So if you met one dishonest Mexican, would you tell everyone that all Mexicans were dishonest?
But you hear about one dishonest company, and parade this around like all companies are dishonest. How, exactly, do you "illegally import Indian workers"?
With all due respect, Sir, you are dead wrong. It's not that H1-B's are cheaper if you look at TCO, they are not that much cheaper. They don't quit to get $1 an hour more next door. They don't make the kind of demands American workers do. Instead of walking around with a "The Company... owes ME" attitude they walk around with a "Thank GOD I got this job and can support my family" attitude. Oftentimes the H1B is the primary means of support for a large family back home.
I helped sponsor folks, and managed them as a hiring manager. Your view is very typical of a person who has never been in a management position. The H1B's working for me, when I was doing this, were dedicated, hardworking, honest, decent guys. Frankly many of the comments here have to do with American's inability to accept other cultures, and just plain old ugly racism.
I don't mean to be insulting. Business does what it does. Government does what it does. They are both evil, and they are both good. But don't fault business for doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
You are absolutely correct and there is another side to this too...
Although I have no PROOF (except life experience) the companies getting put first in line for H1-B's are the companies that are owed the most political favors by the party in power... So once again we see corporate fascism on display, which is the real problem it's not liberal.vs. conservative it's corruption and pay to play.vs. being fair and treating people equally...
It's incredibly hard to get an H1-B unless the sponsor is one of the F100, even harder to immigrate here... Which is exactly why anything remotely looking like Amnesty makes a lot of people really, really angry...
Very few companies will hire people under i-9, so none are really "contractors" in the end.
Because it's illegal thanks to onerous government regulations piled on by well intentioned idiots screaming and howling that The Government needs to do something which is prevalent all over (and in full display here). The government says if you go to the same place every day, and have one client, you are NOT an independent contractor. And by doing this THE GOVERNMENT created higher wages for I.T. people because now they work for "Contracting Houses" which is another way of saying greedy pimp in many markets. So instead of making yet another law... can we repeal the one that caused this mess in the first place?
Yep. I am sure that picture... produced by a billion dollar agency for one of the big 3 automakers... cost the client upwards of six figures. Surely the most expensive Digital 6x9 Hasselblad money can buy. The resolution... was stunning, everything was absolutely perfect, the lighting, the sky, the facial expression, the shadows... it was absolutely stunning. I forget the actual dimensions of the thing, I remember it took PhotoShop a very long time to get it open... and you could zoom, and zoom, and zoom and it still looked great at monitor 72dpi respolution.
It's the same story with web servers. On a web server you're most likely to run out of threads and sockets, not CPU, not memory, not disk... unless developers are very stupid. But the manufacturers would have you believe their super duper quad processor 16 core server with 64 GB of super fast memory and 17K SATA drives are going to support more users -- because the commodity mode web servers are down to $1500 each and there is little margin there... So the server sales guys, they make the most incredible statements... I laugh at them, mostly.
We're in agreement. The only thing that's changed is the velocity at which the propaganda spreads, and the transition from Sarnoff's law to Metcalf's. Somewhere between the journolist and the creation of the OFA Facebook Action apps by Chris North we've gone to a lie spreading machine that runs at an astoundingly efficient speed - like nothing the world has ever seen.
It's funny. You can give people the most liberal education on earth. But the one's that actually make something of themselves, they all turn in to conservatives by the time they turn 30. As a business owner I have yet to meet a far left progressive business owner. Oh yeah, some of them talk the talk to the outside world. But behind closed doors one discovers it's all an act... for money's sake.
But I have hope. Progressives always box themselves into corners they can't get out of.
During the Bush years they perfected the art of red meat slathering abuse - and used it very successfully. Bush wasn't just "misguided" or "wrong on policy" he was a satanic, baby eating, not even human! And it worked, it got Obama elected. But then what? Your base is all fired up, and to keep it fired up you have no choice but to pile red meat on top of red meat, emotional rhetoric on top of rhetoric. So pretty soon, if you opposed raising taxes on cigarets by one penny you were a TERRORIST! After a while, people who aren't ideological loons just don't get all upset any more. Yeah, yeah, I'm a racist, xenophobic ignorant hayseed pig, what ever, do you have anything NEW to say? The only thing that's still working is "Hey, tonight there's gonna be a race riot and you might get free stuff" and the usual causes that a small number of people are dedicated to no matter what, because protest is a social club where they all get drunk and stoned and shout rage at "the man". Or they get paid to protest...
