That's BS. The main reason people are upset about both H1Bs and offshoring is because it reduces the incentives for people to go into these fields in the U.S., and forces our people to go into less lucrative jobs requiring (and thereby producing) less-educated workers. In other words, it removes these jobs from our economy, producing a more fragile and less beneficial economy for employees. Fewer opportunities for employees.
I do not want my son to have to be a milk producer or a waiter just to make ends meet, when he could have a job as an engineer or something else more stimulating and profitable.
I believe there was a Queen of England who once said "I do not believe it wise to give up that which we have." Sage advice, IMHO.
Until having a kid myself, I thought the same thing. I thought that parents should spend more time supervising their kids rather than plopping them in front of the TV/PC without supervision...
Now I realize that this was too unrealistic for most people, including myself and my wife.
In order to maintain a reasonable standard of living, many couples both have to work now. It wasn't like this before the 70's. Care to guess what happened? Women's lib. Women working put pressure on wages such that now, basically women have to work for the family to have the same standard of living they would have had before with only the man working. This began a slippery slope because the more women worked, the more wages came to only reflect half of a family income, and thus the more other women had to work.
Needless to say, this puts a strain on everyone, and leaves little time or energy for playing with and supervising the kids. Without a social stigma attached to working women, the market will force most families to have both parents work. The only way out is a movement pushing married people to have one spouse of the two stay at home, which I don't see happening.
I am not a lawyer yet, so don't rely on this as legal advice.
You are having trouble understanding this because you don't have a proper understanding of what a license is...
A license is permission to use another's property. A license agreement is a contract wherein one party gives a license (here, permission to use the software) in exchange for something (here, some promises) in return.
Until the buyer agrees to the terms, he doesn't get the permission, or license, to use the software. The license is a legal right separate and apart from any physical paper. Thus, the COA really has nothing to do with the license -- it's really just a trademark and a warranty that the software is genuine. Do you see how the issue of genuineness of the software is separate from the issue of permission to use it?
The answer to your question is most likely #1. They got a computer with something on it they don't have a right to use.
First of all, the aversion to spending _extra_ effort is really a desire for efficiency and a desire to spend more time doing what we like to do in our lives; in other words, "the pursuit of happiness" (and efficiency).
Second, exercise machines have a number of useful purposes. They allow us to focus on higher value labor and fun, i.e. things that create more value and give us more enjoyment. People are still free to go out and run outdoors if they like, but if they find it's more efficient to spend 10 hours working to create a new business, and only 20 minutes running to stay fit, rather than 30 minutes getting out, 20 minutes running, and 30 minutes getting back, that's a great gain in efficiency for the individual himself who wants to save time, and for the people who depend on his business.
However, I do agree that we shouldn't simplify our spelling much. Some things could be simplified without too much of a consequence, but major changes would make the whole population less efficient at reading and doing their jobs, while only making things marginally easier for students.
I've lived in Northern Virginia most of my life, right outside DC. The power outages have always been a big problem here. Power is usually out at least a few times a year, in some places for up to a day or two. I was actually at the dentist the other day and the power went out for about 10 minutes.
The main problem is the number of big trees and the amount of snow and ice that can pull down power lines.
But because it's a suburban area, the cost of buried power lines would be huge -- the lay of the land is changing all the time, and every new development or construction project would then be required to tangle with re-laying underground power lines. Most developed residential areas would be stable, but there is a lot of new development and redevelopment in the area.
The entire concept of a "shortage of workers" is BS. Supply and demand are a sliding scale. Anyone who says there is a shortage of workers is ACTUALLY saying "I don't want to pay this guy what he's asking; I want to pay him less, so let's depress the price of labor by inflating the labor supply."
The same is true for workers. Anyone who says "I can't get a job" could either accept lower pay, or work harder.
So what does this mean? It means the question is all about supply and demand, and therefore all about how supply and demand are managed or mangled by the government (because they are going to get into it either way).
If you think programming jobs are something we should support and encourage, because there are positive externalities for the middle class, other industries, and our country in general, then we should not be depressing salaries by importing cheaper workers. If you think we don't need to maintain a strong U.S. capability in IT/CS employees, then you would simply want to get the cheapest workers possible, and decimate demand for CS education and employment among U.S. citizens.
I tend toward the former camp. I think there are MANY MANY positive externalities to almost any technical or engineering-related employment. These are the people who have the capability to, and do, later leave their jobs to start new companies and develop new ideas. Without the ability to make a decent middle-class living in the field, many smart people will do other things.
The middle class is going away in this country unless people wake up and realize why exactly it is that doctors and lawyers get paid well, while people in other highly difficult and technical work do not.
As far as I can tell, 'alinea' is not a word in English.
