What GDP increase there is goes in the pockets of guys like Carlos Slim. The average Mexican is more fucked than ever. Of course they come up here.
As far as H1B goes, I only large employers pretend it's not a Big Lie intended to depress wages and displace pesky American programmers. They do the same thing with supermodels BTW , oh and they did the same thing with chefs also. It's a very old game, just new to you, and your congressman knows all about it and he/she approves being from the 1% and all.
... component owners are generally openly hostile to outside patches: if you're a dev, accepting an outside patch makes your lead angry (due to the need to maintain this patch and to justify in in shiproom the unplanned design change), makes test angry (because test is on the hook for making sure the change doesn't break anything, and you just made work for them), and PM is angry (due to the schedule implications of code churn). There's just no incentive to accept changes from outside your own team. You can always find a reason to say "no," and you have very little incentive to say "yes."'"
Yeah, that's exactly true in open source sw also, especially the projects maintained by larger corporations. All the devs are payroll with a lot to lose and nothing to gain in just the ways outlined in the article.
Add to that the devs are also clubby in the extreme. They are easily slighted in online communication and it takes just one sufficiently high level dev branding you as undesirable for any reason and you're done.
Believe me I've seen this happening from the inside and to people who just wanted to learn and contribute to our project. The human mind is a wondrous thing and apparently you don't have to actually meet someone in person in order to develop an irrational hatred of them . I have watched as our own prickly pear in the hierarchy, a guy with effective hire/fire power over others bad mouths an outsider and the result is that no one is going to be caught dead helping that person online much less think about accepting that person's contribs.
We all know,even if only unconsciously, that this is the politics of open source. You see that knowledge leaking out in the obsequious responses hopeful acolytes give to being abused, curtly replied to or insulted online by some gate keeper of the project. People just take it because they have to and when they can't take it anymore, when they've worn out their paper-thin welcome, they just stop appearing.
People come to wield extraordinary power in OS projects because generally they're the one person who knows about X. Its their world and they make up the rules. There is precious little redundancy WRT dev knowledge, build knowledge, module knowledge etc etc and the devs like it that way.
Unfortunately, for a large segment of the population, that kind of power leads directly to despotism. Wikipedia is often cited as having this problem WRT Wikipedians with super powers, so it's not limited to just writing code.
The price we pay is hard to see because it's in what never happens- innovation. Innovation is the worst thing for a project, on top of all the other reasons the OP cited, there's potential prestige that would flow to the innovator that a lot of payroll devs would be jealous of. Anything that smells like innovation is unconsciously threatening to them. It's just a natural fact that if your cycles aren't sucked up by an overabundance of ordinary programming duties you have a better chance of a reconceptualizing a problem more broadly You see this everywhere too. In a lot of fields the people who run the experiments aren't the ones who think them up . That falls on lab workers. The researchers who make great advances aren't the ones who run the classes and grade the papers and homework, that falls to the TA.
Meanwhile, what is erstwhile the innovator supposed to do? That person hardly has the power to fork a large project and the studies of projects which have been forked by charismatic outsiders show that, almost universally, forks are ultimately abandoned , maybe some contribs folded back in, but more generally just fail owing to a lack of resources.
The likelihood of this outcome is also unconscious knowledge for most devs and heavily influences their interactions with project owners. In the end, those project owners are really as much gatekeepers / people whose egos need to be pleased and never ever offended as any corporate boss.
He doesn't have a "value system" as normal people mean that concept. How many times does he need to prove that to everyone? Why do people sign up for FB? Does anyone really trust that when his ship starts sinking, he won't post a 3.am. *privacy policy update* and sell absolutely everything about you to the highest bidder who in turn just wants to mine your data to create a "character profile" and sell it to, say, your potential future employers? Or that Zuck will just do that himself ?
FB is one gigantic blackmailing data collection machine without the blackmail part. The profit will be derived from "concluding" things about your character and proclivities which will follow you, haunt you, limit you until the day you die .
You offer one piece of *evidence* an uncited statistic: *double digiits*.
Being a good slashdot denizen, of course I tried to confirm or refute this this claim.
There is zero evidence that *double digit percentages of employees* engaged in any misconduct or were even interviewed. I wonder where you got that statistic.
The full transcripts, number of tapes , minutes of each tape, location of each tape is publicly available because the tapes were turned over to the police as a condition for O'Keefe's immunity from criminal prosecution.
What they revealed was that O'Keefe systematically doctored and edited the tapes to produce guilt where there was clearly none.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy
Points arising-
They did not interview *double digit percentages* of ACORN's lower level employees or employees of any type.
