I wonder if in 50 years when China is the dominant superpower you will take the view that it is alright for them to bitchslap the US because "they have the power and the might, they don't need to play well with us".
How will that happen?
Demographers such as Ben Wattenberg have proven that the link between a country's growth is inextricably linked to their population growth. As a result of the "one child per family" policy, China is currently experiencing negative population growth.
If they were to receive a third grade report card they'd receive low marks in the "plays well with others" category.
Please remind me why half of Europe is not currently speaking German, why Japan and Germany lost in wars to a certain country and yet are world powers, how the economy fares in Basra today compared to the past decade, and two nations who within the past five years lost totalitarian regimes and are forming democratic institutions. Oh, and who right now is getting all of the money from Iraq's oil? (Hint: It ain't the USA.)
If this isn't your idea of "playing well with others," I welcome it.
Let's see, there's the invasion of Iraq (against the wishes of the U.N.)...
Pardon me while I beat a dead horse.
The UN had repeatedly said "Iraq must do this, or else," and then determined that Iraq had not done so. This happened more than half a dozen times over the past decade. By voting against action in Iraq, the UN made its own declarations meaningless. So who cares if they disapproved?
You would rather have Saddam continuing to murder his own people and invade neighboring lands? How long would inspections continue before the international community became bored (or, in the case of France, Russia, and China, complicit) and Iraq was once again able to access the materials needed for WMD?
"Oh, but it's the USA's fault he had WMD in the first place." Yeah. So? Who cares whose fault it was? It was up to the international community to defend the standards they themselves set, and they failed.
challenging conventional assumptions about WiFi and suggesting new architectures for digital networks that are based on physical proximity rather than solely connectivity
Uhm, isn't that what ad hoc wireless 802.11 networks are for?
I mean, seriously...carrying an AP around in your backpack? Why bother when the 802.11 standard, and most hardware, provides both infrastructure (with AP) and ad hoc (without AP) modes?
I would forward you to the work of Prof. William E. Howden on testing, and how through analysis you can prove demonstrably that you are X% sure that the code is Y% bug-free.
It's one of the seminal papers on the subject, and is covered in any decent upper-division/grad-level Software Engineering course.
How about this: Writing bug-free software is manageable, but ludicrously expensive.
I worked at a company that insisted on making the software bug-free. Trouble is, in order to do it, we had to eliminate features. What we ended up releasing was smooth as glass and genuinely bug-free (trust me, after that much testing, and that much work, you KNOW that it's bug free) but it was so limited in its capabilities that we were unable to recoup our investment.
Believing that it's impossible is lazy; we can make lead into gold, but the process costs more than the gold is worth. Same is true for bug-free software. We can make it bug-free, but it costs more than most can afford.
I don't remember "civil disobedience" as practiced by Ghandi or MLK including breaking things... it was generally a peaceful type of thing. Maybe a sit-in, demonstrating outside the machines and explaining to the people who come in to vote what's wrong with them, or disobedience like this - but not wrecking the machine. Anyway, these machines seem to do a good enough job of breaking themselves - why go to all the trouble?
Ghandi and MLK didn't invent Civil Disobedience. Try Henry David Thoreau in 1849. (Link goes to Project Gutenberg text.)
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or
backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
I think Thoreau would be more supportive of the citizen subject of the government who would, rather than stage an impotent sit-in or violent damaging of hardware, hack the system for his own amusement.
There were flash cards moved around, but no paper.
I voted in the SD election as well, and in fact, I was one of the people who asked for a paper receipt. It was denied.
There is a printer, but it's used only to print a tally of votes received at that machine. Nothing says that the data can't get corrupted before it gets there.
The Constitution in its current form differs with me on that point.
The democracy the Constitution defines is pretty weak as far as democracies go to begin with. It defines it as a representative democracy, and a large number of offices, including the President, are not even elected directly by the masses. The rest of the Executive and entirety of the Judicial branches of the federal government are appointed. Additionally, there are built-in restrictions on what laws the masses can enact (e.g., gun control) just for those instances where stupidity becomes popular.
What am I saying? Stupidity has always been popular.