Here are the assertions (whether explicit or implicit) the author makes which I think are valid:
1. That consumers will probably continue to buy DRMed products regardless of what the FSF says.
2. That the reason consumers buy it is because they think they're better off with the DRMed item than without it.
3. Consumers should be allowed to make that choice, because it's voluntary and in their opinion, it benefits them. (This is not a radical free-market position to take.)
4. The FSF's recent actions, such as the demonstration, will not persuade such consumers -- practical consumers will tend to think FSF is a radical organization and will be more likely to disregard their message. Such actions likely appear to practical consumers as hysteria or hyperbole.
I would have to disagree. It's a GOOD thing that kids are being pushed to learn more challenging material. The problem is that they are allowed to hold back the class.
There should be an understood and agreed-upon curriculum, as one parent said, and it should be followed. Kids that don't get it should be allowed to go to office hours or something, but shouldn't hold up the others. Kids should be failed if they can't understand the material.
But people should most definitely NOT be discouraged from taking more challenging classes. That would only mean that you would lose some of the people in the middle who actually are able to manage the material, but just didn't have quite enough self-motivation, or had been discouraged by being told it was too difficult or something...
Although someone who knows C++ could, as you say, go back to C, I disagree with the educational approach you suggest.
I don't think it's very easy to teach someone about OO programming before teaching attention to syntax, and good procedural programming thought and organization...
The best way would be to start with a C-like subset of C++, to teach procedural programming, and then move to C++.
The thing about OO programming is that it requires a complex balancing act of competing interests -- identifying the 'objective' structure or object hierarchies that make sense for a program, identifying the procedural structure of a program, and merging the two. Some parts of a program make more sense to be done procedurally, some are done through interactions between the functions of objects, and some are done purely by choosing the correct objective structure.
In my experience, few programmers actually have enough experience to exercise good judgment in putting all this together. This can be demonstrated by the fact that many people who purport to be doing good OO programming think about object hierarchies and patterns in their design, but fail to think sufficiently about functional/procedural diagrams and the procedural flow. Sometimes this results in the commonly-seen massively-overbloated overdesigned OO programming projects we're all familiar with...
Java is an 'extra' language. C++ is a 'fundamental' language, if you ask me. People learn real fundamental skills by mastering C/C++; thereafter, java is a gimme. And not everyone thinks java's going to enjoy continued popularity in the upcoming years... And you simply cannot write java in java.;)
The union you describe would seem reasonable, but I think many are not. Check out the building full of unfireable teachers in new york, who just go there to chill all day because the firing process is so expensive and litigation-prone that the city can't afford to worry about it. There are many other instances where unions limit the amount of time an employee can voluntarily work, which I also think is wrong.
"If the conditions are too oppressive, the company will not find labor to perform under it. "
The problem with your reasoning here is that when every company can negotiate with employees individually, they can all put the squeeze on the employees because their conditions will all deteriorate together. The employee won't quit because everywhere else is the same, or not different enough to make it worth the sometimes significant costs of quitting, moving, etc.
Employees won't quit unless there is a better job to go to. If there is a better job, they'll quit and go there, but then that employer has every incentive to simply put the squeeze on. What's the employee going to do, go back to his previous employer? So there's a tendency toward squeezing the employees which can only be countered by collective bargaining, law, or companies that are not run by rational wealth-maximizers, i.e., socially conscious companies.
Many valid points, although I do think that, as others have noted, unions can get slightly insane sometimes and forget about what's in the interest of the whole company, such as letting the company fire the lazy or incompetent.
BUT. The biggest reason FOR unions in the software world is HOURS. If every full-time job I get demands unlimited hours, I can't remain healthy, and I can't take care of the rest of my life. I have been there. How many of you remember heading to work with a quad venti latte at 10am after only getting home at 5am? Lots, I'll bet.
I've been through periods where that went on far too long, but it seemed like everywhere else my friends were working was the same way. This is just too much for anyone. It's not healthy or sustainable. 60hr weeks are one thing. 100+hr weeks are too much. The software industry needs to get its hours under control. I have nothing against working hard, believe me. But destroying our health is not a desirable goal.
The Supreme Court has been dealing with these sorts of definitions for quite a while now, and although I can't say they've done such a great job, there are many good ideas in first amendment case law.
For instance, just to take a stab using some of these ideas, you could use a definition like this:
"Any visual depiction of a sexual act (defined elsewhere), breasts, or genitals, which appeals or is directed to appeal primarily to the prurient interest, and lacks substantial literary, artistic, cultural, or scientific value."
1. An automated verification service for your ownership of domains.
2. An automated system that allows you to send requests to ISPs to block packets from certain people to your domains. The system would use a service to verify your ownership of your domains (with digital signatures), then add rules to block that spammer's traffic to your domains.
