Yea because the average lifestyle is exactly the same now as it was 100 years ago or even 1000 years ago. Maybe I'm missing the sarcasm, but I read your post as if you actually believe it.
Did I hear something? ???*Woosh*???
Hmm... Let's see. 5000 BC: Iraq, Samarra. About the only thing we know is they did pottery. Beyond this point, there aren't any reliable records. 4000 BC: Mesopotamia. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves. 3000 BC: Mesopotamia. The Sumerian hegemony. A few wealth people and a large number of worker-slaves. 2000 BC: Egypt. The height of the Old Kingdom. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves. 1000 BC: China, Zhou Dynasty. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves. 0 AD: Roman Empire. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves. 1000 AD: Europe. Middle of the Dark Ages. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves. 2000 AD: United States. A few wealthy people, and a large number of worker-slaves.
Having worked in a government office, I'm willing to believe that the "more expensive" portion alone was enough to make municipalities avoid them. I'm just curious if there's any truth to it.
That's why you legislate it at the state or federal level, just as every other major safety innovation has had to, historically.
Airbags: "They cost too much! Cars will be too expensive." Seatbelts: "Consumers find them too restrictive!" Third brake light: "It increases cost! And why would you need 3?" Anti-lock brakes: "The maintenance costs will be extraordinary!" Replacing metal 'guard rails' with concrete... Repairing structurally deficient bridges......
You get the idea. The only way to get anything new adopted is either to have a lot of people die in a short period of time, preferably affluent people (see also: Titanic), to tax it, or to have a ground-swell of public support for it. Simply arguing for it on the basis that it'll save lives is a pointless endeavor.
It could save a hundred thousand lives a year, and nobody would give a fuck. See also: Drunk driving. Inattentive driving, etc. Nobody wants to deal with those problems, so people go right on dying... but at predictable rates. So there you have it.
Dude, all you've done is pulled a bunch of numbers out of your ass, and then constructed an argument on it. Now I appreciate that maybe Fox News has had a bad impact on your ability to construct a proper argument, but rather than address the specific points, I'll just throw out a couple key principles that are well-established and then hit the conclusion.
First, if you increase labor, and demand remains constant, the price will drop. This is the law of supply and demand. All of your quoting of numbers and beating of chest tries to cover up the fact that more workers means lower wages, all other things being equal. It's an escapable economic truth.
As to the rest of your rant, it's all weasel words, ad homid attacks, and a lot of screaming "It can't be true because it can't be true because..." circular logic.
Here's some global data regarding wages. I'm not going to make it too easy for you by linking in the exact table you need to look at... but if you want to educate yourself instead of screaming profanities... I'd start there.
Dude, you are the reason why tenure is a bad thing. If anyone suggested something as hopelessly stupid as what you just did in my college, I'd not just boot your ass, I'd build a special rocket to fire you into the Sun to rid the planet of your stupidity.
Every 10 years, some pundit comes along and says technology will have us all living the good life and little robots and shit will do all the work for us. But the truth is the same today as it has been throughout human history: It's cheaper to enslave other people to achieve that "good life" than it is to build the technology to elevate us all. And humanity, on the whole, has steadfastly chosen short term gain for some over long-term prosperity all. Hell, this ball of spinning rock you're on is actually starting to cook itself (and us) because of this fact of humanity.
The entire notion ranks right up there with believing that a better understanding of the problem will necessarily lead to better decisions. Lulz. You can lead a horse to water...
Instagram: A photo sharing site. These have been around since, I don't know, the beginning of the internet?
GoPro: We took a camera... and duct taped it to you! Wow. Innovative.
iPhone / iPad: Can't comment on it on this website. Too many religious connotations, not enough facts.
Square: omg! A way to insecurely store your personal banking data on your phone.
None of these things will be remembered in 20 years as significantly advancing the state of the art.
Google self-driving cars? Tesla? SpaceX? Drones from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems & Northrop Grumman?
Not in production, just became profitable after heavy government subidizing, follows on the heels of NASA who did all the heavy lifting, and things in the sky that are trying to kill us. Yeah... USA! USA! USA!
Gimme a break, man. Look at the Large Hadron Collider -- that could have been us, but we slashed the funding. A Nobel Prize? What's that compared to sleezy marketing and questionable accounting practices? Not much, that's what.
When I say new tech, I don't mean new business. America is great at cranking out variations on the same theme -- turn on the TV sometime. It's all just rehashes. And our technology sector is quickly becoming the same thing. It's all formulaic. There is no innovation, no risk taking, no entrepreneurship.
And that's my point. Every last example you've thrown up has been done before. Every. Last. One. Google car? DARPA robotics. SpaceX? NASA. Tesla? Tesla! And drones... dude, R/C airplanes aren't exactly cutting edge. We can mass produce them, yes, but it's not revolutionary... it's just taking what we already had and repurposing it.
They're nice pieces of kit, but they are not revolutionary, ground-breaking, paradigm-breaking things. We haven't had any of that in a good fifteen years now. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world... China's building dams that it takes all afternoon to walk across, entire cities and railway projects are springing up almost overnight, etc. In Europe, we've got the LHC churning out new physics.
Just about everywhere else you care to look besides the United States is showing signs of innovative new ways of doing things. The only thing we're good at... is business.
When you create a child you're on the hook for raising it. You don't start out knowing everything about it so you have to learn about it at the same time you teach it. That's moral. A new form of life is necessarily going to require more learning on our part in order to raise well. We will make mistakes. We will hurt it. But that's life. The only realistic other option is not to create it to begin with. Better to exist imperfectly than not all.