Anyway, I don't think the Constitution is quite so pro-democracy as most Americans, who never paid any attention in Social Studies class anyway, seem to believe. My girlfriend, who is Chinese, was astonished to hear me actually "admit" (her word) that the US practiced representative democracy. She felt she had really nailed me when she got me to say that. I thought that was kinda silly, but it's true.
In America, democracy and liberty are defended, but practiced not quite so much.
You're exactly right. And it's precisely BECAUSE it's so obvious that they set out to state an opinion (and clearly marked the opinions as such) that is why Infinium's claims are so silly.
Adam named all of the animals. This suggests that they were all subordinate to him, although he was still appointed to care for them, not exploit them.
Yeah. And there's a bit in there about "dominion over all the animals." And then there's the bit where Jesus mentions birds, and how "if God cares so much for a bird, how much more he cares for you?" -- which... ok, yeah, maybe we are better than animals in the Bible. But it still doesn't mean anything about life on other planets.
That revelation, I suspect, is reserved for when we get to that point.:)
Non-christian religions.... However, if I believed in a creator-god and in the uniqueness and specialness of human life in the universe, then yea, that would cause some issues.
Christianity doesn't require you to believe in the uniqueness and specialness of human life in the universe. We are noted as the caretakers of Earth in Genesis, which doesn't necessarily put us above animals. We are also supposedly made in the image of God, but that means different things, and though we be made in God's image on Earth there may be others created in God's image elsewhere.
But generally these things aren't terribly important. What is more important is how I treat you, that I actively do what I can to make the world a better place, and that I return God's love as much as I can.
Gone, but caught on camera. You know precisely when the tag disappeared and where from. You just look at the camera recording at that time and place, and you will then be able to see the shoplifter remove the item with your own eyes. Not only that, you have an image of the shoplifter to use for tracking the shoplifter down, and something to show the court.
So maybe you don't catch the shoplifter in the act, but you can prosecute very easily.
Intel did what they did because it was good for Intel, not because they care about what's good for us. If Intel wanted to make a 64-bit chip, they HAD to follow AMD's standard, because everyone else already was.
What's wrong is the fact that they're not saying they're following AMD's standard. And they're doing this for a very good, what's-best-for-Intel reason as well: If word gets out that Intel is now playing "follow the leader" to AMD, instead of the other way around (how it's been for what, 20 years?) then the stock price will drop so fast it'll make your head swim. Most long-term Intel investors point to Intel's leadership role in the industry for why they bought the stock. If that's not a factor any more, a lot of heavy hitters are gonna ditch.
Bingo -- this isn't about stealing, it's about market-wide compatibility. And THAT is what is so stunning about the news. AMD has always followed Intel's lead -- they had to, if they wanted anyone to buy their chips. But now, for the first time ever, now Intel is following AMD's lead in microprocessor design.
Intel wants to be quiet about this because for the first time, they are following AMD's lead. Since the 1980s, Intel has followed no one, and AMD/Cyrix/etc have followed them. For Intel to now be following AMD is, quite frankly, huge. A lot of investors' faith in Intel is based on their leadership role. Intel wants to keep this out of the mainstream, because if this knowledge becomes common, a lot of investors are going to question their investment in Intel. That means stock prices going down, down, down.
What's happened is that Intel no longer controls their own standard. The "x86" instruction set cannot be abandoned. This is the mistake that IBM made in the 1980s with Microchannel. They came out with a new standard that wasn't compatible with their old standard. By doing so, they effectively locked themselves out of the industry they helped to create.
A big reason Microsoft is still so dominant is that when they came out with NT, they did this right -- they made it moderately compatible, and slowly but surely with each product release worked towards the goal of getting the market to use NT technology -- which they ultimately achieved with the release of Windows XP. It required design compromises in NT (the old 3.51 version was far more secure than all subsequent versions, because they couldn't have pulled it off as well otherwise) and slowly phasing out the old DOS prompt (finally gone with ME in 2000).