It's the same with social justice. Eventually you run out of money, and the problems don't get better. You attract all kinds of outsiders who come to live in your country to get free stuff. Sooner or later the moneyed class realizes you're on a path to failure and stops contributing, and the wealthy you taxed to pay for the social programs leave and go elsewhere. This is exactly what's happening in quite a few European countries right now, and big surprise they are all trending to the right.
It's the same with buying blocks of votes. The liberals in America performed a miracle - they went from the party of Jim Crow & KKK to the party of the 100% assured black vote. And it worked, for a while. But they finally got their way - we got a black (well, 1/2 black) president. And, as we all know, the blacks didn't get squat. In fact, they are much worse off! Fanning the flames of racism for all they are worth... and blacks voted for Republicans in the midterms. Not all of them... but a surprising number. And the more they promise to the Hispanics - after years of making promises they couldn't possibly keep - the more they anger the blacks. Who haven't they screwed since Obama got elected? Who haven't they made absurd promises too and failed to deliver?
Just like you can't call your opposition a terrorist every day for five years and have any believability, you can't promise a group of people the sun, the sky, and the moon and not deliver anything, anything at all. And the current crop of progressives in the U.S. - this is exactly what they have done.
Same story with Obamacare: "We're going to insure EVERYONE! And it will be FREE! And prices, they are going to go DOWN!" Well, big surprise, that was a fantasy....
So I have hope that although the die hard left wing "The Narrative" parrots will never stop reciting their mantras mindlessly. But the rest of us who were fooled, are waking up.... BTW I could bitch and complain all day about the right wing too. But they aren't the ones who have been in power the last six years, are they?
MST3K is... my favorite show on earth. I am sad some of the original ones can never be shown again because of copyright.
That's a great ID10T story. Right up there with INSERT INTO MyHugeTable (ID, Value) Values (SELECT MAX(ID)+1 From MyHugeTable, "Value") which I found on a table with one million rows when client asked why his website was so slow.
Or the client who sent us a 76MB image of a well known football quarterback standing in front of the latest model of car - When we requested a Facebook app icon (16x16px). And when I said "That's not going to scale very well" they asked "Why not? We need and to be visible in the icon... And I'm too busy thinking WTF did THAT camera cost.... Probably more than I make in a year.
But I digress... the most annoying is "Well, computers have doubled in speed the last 18 months, so {battery technology, solar panel output, gas mileage, speed of a fiber optic cable, data plan speed, you name it} will double in the next 18 months too.
You should see the propaganda on Russian television where Ukrainians are raping women, gutting children, burning down houses. None of this got translated by Western journalists of course. Seriously, I speak enough of the language to be able to understand some of it, it was really incredible. Makes the story of the shot in the back with the hands up pretty tame....
The Russians look at the U.S. through their cultural lens and quickly realize that they can manipulate the ideologues easily to their benefit. FSB and Bratva stooges are extremely active on U.S. comment boards, they are very easy to spot, even easier than the OFA trolls who cut and paste the exact same text on every story, with the marching orders changing every 2,3 days.
The question we should be asking ourselves if how we, as an allegedly educated society, have managed to raise so many extremely gullible individuals (the useless idiots you refer to)? Is it the Internet? The education system? Too much free time? The astounding bold faced lies you see repeated by so many supposedly educated folks is downright alarming. There's a new attitude - "I know it's a lie, but I knowingly tell it over and over" - and a new stubbornness "Yes, I repeated a lie a thousand times over in the past, but I will never, ever admit it. Today's lie is ____________!! And if you don't repeat this lie you are a racist, homophobic, terrorist whatever. I've lost friends over this.
Maybe the population of useful idiots hasn't changed, it's just that now they have a voice. And it's the useful idiots who love the sound of their own voice. I hope so...