Yes, but we don't dissect our children to figure out how to better parent them.
The last thing I want to have to do is fire anyone unless they are richly deserving and that usually is demonstrated by a history of failure over time. So, if I have a "problem", he's going to be my problem for awhile. Thankfully, if you do find the right candidates, the failures are few and far between.
I can't say I speak for everyone, but I know I speak for the most professional amongst us when I say: Thank you. I'll never work for you, but we need more managers like you in the field. People who are willing to roll their sleeves up and get involved. So again, thanks.
We now return to our regularly scheduled flame-fest, already in progress...
We've long established that the source of the human "soul" is in the brain. Those interconnections give rise to consciousness and self-awareness -- and sentience. If you build something that precisely models the brain, you will be creating sentience. I have to question how we can create a sentient creature simply to experiment upon it and still claim to have a shred of humanity to us.
I know that this is not as dazzling and interesting as building the device to geeks like us, but we cannot simply ignore the ethical consequences of our actions. All vocations, all manner of human endeavor, must move forward with an eye towards a respect for life. This may not be human life we're creating, or even organic life, but it is no less deserving.
Someday we're going to have cybernetic life walking about. And I have to wonder -- how well will they treat us, when they find out how ethical we were in creating it?
Remember that unemployment is rising to never-before-seen levels. Youth unemployment stands around 25%-30% in Southern Europe, and sometimes much higher. In the meantime, start-ups are looking at illegal immigrants for techie jobs... Why is that? Because, yes, these people want to stuff as much money in their pockets as possible.
We're at 25-30% right now and have none of those protections. We just lie through our teeth about how we calculate our unemployment. I'm not sure giving up those protections will net the result you're looking for. You'll still have unemployment, except now life for 100% of your population will suck, instead of 25%.
If someone is churning out substandard code and causing schedules to slip... be they an American or H1-B holder... replace them... it's that simple.
You haven't worked with people who ask you to... do the needful... have you? The substandard code is a byproduct of a combination of culture, language barrier, and a lack of experience. Note that I said experience, not education. American labor often stresses that people take their own initiative in solving a problem. You're expected to come up with a solution on your own, with little oversight or guidance, and you're given some leeway in making that happen. Yes, some companies are worse about this than others -- I am speaking in generalities here. YMMV. The culture of many of our immigrants is to not take that initiative -- but to only do things under the express guidance of their leaders. They see a problem and unless it's in the three ring binder that says "Things Management Says You Should Do When You Spot Problem X", it doesn't exist. They don't even see it. If you ask them about it, they'll say they don't know.
I'd snark you back and say "it's that simple," but nothing about conflicting cultural ideas and attitudes is. Nothing. You can't just replace people who have good attitudes but limited experience or have been trained to not take the initiative... you're just passing the buck on to the next person then. And it won't save your project. Software development isn't like factory work -- you can't mongolian hoarde the problem and solve it faster. In truth, a lot of times adding new people or more people makes the project take longer. This is a "people" problem, but it's commonly seen in all engineering disciplines. It's just the nature of the work.
The H1-B problem is not about putting down immigrants. We want them. Hell, we need them for some industries. The problem is that you can't destabilize an industry by radically changing either supply, or demand, and not have it hurt everyone. The H1-B program radically increased supply, and as a result, the cost of technical labor dropped -- a lot. It dropped so much that a lot of people who had invested in an education in it were left high and dry, and many people who had solid experience suddenly found themselves knocked several notches down on their career path and had to scramble to find a way to support their current lifestyle at a much lower income, with often tragic results. So a lot of experienced people left the industry to move into fields that were more stable, and the overall quality of the labor dropped.
This, in turn, fueled more cries for H1-Bs because high level positions were now going unfulfilled -- there was a glut of low-level workers, and very few experienced people because they didn't want to move 'down' in their career and simply moved out. That gap simply couldn't be filled no matter how many workers you threw at the problem. So the entire problem became cyclical... more H1-Bs mean more experienced workers leave, which mean lower overall quality of work, and now businesses are scrambling to find anyone who's qualified amongst a veritable sea of resumes... none which have the amount of experience needed.
And that, right there, is how our industry collapsed. It was because of short-term thinking -- they wanted to tap into the global labor market, so they poked a hole in the dam of regulations holding them back, thinking they could suckle off the new supply of cheap labor. But they were trying to drink out of a firehose, and then the dam exploded and washed out the entire industry.
There is no new tech now in this country. It's all gone to shit. It died because of short-term thinking, and now our high tech industry is just an empty shell, unable to produce any better than the third world, because that's the only labor source we have left.
My company has an entire office full of people in Italy that do nothing because we have no more use for the facility but the local laws do not allow us to fire them.
We call those types of people Senators over here in the USA.
Not to mention the insane amount of paid time off many Europeans get.
Paid time off... that sounds nice. I'm putting in 60 hours this week.
Many are out of work needlessly. If the government would unpucker its asshole and allow the crap people to be fired, the companies wouldnt be so afraid to hire new ones.
Sounds like the government may have been reacting to high levels of unemployment by making it more difficult to fire people for crap reasons just to rotate in someone at a lower wage. As I understand it, Europeans take quality of life a bit more seriously than over here -- national health care, a solvent social security system, generous unemployment and welfare packages, vacation days that aren't just stand-ins for sick days, and your CEOs over there don't make 4,500x more than your rank and file. It's almost like they... care about the working class.