If Intel wants people to buy into IA-64, they are going to have to do what Microsoft did. It will take a while, and they will have to support multiple standards. In a sense AMD did them a favor, by developing the transitional standard for them; but in another sense, by letting AMD take the lead, they have lost control over the transition. So it's really not the end of the world for Intel, although it will seem so.
So my advice to you is: Short Intel until word gets out. Once word gets out that Intel is now following AMD, cover your short and go long.
Jury trials are the worst. Face it: You're dealing with 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
What you basically do is you multiply the probability of losing by the amount you stand to lose. Then you multiply the remaining probability by what you lose if you don't. You now have two (estimated) dollar amounts. You pick the one with the smallest dollar amount. Move on.
The author of the article is not only telling people that the former amount is not $0, he's trying to say that it's greater than the 10%. But the thing is, HINAL (He Ain't A Lawyer). The big corps have lawyers, and they've asked the lawyers, and their lawyers are telling them percentages, just like you tell your clients. And these companies, if they have any brains at all, have already done the math. And right now, the math favors doing nothing. That's why SCO hasn't won a lot of licensing fees.
Yup. More to the point, he's saying "Just because the opposition to SCO is bigger, louder, and carries the most-respected voices, doesn't mean they're right." He's technically right in that regard; just because Torvalds says they're on crack doesn't mean they can't win.
On the other hand: 1. The fact that the very rights they claim to have are in dispute, 2. The fact that it took them MONTHS to produce, even for the court, any evidence supporting their claims -- and even admitted that they didn't have all of the evidence they'd claimed to have, 3. The fact that their high-priced lawyer hasn't shown up to court in a while, 4. Other facts related to the case,
those DO suggest that this is bullshit, and that there's nothing to fear.
So yeah. Don't believe us because we're loud. Believe us because the evidence supports us.
"The marginal cost to the really big (Fox, CNN) and/or publicly funded institutions (BBC) of providing web-based news is probably pretty low, and it is effectively a loss leader to bring people into their portal, so there is not really an incentive to charge, so I don't think free general news is disappearing any time soon."
If nothing else, there's Yahoo!. I notice that Yahoo! carries content from LA Times and the Washington Post, among others, so I'm able to access their content registration-free via Yahoo!. So that's where I've been reading the most lately -- particularly using Yahoo! news' RSS feed and a newsreader software.
With declining readership with newspapers, along with lower-than-originally-thought payments from advertising, however -- so-called "premium" content -- the really valuable news -- will probably end up being for-pay. In other words, I think you're going to see more pay content on the web because people are abandoning dead-tree media.
I've been involved with two pay sites. The first is financial site The Motley Fool, the second is a college sports recruiting-news site, Rivals.com. I think that both sites' pay services illustrate really well the extremes of the pay-site model.
In the former case, The Motley Fool made their bulletin boards into part of their pay service. Their actual home-generated content remained free. This struck me as being a horrible decision, because the value of the boards was provided by the posters who contributed information and advice on the boards -- they were, in fact, trying to reduce traffic to their boards. If I'm going to be contributing value to their boards, I should get paid for it -- not the other way around. I found the move to pay offensive, and quit.
Rivals.com (specifically texas.rivals.com) is the opposite story. I am a college football junkie, and Geoff Ketchum, who runs the Texas Longhorns board is a true journalist -- the kind who actually works for a living, rather than just barfing up whatever PR he happens to receive or reporting every rumor that he hears as fact. For just five bucks a month, I get information that no one else gets, and I typically hear about the big stories long before anyone else does. There are two regular columns each week that are stuffed with things nobody else knows about, plus constant reports on the latest high-profile recruits, where they want to go, etc.
Jesus, I sound like an ad. Well, it's because I'm very happy to spend the money for the content, because the content has value -- I can't get it anywhere else -- and it's something very specific that interests me.
So, the summary of what I'm trying to say here is this: The move to pay is necessary for some folks who either can't afford to go to print, or who are losing income from print publications, because the internet ad model has proven to be not very good. And people will pay for sites that generate valuable content, but they won't pay just to participate in "communities."
