Actually, there is ZERO reason (except for cost) that this system isn't used already. Aircraft computers are already capable of navigating an aircraft to an airport, lining it up on the runway, and landing it...the systems just aren't connected together.
Pilots nowadays are only used for three things:
Navigating the plane while on the ground.
Navigating the plane while in holding patterns around the airports
Emergency collision avoidance
Given the assumption that the tower will clear a flight path and that somebody will be sitting there to hit the brakes when the plane touches down, there is no reason at all why planes couldn't land themselves after pushing the big, red emergency button:-)
>>Of course employers don't want Unions, it compromises their authority.
So, I have a dream. I take my money and create a company to fufill that dream. Now you're going to tell me I shouldn't have authority over how its run?
>>Let me translate for the dense
The term "blind leading the blind" comes to mind.
>>Unions increase your negotiating power which makes wages rise and firing people more difficult. In other words, basing wages on skill and firing people who slack off goes out the window, replaced by your socialist "screw the skilled to benefit the mediocre" mentality.
>>We like to pay what we feel like paying and fire who we feel like firing. As a former small business owner, this one just made me laugh. Companies are in business to make money...period. They pay what they can to retain employees and still maintain profitability. Do you have any idea how many companies have closed their doors after employee unionization? Look it up.
>>Employers who respect their employers would encourage their employees to form Unions No, I preferred to go out and chat to my employees face to face. I enjoyed running a company, and had fun with my employees. If they'd gone union and forced us into an adversarial relationship, I'd have shut the whole thing down.
>>If money is power and businesses are not democracies, where does the power in our society lie? You know, that's why you leftists will never get anywhere in the tech industry. You try that "poor employee versus the rich boss" mentality that has worked in so many industrial situations, but you overlook the fact that tech workers are QUITE wealthy themselves. I got a good laugh one time watching a union organizer try to sway a bunch of programmers and CS operators to organize and join (he was apparently brought in after a bunch of crummy employees complained after being laid off). It was funny watching the guy rant on and on about the power of "united" workers to finally earn the pay they deserve, and how unions were the only way to show the "rich bastards" who actually controls a company...nobody had the heart to tell him that the company had made them ALL "rich bastards". The presentation ended, the organizer was escorted from the building, and it was never brought up again.
Not unless we figure out how to beat the speed of light. Given an expansion rate of.5c, mankind will have covered only 5,000 light-years of space in 10,000 years. Now, if a supernova were to occur at the centerpoint of human civilization, the last human would be dead of radiation poisoning 7,500 years later....and that's only if they never stopped running.
In the grand scope of things, mankind is merely another bug on the cosmic windshield.
The company you're in is flawed from the start. A consulting company, by it's very nature, shouldn't require funding to remain in business. I too work for a consulting firm, but one with a business model requiring it to make a profit and pay for itself. There's nothing magical about consulting, and consulting firms rarely grow large (which is probably why your company is having such a hard time finding funding). The fact that your company is focusing on securing VC capital rather so that they can maintain a flashy image, rather than pursuing CUSTOMERS who will actually pay the bills, tells me that the management of the company is clueless about what running a company really means.
Ask yourself this: Do you think they would hesitate for a moment to drag you down with them, until they ran out of funding, despite the damage it could do to your career? If the answer is no, then they don't have any loyalty to you. And if they're not loyal to you, why are you worried about them?
Bail now and save yourself. Or better yet, try to get all the programmers to join you and form your own consulting firm, founded on a PROFIT based business model. The firm I work for started when 5 programmers left a situation similar to yours. They hired an MBA and an accountant to handle the business, and a sales guy to promote them. That was 4 years ago...we've now got 40 employees and are clearing 12mil a year in sales (without a DIME of funding).
You're kidding right? Is that actually true? Most kids don't have credit, right? If you're under 18, you basically can't have credit in your name, because (unless an emancipated minor) your signature is legally worthless.
Sadly, no. As a teen, I signed up for one of those CD of the month deals, along with a couple magazines. When I turned 18 and moved away these were "forgotten"...until I applied for a car loan two years later.
My car loan was turned down because the CD club had turned me into collections, and one of the magazines had marked my account as delinquent. In addition, I worked 6 different jobs between 15 and 18 years old, so they'd marked my work history as "Unreliable". Did the fact that I was only a teenager, that I didn't have to work, that I was only trying to gain various types of experience, even weigh into it? Nope...once you get a job, your work history is fair game.
>I wonder if there is a reason for the trees planted neatly in a row?
Oddly enough, I was wondering the same thing myself. I started thinking "This is the NSA, so there has to be a pattern!" So I pulled up the TerraServer image of the site, and took a long look at them to figure out the pattern and ascertain their purpose.
My conclusion? They're to anchor the hillside and keep it from sliding down onto the telescopes:-)
Primarily the fact that the early Earth suffered from extreme climactic shifts, and that this planet originally had a non-oxygen atmosphere. There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that the early Earth regularly (over a period of hundreds of millions of years) alternated between a Venus-like greenhouse effect, and a frozen-solid iceball in space. This would have been extremely harsh on lifeforms.
The theory goes like this: We know that the early atmosphere was primarily nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but that the oceans were present. The high carbon dioxide levels, exacerbated by frequent volcanic eruptions, would cause a greenhouse effect that baked the planet. The higher temperatures, however, also increased the amount of oceanic evaporation. The massive worldwide cloud layer would eventually begin the "nuclear winter" effect, causing the surface temperatures to freeze. As the freezing continued and snowfall increased over the surface of the Earth, more and more solar energy would be reflected back into space, further dropping the temperature until the oceans themselves froze over. The Earth, at this point, would have been a frozen ball in space, with liquid water existing only beneath extremely thick ice sheets. The sheer amount of ice would ultimately be its own undoing though.