Look, I can appreciate bad laws interfering with commerce and employment. I sympathize. But only to a point. The system we have over here which throws the working class under the bus is not an improvement. I do not often hear of cities in Europe being reclaimed by nature because it was infested with poor people and we didn't care enough to rebuild it. I don't hear about expensive cell phone plans with limited options and everything is locked in by vendor. I don't hear about nightmare housing situations where 20% of a country's homes sit vacant while nearly the same number of people are homeless.
You may have traded a lack of profit and industry production for a better quality of life and resent that fact, but take it from someone whose country chose the former over the latter: It's bad. It's real bad over here. For every person who "made it" and became a success story, there's dozens who are living hand to mouth and afraid they won't be able to afford food next week.
Europe has its problems... but choose wisely which ones you want to trade them for.
You might be a greedy scumbag, regardless of the amount of money you have already accrued. Check for the following symptoms: not wanting to pay taxes on money your employees earned for you, feeling it is totally acceptable to dumb toxic waste from your country off the coast of Somalia, or stealing from babies.
You must have missed the part where they said they want to do it legally. There. It's in bold now to be harder to ignore in your frenzied rush to get in a few licks without bothering to check and see that this is Europe, not the United States. You know, with the paying of taxes and the giving of benefits. They want to give those things away. Oh, and vacation days? They have those in Europe. It's some radical liberal idea that just hasn't caught on here. And as for toxic waste and stealing babies... well that escalated quickly... this is software development, not a nuclear weapons program with a side of trading in humans...
It's more like: "We don't want to pay proper wages for good techies, so we are breaking/bending every rules to exploit cheap illegal labor and keeping more of the venture capitalist money for ourselves".
You're confusing Europe for the United States. We just made labor exploitation legal. Not exactly a new concept -- the H1-B visa program might have screwed up, but we built our entire railways at the turn of the last century on the backs of chinese immigrants. The European Union has much stricter laws regarding labor exploitation, and also immigration. It's flat out near-impossible to immigrate into many of those countries. And this is coming from someone who's highly trained, has a college degree, and is in a field highly sought-after.
They're not lying -- it really is hard to get people into the country legally. Europe's been suffering a "brain drain" for years -- it's easy to leave. It's hard to get in.
I'm an engineer looking at the result of the employment of dozens of software engineers that built the Windows version of iTunes. For your assertions to be true, they'd all have to be total morons. This isn't about me, it's about them. I'm simply saying... I've delved into the windows API as it relates to drivers. It is a mess. You can throw up all the documentation in the world, but it doesn't change the fact that dozens of other engineers ran into the same problems, and solved them in the same way. Internet forums are filled with people complaining about message pumps and bad interfaces. Filled.
You can either accept that Microsoft designed something badly, or that thousands of programmers who do this for a living all suck. I know which one I'd bet on.
Or the sites will just move domains/set up alternate domains, as has happened with thepiratebay, eztv, and demonoid just off the top of my head
Why even bother? You can either install plugins off the Firefox site that'll do it for you, or just use Tor to access the site from one of the 150 other countries that aren't retarded. Once you have the magnet URI, the rest is distributed, and there's no amount of DNS tomfoolery that'll stop that.
Hey. I'm an American. Our H1-B visa program has tanked our industry. Substandard code, slipping release schedules, low wages. There is plenty of domestic talent here already, and I'm not even here on a visitor's pass.
What would it take for me to get out of my mismanaged and failed country of fools and into your country, which appears to be slightly less mismanaged and the changes are being pushed by startups who want to pay me well instead of MegaCorp(tm) who wants to pay me minimum wage to do something that takes 10 years of training to get into?
I'm deadly serious here. I could line up about 50,000 americans inside a week for you guys -- we're unemployed but we have the skillset. Our H1-B Visa program has killed our tech sector. Don't fall for the same trap we did.
The Windows HAL is certainly not the greatest API ever, but somehow everyone other than Apple manages to have their device detection work by callback or event sink, not by polling. If Apple really is polling for USB presence, then there's really no way you can blame that on the Microsoft API, which does provide better ways of doing USB device presence detection.
I wasn't blaming Microsoft for Apple's poor design decision, I was blaming Microsoft for the entire design of HAL. I mean, my god... it's a nightmare of convoluted and badly-documented objects and methods. I won't go as far as to say whoever decided to go with polling instead of event-driven made a great design choice, but I can understand how, after days and days of pouring over bad documentation, he decided it was either ritualistic suicide or go with the better-documented interface...
People complained on the Apple boards more than two years ago that it was consuming up to 50% of CPU cycles, and thus far it's as bad as it always has been. Mind you, Mac users aren't complaining. Just Windows users."
The reason is two-fold. First, iTunes scans your folders for new files periodically if you don't let it manage your collection for you. Second, it's constantly searching for an iDevice using the 'mobile' service; All that CPU is being eaten making windows calls to each attached USB bus and being asked "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" And then, of course, launching iTunes as soon as one is detected. You can disable this service with no ill-effect, but you have to do it manually. iTunes will then throw up a warning and then continue on its merry. That, by the way, is also on the Apple message boards.
Now yes, Apple shouldn't have done this without telling its users: Hey, enabling this is gonna slow your junk down! -- But on the flip, Microsoft's hardware abstraction layer is a terrible, horrible, implimentation that makes every access from userspace terribly expensive. And worse? Some of the documentation specifically says they want it that way! On purpose! Everytime I have to work with HAL I'm filled with a strong urge to strip all my clothes off, burn them, then take a cold shower while shivering up in the corner, scrubbing my skin raw, chanting "must...wash...away...the sin..."
I guess what I'm saying is... Shame on both of them. Now if you'll excuse me, I have another shower to take.