Malarkey. My boss would kill to find qualified people to do what we need. The trouble is, the qualified people largely aren't citizens, if they even exist at all. We need folks who are experienced with wireless, specifically related to ad-hoc and mesh networking. We need strong programming skills and a good familiarity with embedded Linux, Windows drivers, and the 802.11 MAC. We've found a lot of folks who have done work in NS2, but few who have done it in the real world.
We'll pay for the expertise if we can find it, and we'll snag a local if we can -- we're a startup! We can't afford the hassle of H1B's or outsourcing! -- but the sort of things we're looking for have proven to be difficult to find in ANY candidate.
Look, the military has plans for EVERYTHING. Part of being in the military means drawing up plans: "What would we do if XYZ happened?" So that in the odd chance that XYZ happens -- say, we get invaded by aliens -- then the military has a plan that they can execute.
And it's not just about plans for war in space. It's about plans for how chocolate-chip cookies should be made in the mess hall. Or for how clothes must be made, right down to the stitching, type of thread, precise colors and sizes.
It's part of the military's duty: Create a plan that any idiot can follow and execute given existing equipment, along with several acceptable alternatives, for any given scenario -- be it making a bunk bed for a training facility or the threat of Earth being mowed down by Vogons to build a hyperspace bypass.
Just because the military has plans to do something, doesn't mean they're going to do them. Because having plans they're not necessarily going to execute today is just part of what they do, so that if something DOES happen, they are prepared for it.
That's a joke. Sort of. All three of the places I was laid off are pretty much gone.
Since I left my first job after grad school, I was laid off three times: Once after 7 months, once after 5 months, and once after 18 months.
I just tell them the truth: The first company had to reduce headcount to get their next round of VC funding, and I was junior. The second lost its funding due to 9/11 worries. The third had its funding cut after failing to produce a single product in over six years.
I then talk about how the changes have made me stronger. How it has forced me to learn more in less time than those who have held steady jobs. I show them how, while I worked for those companies, I consistently produced more value than I cost -- in dollars, whenever possible.
But mostly, remember that times have been tough for everyone in the tech industry. An employer who doesn't know that or doesn't take it into account is probably not worth working for.
excellent meaning "supports my views"
article meaning "editorial"
Although I agree with the article's point of view, you're dead-on about the submitter's bias. Of course, the submitter's bias is probably why the submitter noticed the article in the first place, and if the submitter didn't like the article, he/she probably wouldn't have submitted it.
This is clearly an opinion piece, not so much a report.
Slashdot Mirror
How will that happen?
Demographers such as Ben Wattenberg have proven that the link between a country's growth is inextricably linked to their population growth. As a result of the "one child per family" policy, China is currently experiencing negative population growth.
Perhaps you meant to say India?
Please remind me why half of Europe is not currently speaking German, why Japan and Germany lost in wars to a certain country and yet are world powers, how the economy fares in Basra today compared to the past decade, and two nations who within the past five years lost totalitarian regimes and are forming democratic institutions. Oh, and who right now is getting all of the money from Iraq's oil? (Hint: It ain't the USA.)
If this isn't your idea of "playing well with others," I welcome it.
Pardon me while I beat a dead horse.
The UN had repeatedly said "Iraq must do this, or else," and then determined that Iraq had not done so. This happened more than half a dozen times over the past decade. By voting against action in Iraq, the UN made its own declarations meaningless. So who cares if they disapproved?
You would rather have Saddam continuing to murder his own people and invade neighboring lands? How long would inspections continue before the international community became bored (or, in the case of France, Russia, and China, complicit) and Iraq was once again able to access the materials needed for WMD?
"Oh, but it's the USA's fault he had WMD in the first place." Yeah. So? Who cares whose fault it was? It was up to the international community to defend the standards they themselves set, and they failed.
Uhm, isn't that what ad hoc wireless 802.11 networks are for?
I mean, seriously...carrying an AP around in your backpack? Why bother when the 802.11 standard, and most hardware, provides both infrastructure (with AP) and ad hoc (without AP) modes?
I would forward you to the work of Prof. William E. Howden on testing, and how through analysis you can prove demonstrably that you are X% sure that the code is Y% bug-free.