Throughout this entire process, those volcanoes I mentioned have still been erupting and spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The oceans are the largest carbon dioxide sink on the planet, and under normal circumstances would remove the vast majority of CO2 released by volcanic processes. But with a thick sheet of ice covering them, the carbon dioxide would build up FAR beyond what we have today. This would eventually reverse the cooling, causing another greenhouse effect and repeating the cycle.
This theory holds that the cycles didn't end until two things happened. 1) Planetary volcanism subsided, reducing carbon dioxide outflow. And 2) plant life finally evolved which began turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, which is much less likely to cause a greenhouse effect. Only after the decreased carbon dioxide levels stabilized our atmosphere could more complex life-forms evolve.
If the universe is "only" 15-20 billion years old, and those other life forms would be chemically similar to us (hey, that's as reasonable as any other postulate here), they'd require the same elements available, which would mean the same stellar processes (current theories require a few cycles of stellar formation and nova to provide elements above Lithium), and would take the same time to form. If they're out there, it seems more reasonable to think they'd be "only" as advanced as we are.
Therein lies the flaw in your argument. The Earth has been "human friendly" in its present form for several hundred million years, and yet the human family tree only stretches back a few million. You forget that the Earth existed as a pristine, life-friendly planet long before we came along.
So what if, instead of the dinosaurs evolving 225 million years ago, we had instead? It's only quirk of fate that allowed Dinosauria to evolve into the dominant life form, instead of our primitive pre-mammallian ancestors. If our evolutionary path had remained the same, but the timeframe was bumped up to that point, the modern intelligent human species would be over 200 million years old, instead of the measly few hundred thousand years we have today. Where would we be, had that been the case? How many stars would we have colonized, or new technologies would we have invented? Think about it, a quirk of evolutionary fate is the only thing that set us back.
Now, who's to say the same situation occurred on all planets? There was no real reason why our species didn't evolve 225 million years aago, and there's no reason to think that other species couldn't have evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. When you also take into account that some sun-like stars are billions of years older than even ours, the possibility arises of billion year old civilizations in our own galaxy. I don't know about you, but I'd expect that they'd be far more advanced than we are today.
I was one of those smart kids that didn't get picked on in high school, and the reasons had nothing to do with humility or grace. I have studied the Te since I was six years old. Three days into my freshman year, some quarterback sized a** noticed how smart I was, and figured that smart=nerd, and that meant I was fair game. He started to pick on me, I told him to f*** off, he decided to teach me a lesson, and I broke three of his ribs and one of his forearms. I had a couple other people who gunned for me afterwards, but I taught them all the same lesson (one is forever blinded in his left eye because of me).
You see, there was only two ways to avoid the bullying when I was in school. You either had to kick everyones asses, or kiss everyones asses. I did the former, because it was the "proper" way to handle things.
Putting political corectness aside for a moment, the exceptionally mentally gifted are superior to the rest of the kids they go to school with. With the proper training and education, one of them could be the person to invent warp fields, cure disease forever, or prove cold fusion. But what is that kid likely to learn when he's forced to hide his intellectual superiority because "it'll make the other kids jealous", or "it's unfair"? Smart kids want to be as socially accepted as any other kid, and if you drive it into them that using their intelligence is what causes people to not like them, they will eventually turn away from their intelligence and stop learning.
The proper way to handle this would be to acknowledge that all kids are NOT created equal, and then modify our educational system so that these kids can really excel.
All totalled, state, federal, local, and accumulated sales, over half of my income goes to the government. Don't get me wrong BTW, I'm not a dick. I donated nearly $10,000 and a couple hundred hours of my time to charities in the last year...and didn't even claim it as a tax deduction (charity done to bring later benefit isn't charity). I haven't forgotten what it's like to be dirt poor (you can't forget), and I do what I can to help out those who are really in need. The majority of my time and money is donated to Women And Childrens centers to help out families who were put in the same position as mine, and to the local childrens crisis center.
What I resent is the idea that we should be forced to pay even more. Half my money toes to the government now, so where do we draw the line? 60%? 70% 75% As I see it, I now spend half my working hours "bettering society". Are you going to tell me that my working time isn't even half mine?
I would never suggest that all aid to the poor be cut off. Without food stamps, I probably would have starved or ended up in an orphanage before I was 5. So I guess we can agree that offering minimal assistance (food, clothing) to the poor is a good thing for society.
What I don't care for is this left leaning socialist bullsh*t that seemingly wants to punish people BECAUSE they have been a success. I raised myself out of poverty because I didn't want my children to experience childhood in a home with a perpetually leaky roof, no light or heat (when my mom couldn't afford the bills), and cockroaches all over the place. All through my childhood I dreamed about living in a large, comfortable house with a good heater, and a really big color TV. Rather than driving around in a smoking rattletrap like my moms old AMC Pacer, I wanted something a little more modern and comfortable. And you know what? I got them by working my ass off. And now you socialists want to PUNISH ME because I'm successful? You want to take away my money because I'm not spending my money on what YOU think it should be spent on? You want to tax the hell out of me because it's unfair that I got off my ass and did something to improve myself, while others didn't?