O'Keefe was NOT in "pimp garb " as it appears in the video when he was addressing ACORN employees, he was actually in a suit and tie.
O'Keefe was sued in court by one of his victims and lost to the tune of $100,000.
From the totality of the scam that O'Keefe and Giles ran , I conclude the following.
O'Keefe and Giles are classic, textbook sociopaths.
http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
Not only did they run the ACRON scam and vicitimize the individual ACORN workers, but they also victimized civil society itself by destroying a wel-respected, law-abiding participant in that society.
O'Keefe has admitted the reason he went after ACRON was because they were engaged in voter registration.
O'Keefe was arrested at the Capitol for breaking into the telephone exchange there in an apparent attempt to tap the phone lines.
Everyone form Forbes to MediaMatters has concluded the same thing about James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles- they're lowlife scammers -
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/03/08/james-okeefe-pays-100000-to-acorn-employee-he-smeared-conservative-media-yawns/http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/02/17/james-okeefe-and-the-myth-of-the-acorn-pimp/160485http://wonkette.com/505026/wonket-sexclusive-totally-blameless-crime-stopper-james-okeefe-to-pay-100000-to-acorn-criminal
Fuck you.
Fuck you. Education is a benefit to all of society which gets paid back by advances in technology and the industry creation which results. This is so basic it's not even worth arguing about. Education should be 100% free paid for in full by the government who should exert cost controls and force universities to live with them.
This is how other nations do it. The cost of the crippling debt imposed on students is a drag on the economy. The resulting student loan debt is NOTHING but the next bubble unless you take seriously that 1 in 60 of all dollars in the world (all money that is) SHOULD naturally be American student loan debt, that statistic sounds about right to you.
This war isn't going to stop until the universities and ther power they wield over society is done. On the way, all these publishers are just collateral damage.
That's what you get for setting yourself up to try to profit by endebting people before they've even been given a chance to start their lives.
I am sure university admins and the text book publishing industry get their rocks off when they think of how well their economic hit-man tactics work on people stupid enough , er make that young enough, to buy their line that they're an absolute necessity to participate in a modern economy at any price. I am sure the craggy 60 year old admins and tenured creeps who walk around campus get some deviant sexual thrill from contemplating how fucked all the smiling young people around them are without any of them even knowing it and how for the next 30 years they'll be paying and and all of their spare income to support their lavish lifestyles and gold plated retirement deals....
The monster needs to be starved to death. It's money supply lines need to be crippled, broken and finally cut off, it's legitimacy destroyed. College is a scam. Textbooks are a scam. The people perpetrating these scams should be prosecuted under RICO statute, found guilty and then jailed.
You're playing games with the word *they*. They , the offenders- were identified as low level workers. They- the IRS- was not aware of what *they* - the culpable people- were doing.
So when you say *they* did this, be clear who *they* are. It was not the IRS as an organization, from the top-down. It was low level workers.
In case you're from Mars- this is frequently how organizations work with Earthlings.
You can DEPEND on the fact that this has been done in the opposite way to the opposite side before. If this kind of abuse is permitted structurally, then this is not the first time.
The solution has to be structural, because it's structural problem (which permitted people to do this). The last thing anyone wants is the IRS being used as a tool for personal vendettas. No one wants that and frankly I am surprised that this is not strictly made impossible and frankly I expect them to *make it so*.
Notice that this tactic of attacking an organization via the deeds iof its lowest workers s very similar to what was done with ACORN. After repeatedly fishing for a low level employee who would act inappropriately on camera, James O'Keefe finally settled for someone who appeared to be acting inappropriately (but who actually called the police after O'Keefe and his confederate left).
Of course they're going to try to gin this up into a second term killing "scandal" *it goes all the way to the top!!!* * we have the smoking gun!!!*
It's what they did to Clinton with with Monica Lewinsky. They take as their model what happened to Nixon with Watergate. They have tried this with *every single Democratic President * since Watergate. The difference is of course that Nixon was a genuine crook who genuinely broke the law and genuinely tried to use the power of the government to cover it up and genuinely provoked a Constitutional crisis.
They need to kill anything that provides textbooks for free or they wont survive. We don't even have to wonder about this goal, we just have to wonder how they'll try to execute on it. . My best guess is embrace,extend then murder- like \Microsoft tried to do with Java when it started out.
They'll offer their *versions* then their *versions* will be (all but) mandatory.