It's one of the seminal papers on the subject, and is covered in any decent upper-division/grad-level Software Engineering course.
How about this: Writing bug-free software is manageable, but ludicrously expensive.
I worked at a company that insisted on making the software bug-free. Trouble is, in order to do it, we had to eliminate features. What we ended up releasing was smooth as glass and genuinely bug-free (trust me, after that much testing, and that much work, you KNOW that it's bug free) but it was so limited in its capabilities that we were unable to recoup our investment.
Believing that it's impossible is lazy; we can make lead into gold, but the process costs more than the gold is worth. Same is true for bug-free software. We can make it bug-free, but it costs more than most can afford.
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext93/civil11.txt
^---that's the link.
Ghandi and MLK didn't invent Civil Disobedience. Try Henry David Thoreau in 1849. (Link goes to Project Gutenberg text.)
I think Thoreau would be more supportive of the citizen subject of the government who would, rather than stage an impotent sit-in or violent damaging of hardware, hack the system for his own amusement.
Or maybe it's just that I would like to see that?
There were flash cards moved around, but no paper.
I voted in the SD election as well, and in fact, I was one of the people who asked for a paper receipt. It was denied.
There is a printer, but it's used only to print a tally of votes received at that machine. Nothing says that the data can't get corrupted before it gets there.
You should get her an iBook instead. That's what my bro and I did. She loves it.
The democracy the Constitution defines is pretty weak as far as democracies go to begin with. It defines it as a representative democracy, and a large number of offices, including the President, are not even elected directly by the masses. The rest of the Executive and entirety of the Judicial branches of the federal government are appointed. Additionally, there are built-in restrictions on what laws the masses can enact (e.g., gun control) just for those instances where stupidity becomes popular.
What am I saying? Stupidity has always been popular.
Anyway, I don't think the Constitution is quite so pro-democracy as most Americans, who never paid any attention in Social Studies class anyway, seem to believe. My girlfriend, who is Chinese, was astonished to hear me actually "admit" (her word) that the US practiced representative democracy. She felt she had really nailed me when she got me to say that. I thought that was kinda silly, but it's true.
In America, democracy and liberty are defended, but practiced not quite so much.
You're exactly right. And it's precisely BECAUSE it's so obvious that they set out to state an opinion (and clearly marked the opinions as such) that is why Infinium's claims are so silly.
Adam named all of the animals. This suggests that they were all subordinate to him, although he was still appointed to care for them, not exploit them.
:)
Yeah. And there's a bit in there about "dominion over all the animals." And then there's the bit where Jesus mentions birds, and how "if God cares so much for a bird, how much more he cares for you?" -- which... ok, yeah, maybe we are better than animals in the Bible. But it still doesn't mean anything about life on other planets.
That revelation, I suspect, is reserved for when we get to that point.
Christianity doesn't require you to believe in the uniqueness and specialness of human life in the universe. We are noted as the caretakers of Earth in Genesis, which doesn't necessarily put us above animals. We are also supposedly made in the image of God, but that means different things, and though we be made in God's image on Earth there may be others created in God's image elsewhere.
But generally these things aren't terribly important. What is more important is how I treat you, that I actively do what I can to make the world a better place, and that I return God's love as much as I can.
Gone, but caught on camera. You know precisely when the tag disappeared and where from. You just look at the camera recording at that time and place, and you will then be able to see the shoplifter remove the item with your own eyes. Not only that, you have an image of the shoplifter to use for tracking the shoplifter down, and something to show the court.
So maybe you don't catch the shoplifter in the act, but you can prosecute very easily.
Intel did what they did because it was good for Intel, not because they care about what's good for us. If Intel wanted to make a 64-bit chip, they HAD to follow AMD's standard, because everyone else already was.
What's wrong is the fact that they're not saying they're following AMD's standard. And they're doing this for a very good, what's-best-for-Intel reason as well: If word gets out that Intel is now playing "follow the leader" to AMD, instead of the other way around (how it's been for what, 20 years?) then the stock price will drop so fast it'll make your head swim. Most long-term Intel investors point to Intel's leadership role in the industry for why they bought the stock. If that's not a factor any more, a lot of heavy hitters are gonna ditch.