In addition to that, what is it going to do with an already over stressed Air Traffic Control system?
The ATC system is "over stressed" because of large numbers of commercial flights, of which the majority are shipping. UPS, DHS, FedEx... they all have larger fleets than any commercial airline you're flying.
Drones don't need runway clearances, etc., and as long as they maintain flight separation (vertical and horizontal) in controlled airspace they're a non-event. ATC could care less -- they probably wouldn't even be on radar anyway, since to my knowledge they don't carry transponders. Remember that guy who decided to go hook up a bunch of weather balloons and float through the LAX holding pattern? Their first indication of trouble was a pilot radioing that he saw some guy with a shotgun float by the window sucking down a beer.
Controllers don't usually look at the actual radar. It's all transponders. You could fly an aircraft carrier through the flight corridor and it would go unnoticed by ATC until someone called it in. -_-
Actually, no real device is ohmic at all. Even a resistor will heat up with increasing current causing an increased resistance that is non-linear. For us EEs, ohmic devices are our massless pullies and frictionless inclines.
I'm not a certified EE, but I have built electronic circuits. I know there's a lot of ways to 'cheat' on paper; switching power supplies don't get rid of ohm's law though, they're simply more efficient. Ohm's law is about the relationship between resistance, voltage, and current. Those relationships are derived from the physics about electron exchange between different materials. Now yes, capacitors and inductors both run 90 degrees out of phase between voltage and current so it can appear to be violating ohm's law, but if you apply a correction factor you'll see it's pretty close to parity. When you get down to really small discrete components, like a transitor for example, measurement inaccuracy and time domains will really start to screw with you, but ohm's law still holds even down to that scale.
Ohm's law is the reason for these changes Intel is making: An attempt to remove parasitics from the circuits, which all boil down to resistance; Whether it's phase-shifted forward because of capacitors, or backwards because of inductors, or because of components that create those effects, doesn't really matter.
Now you're right, a purely ohmic device doesn't exist. Even resistors can generate small amounts of phase shift. But that doesn't make them "massless pullies" or "frictionless inclines". Ohm's law is still useful for the same reason the OSI 7 layer model is still useful, despite no network yet having been designed that perfectly adheres to it...
I worked blue collar jobs for about 5 years before getting my first programming job, and that paid $18k. You imagine having to try hard to get that first sucky job is new?
Yeah, well, since my point was they aren't finding jobs period, your comments that you were able to find jobs at that age sorta backs up my point, which probably wasn't what you were going for... but it's illustrative nonetheless.
Perhaps you're not actually reading (in which case I'm not sure this will help) but what I'm yelling is: "I did it, so can you". There is no secret to success, but there are principles, and damned if my parents taught me anything about money (to be fair, they didn't know themselves).
Did your parents' GDP vs. Household Income have an inverse relationship? Did yours? You can yell it all you want, but the numbers, unlike "principles" don't lie.
Economies go in cycles. Always have. Don't let it get you down - this is only as bad as the 70s, and not anything like the 30s.
Umm, I'm afraid history strongly disagrees. The longest period of economic downturn was 5.5 years. People have been talking about the poor economy since the first term of the last president. He had two terms. This president just started his second term. So I'd say we're no longer cyclical... We are, to use the venacular, Fucked.
There's one thing I know about luck and "statistical success": life gives us all repeated opportunities and fuck-yous.
Yeah. And you missed the point where I said the random number generator has had its inputs tweaked a bit. It's now giving a lot more fuck-yous.
Putting everything you have into each opportunity, failing, and then chasing the next one anyway is what works in the long term.
Or you die a penniless pauper, like Nicolai Tesla did, shortly after single-handedly paving the way for the modern power distribution grid, electric motor, generator, and demonstrated how to do it all wirelessly.
As far as my responsibility to help others: I've given over $1000 to charity this month alone - to help people in countries where the system is vastly more fucked up than the cards you were dealt. Try looking around the world before whining about how rough you have it here - hell, try living in the trailer park I grew up in - and hold your accusations about me until you're doing the same to help others.
Sir, I spent my childhood being shot at and living in the woods, under a pile of 2x4s and a tarp, and my toilet was a hole in the ground. So don't talk to me about your "trailer park" growing up. And it isn't whining; Both of us shouldn't have to be living in our respective childhood shitholes in a country that boasts the highest GDP of any country on the planet. Well, if we're so rich, how come so many are living so poor?
That's my point, sir. Why, in this country, with this much wealth, are so many starving? Are so many homeless? Are so many uneducated or undereducated? Why is our childbirth complication rate so high? Why are our hospitals stuffed with people dying of treatable diseases? And how the fuck did polio and tuberculosis make a comeback -- we eradicated those diseases, with not a single case seen for years. Now they're all back.
You can sit there and argue the optimal case until your face falls off and it won't change anything. Argue attitude. Argue experience. Argue whatever the fuck you want, but the average case says we're losing ground. Fast.
In a few more years, people still spewing the delusional "I can do anything!" speech will find themselves swiftly being socially isolated for fear of their stupidity being contagious.
Bought my ticket to Somalia today! Success and wealth, here I come!!
On one hand, I want to tell you that there was the implicit understanding that you think about where you want to move to, and not just close your eyes, thumb a spot on the map, and buy a ticket to that place. On the other hand, I hesitate to get between a man and his Darwin Award...
Slashdot Mirror
Yea because the average lifestyle is exactly the same now as it was 100 years ago or even 1000 years ago. Maybe I'm missing the sarcasm, but I read your post as if you actually believe it.
Did I hear something?