And often, technological progress and conservation can go hand in hand. My own house has thermal imaging sensors in every room. When someone walks into one, it checks the ambient light level to see if additional light is needed, and turns the room lights on if they are. 30 seconds after leaving the room, the lights shut themselves back off. The system is also tied into my thermostat, so that when no people are detected in any rooms, the house temperature can be adjusted to reduce unneeded heating/cooling. It also doubles as a handy home security system:) It's a simple advance, and a neat trick to show people who enter my home for the first time, but more practically it serves as an excellent example of advancing technology making our lives easier while saving money and energy at the same time.
Oh, that's a riot. So we're going to pull people off of a speaker assembly line and put them to work as carpenters and teachers? What if they LIKE working on speakers? Are you going to tell them that they are no longer allowed to do the job they enjoy because it doesn't benefit your vision of a Utopian society? What are you suggesting, that people be enslaved and forced to work on whatever "society" deems an acceptable project? I seem to recall something like that happening in recent history...in Nazi Germany.
Besides, your vision is fundamentally flawed. You are assuming that because people work one job, they are unable to do something else that might benefit mankind. Well, why don't you hop in your car and drive to your nearest slum. You'll see lots of people there that aren't working on anything at the moment. By your logic, since these people aren't busy building products to cater to the rich, shouldn't they be building houses, or teaching, or doing "more useful things"? They don't because that doesn't interest them, just as it doesn't interest the majority of people in the world. You assume that our fundamental nature is to help each other, and that this nature is being opressed by capitalism. Society has shown again and again that this assumption about our nature is fundamentally untrue...beneath everything else, we are greedy. No social policy is ever going to change that.
Everytime I hear someone ever-so-modestly say, "Hey, nobody ever helped me, everything I got I earned... if someone's in the shit, it's probably their own fault", I think, "There's goes someone goes someone without a fuckin' clue... and proud of it."
Oh bullshit. I grew up poor. My dad walked out when I was two, and my mom raised us on her minimum wage job and food stamps. I lived in an extremely poor part of town, and had friends just as poor as I was. But I didn't want to deal with that, so I slaved away at my schoolwork and hacked on my TRS-80 while all of my friends were "hanging out" and wasting their time.
Today, I make more money in one year than my mom did in fifteen. And my old friends? They're just as poor as ever, and rather envious of the fact that I can buy practically anything I desire while they scrounge for the money to eat with. But I DO NOT feel sorry for them. I pulled myself out of that situation, and I tried to help them do the same, but they were not willing to invest the time and effort to improve themselves. They'd rather sit around bitching about the "inequity of wealth" than do anything to improve their situations.
Nobody ever did help me. I paid for my own education, I kept myself motivated, and I raised myself out of poverty. Everyone I know who is still in that situation is there because they refused to do the same thing. The system is giving them exactly what they put into it...nothing.
Actually, the car industry is an excellent example of why things MUST change. Look at the American automotive industries in the 1940's-1960's. Detroit was pumping out beautiful cars with innovations up the wang, and absolutely dominated the world automotive market. The problem was that by the late 60's-early 70's, quality had gone downhill. If you asked a Detroit engineer about it at the time, you would have got a response like "Well, that's just how cars are! People won't pay for a high quality automobile". And what happened next? The Japanese stepped into the market and introduced inexpensive, well built, and RELIABLE automobiles, and nearly killed Detroit in the process. Thousands of American workers lost their jobs because they refused to pull their heads out of the sand and fix the problems.
I fear that the computer industry today is at the same point the automotive industry was 30 years ago. Quality is poor, but nobody sees a reason to fix it because there's no alternatives and low quality is considered normal. It was only in response to higher quality competition that American car builders finally cleaned up their acts and began building better products.
So the only question in my mind is, who will be the next Japan?
Actually, it's a common myth that AT&T built our telephone structure. If you look back at the early history of telephones in America, you'll see that there were literally hundreds of different companies that built the infrastructure and offered services to various parts of the country. All AT&T did was leverage their dominance to swallow up these smaller competitors until they owned nearly the entire national telephone grid (note: a few of the early AT&T competitors resisted and still exist as small regional telecom operations today). At the same time they were buying out, or crushing, their competitors, they also got some effective legal protections in place to secure their monopoly (like having municipalities pass ordinances specifying that only one telephone line could be strung on municipal poles, and AT&T maintaining an iron grip on those lines).
I'd also like to point out that the Internet probably wouldn't exist in its current form if AT&T had remained whole. Much of the modern Internets resilience comes from the fact that packet traffic is routed through multiple fiber backbones from multiple providers. Those providers simply wouldn't exist if AT&T had retained its monopoly. And do you think AT&T, a single profit driven corporation, would have installed multiple backbones to keep the network running well? Heck no, they would have gone with the cheapest option available. It's also likely that AT&T would have tried to exploit the Internet boom by instituting fees and rates to increase their profits. Higher Internet access costs would have muffled the growth of the Internet, and would have likely dampened our long economic growth period.
Erm, that did come out a little confusing...sorry:) I meant to say, if you decide to move to Berkeley you can consider a SanFran position anyway (in fact, I recommend it). As far as prices go, Berkeley is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as SF. There are no cheap places to live in the Bay Area...if there were, people wouldn't commute for hours on end.
There are coding jobs EVERYWHERE in the Bay Area, but the best paying positions are in SF and the South Bay. If you do move to SF, you should consider SanFran. Since BART (think above ground subway, except where it goes under the Bay) runs through Berkeley, you can walk to a station and be in downtown SF in under 30 mins without ever seeing a brakelight or putting up with exhaust fumes.
Of course, this is partly why housing in the Berkeley area is so expensive:)
You don't want to live in Alaska. Having lived there for all but ~4 months of my life, I can honestly say that it's a very, very, boring state to live in.