We can defeat this. We can defeat anything they try to do. We can take down textbooks, then course credit, then finally the whole degree granting system. It's days are numbered and if, through legislative fiat- the final refuge of scoundrels- say through mandatory *accreditation* for anything calling itself an "educational degree" then other nations who aren't owned lock stock and barrel by the 1% sociopath class, which at this point pretty well describes higher education and all the industries and personalities around it :
"University endowments and teachersâ(TM) pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
The previously unreported investments mean that education professionals are able to profit twice off the same student: first by hiking the cost of tuition, then through dividends and higher valuations on their holdings in Sallie Mae, the largest student lender and loan servicer in the country, which profits by charging relatively high interest rates on its loans and not refinancing high-rate loans after students graduate and get well-paying jobs."
all those other nations and other people won't be following their lead and America can enjoy its status as an educational and economic backwater of graft corruption and crony capitalism.
Get fucking real. The whole purpose of warrants is to stop the government from prying into private affairs . People clearly consider their email private (passwords) and parts of their online social networks private (and part s not) . Are you really going to tell them that it's all just an illusion, ha ha, GOTCHA? It's not a game. It's not a technicality. you and the DOJ are heedlessly fucking with the foundational legitimacy of the government which is nothing ore than the consent of the governed.
A nation is not a a natural fact, a kind of trap that people are born into and can't get out of. It's an agreed upon structure that holds only so long as all those people who you think have just been fooled and who you think are fools for thinking their private information is private , so long as all those people approve of the government. Past that, if the DOJ and people like you PUT all those OTHER people past that, then the nation ceases to be legitimate and , a little later, ceases to be.
Please live in reality, not some lawyerly technocratic lobbyist-llike game of GOTCHA, SUCKER! because lawyers and lobbyists forget that the BASIS of their power is not really the government at all, it's the People.
Magnets of every form are not a free form of energy. This is a trick using magnets. Maybe something very efficient will come out of it. Maybe it's just cool. Maybe it will lead to other things. What it won't lead to is a reversal of the laws of thermodynamics.
I fucking love my tablet as a reading device. Battery lasts forever. Text size is awesome. Trillions of interesting PDFs to be read. Tablets are fantastic for on-the-go the consumption of highly technical material. I don't see myself not needing that in 8 years and about the only thing that will replace my need for a tablet is e-paper.
"- but in that case the examiner was accepting bribes from a competitor of the claimant so clearly the law was broken."
You know this happens all the time. It just stands to reason. You submit a patent. The examiner notifies the company who pays him. They submit a patent. The examiner rejects your patent a bunch of times , meanwhile, the other patent gets processed. Or backdated . Or whatever. I mean, as an insidier is there anything seriously in place to prevent that kind of thing from being done by anyone arrogant enough to try it?
When you look at the LIBOR scandal and how that went on with FULL KNOWLEDGE of people like Tim Geitner , and you look at the banks giving out what they themselves called liar loans and you look at what went on in Enron and Global Crossing and the S and L scandals and the known-to-be-fake ratings the credit rating agencies were handing out up til 2008 exchange for "payment of services"... I mean.. if anyone prior to any of those scandals has said "I'll be THIS is what they do " they would have been called paranoid and worse.
The patent office is ripe for systematic abuse by corporations who stand to make billions from that abuse. How are they doing it? I don't know. But you KNOW just Joe Blow submitting his Good Idea is going to result in the multinational ending up with the patent, or one very similar or a new strategic patent rapidly submitted thereafter well before Joe Blow's patent makes it through the review process that renders Joe Blows patent useless. Or they backdate patents submitted by their handlers.... or whatever it is the multinationals are paying off examiners and their managers to do.
You KNOW it's true in your bones. We ALL know it's true and that's it's just a matter of time before we find out the exact details.
"So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on. It is perfectly fine to limit these items, to make sure there ARE "have-nots". People don't HAVE to have every single goddam song in their library."
There will always be "have nots" because there isn't time to consume all existing products. Those people form Venn diagrams whose circles don't overlap.
You can see clearly that people are fantastically different from each other based on the arbitrary path they've taken through the same culture and the ideas and norms they've been exposed to just by watching the news.
Case in point- the sorority sister's mad rant email. The very reason this is an object of fascination is because her behavior is no far out of the norm, her concerns so fantastically removed from the experience of people as to be unreal and seemingly insane. Yet people from her subculture are defending her and saying it was a shame that someone from that subculture defected and passed along the email.
Even if we did have one dominant culture, history shows that subcultures with radically different values exist and thrive. In fact, some people argue that we seek out, create, value and sustain such mini-cultures because it harkens back to the small tribes we evolved to live in; it fits and is just *right* and feels personal in ways that are deeply meaningful to us.
Reality as it's given to us by society and interpreted through rationality IS depressing. The secret is - you don't stop there, you keep going. deeper.