The New Republic used to be a great journalistic enterprise. It featured quality opinion from both the left and the right, and presented it in a very open way.
Then it went for the far left MSNBC audience. Readership dropped to the point it is on life support. People don't like one sided news - unless they, themselves are die hard ideologues. The truth is that only a small percentage on the left and the right are this closed minded and one sided. These are the folks who scream that the more balanced news outlets are all liars.
Sorry, that's what happened. And that's why the people quit.
How so, David? Was not aware of this. Didn't learn this in college... Or are you talking about quantum rules here? Quantum rules don't apply to spaceships (Unless we're a particle of course)
In the first generation when they were flying along faster than light and fired photons as torpedoes... and you could see the light they made II quit trying to accept the science. There isn't any... Being a ham my favorite thing was "subspace radio" who's range was entirely determinant of the needs of the plot...
But I disagree with one thing. Really smoking hot and dumber than a bag of hammers is preferable to knowing the lingo and not understanding the concepts. I'm sure we can all agree on this one exception.
You might able to bend space for objects with little to no mass. Whether or not that's actually useful remains to be seen.
For all I know, there is some way of going FTL that we just don't know about
I agree with you there. Space can probably be bent in some way, something is clearly happening around black holes that's beyond our view/understanding. But in nature if I stack 2 of THIS and 2 of THAT I have a stack of four things. It all comes down to math... If you were trying to communicate with an alien, math would be the best place to start.
It could be a holographic universe. Or an n-dimensional one, Or a fixed-dimensional one. But 2+2, it's four... no matter what.
Saying "Well MAYBE there is a universe where the rules of mass, velocity, force, etc. don't follow the formulas they do in THIS universe, but that's wishful thinking again. On any given star in our galaxy, these equations are going to be the same. And most likely anything in the Hubble Deep Field...
Are there boundary condition events we can't define/explain? Certainly. But none of these conditions have been replicated in a controlled environment, and we know that the brain doesn't have the greatest memory, and is easily fooled.
Now if you want to talk about things that math isn't written for yet - like where that pesky electron is going to pop into existence next, yeah, we don't know squat. But this is a discussion about space travel, okay? We're talking about moving an object that has mass from one place to another. Those rules are going to be the same everywhere in the known universe or the system just doesn't work. You can "Well what if there's a place where gravity is reversed, and things fall up?" and I will say "the keyword in your statement is IF...
You're welcome and I so appreciate this as so often I get flamed for being Mr. Master of The Obvious and poking gentle fun at the "Let's just legislate/wish into existence behavior/physics/you name it"
This kind of thinking is admirable, it really is so please don't take offense by my comment.
Ever since the dawn of time, be it the big bang or some pangalactic hyperdimensional super-being waving his finger (depending on your own personal beliefs) we've had the rules of mathematics. 2+2 was 4... before the big bang. And 2+2 will still equal 4 when the entire universe was gone. You cannot make 2+2=5 no matter how hard you try.
That's what you are wishing will change. The relationships between velocity, mass, etc. are governed by the laws of mathematics. They are the same, everywhere in the Universe.
You remind me of one of my progressive liberal friends, who declared one day that I could build a solar chainsaw by putting two solar panels on a little kid's wagon. He really wanted that to work. However the math proved it was a fantasy of astounding proportions, as the energy in 1 gallon of gasoline so far exceeds what you can get from two solar panels it's staggering. We then explored the idea further - it turned out that no improvement in solar technology will ever make this possible, because the energy from the sun received in the area of the two panels at 100% efficiency wouldn't run a chain saw. The only way it would work is if the sun went super nova, or we all move into the Star Trek Universe where matter and energy are interchangeable... Or the power is produced by little elves I suppose.
So please, keep wishing for a better tomorrow, and don't be discouraged. But don't bypass math and physics, they are very, very important to these discussions.
I completely understand your point. I disagree with a few points though.
Yesterday a newspaper in Russia decided to only print good news for a day. Guess what? Traffic to the website dwindled to nearly nothing.