Ah, but when I retire, that's exactly what I'll be looking for. I grew up in a quiet rural California that doesn't exist anymore, and I want to find that quiet again someday. Some people seem to think that an area isn't "liveable" if it doesn't have a sushi bar on every corner, a 14-screen multiplex every three blocks, and 19 million 7-11's. I grew up fly-fishing on the Feather River, packing into the Desolation Wilderness back when it lived up to its name, and spending hundreds of hours staring through my telescope into an ink-black sky. You can't do those things in California anymore, what with the water pollution, light pollution (the sky in both the SV and much of the Central Valley is dull orange at night), and what I kindly call "people pollution". Someday, I want the quiet again...even if I have to give up my T1 to get it:-)
It's easy enough to understand why. I'm a California native brought up a stones throw from the SV and I can tell you that California has changed drastically in the last 20 years. California has long been seen as the land of "cool people", where everyone has a good tan and says "Dude" a lot. The reality is that up until the last two decades, the vast majority of the state (outside of LA and the Bay Area basin) was rural farmland and desolate, empty foothills. The economic growth here over the last 20 years has caused vast amounts of farmland to be built over in the name of "economic growth" (anyone else remember the cherry orchards around San Jose?), which pretty much destroyed the rural lifestyle enjoyed by much of the state. Some adapted to the growth, some even thrived on it, but a LOT of Californians packed up and moved elsewhere to find the slower paced rural lifestyles they were used to. Most of them ended up in Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, and without realizing it, they created the exact same situation they were trying to flee. The locals in those states became resentful of the major influx of "those damned Californians", and the development explosion they brought with them, and aren't afraid to show their disdain.
I still live in California because I'm a programmer and this is where the money is, but I can tell you that it isn't the same state I grew up in. When I move elsewhere after I retire, I will understand it if the locals don't like me (I'm thinking Alaska...I love the cold:)
I agree that it would be rather dumb to fire someone over this, but disciplinary actions are deserved.
The CIA network, by its very nature, must be one of the secure LANs in the world. By installing unapproved software on an unapproved server, they may have inadvertently placed the security of the entire network at risk. While the article dosn't specifically mention what software was used, I seriously doubt that a security audit was performed on the source to verify that it wouldn't open up any holes.
The chat room created the potential for inadvertent security leaks by allowing unmonitored communications between non-authenticated personnell. Think about it this example, two CIA buddies regularly converse via this chat room during their lunch hours. One day, someone else (either internal or external to their network) gains access to the chat room and masquerades as one of the two regular users. When the other guy comes on, he sees the screen name and automatically assumes that it's his buddy, mentally placing him in the trusted category. Now, when this guy asks him what he's doing today, he probably wont think twice about telling him. Voila, he's just breached national security without realizing it.
As I said above, these guys should be disciplined, and they should probably be forced to re-take the security training classes, but they have showed creativity by solving what they saw as a communications "problem", and by keeping it operational on a heavily secured and monitored network for over a year without detection. These sound like the kinds of guys who would make excellent electronic intelligence agents.
While I can't vouch for the rest of the country, California voters are pretty much immune to widespread electronic voter fraud. When Cali. residents cast their votes on Tuesday, those votes will be piped through a brand new Java based statewide election reporting system. This system, developed in part by the company I work for, is brand new from the ground up and has undergone full code audits from several parties to verify that no "illicit" code is hiding inside. You still don't trust the code? Well, it's your right to be paranoid, but I regularly have lunch with the guys who wrote the new software and I can tell you my mind will be at ease.
Uh...no. You can make anything legal (or illegal) in the US by changing the Constitution. Unconstitutional means "against the Constitution", so if it's changed in the Constitution you gan't do a damned thing about it (except maybe pick up your gun and rebel).
FYI- I was on the other side of the fence here a few years back, when we called in the police to help with a 17 year old employee who'd logged into the network after being fired, and proceeded to download all of our companys source code before wasting our source control systems (the little idiot even wasted our backup machines...but he forgot to delete the transfer logs). Two days later I received a call from the police asking me to identify some of the code they'd located, so I went down to the police station. After I got there, I was quite shocked to see that they'd not only confiscated the kids computer, but also his dads desktop machine, his dads laptop, their webserver, their DNS server, their network switch, and a ton of other crap (they even grabbed the mice!) The cop explained that when they raid a house for a computer crime, they essentially grab Everything and sort out what is, and what isn't, evidence later.
Because I'd met the kids dad and I knew he was a professional programmer, I managed to talk the police into returning the rest of the equipment. In other words, his dad got lucky in the fact that I'm a nice guy. The police wanted to hold all of the equipment as evidence at least until trial.
So yes, there is a danger there. If you are worried about your kids putting you at risk, I'd suggest doing what I've done. Put a SECURE firewall on the network and block all ports except those needed for regular mail and web usage. If you have a home office, make sure the server is located within that room and that it is LOCKED when you are not around. Then check your logs on a regular basis to see if your kid is trying to hack the firewall or bypass it...if he is, sit him down and explain the ramifications of what he is trying to do. That kid ended up spending 10 days in juvie, and working 6 months in community service for what he did...I certainly don't think you want your kid facing the same thing.
But that growth alone won't sustain the computer industry. As of 1997 (the latest year I've seen numbers for) the yearly population growth in the U.S. was 0.88%. Even if we estimate that 60% of those new births will eventually become computer buyers, that translates to new market growth of slightly more than 0.5% yearly. Divide that growth among all of the major computer companies, not to mention the mom-n-pop shops, and you'll see that depending on an increasing population for sales growth would be suicidal for any company.