???*Woosh*???
Hmm... Let's see.
5000 BC: Iraq, Samarra. About the only thing we know is they did pottery. Beyond this point, there aren't any reliable records.
4000 BC: Mesopotamia. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
3000 BC: Mesopotamia. The Sumerian hegemony. A few wealth people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 BC: Egypt. The height of the Old Kingdom. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
1000 BC: China, Zhou Dynasty. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
0 AD: Roman Empire. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
1000 AD: Europe. Middle of the Dark Ages. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 AD: United States. A few wealthy people, and a large number of worker-slaves.
Have I made my point yet?
Having worked in a government office, I'm willing to believe that the "more expensive" portion alone was enough to make municipalities avoid them. I'm just curious if there's any truth to it.
That's why you legislate it at the state or federal level, just as every other major safety innovation has had to, historically.
Airbags: "They cost too much! Cars will be too expensive." ...
Seatbelts: "Consumers find them too restrictive!"
Third brake light: "It increases cost! And why would you need 3?"
Anti-lock brakes: "The maintenance costs will be extraordinary!"
Replacing metal 'guard rails' with concrete...
Repairing structurally deficient bridges...
You get the idea. The only way to get anything new adopted is either to have a lot of people die in a short period of time, preferably affluent people (see also: Titanic), to tax it, or to have a ground-swell of public support for it. Simply arguing for it on the basis that it'll save lives is a pointless endeavor.
It could save a hundred thousand lives a year, and nobody would give a fuck. See also: Drunk driving. Inattentive driving, etc. Nobody wants to deal with those problems, so people go right on dying... but at predictable rates. So there you have it.
Dude, all you've done is pulled a bunch of numbers out of your ass, and then constructed an argument on it. Now I appreciate that maybe Fox News has had a bad impact on your ability to construct a proper argument, but rather than address the specific points, I'll just throw out a couple key principles that are well-established and then hit the conclusion.
First, if you increase labor, and demand remains constant, the price will drop. This is the law of supply and demand. All of your quoting of numbers and beating of chest tries to cover up the fact that more workers means lower wages, all other things being equal. It's an escapable economic truth.
As to the rest of your rant, it's all weasel words, ad homid attacks, and a lot of screaming "It can't be true because it can't be true because..." circular logic.
Here's some global data regarding wages. I'm not going to make it too easy for you by linking in the exact table you need to look at... but if you want to educate yourself instead of screaming profanities... I'd start there.
Dude, you are the reason why tenure is a bad thing. If anyone suggested something as hopelessly stupid as what you just did in my college, I'd not just boot your ass, I'd build a special rocket to fire you into the Sun to rid the planet of your stupidity.
Every 10 years, some pundit comes along and says technology will have us all living the good life and little robots and shit will do all the work for us. But the truth is the same today as it has been throughout human history: It's cheaper to enslave other people to achieve that "good life" than it is to build the technology to elevate us all. And humanity, on the whole, has steadfastly chosen short term gain for some over long-term prosperity all. Hell, this ball of spinning rock you're on is actually starting to cook itself (and us) because of this fact of humanity.
The entire notion ranks right up there with believing that a better understanding of the problem will necessarily lead to better decisions. Lulz. You can lead a horse to water...
Instagram? GoPro? iPhone? iPad? Square?
Instagram: A photo sharing site. These have been around since, I don't know, the beginning of the internet?
GoPro: We took a camera... and duct taped it to you! Wow. Innovative.
iPhone / iPad: Can't comment on it on this website. Too many religious connotations, not enough facts.
Square: omg! A way to insecurely store your personal banking data on your phone.
None of these things will be remembered in 20 years as significantly advancing the state of the art.
Google self-driving cars? Tesla? SpaceX? Drones from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems & Northrop Grumman?
Not in production, just became profitable after heavy government subidizing, follows on the heels of NASA who did all the heavy lifting, and things in the sky that are trying to kill us. Yeah... USA! USA! USA!
Gimme a break, man. Look at the Large Hadron Collider -- that could have been us, but we slashed the funding. A Nobel Prize? What's that compared to sleezy marketing and questionable accounting practices? Not much, that's what.
When I say new tech, I don't mean new business. America is great at cranking out variations on the same theme -- turn on the TV sometime. It's all just rehashes. And our technology sector is quickly becoming the same thing. It's all formulaic. There is no innovation, no risk taking, no entrepreneurship.
And that's my point. Every last example you've thrown up has been done before. Every. Last. One. Google car? DARPA robotics. SpaceX? NASA. Tesla? Tesla! And drones... dude, R/C airplanes aren't exactly cutting edge. We can mass produce them, yes, but it's not revolutionary... it's just taking what we already had and repurposing it.
They're nice pieces of kit, but they are not revolutionary, ground-breaking, paradigm-breaking things. We haven't had any of that in a good fifteen years now. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world... China's building dams that it takes all afternoon to walk across, entire cities and railway projects are springing up almost overnight, etc. In Europe, we've got the LHC churning out new physics.
Just about everywhere else you care to look besides the United States is showing signs of innovative new ways of doing things. The only thing we're good at... is business.
When you create a child you're on the hook for raising it. You don't start out knowing everything about it so you have to learn about it at the same time you teach it. That's moral. A new form of life is necessarily going to require more learning on our part in order to raise well. We will make mistakes. We will hurt it. But that's life. The only realistic other option is not to create it to begin with. Better to exist imperfectly than not all.
Yes, but we don't dissect our children to figure out how to better parent them.