Employers are largely composed of con men and criminals. Ask any IRS agent about it; they just take this as an accepted fact going in and they're not wrong. I have worked for upwards of 20 employers of various descriptions from flipping burgers to mega corps and I can say with certainty that each and every one of them was some species of scammer.
Congress listens to them at all because Congress is more of the same- ambitious men who want money, women and power. Anything that gets in the way- in this case paying Americans American wages instead of pretending there's a desperate STEM labor shortage and flooding the market with H1Bs- is a total non-starter for them. They don't even think twice about it- "oh... here's how you run THIS scam..."
There's not really more to it than that. Employers are liars through and through and the companies they create are in a constant game of cat and mouse with the law, with their customers and with their employees.
It's genetic and what we need to find is a genetic cure for it. We need to tone down the sociopathic impulses that drive people and tone up the empathetic ones. Doing that will be THE achievement of the 21st century.
It's not panacea, but any little movement in that direction would yield huge savings in law enforcement, regulation, societal disruption and a massive increase in egalitarian outcomes. We can then take all that saved energy and money and attention and put it on creating even better things and circumstances for ourselves.
People from future generations will look at our literature and TV and movies and culture and be glad they didn't now just as we're glad we didn't live in the Dark Ages.
In all projections of a future (where humans have survived), we're more peaceful, more productive, there aren't have and have nots , there isn't just base level strife that causes grown men to rape 5 year old children.
How do we get there? By religion? By indoctrination? By capitalism? By communism? The fact is men are genetically predisposed to not just crave having more than the other guy but to FLAUNT it and to absolutely GRIND the other guy down. This is how men show their brightly colored feathers to females and females do indeed prefer men who have more stuff, power and prestige.
Women like winners and men like to win. It's a marriage made by hell.
So sure, the corporations are knowing and deliberately lying about the STEM graduate situation. They've been doing that since at least 1995 according to Norm Matloff.
And Congress and the press go along with the lie because all the men at the top of THOSE hierarchies stand to benefit by undermining other men who do not hold those positions of power. This is just instinctive knowledge. Congress knows they're lying, knows why they're lying and knows it's their part in this scam to wring their hands and decry their fellow (male) citizens qualifications.
The author is projecting his own value system on alien's motivations too. I agree they probably wouldn't want to turn us into batteries ala Stephan Hawking / Matrix largely because why? - you can already create anything we could possibly have.
OTOH it's not IMPOSSIBLE that advanced creatures have an advanced morality / compassion / values that causes them to CARE about the fate of things not themselves.
Why we ourselves show some primitive forms of this on occasion.
Slashdot Mirror
So why do you continue to shoot your mouth off about it, using your qualifications in one field in which you have a valid claim to earned authority in an attempt to promote a non-scientific opinion in another field in which you can stake no legitimate claim ?
Do science like everyone else does - conduct research, publish your findings in legitimate peer reviewed journals and publicly answer your critics to the scientific community's satisfaction- or shut the fuck up.
Yeah but the boomers won't be alive then. Hell, the Koch brothers won't be alive in 10 years. What do they care? I got mine while I was alive, fuck you all, suckers.
I have a dream.
I have a dream where one day the people who today, in editorials and online, deny science, deny global warming will be forced to personally, individually, away from and distinct from the rest of the population be forced to directly bear the consequences of their beliefs. I have a dream .
I have a dream that one day the people who deny evolution will also be systematically and permanently denied the medicine and treatments which exists only because doctors and researchers applied evolutionary theory to the problems of diseases . I have a dream.
I have a dream that each individual, no matter who or how small, will be given the opportunity to live out in full the consequences of what they today advocate for the rest of us and the rest of us will live out the consequences of our own decisions, unencumbered by the science deniers who used to live freely amongst us.
I have a dream.
Please. Institutions are about as humorless and paranoid as it gets. I am surprised the mental health professionals at NASA didn't read the lyrics to that song and conclude that they had to remotely put this guy down.
I must say though, anonymous person posting over tor does leave a little credibility to be desired
Just the opposite. Few people can afford to tell the truth the The Machine That Never Forgets and also sign their real name to it. It's amazing to me that people don't understand the genuine social utility of real anonymity. That's where what is unsayable gets said. That's where the truth gets told.
It's just a recognition that immigration can be used as a tool in class warfare. It's a very old story- consider the Chinese brought here to work on the railroads by the robber barons.
*Your* cognitive dissonance comes from the fact that *you* think liberals are all for unlimited immigration . The facts are just the opposite. It's the right wing / libertarian CATO Institute and their mouthpiece Dan Griswold who are constantly pushing for- in their own words "unlimited free flow of people, services and goods across borders". Because you know, people are just another good.