It's not a non-sequitur at all, if they only raided 1/7 of the establishments they were targeting. They are making estimates based on a limited sample size.
It sounds to me like they were actually trying to fudge the numbers DOWN rather than up, in this case. They are starting to get worried about their share prices.
Movies are one of the few good international businesses the US has left. I think it's important for us to preserve our dominance in this industry, and therefore to figure out ways to stop piracy.
Pirates are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. If this continues, eventually they'll just be sharing stupid home movies of people swinging light-sabers.
Your analogy is inapposite because no one is forcing you to actually buy the content. You are free to not buy anything you don't want. That was my point. In any case, I seem to recall that representative government might also have been a factor in that revolution.
Technically, sure, you can define capitalism as extreme laissez faire, but I was not using that definition. There are many sorts of capitalism, and I was talking about it as a mixed legal and economic system in which we recognize that property rights give rise to trade, and trade increases efficiency and thereby creates value. All property rights are an intervention in your sense, as are criminal laws, etc., but they are important to a balanced form of capitalism.
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The US is a battery. India and China are basically ground for the next 50 years or so. We need a resistor or two.
That's BS. The main reason people are upset about both H1Bs and offshoring is because it reduces the incentives for people to go into these fields in the U.S., and forces our people to go into less lucrative jobs requiring (and thereby producing) less-educated workers. In other words, it removes these jobs from our economy, producing a more fragile and less beneficial economy for employees. Fewer opportunities for employees.
I do not want my son to have to be a milk producer or a waiter just to make ends meet, when he could have a job as an engineer or something else more stimulating and profitable.
I believe there was a Queen of England who once said "I do not believe it wise to give up that which we have." Sage advice, IMHO.
Yes, we should sell more milk and do less processor design work. Great idea.
These things are not the same.
Until having a kid myself, I thought the same thing. I thought that parents should spend more time supervising their kids rather than plopping them in front of the TV/PC without supervision...
Now I realize that this was too unrealistic for most people, including myself and my wife.
In order to maintain a reasonable standard of living, many couples both have to work now. It wasn't like this before the 70's. Care to guess what happened? Women's lib. Women working put pressure on wages such that now, basically women have to work for the family to have the same standard of living they would have had before with only the man working. This began a slippery slope because the more women worked, the more wages came to only reflect half of a family income, and thus the more other women had to work.
Needless to say, this puts a strain on everyone, and leaves little time or energy for playing with and supervising the kids. Without a social stigma attached to working women, the market will force most families to have both parents work. The only way out is a movement pushing married people to have one spouse of the two stay at home, which I don't see happening.
If you can't afford lawyers, nobody's going to sue you for patent infringement...
I am not a lawyer yet, so don't rely on this as legal advice.
You are having trouble understanding this because you don't have a proper understanding of what a license is...
A license is permission to use another's property. A license agreement is a contract wherein one party gives a license (here, permission to use the software) in exchange for something (here, some promises) in return.
Until the buyer agrees to the terms, he doesn't get the permission, or license, to use the software. The license is a legal right separate and apart from any physical paper. Thus, the COA really has nothing to do with the license -- it's really just a trademark and a warranty that the software is genuine. Do you see how the issue of genuineness of the software is separate from the issue of permission to use it?
The answer to your question is most likely #1. They got a computer with something on it they don't have a right to use.
No useful purpose? I completely disagree.
First of all, the aversion to spending _extra_ effort is really a desire for efficiency and a desire to spend more time doing what we like to do in our lives; in other words, "the pursuit of happiness" (and efficiency).
Second, exercise machines have a number of useful purposes. They allow us to focus on higher value labor and fun, i.e. things that create more value and give us more enjoyment. People are still free to go out and run outdoors if they like, but if they find it's more efficient to spend 10 hours working to create a new business, and only 20 minutes running to stay fit, rather than 30 minutes getting out, 20 minutes running, and 30 minutes getting back, that's a great gain in efficiency for the individual himself who wants to save time, and for the people who depend on his business.
However, I do agree that we shouldn't simplify our spelling much. Some things could be simplified without too much of a consequence, but major changes would make the whole population less efficient at reading and doing their jobs, while only making things marginally easier for students.
I've lived in Northern Virginia most of my life, right outside DC. The power outages have always been a big problem here. Power is usually out at least a few times a year, in some places for up to a day or two. I was actually at the dentist the other day and the power went out for about 10 minutes.
The main problem is the number of big trees and the amount of snow and ice that can pull down power lines.
But because it's a suburban area, the cost of buried power lines would be huge -- the lay of the land is changing all the time, and every new development or construction project would then be required to tangle with re-laying underground power lines. Most developed residential areas would be stable, but there is a lot of new development and redevelopment in the area.