The death of journalism, in my opinion, happened because of a series of events:
Conservative talk radio revitalized the AM broadcast band. The left, horrified over this, desperately tried to launch their own highly politicized brands and failed miserably. The left's messaging just doesn't play well in the call in listener talk show format.
Television execs looked at the audience share metrics for conservative talk radio and decided they wanted a piece too. Fox, which in the early days was very much right of center, came out and crushed CNN (The only other all news property at the time).
The Internet came of age. Any whack job with a keyboard could launch a news site. The left was first to the punch here by a huge margin.
Web 2.0 came of age. The comments became as important as the stories. Political operatives on both sides hired PR firms to create content in the comment sections slanted to the viewpoint of the paying customer.
Television - the news source for the over 40 crowd - got rid of the expensive, cranky reporters and now just reads what's getting the most clicks on the Internet.
On the Internet, traffic = revenue. So the most salacious over the top titillating emotionally charged bat shit crazy bullshit became commonplace.
The newsrooms followed suit. Everything became BREAKING NEWS!!! The anchors got prettier... The in your face flashing graphic crap skyrocketed.
What's happening now is that Fox has moved closer to the center, except for the 10:00-11:00 time slot, MSNBC has moved very far left, CNN is desperately trying to find a voice. CBS has moved to the center, NBC remains lefty, ABC remains lefty. Conservative talk radio continues to dominate AM despite the left's attempt to smear all those guys on the Internet. Far left wing media is in serious decline, which matches the mood of the country right now.
I am by no means making a value judgement here....
We have an administration who can't keep a secret for more than 30 seconds, who couldn't build a simple enrollment website, who can't protect the president, who doesn't back up emails for crissakes... and you want them entrusted with this?
The pretty young girls in Marketing, who serve an important role to the middle aged sales force, they remain. The Sales & Marketing folks all stay. The guys that fix the robots stay. Seems like a great place to work!
BREAKING NEWS! Make some crazy statement, get on SlashDot! Yes, friends, you too can be immortalized for the sake of CPI and CPC revenue potential. Just have a name that's recognizable, and make some crazy statement about AI, Computers, Global Warming, Obama.... and you'll be immortalized as 500 people with nothing better to do post arguments on Slashdot.
Please take a trip to the Western US and spend two weeks driving around. Places like New Mexico, Nevada, Utah... Or come to South East Michigan, where if you're going less than 80 you're an impediment to traffic. Sure, in the NE corridor you're lucky to get to 55...
I disagree. In states where people drive like Maniacs, people are used to going high speed and understand the reaction times.
In states were people putter along, it's entirely different.
In South East Michigan, many of the Interstates rival the autobahn. If you're going slower than 80 you're a danger to yourself and others. In Ohio, it's an entirely different story, the speed limit is 65, the enforcement is really strong. Funny thing, the majority of the accidents you see near the borders are Ohioans in Michigan, and Michganders in Ohio.
Which brings me to the main point. The Federal One Size Fits All speed limit does not work.
When I learned to drive - in Roswell, New Mexico - I was taught that "The highest number of the speedometer is the speed the car was meant to go" - No kidding. In town we all drove around at 20 mph, Once outside the city limits you floored the car and let it run. There was practically nothing between Roswell and Albuquerque, and one turn. It's 300 miles! If you saw a cop, he waved at you, no matter what speed you were going. If you had Texas plates, you'd be thrown in jail for going 71.
That's the reality. I am sure in Montana every body is going 85 already.... and they are laughing at the commenters here. Just sayin...
Not sure where your information comes from... But outsourcing has definitely NOT reduced I.T. wages by "One Third" as you claim. Just about all wages have been stagnant the last five, six years in my market. I've NEVER seen wages for any given position going down.
Yes, there are some big companies with jobs posted at absurd salaries that they will never, ever fill. They do that... to get resumes.
Flood of STEM visas? The Visa program count hasn't changed much in years. What flood are you referring to?
Finally, I have seen ZERO age discrimination in I.T except on the West Coast, which is age discriminatory for EVERYONE.
You are 100% correct. A large racoon with wet feet can short out a transformer under very rare conditions, but all that happens is the fusible link blows....
Slashdot Mirror
So if you met one dishonest Mexican, would you tell everyone that all Mexicans were dishonest?