Sorry but the party line in liberal-land is that multinational corporations want to dissolve the borders in order to create a sense of rootlessness in the population thereby disenfranchising them from the politics of the nation. A constantly moving, migrant population of workers whose only constant is the corporation which deigns to employ them is their target, final state.
This is why corporations move young families around so much, especially when the kids are young. That's when young parents will bond with other young parents and set down roots and form post-college, lifelong friendships . You join the PTA, get involved in church, get involved with the community you live in etc etc etc.
Oh no no no, none of that serves the corporate interest. They want the only constant thing in your life to be them and your only allegiance to be to them. They have consciously done this for decades now. They want company men, not citizens.
What liberals want is to export labor and environmental standards so that immigration is curtailed because Mexico, say is prosperous instead of the NAFTA -created fucking failed narco state it is. I wonder where all the NAFTA cheerleaders are, you know, the ones who said that NAFTA would turn Mexico and central America into this wonderful place of 1st world prosperity within a generation. What GDP increase there is goes in the pockets of guys like Carlos Slim. The average Mexican is more fucked than ever. Of course they come up here.
As far as H1B goes, I only large employers pretend it's not a Big Lie intended to depress wages and displace pesky American programmers. They do the same thing with supermodels BTW , oh and they did the same thing with chefs also. It's a very old game, just new to you, and your congressman knows all about it and he/she approves being from the 1% and all.
... component owners are generally openly hostile to outside patches: if you're a dev, accepting an outside patch makes your lead angry (due to the need to maintain this patch and to justify in in shiproom the unplanned design change), makes test angry (because test is on the hook for making sure the change doesn't break anything, and you just made work for them), and PM is angry (due to the schedule implications of code churn). There's just no incentive to accept changes from outside your own team. You can always find a reason to say "no," and you have very little incentive to say "yes."'"
Yeah, that's exactly true in open source sw also, especially the projects maintained by larger corporations. All the devs are payroll with a lot to lose and nothing to gain in just the ways outlined in the article.
Add to that the devs are also clubby in the extreme. They are easily slighted in online communication and it takes just one sufficiently high level dev branding you as undesirable for any reason and you're done.
Believe me I've seen this happening from the inside and to people who just wanted to learn and contribute to our project. The human mind is a wondrous thing and apparently you don't have to actually meet someone in person in order to develop an irrational hatred of them . I have watched as our own prickly pear in the hierarchy, a guy with effective hire/fire power over others bad mouths an outsider and the result is that no one is going to be caught dead helping that person online much less think about accepting that person's contribs.
We all know,even if only unconsciously, that this is the politics of open source. You see that knowledge leaking out in the obsequious responses hopeful acolytes give to being abused, curtly replied to or insulted online by some gate keeper of the project. People just take it because they have to and when they can't take it anymore, when they've worn out their paper-thin welcome, they just stop appearing.
People come to wield extraordinary power in OS projects because generally they're the one person who knows about X. Its their world and they make up the rules. There is precious little redundancy WRT dev knowledge, build knowledge, module knowledge etc etc and the devs like it that way.
Unfortunately, for a large segment of the population, that kind of power leads directly to despotism. Wikipedia is often cited as having this problem WRT Wikipedians with super powers, so it's not limited to just writing code.
The price we pay is hard to see because it's in what never happens- innovation. Innovation is the worst thing for a project, on top of all the other reasons the OP cited, there's potential prestige that would flow to the innovator that a lot of payroll devs would be jealous of. Anything that smells like innovation is unconsciously threatening to them. It's just a natural fact that if your cycles aren't sucked up by an overabundance of ordinary programming duties you have a better chance of a reconceptualizing a problem more broadly You see this everywhere too. In a lot of fields the people who run the experiments aren't the ones who think them up . That falls on lab workers. The researchers who make great advances aren't the ones who run the classes and grade the papers and homework, that falls to the TA.
Meanwhile, what is erstwhile the innovator supposed to do? That person hardly has the power to fork a large project and the studies of projects which have been forked by charismatic outsiders show that, almost universally, forks are ultimately abandoned , maybe some contribs folded back in, but more generally just fail owing to a lack of resources.
The likelihood of this outcome is also unconscious knowledge for most devs and heavily influences their interactions with project owners. In the end, those project owners are really as much gatekeepers / people whose egos need to be pleased and never ever offended as any corporate boss.