The last thing I want to have to do is fire anyone unless they are richly deserving and that usually is demonstrated by a history of failure over time. So, if I have a "problem", he's going to be my problem for awhile. Thankfully, if you do find the right candidates, the failures are few and far between.
I can't say I speak for everyone, but I know I speak for the most professional amongst us when I say: Thank you. I'll never work for you, but we need more managers like you in the field. People who are willing to roll their sleeves up and get involved. So again, thanks.
We now return to our regularly scheduled flame-fest, already in progress...
We've long established that the source of the human "soul" is in the brain. Those interconnections give rise to consciousness and self-awareness -- and sentience. If you build something that precisely models the brain, you will be creating sentience. I have to question how we can create a sentient creature simply to experiment upon it and still claim to have a shred of humanity to us.
I know that this is not as dazzling and interesting as building the device to geeks like us, but we cannot simply ignore the ethical consequences of our actions. All vocations, all manner of human endeavor, must move forward with an eye towards a respect for life. This may not be human life we're creating, or even organic life, but it is no less deserving.
Someday we're going to have cybernetic life walking about. And I have to wonder -- how well will they treat us, when they find out how ethical we were in creating it?
Remember that unemployment is rising to never-before-seen levels. Youth unemployment stands around 25%-30% in Southern Europe, and sometimes much higher. In the meantime, start-ups are looking at illegal immigrants for techie jobs... Why is that? Because, yes, these people want to stuff as much money in their pockets as possible.
We're at 25-30% right now and have none of those protections. We just lie through our teeth about how we calculate our unemployment. I'm not sure giving up those protections will net the result you're looking for. You'll still have unemployment, except now life for 100% of your population will suck, instead of 25%.
If someone is churning out substandard code and causing schedules to slip... be they an American or H1-B holder... replace them... it's that simple.
You haven't worked with people who ask you to... do the needful... have you? The substandard code is a byproduct of a combination of culture, language barrier, and a lack of experience. Note that I said experience, not education. American labor often stresses that people take their own initiative in solving a problem. You're expected to come up with a solution on your own, with little oversight or guidance, and you're given some leeway in making that happen. Yes, some companies are worse about this than others -- I am speaking in generalities here. YMMV. The culture of many of our immigrants is to not take that initiative -- but to only do things under the express guidance of their leaders. They see a problem and unless it's in the three ring binder that says "Things Management Says You Should Do When You Spot Problem X", it doesn't exist. They don't even see it. If you ask them about it, they'll say they don't know.
I'd snark you back and say "it's that simple," but nothing about conflicting cultural ideas and attitudes is. Nothing. You can't just replace people who have good attitudes but limited experience or have been trained to not take the initiative... you're just passing the buck on to the next person then. And it won't save your project. Software development isn't like factory work -- you can't mongolian hoarde the problem and solve it faster. In truth, a lot of times adding new people or more people makes the project take longer. This is a "people" problem, but it's commonly seen in all engineering disciplines. It's just the nature of the work.
The H1-B problem is not about putting down immigrants. We want them. Hell, we need them for some industries. The problem is that you can't destabilize an industry by radically changing either supply, or demand, and not have it hurt everyone. The H1-B program radically increased supply, and as a result, the cost of technical labor dropped -- a lot. It dropped so much that a lot of people who had invested in an education in it were left high and dry, and many people who had solid experience suddenly found themselves knocked several notches down on their career path and had to scramble to find a way to support their current lifestyle at a much lower income, with often tragic results. So a lot of experienced people left the industry to move into fields that were more stable, and the overall quality of the labor dropped.
This, in turn, fueled more cries for H1-Bs because high level positions were now going unfulfilled -- there was a glut of low-level workers, and very few experienced people because they didn't want to move 'down' in their career and simply moved out. That gap simply couldn't be filled no matter how many workers you threw at the problem. So the entire problem became cyclical... more H1-Bs mean more experienced workers leave, which mean lower overall quality of work, and now businesses are scrambling to find anyone who's qualified amongst a veritable sea of resumes... none which have the amount of experience needed.
And that, right there, is how our industry collapsed. It was because of short-term thinking -- they wanted to tap into the global labor market, so they poked a hole in the dam of regulations holding them back, thinking they could suckle off the new supply of cheap labor. But they were trying to drink out of a firehose, and then the dam exploded and washed out the entire industry.
There is no new tech now in this country. It's all gone to shit. It died because of short-term thinking, and now our high tech industry is just an empty shell, unable to produce any better than the third world, because that's the only labor source we have left.
My company has an entire office full of people in Italy that do nothing because we have no more use for the facility but the local laws do not allow us to fire them.
We call those types of people Senators over here in the USA.
Not to mention the insane amount of paid time off many Europeans get.
Paid time off... that sounds nice. I'm putting in 60 hours this week.
Many are out of work needlessly. If the government would unpucker its asshole and allow the crap people to be fired, the companies wouldnt be so afraid to hire new ones.
Sounds like the government may have been reacting to high levels of unemployment by making it more difficult to fire people for crap reasons just to rotate in someone at a lower wage. As I understand it, Europeans take quality of life a bit more seriously than over here -- national health care, a solvent social security system, generous unemployment and welfare packages, vacation days that aren't just stand-ins for sick days, and your CEOs over there don't make 4,500x more than your rank and file. It's almost like they... care about the working class.
Look, I can appreciate bad laws interfering with commerce and employment. I sympathize. But only to a point. The system we have over here which throws the working class under the bus is not an improvement. I do not often hear of cities in Europe being reclaimed by nature because it was infested with poor people and we didn't care enough to rebuild it. I don't hear about expensive cell phone plans with limited options and everything is locked in by vendor. I don't hear about nightmare housing situations where 20% of a country's homes sit vacant while nearly the same number of people are homeless.