Slashdot Mirror
Pilots nowadays are only used for three things:
- Navigating the plane while on the ground.
- Navigating the plane while in holding patterns around the airports
- Emergency collision avoidance
Given the assumption that the tower will clear a flight path and that somebody will be sitting there to hit the brakes when the plane touches down, there is no reason at all why planes couldn't land themselves after pushing the big, red emergency buttonGod I hate socialists....
>>Of course employers don't want Unions, it compromises their authority.
So, I have a dream. I take my money and create a company to fufill that dream. Now you're going to tell me I shouldn't have authority over how its run?
>>Let me translate for the dense
The term "blind leading the blind" comes to mind.
>>Unions increase your negotiating power which makes wages rise and firing people more difficult.
In other words, basing wages on skill and firing people who slack off goes out the window, replaced by your socialist "screw the skilled to benefit the mediocre" mentality.
>>We like to pay what we feel like paying and fire who we feel like firing.
As a former small business owner, this one just made me laugh. Companies are in business to make money...period. They pay what they can to retain employees and still maintain profitability. Do you have any idea how many companies have closed their doors after employee unionization? Look it up.
>>Employers who respect their employers would encourage their employees to form Unions
No, I preferred to go out and chat to my employees face to face. I enjoyed running a company, and had fun with my employees. If they'd gone union and forced us into an adversarial relationship, I'd have shut the whole thing down.
>>If money is power and businesses are not democracies, where does the power in our society lie?
You know, that's why you leftists will never get anywhere in the tech industry. You try that "poor employee versus the rich boss" mentality that has worked in so many industrial situations, but you overlook the fact that tech workers are QUITE wealthy themselves. I got a good laugh one time watching a union organizer try to sway a bunch of programmers and CS operators to organize and join (he was apparently brought in after a bunch of crummy employees complained after being laid off). It was funny watching the guy rant on and on about the power of "united" workers to finally earn the pay they deserve, and how unions were the only way to show the "rich bastards" who actually controls a company...nobody had the heart to tell him that the company had made them ALL "rich bastards". The presentation ended, the organizer was escorted from the building, and it was never brought up again.
Not unless we figure out how to beat the speed of light. Given an expansion rate of .5c, mankind will have covered only 5,000 light-years of space in 10,000 years. Now, if a supernova were to occur at the centerpoint of human civilization, the last human would be dead of radiation poisoning 7,500 years later....and that's only if they never stopped running.
In the grand scope of things, mankind is merely another bug on the cosmic windshield.
The company you're in is flawed from the start. A consulting company, by it's very nature, shouldn't require funding to remain in business. I too work for a consulting firm, but one with a business model requiring it to make a profit and pay for itself. There's nothing magical about consulting, and consulting firms rarely grow large (which is probably why your company is having such a hard time finding funding). The fact that your company is focusing on securing VC capital rather so that they can maintain a flashy image, rather than pursuing CUSTOMERS who will actually pay the bills, tells me that the management of the company is clueless about what running a company really means.
Ask yourself this: Do you think they would hesitate for a moment to drag you down with them, until they ran out of funding, despite the damage it could do to your career? If the answer is no, then they don't have any loyalty to you. And if they're not loyal to you, why are you worried about them?
Bail now and save yourself. Or better yet, try to get all the programmers to join you and form your own consulting firm, founded on a PROFIT based business model. The firm I work for started when 5 programmers left a situation similar to yours. They hired an MBA and an accountant to handle the business, and a sales guy to promote them. That was 4 years ago...we've now got 40 employees and are clearing 12mil a year in sales (without a DIME of funding).
You're kidding right? Is that actually true? Most kids don't have credit, right? If you're under 18, you basically can't have credit in your name, because (unless an emancipated minor) your signature is legally worthless.
Sadly, no. As a teen, I signed up for one of those CD of the month deals, along with a couple magazines. When I turned 18 and moved away these were "forgotten"...until I applied for a car loan two years later.
My car loan was turned down because the CD club had turned me into collections, and one of the magazines had marked my account as delinquent. In addition, I worked 6 different jobs between 15 and 18 years old, so they'd marked my work history as "Unreliable". Did the fact that I was only a teenager, that I didn't have to work, that I was only trying to gain various types of experience, even weigh into it? Nope...once you get a job, your work history is fair game.
>I wonder if there is a reason for the trees planted neatly in a row?
:-)
Oddly enough, I was wondering the same thing myself. I started thinking "This is the NSA, so there has to be a pattern!" So I pulled up the TerraServer image of the site, and took a long look at them to figure out the pattern and ascertain their purpose.
My conclusion? They're to anchor the hillside and keep it from sliding down onto the telescopes
Primarily the fact that the early Earth suffered from extreme climactic shifts, and that this planet originally had a non-oxygen atmosphere. There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that the early Earth regularly (over a period of hundreds of millions of years) alternated between a Venus-like greenhouse effect, and a frozen-solid iceball in space. This would have been extremely harsh on lifeforms.
The theory goes like this: We know that the early atmosphere was primarily nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but that the oceans were present. The high carbon dioxide levels, exacerbated by frequent volcanic eruptions, would cause a greenhouse effect that baked the planet. The higher temperatures, however, also increased the amount of oceanic evaporation. The massive worldwide cloud layer would eventually begin the "nuclear winter" effect, causing the surface temperatures to freeze. As the freezing continued and snowfall increased over the surface of the Earth, more and more solar energy would be reflected back into space, further dropping the temperature until the oceans themselves froze over. The Earth, at this point, would have been a frozen ball in space, with liquid water existing only beneath extremely thick ice sheets. The sheer amount of ice would ultimately be its own undoing though.