But you hear about one dishonest company, and parade this around like all companies are dishonest. How, exactly, do you "illegally import Indian workers"?
With all due respect, Sir, you are dead wrong. It's not that H1-B's are cheaper if you look at TCO, they are not that much cheaper. They don't quit to get $1 an hour more next door. They don't make the kind of demands American workers do. Instead of walking around with a "The Company... owes ME" attitude they walk around with a "Thank GOD I got this job and can support my family" attitude. Oftentimes the H1B is the primary means of support for a large family back home.
I helped sponsor folks, and managed them as a hiring manager. Your view is very typical of a person who has never been in a management position. The H1B's working for me, when I was doing this, were dedicated, hardworking, honest, decent guys. Frankly many of the comments here have to do with American's inability to accept other cultures, and just plain old ugly racism.
I don't mean to be insulting. Business does what it does. Government does what it does. They are both evil, and they are both good. But don't fault business for doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
You are absolutely correct and there is another side to this too...
.vs. conservative it's corruption and pay to play .vs. being fair and treating people equally...
Although I have no PROOF (except life experience) the companies getting put first in line for H1-B's are the companies that are owed the most political favors by the party in power... So once again we see corporate fascism on display, which is the real problem it's not liberal
It's incredibly hard to get an H1-B unless the sponsor is one of the F100, even harder to immigrate here... Which is exactly why anything remotely looking like Amnesty makes a lot of people really, really angry...
Very few companies will hire people under i-9, so none are really "contractors" in the end.
Because it's illegal thanks to onerous government regulations piled on by well intentioned idiots screaming and howling that The Government needs to do something which is prevalent all over (and in full display here). The government says if you go to the same place every day, and have one client, you are NOT an independent contractor. And by doing this THE GOVERNMENT created higher wages for I.T. people because now they work for "Contracting Houses" which is another way of saying greedy pimp in many markets. So instead of making yet another law... can we repeal the one that caused this mess in the first place?
Yep. I am sure that picture... produced by a billion dollar agency for one of the big 3 automakers... cost the client upwards of six figures. Surely the most expensive Digital 6x9 Hasselblad money can buy. The resolution... was stunning, everything was absolutely perfect, the lighting, the sky, the facial expression, the shadows... it was absolutely stunning. I forget the actual dimensions of the thing, I remember it took PhotoShop a very long time to get it open... and you could zoom, and zoom, and zoom and it still looked great at monitor 72dpi respolution.
It's the same story with web servers. On a web server you're most likely to run out of threads and sockets, not CPU, not memory, not disk... unless developers are very stupid. But the manufacturers would have you believe their super duper quad processor 16 core server with 64 GB of super fast memory and 17K SATA drives are going to support more users -- because the commodity mode web servers are down to $1500 each and there is little margin there... So the server sales guys, they make the most incredible statements... I laugh at them, mostly.
We're in agreement. The only thing that's changed is the velocity at which the propaganda spreads, and the transition from Sarnoff's law to Metcalf's. Somewhere between the journolist and the creation of the OFA Facebook Action apps by Chris North we've gone to a lie spreading machine that runs at an astoundingly efficient speed - like nothing the world has ever seen.
It's funny. You can give people the most liberal education on earth. But the one's that actually make something of themselves, they all turn in to conservatives by the time they turn 30. As a business owner I have yet to meet a far left progressive business owner. Oh yeah, some of them talk the talk to the outside world. But behind closed doors one discovers it's all an act... for money's sake.
But I have hope. Progressives always box themselves into corners they can't get out of.
During the Bush years they perfected the art of red meat slathering abuse - and used it very successfully. Bush wasn't just "misguided" or "wrong on policy" he was a satanic, baby eating, not even human! And it worked, it got Obama elected. But then what? Your base is all fired up, and to keep it fired up you have no choice but to pile red meat on top of red meat, emotional rhetoric on top of rhetoric. So pretty soon, if you opposed raising taxes on cigarets by one penny you were a TERRORIST! After a while, people who aren't ideological loons just don't get all upset any more. Yeah, yeah, I'm a racist, xenophobic ignorant hayseed pig, what ever, do you have anything NEW to say? The only thing that's still working is "Hey, tonight there's gonna be a race riot and you might get free stuff" and the usual causes that a small number of people are dedicated to no matter what, because protest is a social club where they all get drunk and stoned and shout rage at "the man". Or they get paid to protest...