We are a
Zuckerberg is a narcissist and likely also a sociopath:
Note the amusing pro forma disclaimer in this video before the slicing and dicing begins:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuB_ng5uVaI
He doesn't have a "value system" as normal people mean that concept. How many times does he need to prove that to everyone? Why do people sign up for FB? Does anyone really trust that when his ship starts sinking, he won't post a 3.am. *privacy policy update* and sell absolutely everything about you to the highest bidder who in turn just wants to mine your data to create a "character profile" and sell it to, say, your potential future employers? Or that Zuck will just do that himself ?
FB is one gigantic blackmailing data collection machine without the blackmail part. The profit will be derived from "concluding" things about your character and proclivities which will follow you, haunt you, limit you until the day you die .
You offer one piece of *evidence* an uncited statistic: *double digiits*. Being a good slashdot denizen, of course I tried to confirm or refute this this claim. There is zero evidence that *double digit percentages of employees* engaged in any misconduct or were even interviewed. I wonder where you got that statistic. The full transcripts, number of tapes , minutes of each tape, location of each tape is publicly available because the tapes were turned over to the police as a condition for O'Keefe's immunity from criminal prosecution. What they revealed was that O'Keefe systematically doctored and edited the tapes to produce guilt where there was clearly none. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy Points arising- They did not interview *double digit percentages* of ACORN's lower level employees or employees of any type. O'Keefe was NOT in "pimp garb " as it appears in the video when he was addressing ACORN employees, he was actually in a suit and tie. O'Keefe was sued in court by one of his victims and lost to the tune of $100,000. From the totality of the scam that O'Keefe and Giles ran , I conclude the following. O'Keefe and Giles are classic, textbook sociopaths. http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html Not only did they run the ACRON scam and vicitimize the individual ACORN workers, but they also victimized civil society itself by destroying a wel-respected, law-abiding participant in that society. O'Keefe has admitted the reason he went after ACRON was because they were engaged in voter registration. O'Keefe was arrested at the Capitol for breaking into the telephone exchange there in an apparent attempt to tap the phone lines. Everyone form Forbes to MediaMatters has concluded the same thing about James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles- they're lowlife scammers - http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/03/08/james-okeefe-pays-100000-to-acorn-employee-he-smeared-conservative-media-yawns/ http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/02/17/james-okeefe-and-the-myth-of-the-acorn-pimp/160485 http://wonkette.com/505026/wonket-sexclusive-totally-blameless-crime-stopper-james-okeefe-to-pay-100000-to-acorn-criminal
Fuck you.
Fuck you. Education is a benefit to all of society which gets paid back by advances in technology and the industry creation which results. This is so basic it's not even worth arguing about. Education should be 100% free paid for in full by the government who should exert cost controls and force universities to live with them.
This is how other nations do it. The cost of the crippling debt imposed on students is a drag on the economy. The resulting student loan debt is NOTHING but the next bubble unless you take seriously that 1 in 60 of all dollars in the world (all money that is) SHOULD naturally be American student loan debt, that statistic sounds about right to you.
This war isn't going to stop until the universities and ther power they wield over society is done. On the way, all these publishers are just collateral damage.
That's what you get for setting yourself up to try to profit by endebting people before they've even been given a chance to start their lives.
I am sure university admins and the text book publishing industry get their rocks off when they think of how well their economic hit-man tactics work on people stupid enough , er make that young enough, to buy their line that they're an absolute necessity to participate in a modern economy at any price. I am sure the craggy 60 year old admins and tenured creeps who walk around campus get some deviant sexual thrill from contemplating how fucked all the smiling young people around them are without any of them even knowing it and how for the next 30 years they'll be paying and and all of their spare income to support their lavish lifestyles and gold plated retirement deals....
The monster needs to be starved to death. It's money supply lines need to be crippled, broken and finally cut off, it's legitimacy destroyed. College is a scam. Textbooks are a scam. The people perpetrating these scams should be prosecuted under RICO statute, found guilty and then jailed.
You're playing games with the word *they*. They , the offenders- were identified as low level workers. They- the IRS- was not aware of what *they* - the culpable people- were doing.
So when you say *they* did this, be clear who *they* are. It was not the IRS as an organization, from the top-down. It was low level workers.
In case you're from Mars- this is frequently how organizations work with Earthlings.
You can DEPEND on the fact that this has been done in the opposite way to the opposite side before. If this kind of abuse is permitted structurally, then this is not the first time.
The solution has to be structural, because it's structural problem (which permitted people to do this). The last thing anyone wants is the IRS being used as a tool for personal vendettas. No one wants that and frankly I am surprised that this is not strictly made impossible and frankly I expect them to *make it so*.