Throughout this entire process, those volcanoes I mentioned have still been erupting and spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The oceans are the largest carbon dioxide sink on the planet, and under normal circumstances would remove the vast majority of CO2 released by volcanic processes. But with a thick sheet of ice covering them, the carbon dioxide would build up FAR beyond what we have today. This would eventually reverse the cooling, causing another greenhouse effect and repeating the cycle.
This theory holds that the cycles didn't end until two things happened. 1) Planetary volcanism subsided, reducing carbon dioxide outflow. And 2) plant life finally evolved which began turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, which is much less likely to cause a greenhouse effect. Only after the decreased carbon dioxide levels stabilized our atmosphere could more complex life-forms evolve.
If the universe is "only" 15-20 billion years old, and those other life forms would be chemically similar to us (hey, that's as reasonable as any other postulate here), they'd require the same elements available, which would mean the same stellar processes (current theories require a few cycles of stellar formation and nova to provide elements above Lithium), and would take the same time to form. If they're out there, it seems more reasonable to think they'd be "only" as advanced as we are.
Therein lies the flaw in your argument. The Earth has been "human friendly" in its present form for several hundred million years, and yet the human family tree only stretches back a few million. You forget that the Earth existed as a pristine, life-friendly planet long before we came along.
So what if, instead of the dinosaurs evolving 225 million years ago, we had instead? It's only quirk of fate that allowed Dinosauria to evolve into the dominant life form, instead of our primitive pre-mammallian ancestors. If our evolutionary path had remained the same, but the timeframe was bumped up to that point, the modern intelligent human species would be over 200 million years old, instead of the measly few hundred thousand years we have today. Where would we be, had that been the case? How many stars would we have colonized, or new technologies would we have invented? Think about it, a quirk of evolutionary fate is the only thing that set us back.
Now, who's to say the same situation occurred on all planets? There was no real reason why our species didn't evolve 225 million years aago, and there's no reason to think that other species couldn't have evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. When you also take into account that some sun-like stars are billions of years older than even ours, the possibility arises of billion year old civilizations in our own galaxy. I don't know about you, but I'd expect that they'd be far more advanced than we are today.
I was one of those smart kids that didn't get picked on in high school, and the reasons had nothing to do with humility or grace. I have studied the Te since I was six years old. Three days into my freshman year, some quarterback sized a** noticed how smart I was, and figured that smart=nerd, and that meant I was fair game. He started to pick on me, I told him to f*** off, he decided to teach me a lesson, and I broke three of his ribs and one of his forearms. I had a couple other people who gunned for me afterwards, but I taught them all the same lesson (one is forever blinded in his left eye because of me).
You see, there was only two ways to avoid the bullying when I was in school. You either had to kick everyones asses, or kiss everyones asses. I did the former, because it was the "proper" way to handle things.
Putting political corectness aside for a moment, the exceptionally mentally gifted are superior to the rest of the kids they go to school with. With the proper training and education, one of them could be the person to invent warp fields, cure disease forever, or prove cold fusion. But what is that kid likely to learn when he's forced to hide his intellectual superiority because "it'll make the other kids jealous", or "it's unfair"? Smart kids want to be as socially accepted as any other kid, and if you drive it into them that using their intelligence is what causes people to not like them, they will eventually turn away from their intelligence and stop learning.
The proper way to handle this would be to acknowledge that all kids are NOT created equal, and then modify our educational system so that these kids can really excel.
All totalled, state, federal, local, and accumulated sales, over half of my income goes to the government. Don't get me wrong BTW, I'm not a dick. I donated nearly $10,000 and a couple hundred hours of my time to charities in the last year...and didn't even claim it as a tax deduction (charity done to bring later benefit isn't charity). I haven't forgotten what it's like to be dirt poor (you can't forget), and I do what I can to help out those who are really in need. The majority of my time and money is donated to Women And Childrens centers to help out families who were put in the same position as mine, and to the local childrens crisis center.
What I resent is the idea that we should be forced to pay even more. Half my money toes to the government now, so where do we draw the line? 60%? 70% 75% As I see it, I now spend half my working hours "bettering society". Are you going to tell me that my working time isn't even half mine?
I would never suggest that all aid to the poor be cut off. Without food stamps, I probably would have starved or ended up in an orphanage before I was 5. So I guess we can agree that offering minimal assistance (food, clothing) to the poor is a good thing for society.
What I don't care for is this left leaning socialist bullsh*t that seemingly wants to punish people BECAUSE they have been a success. I raised myself out of poverty because I didn't want my children to experience childhood in a home with a perpetually leaky roof, no light or heat (when my mom couldn't afford the bills), and cockroaches all over the place. All through my childhood I dreamed about living in a large, comfortable house with a good heater, and a really big color TV. Rather than driving around in a smoking rattletrap like my moms old AMC Pacer, I wanted something a little more modern and comfortable. And you know what? I got them by working my ass off. And now you socialists want to PUNISH ME because I'm successful? You want to take away my money because I'm not spending my money on what YOU think it should be spent on? You want to tax the hell out of me because it's unfair that I got off my ass and did something to improve myself, while others didn't?
Where exactly is the fairness in that?
And often, technological progress and conservation can go hand in hand. My own house has thermal imaging sensors in every room. When someone walks into one, it checks the ambient light level to see if additional light is needed, and turns the room lights on if they are. 30 seconds after leaving the room, the lights shut themselves back off. The system is also tied into my thermostat, so that when no people are detected in any rooms, the house temperature can be adjusted to reduce unneeded heating/cooling. It also doubles as a handy home security system :) It's a simple advance, and a neat trick to show people who enter my home for the first time, but more practically it serves as an excellent example of advancing technology making our lives easier while saving money and energy at the same time.