It's the same with social justice. Eventually you run out of money, and the problems don't get better. You attract all kinds of outsiders who come to live in your country to get free stuff. Sooner or later the moneyed class realizes you're on a path to failure and stops contributing, and the wealthy you taxed to pay for the social programs leave and go elsewhere. This is exactly what's happening in quite a few European countries right now, and big surprise they are all trending to the right.
It's the same with buying blocks of votes. The liberals in America performed a miracle - they went from the party of Jim Crow & KKK to the party of the 100% assured black vote. And it worked, for a while. But they finally got their way - we got a black (well, 1/2 black) president. And, as we all know, the blacks didn't get squat. In fact, they are much worse off! Fanning the flames of racism for all they are worth... and blacks voted for Republicans in the midterms. Not all of them... but a surprising number. And the more they promise to the Hispanics - after years of making promises they couldn't possibly keep - the more they anger the blacks. Who haven't they screwed since Obama got elected? Who haven't they made absurd promises too and failed to deliver?
Just like you can't call your opposition a terrorist every day for five years and have any believability, you can't promise a group of people the sun, the sky, and the moon and not deliver anything, anything at all. And the current crop of progressives in the U.S. - this is exactly what they have done.
Same story with Obamacare: "We're going to insure EVERYONE! And it will be FREE! And prices, they are going to go DOWN!" Well, big surprise, that was a fantasy....
So I have hope that although the die hard left wing "The Narrative" parrots will never stop reciting their mantras mindlessly. But the rest of us who were fooled, are waking up.... BTW I could bitch and complain all day about the right wing too. But they aren't the ones who have been in power the last six years, are they?
MST3K is ... my favorite show on earth. I am sad some of the original ones can never be shown again because of copyright.
That's a great ID10T story. Right up there with INSERT INTO MyHugeTable (ID, Value) Values (SELECT MAX(ID)+1 From MyHugeTable, "Value") which I found on a table with one million rows when client asked why his website was so slow.
Or the client who sent us a 76MB image of a well known football quarterback standing in front of the latest model of car - When we requested a Facebook app icon (16x16px). And when I said "That's not going to scale very well" they asked "Why not? We need and to be visible in the icon... And I'm too busy thinking WTF did THAT camera cost.... Probably more than I make in a year.
But I digress... the most annoying is "Well, computers have doubled in speed the last 18 months, so {battery technology, solar panel output, gas mileage, speed of a fiber optic cable, data plan speed, you name it} will double in the next 18 months too.
You should see the propaganda on Russian television where Ukrainians are raping women, gutting children, burning down houses. None of this got translated by Western journalists of course. Seriously, I speak enough of the language to be able to understand some of it, it was really incredible. Makes the story of the shot in the back with the hands up pretty tame....
The Russians look at the U.S. through their cultural lens and quickly realize that they can manipulate the ideologues easily to their benefit. FSB and Bratva stooges are extremely active on U.S. comment boards, they are very easy to spot, even easier than the OFA trolls who cut and paste the exact same text on every story, with the marching orders changing every 2,3 days.
The question we should be asking ourselves if how we, as an allegedly educated society, have managed to raise so many extremely gullible individuals (the useless idiots you refer to)? Is it the Internet? The education system? Too much free time? The astounding bold faced lies you see repeated by so many supposedly educated folks is downright alarming. There's a new attitude - "I know it's a lie, but I knowingly tell it over and over" - and a new stubbornness "Yes, I repeated a lie a thousand times over in the past, but I will never, ever admit it. Today's lie is ____________!! And if you don't repeat this lie you are a racist, homophobic, terrorist whatever. I've lost friends over this.
Maybe the population of useful idiots hasn't changed, it's just that now they have a voice. And it's the useful idiots who love the sound of their own voice. I hope so...
The New Republic used to be a great journalistic enterprise. It featured quality opinion from both the left and the right, and presented it in a very open way.