Notice that this tactic of attacking an organization via the deeds iof its lowest workers s very similar to what was done with ACORN. After repeatedly fishing for a low level employee who would act inappropriately on camera, James O'Keefe finally settled for someone who appeared to be acting inappropriately (but who actually called the police after O'Keefe and his confederate left).
Of course they're going to try to gin this up into a second term killing "scandal" *it goes all the way to the top!!!* * we have the smoking gun!!!*
It's what they did to Clinton with with Monica Lewinsky. They take as their model what happened to Nixon with Watergate. They have tried this with *every single Democratic President * since Watergate. The difference is of course that Nixon was a genuine crook who genuinely broke the law and genuinely tried to use the power of the government to cover it up and genuinely provoked a Constitutional crisis.
two... one....
They need to kill anything that provides textbooks for free or they wont survive. We don't even have to wonder about this goal, we just have to wonder how they'll try to execute on it. . My best guess is embrace ,extend then murder- like \Microsoft tried to do with Java when it started out.
They'll offer their *versions* then their *versions* will be (all but) mandatory.
We can defeat this. We can defeat anything they try to do. We can take down textbooks, then course credit, then finally the whole degree granting system. It's days are numbered and if, through legislative fiat- the final refuge of scoundrels- say through mandatory *accreditation* for anything calling itself an "educational degree" then other nations who aren't owned lock stock and barrel by the 1% sociopath class, which at this point pretty well describes higher education and all the industries and personalities around it :
From:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/09/sallie-mae-student-loans_n_3247979.html
"University endowments and teachersâ(TM) pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
The previously unreported investments mean that education professionals are able to profit twice off the same student: first by hiking the cost of tuition, then through dividends and higher valuations on their holdings in Sallie Mae, the largest student lender and loan servicer in the country, which profits by charging relatively high interest rates on its loans and not refinancing high-rate loans after students graduate and get well-paying jobs."
all those other nations and other people won't be following their lead and America can enjoy its status as an educational and economic backwater of graft corruption and crony capitalism.
That is, to the extent that's not already true.
Get fucking real. The whole purpose of warrants is to stop the government from prying into private affairs . People clearly consider their email private (passwords) and parts of their online social networks private (and part s not) . Are you really going to tell them that it's all just an illusion, ha ha, GOTCHA? It's not a game. It's not a technicality. you and the DOJ are heedlessly fucking with the foundational legitimacy of the government which is nothing ore than the consent of the governed.
A nation is not a a natural fact, a kind of trap that people are born into and can't get out of. It's an agreed upon structure that holds only so long as all those people who you think have just been fooled and who you think are fools for thinking their private information is private , so long as all those people approve of the government. Past that, if the DOJ and people like you PUT all those OTHER people past that, then the nation ceases to be legitimate and , a little later, ceases to be.
Please live in reality, not some lawyerly technocratic lobbyist-llike game of GOTCHA, SUCKER! because lawyers and lobbyists forget that the BASIS of their power is not really the government at all, it's the People.
Come on. This headline reads like something that will save consumers billions - limiting the power of a duopoly- will actually COST them billions.
I mean, nice try.
Magnets of every form are not a free form of energy. This is a trick using magnets. Maybe something very efficient will come out of it. Maybe it's just cool. Maybe it will lead to other things. What it won't lead to is a reversal of the laws of thermodynamics.
What happens if fossil fuels remain plentiful and we actually burn them? Everyone dies, that's what.
No?
I fucking love my tablet as a reading device. Battery lasts forever. Text size is awesome. Trillions of interesting PDFs to be read. Tablets are fantastic for on-the-go the consumption of highly technical material. I don't see myself not needing that in 8 years and about the only thing that will replace my need for a tablet is e-paper.
"- but in that case the examiner was accepting bribes from a competitor of the claimant so clearly the law was broken."
You know this happens all the time. It just stands to reason. You submit a patent. The examiner notifies the company who pays him. They submit a patent. The examiner rejects your patent a bunch of times , meanwhile, the other patent gets processed. Or backdated . Or whatever. I mean, as an insidier is there anything seriously in place to prevent that kind of thing from being done by anyone arrogant enough to try it?
When you look at the LIBOR scandal and how that went on with FULL KNOWLEDGE of people like Tim Geitner , and you look at the banks giving out what they themselves called liar loans and you look at what went on in Enron and Global Crossing and the S and L scandals and the known-to-be-fake ratings the credit rating agencies were handing out up til 2008 exchange for "payment of services"... I mean.. if anyone prior to any of those scandals has said "I'll be THIS is what they do " they would have been called paranoid and worse.