Oh, that's a riot. So we're going to pull people off of a speaker assembly line and put them to work as carpenters and teachers? What if they LIKE working on speakers? Are you going to tell them that they are no longer allowed to do the job they enjoy because it doesn't benefit your vision of a Utopian society? What are you suggesting, that people be enslaved and forced to work on whatever "society" deems an acceptable project? I seem to recall something like that happening in recent history...in Nazi Germany.
Besides, your vision is fundamentally flawed. You are assuming that because people work one job, they are unable to do something else that might benefit mankind. Well, why don't you hop in your car and drive to your nearest slum. You'll see lots of people there that aren't working on anything at the moment. By your logic, since these people aren't busy building products to cater to the rich, shouldn't they be building houses, or teaching, or doing "more useful things"? They don't because that doesn't interest them, just as it doesn't interest the majority of people in the world. You assume that our fundamental nature is to help each other, and that this nature is being opressed by capitalism. Society has shown again and again that this assumption about our nature is fundamentally untrue...beneath everything else, we are greedy. No social policy is ever going to change that.
Everytime I hear someone ever-so-modestly say, "Hey, nobody ever helped me, everything I got I earned ... if someone's in the shit, it's probably their own fault", I think, "There's goes someone goes someone without a fuckin' clue ... and proud of it."
Oh bullshit. I grew up poor. My dad walked out when I was two, and my mom raised us on her minimum wage job and food stamps. I lived in an extremely poor part of town, and had friends just as poor as I was. But I didn't want to deal with that, so I slaved away at my schoolwork and hacked on my TRS-80 while all of my friends were "hanging out" and wasting their time.
Today, I make more money in one year than my mom did in fifteen. And my old friends? They're just as poor as ever, and rather envious of the fact that I can buy practically anything I desire while they scrounge for the money to eat with. But I DO NOT feel sorry for them. I pulled myself out of that situation, and I tried to help them do the same, but they were not willing to invest the time and effort to improve themselves. They'd rather sit around bitching about the "inequity of wealth" than do anything to improve their situations.
Nobody ever did help me. I paid for my own education, I kept myself motivated, and I raised myself out of poverty. Everyone I know who is still in that situation is there because they refused to do the same thing. The system is giving them exactly what they put into it...nothing.
Actually, the car industry is an excellent example of why things MUST change. Look at the American automotive industries in the 1940's-1960's. Detroit was pumping out beautiful cars with innovations up the wang, and absolutely dominated the world automotive market. The problem was that by the late 60's-early 70's, quality had gone downhill. If you asked a Detroit engineer about it at the time, you would have got a response like "Well, that's just how cars are! People won't pay for a high quality automobile". And what happened next? The Japanese stepped into the market and introduced inexpensive, well built, and RELIABLE automobiles, and nearly killed Detroit in the process. Thousands of American workers lost their jobs because they refused to pull their heads out of the sand and fix the problems.
I fear that the computer industry today is at the same point the automotive industry was 30 years ago. Quality is poor, but nobody sees a reason to fix it because there's no alternatives and low quality is considered normal. It was only in response to higher quality competition that American car builders finally cleaned up their acts and began building better products.
So the only question in my mind is, who will be the next Japan?
Actually, it's a common myth that AT&T built our telephone structure. If you look back at the early history of telephones in America, you'll see that there were literally hundreds of different companies that built the infrastructure and offered services to various parts of the country. All AT&T did was leverage their dominance to swallow up these smaller competitors until they owned nearly the entire national telephone grid (note: a few of the early AT&T competitors resisted and still exist as small regional telecom operations today). At the same time they were buying out, or crushing, their competitors, they also got some effective legal protections in place to secure their monopoly (like having municipalities pass ordinances specifying that only one telephone line could be strung on municipal poles, and AT&T maintaining an iron grip on those lines).
I'd also like to point out that the Internet probably wouldn't exist in its current form if AT&T had remained whole. Much of the modern Internets resilience comes from the fact that packet traffic is routed through multiple fiber backbones from multiple providers. Those providers simply wouldn't exist if AT&T had retained its monopoly. And do you think AT&T, a single profit driven corporation, would have installed multiple backbones to keep the network running well? Heck no, they would have gone with the cheapest option available. It's also likely that AT&T would have tried to exploit the Internet boom by instituting fees and rates to increase their profits. Higher Internet access costs would have muffled the growth of the Internet, and would have likely dampened our long economic growth period.
And you think breaking them up was a bad thing?
Erm, that did come out a little confusing...sorry :) I meant to say, if you decide to move to Berkeley you can consider a SanFran position anyway (in fact, I recommend it). As far as prices go, Berkeley is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as SF. There are no cheap places to live in the Bay Area...if there were, people wouldn't commute for hours on end.
There are coding jobs EVERYWHERE in the Bay Area, but the best paying positions are in SF and the South Bay. If you do move to SF, you should consider SanFran. Since BART (think above ground subway, except where it goes under the Bay) runs through Berkeley, you can walk to a station and be in downtown SF in under 30 mins without ever seeing a brakelight or putting up with exhaust fumes.
:)
Of course, this is partly why housing in the Berkeley area is so expensive
You don't want to live in Alaska. Having lived there for all but ~4 months of my life, I can honestly say that it's a very, very, boring state to live in.