Then it went for the far left MSNBC audience. Readership dropped to the point it is on life support. People don't like one sided news - unless they, themselves are die hard ideologues. The truth is that only a small percentage on the left and the right are this closed minded and one sided. These are the folks who scream that the more balanced news outlets are all liars.
Sorry, that's what happened. And that's why the people quit.
How so, David? Was not aware of this. Didn't learn this in college... Or are you talking about quantum rules here? Quantum rules don't apply to spaceships (Unless we're a particle of course)
In the first generation when they were flying along faster than light and fired photons as torpedoes... and you could see the light they made II quit trying to accept the science. There isn't any... Being a ham my favorite thing was "subspace radio" who's range was entirely determinant of the needs of the plot...
But I disagree with one thing. Really smoking hot and dumber than a bag of hammers is preferable to knowing the lingo and not understanding the concepts. I'm sure we can all agree on this one exception.
You might able to bend space for objects with little to no mass. Whether or not that's actually useful remains to be seen.
For all I know, there is some way of going FTL that we just don't know about
I agree with you there. Space can probably be bent in some way, something is clearly happening around black holes that's beyond our view/understanding. But in nature if I stack 2 of THIS and 2 of THAT I have a stack of four things. It all comes down to math... If you were trying to communicate with an alien, math would be the best place to start.
It could be a holographic universe. Or an n-dimensional one, Or a fixed-dimensional one. But 2+2, it's four... no matter what.
Saying "Well MAYBE there is a universe where the rules of mass, velocity, force, etc. don't follow the formulas they do in THIS universe, but that's wishful thinking again. On any given star in our galaxy, these equations are going to be the same. And most likely anything in the Hubble Deep Field...
Are there boundary condition events we can't define/explain? Certainly. But none of these conditions have been replicated in a controlled environment, and we know that the brain doesn't have the greatest memory, and is easily fooled.
Now if you want to talk about things that math isn't written for yet - like where that pesky electron is going to pop into existence next, yeah, we don't know squat. But this is a discussion about space travel, okay? We're talking about moving an object that has mass from one place to another. Those rules are going to be the same everywhere in the known universe or the system just doesn't work. You can "Well what if there's a place where gravity is reversed, and things fall up?" and I will say "the keyword in your statement is IF...
You're welcome and I so appreciate this as so often I get flamed for being Mr. Master of The Obvious and poking gentle fun at the "Let's just legislate/wish into existence behavior/physics/you name it"
This kind of thinking is admirable, it really is so please don't take offense by my comment.
Ever since the dawn of time, be it the big bang or some pangalactic hyperdimensional super-being waving his finger (depending on your own personal beliefs) we've had the rules of mathematics. 2+2 was 4... before the big bang. And 2+2 will still equal 4 when the entire universe was gone. You cannot make 2+2=5 no matter how hard you try.
That's what you are wishing will change. The relationships between velocity, mass, etc. are governed by the laws of mathematics. They are the same, everywhere in the Universe.
You remind me of one of my progressive liberal friends, who declared one day that I could build a solar chainsaw by putting two solar panels on a little kid's wagon. He really wanted that to work. However the math proved it was a fantasy of astounding proportions, as the energy in 1 gallon of gasoline so far exceeds what you can get from two solar panels it's staggering. We then explored the idea further - it turned out that no improvement in solar technology will ever make this possible, because the energy from the sun received in the area of the two panels at 100% efficiency wouldn't run a chain saw. The only way it would work is if the sun went super nova, or we all move into the Star Trek Universe where matter and energy are interchangeable... Or the power is produced by little elves I suppose.
So please, keep wishing for a better tomorrow, and don't be discouraged. But don't bypass math and physics, they are very, very important to these discussions.
I completely understand your point. I disagree with a few points though.
Yesterday a newspaper in Russia decided to only print good news for a day. Guess what? Traffic to the website dwindled to nearly nothing.
The death of journalism, in my opinion, happened because of a series of events:
Conservative talk radio revitalized the AM broadcast band. The left, horrified over this, desperately tried to launch their own highly politicized brands and failed miserably. The left's messaging just doesn't play well in the call in listener talk show format.