Bingo -- this isn't about stealing, it's about market-wide compatibility. And THAT is what is so stunning about the news. AMD has always followed Intel's lead -- they had to, if they wanted anyone to buy their chips. But now, for the first time ever, now Intel is following AMD's lead in microprocessor design.
Intel wants to be quiet about this because for the first time, they are following AMD's lead. Since the 1980s, Intel has followed no one, and AMD/Cyrix/etc have followed them. For Intel to now be following AMD is, quite frankly, huge. A lot of investors' faith in Intel is based on their leadership role. Intel wants to keep this out of the mainstream, because if this knowledge becomes common, a lot of investors are going to question their investment in Intel. That means stock prices going down, down, down.
What's happened is that Intel no longer controls their own standard. The "x86" instruction set cannot be abandoned. This is the mistake that IBM made in the 1980s with Microchannel. They came out with a new standard that wasn't compatible with their old standard. By doing so, they effectively locked themselves out of the industry they helped to create.
A big reason Microsoft is still so dominant is that when they came out with NT, they did this right -- they made it moderately compatible, and slowly but surely with each product release worked towards the goal of getting the market to use NT technology -- which they ultimately achieved with the release of Windows XP. It required design compromises in NT (the old 3.51 version was far more secure than all subsequent versions, because they couldn't have pulled it off as well otherwise) and slowly phasing out the old DOS prompt (finally gone with ME in 2000).
If Intel wants people to buy into IA-64, they are going to have to do what Microsoft did. It will take a while, and they will have to support multiple standards. In a sense AMD did them a favor, by developing the transitional standard for them; but in another sense, by letting AMD take the lead, they have lost control over the transition. So it's really not the end of the world for Intel, although it will seem so.
So my advice to you is: Short Intel until word gets out. Once word gets out that Intel is now following AMD, cover your short and go long.
Jury trials are the worst. Face it: You're dealing with 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
What you basically do is you multiply the probability of losing by the amount you stand to lose. Then you multiply the remaining probability by what you lose if you don't. You now have two (estimated) dollar amounts. You pick the one with the smallest dollar amount. Move on.
The author of the article is not only telling people that the former amount is not $0, he's trying to say that it's greater than the 10%. But the thing is, HINAL (He Ain't A Lawyer). The big corps have lawyers, and they've asked the lawyers, and their lawyers are telling them percentages, just like you tell your clients. And these companies, if they have any brains at all, have already done the math. And right now, the math favors doing nothing. That's why SCO hasn't won a lot of licensing fees.
Yup. More to the point, he's saying "Just because the opposition to SCO is bigger, louder, and carries the most-respected voices, doesn't mean they're right." He's technically right in that regard; just because Torvalds says they're on crack doesn't mean they can't win.
On the other hand:
1. The fact that the very rights they claim to have are in dispute,
2. The fact that it took them MONTHS to produce, even for the court, any evidence supporting their claims -- and even admitted that they didn't have all of the evidence they'd claimed to have,
3. The fact that their high-priced lawyer hasn't shown up to court in a while,
4. Other facts related to the case,
those DO suggest that this is bullshit, and that there's nothing to fear.
So yeah. Don't believe us because we're loud. Believe us because the evidence supports us.
"The marginal cost to the really big (Fox, CNN) and/or publicly funded institutions (BBC) of providing web-based news is probably pretty low, and it is effectively a loss leader to bring people into their portal, so there is not really an incentive to charge, so I don't think free general news is disappearing any time soon."
If nothing else, there's Yahoo!. I notice that Yahoo! carries content from LA Times and the Washington Post, among others, so I'm able to access their content registration-free via Yahoo!. So that's where I've been reading the most lately -- particularly using Yahoo! news' RSS feed and a newsreader software.
With declining readership with newspapers, along with lower-than-originally-thought payments from advertising, however -- so-called "premium" content -- the really valuable news -- will probably end up being for-pay. In other words, I think you're going to see more pay content on the web because people are abandoning dead-tree media.