:-)
Ah, but when I retire, that's exactly what I'll be looking for. I grew up in a quiet rural California that doesn't exist anymore, and I want to find that quiet again someday. Some people seem to think that an area isn't "liveable" if it doesn't have a sushi bar on every corner, a 14-screen multiplex every three blocks, and 19 million 7-11's. I grew up fly-fishing on the Feather River, packing into the Desolation Wilderness back when it lived up to its name, and spending hundreds of hours staring through my telescope into an ink-black sky. You can't do those things in California anymore, what with the water pollution, light pollution (the sky in both the SV and much of the Central Valley is dull orange at night), and what I kindly call "people pollution". Someday, I want the quiet again...even if I have to give up my T1 to get it
It's easy enough to understand why. I'm a California native brought up a stones throw from the SV and I can tell you that California has changed drastically in the last 20 years. California has long been seen as the land of "cool people", where everyone has a good tan and says "Dude" a lot. The reality is that up until the last two decades, the vast majority of the state (outside of LA and the Bay Area basin) was rural farmland and desolate, empty foothills. The economic growth here over the last 20 years has caused vast amounts of farmland to be built over in the name of "economic growth" (anyone else remember the cherry orchards around San Jose?), which pretty much destroyed the rural lifestyle enjoyed by much of the state. Some adapted to the growth, some even thrived on it, but a LOT of Californians packed up and moved elsewhere to find the slower paced rural lifestyles they were used to. Most of them ended up in Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, and without realizing it, they created the exact same situation they were trying to flee. The locals in those states became resentful of the major influx of "those damned Californians", and the development explosion they brought with them, and aren't afraid to show their disdain.
:)
I still live in California because I'm a programmer and this is where the money is, but I can tell you that it isn't the same state I grew up in. When I move elsewhere after I retire, I will understand it if the locals don't like me (I'm thinking Alaska...I love the cold
- The CIA network, by its very nature, must be one of the secure LANs in the world. By installing unapproved software on an unapproved server, they may have inadvertently placed the security of the entire network at risk. While the article dosn't specifically mention what software was used, I seriously doubt that a security audit was performed on the source to verify that it wouldn't open up any holes.
- The chat room created the potential for inadvertent security leaks by allowing unmonitored communications between non-authenticated personnell. Think about it this example, two CIA buddies regularly converse via this chat room during their lunch hours. One day, someone else (either internal or external to their network) gains access to the chat room and masquerades as one of the two regular users. When the other guy comes on, he sees the screen name and automatically assumes that it's his buddy, mentally placing him in the trusted category. Now, when this guy asks him what he's doing today, he probably wont think twice about telling him. Voila, he's just breached national security without realizing it.
As I said above, these guys should be disciplined, and they should probably be forced to re-take the security training classes, but they have showed creativity by solving what they saw as a communications "problem", and by keeping it operational on a heavily secured and monitored network for over a year without detection. These sound like the kinds of guys who would make excellent electronic intelligence agents.While I can't vouch for the rest of the country, California voters are pretty much immune to widespread electronic voter fraud. When Cali. residents cast their votes on Tuesday, those votes will be piped through a brand new Java based statewide election reporting system. This system, developed in part by the company I work for, is brand new from the ground up and has undergone full code audits from several parties to verify that no "illicit" code is hiding inside. You still don't trust the code? Well, it's your right to be paranoid, but I regularly have lunch with the guys who wrote the new software and I can tell you my mind will be at ease.
You can get more info here: http://java.sun.com/features/ 200 0/11/calvoter.html
Uh...no. You can make anything legal (or illegal) in the US by changing the Constitution. Unconstitutional means "against the Constitution", so if it's changed in the Constitution you gan't do a damned thing about it (except maybe pick up your gun and rebel).
FYI- I was on the other side of the fence here a few years back, when we called in the police to help with a 17 year old employee who'd logged into the network after being fired, and proceeded to download all of our companys source code before wasting our source control systems (the little idiot even wasted our backup machines...but he forgot to delete the transfer logs). Two days later I received a call from the police asking me to identify some of the code they'd located, so I went down to the police station. After I got there, I was quite shocked to see that they'd not only confiscated the kids computer, but also his dads desktop machine, his dads laptop, their webserver, their DNS server, their network switch, and a ton of other crap (they even grabbed the mice!) The cop explained that when they raid a house for a computer crime, they essentially grab Everything and sort out what is, and what isn't, evidence later.
Because I'd met the kids dad and I knew he was a professional programmer, I managed to talk the police into returning the rest of the equipment. In other words, his dad got lucky in the fact that I'm a nice guy. The police wanted to hold all of the equipment as evidence at least until trial.
So yes, there is a danger there. If you are worried about your kids putting you at risk, I'd suggest doing what I've done. Put a SECURE firewall on the network and block all ports except those needed for regular mail and web usage. If you have a home office, make sure the server is located within that room and that it is LOCKED when you are not around. Then check your logs on a regular basis to see if your kid is trying to hack the firewall or bypass it...if he is, sit him down and explain the ramifications of what he is trying to do. That kid ended up spending 10 days in juvie, and working 6 months in community service for what he did...I certainly don't think you want your kid facing the same thing.
But that growth alone won't sustain the computer industry. As of 1997 (the latest year I've seen numbers for) the yearly population growth in the U.S. was 0.88%. Even if we estimate that 60% of those new births will eventually become computer buyers, that translates to new market growth of slightly more than 0.5% yearly. Divide that growth among all of the major computer companies, not to mention the mom-n-pop shops, and you'll see that depending on an increasing population for sales growth would be suicidal for any company.