Television execs looked at the audience share metrics for conservative talk radio and decided they wanted a piece too. Fox, which in the early days was very much right of center, came out and crushed CNN (The only other all news property at the time).
The Internet came of age. Any whack job with a keyboard could launch a news site. The left was first to the punch here by a huge margin.
Web 2.0 came of age. The comments became as important as the stories. Political operatives on both sides hired PR firms to create content in the comment sections slanted to the viewpoint of the paying customer.
Television - the news source for the over 40 crowd - got rid of the expensive, cranky reporters and now just reads what's getting the most clicks on the Internet.
On the Internet, traffic = revenue. So the most salacious over the top titillating emotionally charged bat shit crazy bullshit became commonplace.
The newsrooms followed suit. Everything became BREAKING NEWS!!! The anchors got prettier... The in your face flashing graphic crap skyrocketed.
What's happening now is that Fox has moved closer to the center, except for the 10:00-11:00 time slot, MSNBC has moved very far left, CNN is desperately trying to find a voice. CBS has moved to the center, NBC remains lefty, ABC remains lefty. Conservative talk radio continues to dominate AM despite the left's attempt to smear all those guys on the Internet. Far left wing media is in serious decline, which matches the mood of the country right now.
I am by no means making a value judgement here....
Yeah, but isn't this the same network that faked exploding gas tanks, and fabricated evidence against the evil Dubya during an election year?
We have an administration who can't keep a secret for more than 30 seconds, who couldn't build a simple enrollment website, who can't protect the president, who doesn't back up emails for crissakes... and you want them entrusted with this?
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha you are too funny!!!
The pretty young girls in Marketing, who serve an important role to the middle aged sales force, they remain. The Sales & Marketing folks all stay. The guys that fix the robots stay. Seems like a great place to work!
BREAKING NEWS! Make some crazy statement, get on SlashDot! Yes, friends, you too can be immortalized for the sake of CPI and CPC revenue potential. Just have a name that's recognizable, and make some crazy statement about AI, Computers, Global Warming, Obama.... and you'll be immortalized as 500 people with nothing better to do post arguments on Slashdot.
Please take a trip to the Western US and spend two weeks driving around. Places like New Mexico, Nevada, Utah... Or come to South East Michigan, where if you're going less than 80 you're an impediment to traffic. Sure, in the NE corridor you're lucky to get to 55...
I disagree. In states where people drive like Maniacs, people are used to going high speed and understand the reaction times.
In states were people putter along, it's entirely different.
In South East Michigan, many of the Interstates rival the autobahn. If you're going slower than 80 you're a danger to yourself and others. In Ohio, it's an entirely different story, the speed limit is 65, the enforcement is really strong. Funny thing, the majority of the accidents you see near the borders are Ohioans in Michigan, and Michganders in Ohio.
Which brings me to the main point. The Federal One Size Fits All speed limit does not work.
When I learned to drive - in Roswell, New Mexico - I was taught that "The highest number of the speedometer is the speed the car was meant to go" - No kidding. In town we all drove around at 20 mph, Once outside the city limits you floored the car and let it run. There was practically nothing between Roswell and Albuquerque, and one turn. It's 300 miles! If you saw a cop, he waved at you, no matter what speed you were going. If you had Texas plates, you'd be thrown in jail for going 71.
That's the reality. I am sure in Montana every body is going 85 already.... and they are laughing at the commenters here. Just sayin...
Not sure where your information comes from... But outsourcing has definitely NOT reduced I.T. wages by "One Third" as you claim. Just about all wages have been stagnant the last five, six years in my market. I've NEVER seen wages for any given position going down.
Yes, there are some big companies with jobs posted at absurd salaries that they will never, ever fill. They do that... to get resumes.
Flood of STEM visas? The Visa program count hasn't changed much in years. What flood are you referring to?
Finally, I have seen ZERO age discrimination in I.T except on the West Coast, which is age discriminatory for EVERYONE.
You are 100% correct. A large racoon with wet feet can short out a transformer under very rare conditions, but all that happens is the fusible link blows....