You may have traded a lack of profit and industry production for a better quality of life and resent that fact, but take it from someone whose country chose the former over the latter: It's bad. It's real bad over here. For every person who "made it" and became a success story, there's dozens who are living hand to mouth and afraid they won't be able to afford food next week.
Europe has its problems... but choose wisely which ones you want to trade them for.
You might be a greedy scumbag, regardless of the amount of money you have already accrued. Check for the following symptoms: not wanting to pay taxes on money your employees earned for you, feeling it is totally acceptable to dumb toxic waste from your country off the coast of Somalia, or stealing from babies.
You must have missed the part where they said they want to do it legally. There. It's in bold now to be harder to ignore in your frenzied rush to get in a few licks without bothering to check and see that this is Europe, not the United States. You know, with the paying of taxes and the giving of benefits. They want to give those things away. Oh, and vacation days? They have those in Europe. It's some radical liberal idea that just hasn't caught on here. And as for toxic waste and stealing babies... well that escalated quickly... this is software development, not a nuclear weapons program with a side of trading in humans...
It's more like: "We don't want to pay proper wages for good techies, so we are breaking/bending every rules to exploit cheap illegal labor and keeping more of the venture capitalist money for ourselves".
You're confusing Europe for the United States. We just made labor exploitation legal. Not exactly a new concept -- the H1-B visa program might have screwed up, but we built our entire railways at the turn of the last century on the backs of chinese immigrants. The European Union has much stricter laws regarding labor exploitation, and also immigration. It's flat out near-impossible to immigrate into many of those countries. And this is coming from someone who's highly trained, has a college degree, and is in a field highly sought-after.
They're not lying -- it really is hard to get people into the country legally. Europe's been suffering a "brain drain" for years -- it's easy to leave. It's hard to get in.
Maybe you should find another line of work?
I'm an engineer looking at the result of the employment of dozens of software engineers that built the Windows version of iTunes. For your assertions to be true, they'd all have to be total morons. This isn't about me, it's about them. I'm simply saying... I've delved into the windows API as it relates to drivers. It is a mess. You can throw up all the documentation in the world, but it doesn't change the fact that dozens of other engineers ran into the same problems, and solved them in the same way. Internet forums are filled with people complaining about message pumps and bad interfaces. Filled.
You can either accept that Microsoft designed something badly, or that thousands of programmers who do this for a living all suck. I know which one I'd bet on.
Or the sites will just move domains/set up alternate domains, as has happened with thepiratebay, eztv, and demonoid just off the top of my head
Why even bother? You can either install plugins off the Firefox site that'll do it for you, or just use Tor to access the site from one of the 150 other countries that aren't retarded. Once you have the magnet URI, the rest is distributed, and there's no amount of DNS tomfoolery that'll stop that.
Hey. I'm an American. Our H1-B visa program has tanked our industry. Substandard code, slipping release schedules, low wages. There is plenty of domestic talent here already, and I'm not even here on a visitor's pass.
What would it take for me to get out of my mismanaged and failed country of fools and into your country, which appears to be slightly less mismanaged and the changes are being pushed by startups who want to pay me well instead of MegaCorp(tm) who wants to pay me minimum wage to do something that takes 10 years of training to get into?
I'm deadly serious here. I could line up about 50,000 americans inside a week for you guys -- we're unemployed but we have the skillset. Our H1-B Visa program has killed our tech sector. Don't fall for the same trap we did.
The Windows HAL is certainly not the greatest API ever, but somehow everyone other than Apple manages to have their device detection work by callback or event sink, not by polling. If Apple really is polling for USB presence, then there's really no way you can blame that on the Microsoft API, which does provide better ways of doing USB device presence detection.
I wasn't blaming Microsoft for Apple's poor design decision, I was blaming Microsoft for the entire design of HAL. I mean, my god... it's a nightmare of convoluted and badly-documented objects and methods. I won't go as far as to say whoever decided to go with polling instead of event-driven made a great design choice, but I can understand how, after days and days of pouring over bad documentation, he decided it was either ritualistic suicide or go with the better-documented interface...
You mean, exclusive contracts can screw you over? WHO KNEW? See also: Every antitrust investigation. Ever.
People complained on the Apple boards more than two years ago that it was consuming up to 50% of CPU cycles, and thus far it's as bad as it always has been. Mind you, Mac users aren't complaining. Just Windows users."
The reason is two-fold. First, iTunes scans your folders for new files periodically if you don't let it manage your collection for you. Second, it's constantly searching for an iDevice using the 'mobile' service; All that CPU is being eaten making windows calls to each attached USB bus and being asked "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" And then, of course, launching iTunes as soon as one is detected. You can disable this service with no ill-effect, but you have to do it manually. iTunes will then throw up a warning and then continue on its merry. That, by the way, is also on the Apple message boards.
Now yes, Apple shouldn't have done this without telling its users: Hey, enabling this is gonna slow your junk down! -- But on the flip, Microsoft's hardware abstraction layer is a terrible, horrible, implimentation that makes every access from userspace terribly expensive. And worse? Some of the documentation specifically says they want it that way! On purpose! Everytime I have to work with HAL I'm filled with a strong urge to strip all my clothes off, burn them, then take a cold shower while shivering up in the corner, scrubbing my skin raw, chanting "must...wash...away...the sin..."
I guess what I'm saying is... Shame on both of them. Now if you'll excuse me, I have another shower to take.