I've been involved with two pay sites. The first is financial site The Motley Fool, the second is a college sports recruiting-news site, Rivals.com. I think that both sites' pay services illustrate really well the extremes of the pay-site model.
In the former case, The Motley Fool made their bulletin boards into part of their pay service. Their actual home-generated content remained free. This struck me as being a horrible decision, because the value of the boards was provided by the posters who contributed information and advice on the boards -- they were, in fact, trying to reduce traffic to their boards. If I'm going to be contributing value to their boards, I should get paid for it -- not the other way around. I found the move to pay offensive, and quit.
Rivals.com (specifically texas.rivals.com) is the opposite story. I am a college football junkie, and Geoff Ketchum, who runs the Texas Longhorns board is a true journalist -- the kind who actually works for a living, rather than just barfing up whatever PR he happens to receive or reporting every rumor that he hears as fact. For just five bucks a month, I get information that no one else gets, and I typically hear about the big stories long before anyone else does. There are two regular columns each week that are stuffed with things nobody else knows about, plus constant reports on the latest high-profile recruits, where they want to go, etc.
Jesus, I sound like an ad. Well, it's because I'm very happy to spend the money for the content, because the content has value -- I can't get it anywhere else -- and it's something very specific that interests me.
So, the summary of what I'm trying to say here is this: The move to pay is necessary for some folks who either can't afford to go to print, or who are losing income from print publications, because the internet ad model has proven to be not very good. And people will pay for sites that generate valuable content, but they won't pay just to participate in "communities."
To me, it actually seems like an improvement.
Malarkey. My boss would kill to find qualified people to do what we need. The trouble is, the qualified people largely aren't citizens, if they even exist at all. We need folks who are experienced with wireless, specifically related to ad-hoc and mesh networking. We need strong programming skills and a good familiarity with embedded Linux, Windows drivers, and the 802.11 MAC. We've found a lot of folks who have done work in NS2, but few who have done it in the real world.
We'll pay for the expertise if we can find it, and we'll snag a local if we can -- we're a startup! We can't afford the hassle of H1B's or outsourcing! -- but the sort of things we're looking for have proven to be difficult to find in ANY candidate.
Look, the military has plans for EVERYTHING. Part of being in the military means drawing up plans: "What would we do if XYZ happened?" So that in the odd chance that XYZ happens -- say, we get invaded by aliens -- then the military has a plan that they can execute.
And it's not just about plans for war in space. It's about plans for how chocolate-chip cookies should be made in the mess hall. Or for how clothes must be made, right down to the stitching, type of thread, precise colors and sizes.
It's part of the military's duty: Create a plan that any idiot can follow and execute given existing equipment, along with several acceptable alternatives, for any given scenario -- be it making a bunk bed for a training facility or the threat of Earth being mowed down by Vogons to build a hyperspace bypass.
Just because the military has plans to do something, doesn't mean they're going to do them. Because having plans they're not necessarily going to execute today is just part of what they do, so that if something DOES happen, they are prepared for it.
Not everyone sued was guilty. And besides, in this country, you are (in theory, at least) presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Artists have known for years that they were racketeers.
Proving that in court? That's somewhat more difficult.
That's a joke. Sort of. All three of the places I was laid off are pretty much gone.
Since I left my first job after grad school, I was laid off three times: Once after 7 months, once after 5 months, and once after 18 months.
I just tell them the truth: The first company had to reduce headcount to get their next round of VC funding, and I was junior. The second lost its funding due to 9/11 worries. The third had its funding cut after failing to produce a single product in over six years.
I then talk about how the changes have made me stronger. How it has forced me to learn more in less time than those who have held steady jobs. I show them how, while I worked for those companies, I consistently produced more value than I cost -- in dollars, whenever possible.
But mostly, remember that times have been tough for everyone in the tech industry. An employer who doesn't know that or doesn't take it into account is probably not worth working for.
Although I agree with the article's point of view, you're dead-on about the submitter's bias. Of course, the submitter's bias is probably why the submitter noticed the article in the first place, and if the submitter didn't like the article, he/she probably wouldn't have submitted it.
This is clearly an opinion piece, not so much a report.