The patent office is ripe for systematic abuse by corporations who stand to make billions from that abuse. How are they doing it? I don't know. But you KNOW just Joe Blow submitting his Good Idea is going to result in the multinational ending up with the patent, or one very similar or a new strategic patent rapidly submitted thereafter well before Joe Blow's patent makes it through the review process that renders Joe Blows patent useless. Or they backdate patents submitted by their handlers. ... or whatever it is the multinationals are paying off examiners and their managers to do.
You KNOW it's true in your bones. We ALL know it's true and that's it's just a matter of time before we find out the exact details.
Soon to be followed by Rebecca Martinson / Patent lawyer sex tape.
Do you realize that these two people could.... breed?
"So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on. It is perfectly fine to limit these items, to make sure there ARE "have-nots". People don't HAVE to have every single goddam song in their library."
There will always be "have nots" because there isn't time to consume all existing products. Those people form Venn diagrams whose circles don't overlap.
You can see clearly that people are fantastically different from each other based on the arbitrary path they've taken through the same culture and the ideas and norms they've been exposed to just by watching the news.
Case in point- the sorority sister's mad rant email. The very reason this is an object of fascination is because her behavior is no far out of the norm, her concerns so fantastically removed from the experience of people as to be unreal and seemingly insane. Yet people from her subculture are defending her and saying it was a shame that someone from that subculture defected and passed along the email.
Even if we did have one dominant culture, history shows that subcultures with radically different values exist and thrive. In fact, some people argue that we seek out, create, value and sustain such mini-cultures because it harkens back to the small tribes we evolved to live in; it fits and is just *right* and feels personal in ways that are deeply meaningful to us.
If it's true, I'll take it. I'm good with cinnamon and a dash of nutmeg. preheated oven at 350 for 45 minutes, wait to cool before serving.
Reality as it's given to us by society and interpreted through rationality IS depressing. The secret is - you don't stop there, you keep going. deeper.
Employers are largely composed of con men and criminals. Ask any IRS agent about it; they just take this as an accepted fact going in and they're not wrong. I have worked for upwards of 20 employers of various descriptions from flipping burgers to mega corps and I can say with certainty that each and every one of them was some species of scammer.
Congress listens to them at all because Congress is more of the same- ambitious men who want money, women and power. Anything that gets in the way- in this case paying Americans American wages instead of pretending there's a desperate STEM labor shortage and flooding the market with H1Bs- is a total non-starter for them. They don't even think twice about it- "oh... here's how you run THIS scam ..."
There's not really more to it than that. Employers are liars through and through and the companies they create are in a constant game of cat and mouse with the law, with their customers and with their employees.
It's genetic and what we need to find is a genetic cure for it. We need to tone down the sociopathic impulses that drive people and tone up the empathetic ones. Doing that will be THE achievement of the 21st century.
It's not panacea, but any little movement in that direction would yield huge savings in law enforcement, regulation, societal disruption and a massive increase in egalitarian outcomes. We can then take all that saved energy and money and attention and put it on creating even better things and circumstances for ourselves.
People from future generations will look at our literature and TV and movies and culture and be glad they didn't now just as we're glad we didn't live in the Dark Ages.
In all projections of a future (where humans have survived), we're more peaceful, more productive, there aren't have and have nots , there isn't just base level strife that causes grown men to rape 5 year old children.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/africa-child-rape-crisis_n_3103558.html
How do we get there? By religion? By indoctrination? By capitalism? By communism? The fact is men are genetically predisposed to not just crave having more than the other guy but to FLAUNT it and to absolutely GRIND the other guy down. This is how men show their brightly colored feathers to females and females do indeed prefer men who have more stuff, power and prestige.
Women like winners and men like to win. It's a marriage made by hell.
So sure, the corporations are knowing and deliberately lying about the STEM graduate situation. They've been doing that since at least 1995 according to Norm Matloff.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2012/feb/08/citylights1-fed-H1B-visa-engineers/
And Congress and the press go along with the lie because all the men at the top of THOSE hierarchies stand to benefit by undermining other men who do not hold those positions of power. This is just instinctive knowledge. Congress knows they're lying, knows why they're lying and knows it's their part in this scam to wring their hands and decry their fellow (male) citizens qualifications.
The author is projecting his own value system on alien's motivations too. I agree they probably wouldn't want to turn us into batteries ala Stephan Hawking / Matrix largely because why? - you can already create anything we could possibly have.
OTOH it's not IMPOSSIBLE that advanced creatures have an advanced morality / compassion / values that causes them to CARE about the fate of things not themselves.
Why we ourselves show some primitive forms of this on occasion.