In addition to that, what is it going to do with an already over stressed Air Traffic Control system?
The ATC system is "over stressed" because of large numbers of commercial flights, of which the majority are shipping. UPS, DHS, FedEx... they all have larger fleets than any commercial airline you're flying.
Drones don't need runway clearances, etc., and as long as they maintain flight separation (vertical and horizontal) in controlled airspace they're a non-event. ATC could care less -- they probably wouldn't even be on radar anyway, since to my knowledge they don't carry transponders. Remember that guy who decided to go hook up a bunch of weather balloons and float through the LAX holding pattern? Their first indication of trouble was a pilot radioing that he saw some guy with a shotgun float by the window sucking down a beer.
Controllers don't usually look at the actual radar. It's all transponders. You could fly an aircraft carrier through the flight corridor and it would go unnoticed by ATC until someone called it in. -_-
What an absurd statement. Just because a device has non-linear characteristics doesn't mean that V=IR is any less useful.
I assume you meant to reply to the GP, not my post. My position is the same as yours...
Real Hackers(tm) don't hack from a device that records your face, voice, and surroundings... Just sayin'.
Actually, no real device is ohmic at all. Even a resistor will heat up with increasing current causing an increased resistance that is non-linear. For us EEs, ohmic devices are our massless pullies and frictionless inclines.
I'm not a certified EE, but I have built electronic circuits. I know there's a lot of ways to 'cheat' on paper; switching power supplies don't get rid of ohm's law though, they're simply more efficient. Ohm's law is about the relationship between resistance, voltage, and current. Those relationships are derived from the physics about electron exchange between different materials. Now yes, capacitors and inductors both run 90 degrees out of phase between voltage and current so it can appear to be violating ohm's law, but if you apply a correction factor you'll see it's pretty close to parity. When you get down to really small discrete components, like a transitor for example, measurement inaccuracy and time domains will really start to screw with you, but ohm's law still holds even down to that scale.
Ohm's law is the reason for these changes Intel is making: An attempt to remove parasitics from the circuits, which all boil down to resistance; Whether it's phase-shifted forward because of capacitors, or backwards because of inductors, or because of components that create those effects, doesn't really matter.
Now you're right, a purely ohmic device doesn't exist. Even resistors can generate small amounts of phase shift. But that doesn't make them "massless pullies" or "frictionless inclines". Ohm's law is still useful for the same reason the OSI 7 layer model is still useful, despite no network yet having been designed that perfectly adheres to it...
I worked blue collar jobs for about 5 years before getting my first programming job, and that paid $18k. You imagine having to try hard to get that first sucky job is new?
Yeah, well, since my point was they aren't finding jobs period, your comments that you were able to find jobs at that age sorta backs up my point, which probably wasn't what you were going for... but it's illustrative nonetheless.
Perhaps you're not actually reading (in which case I'm not sure this will help) but what I'm yelling is: "I did it, so can you". There is no secret to success, but there are principles, and damned if my parents taught me anything about money (to be fair, they didn't know themselves).
Did your parents' GDP vs. Household Income have an inverse relationship? Did yours? You can yell it all you want, but the numbers, unlike "principles" don't lie.
Economies go in cycles. Always have. Don't let it get you down - this is only as bad as the 70s, and not anything like the 30s.
Umm, I'm afraid history strongly disagrees. The longest period of economic downturn was 5.5 years. People have been talking about the poor economy since the first term of the last president. He had two terms. This president just started his second term. So I'd say we're no longer cyclical... We are, to use the venacular, Fucked .
There's one thing I know about luck and "statistical success": life gives us all repeated opportunities and fuck-yous.
Yeah. And you missed the point where I said the random number generator has had its inputs tweaked a bit. It's now giving a lot more fuck-yous.
Putting everything you have into each opportunity, failing, and then chasing the next one anyway is what works in the long term.
Or you die a penniless pauper, like Nicolai Tesla did, shortly after single-handedly paving the way for the modern power distribution grid, electric motor, generator, and demonstrated how to do it all wirelessly.
As far as my responsibility to help others: I've given over $1000 to charity this month alone - to help people in countries where the system is vastly more fucked up than the cards you were dealt. Try looking around the world before whining about how rough you have it here - hell, try living in the trailer park I grew up in - and hold your accusations about me until you're doing the same to help others.
Sir, I spent my childhood being shot at and living in the woods, under a pile of 2x4s and a tarp, and my toilet was a hole in the ground. So don't talk to me about your "trailer park" growing up. And it isn't whining; Both of us shouldn't have to be living in our respective childhood shitholes in a country that boasts the highest GDP of any country on the planet. Well, if we're so rich, how come so many are living so poor?
That's my point, sir. Why, in this country, with this much wealth, are so many starving? Are so many homeless? Are so many uneducated or undereducated? Why is our childbirth complication rate so high? Why are our hospitals stuffed with people dying of treatable diseases? And how the fuck did polio and tuberculosis make a comeback -- we eradicated those diseases, with not a single case seen for years. Now they're all back.
You can sit there and argue the optimal case until your face falls off and it won't change anything. Argue attitude. Argue experience. Argue whatever the fuck you want, but the average case says we're losing ground. Fast.
In a few more years, people still spewing the delusional "I can do anything!" speech will find themselves swiftly being socially isolated for fear of their stupidity being contagious.
Bought my ticket to Somalia today! Success and wealth, here I come!!
On one hand, I want to tell you that there was the implicit understanding that you think about where you want to move to, and not just close your eyes, thumb a spot on the map, and buy a ticket to that place. On the other hand, I hesitate to get between a man and his Darwin Award...