The entire concept of a "shortage of workers" is BS. Supply and demand are a sliding scale. Anyone who says there is a shortage of workers is ACTUALLY saying "I don't want to pay this guy what he's asking; I want to pay him less, so let's depress the price of labor by inflating the labor supply."
The same is true for workers. Anyone who says "I can't get a job" could either accept lower pay, or work harder.
So what does this mean? It means the question is all about supply and demand, and therefore all about how supply and demand are managed or mangled by the government (because they are going to get into it either way).
If you think programming jobs are something we should support and encourage, because there are positive externalities for the middle class, other industries, and our country in general, then we should not be depressing salaries by importing cheaper workers. If you think we don't need to maintain a strong U.S. capability in IT/CS employees, then you would simply want to get the cheapest workers possible, and decimate demand for CS education and employment among U.S. citizens.
I tend toward the former camp. I think there are MANY MANY positive externalities to almost any technical or engineering-related employment. These are the people who have the capability to, and do, later leave their jobs to start new companies and develop new ideas. Without the ability to make a decent middle-class living in the field, many smart people will do other things.
The middle class is going away in this country unless people wake up and realize why exactly it is that doctors and lawyers get paid well, while people in other highly difficult and technical work do not.
As far as I can tell, 'alinea' is not a word in English.
Here are the assertions (whether explicit or implicit) the author makes which I think are valid:
1. That consumers will probably continue to buy DRMed products regardless of what the FSF says.
2. That the reason consumers buy it is because they think they're better off with the DRMed item than without it.
3. Consumers should be allowed to make that choice, because it's voluntary and in their opinion, it benefits them. (This is not a radical free-market position to take.)
4. The FSF's recent actions, such as the demonstration, will not persuade such consumers -- practical consumers will tend to think FSF is a radical organization and will be more likely to disregard their message. Such actions likely appear to practical consumers as hysteria or hyperbole.
I would have to disagree. It's a GOOD thing that kids are being pushed to learn more challenging material. The problem is that they are allowed to hold back the class.
There should be an understood and agreed-upon curriculum, as one parent said, and it should be followed. Kids that don't get it should be allowed to go to office hours or something, but shouldn't hold up the others. Kids should be failed if they can't understand the material.
But people should most definitely NOT be discouraged from taking more challenging classes. That would only mean that you would lose some of the people in the middle who actually are able to manage the material, but just didn't have quite enough self-motivation, or had been discouraged by being told it was too difficult or something...
Let me clarify that -- you can't write a real java VM in java. It would suck.
Although someone who knows C++ could, as you say, go back to C, I disagree with the educational approach you suggest.
;)
I don't think it's very easy to teach someone about OO programming before teaching attention to syntax, and good procedural programming thought and organization...
The best way would be to start with a C-like subset of C++, to teach procedural programming, and then move to C++.
The thing about OO programming is that it requires a complex balancing act of competing interests -- identifying the 'objective' structure or object hierarchies that make sense for a program, identifying the procedural structure of a program, and merging the two. Some parts of a program make more sense to be done procedurally, some are done through interactions between the functions of objects, and some are done purely by choosing the correct objective structure.
In my experience, few programmers actually have enough experience to exercise good judgment in putting all this together. This can be demonstrated by the fact that many people who purport to be doing good OO programming think about object hierarchies and patterns in their design, but fail to think sufficiently about functional/procedural diagrams and the procedural flow. Sometimes this results in the commonly-seen massively-overbloated overdesigned OO programming projects we're all familiar with...
Java is an 'extra' language. C++ is a 'fundamental' language, if you ask me. People learn real fundamental skills by mastering C/C++; thereafter, java is a gimme. And not everyone thinks java's going to enjoy continued popularity in the upcoming years... And you simply cannot write java in java.
The union you describe would seem reasonable, but I think many are not. Check out the building full of unfireable teachers in new york, who just go there to chill all day because the firing process is so expensive and litigation-prone that the city can't afford to worry about it. There are many other instances where unions limit the amount of time an employee can voluntarily work, which I also think is wrong.
"If the conditions are too oppressive, the company will not find labor to perform under it. "
The problem with your reasoning here is that when every company can negotiate with employees individually, they can all put the squeeze on the employees because their conditions will all deteriorate together. The employee won't quit because everywhere else is the same, or not different enough to make it worth the sometimes significant costs of quitting, moving, etc.
Employees won't quit unless there is a better job to go to. If there is a better job, they'll quit and go there, but then that employer has every incentive to simply put the squeeze on. What's the employee going to do, go back to his previous employer? So there's a tendency toward squeezing the employees which can only be countered by collective bargaining, law, or companies that are not run by rational wealth-maximizers, i.e., socially conscious companies.
Many valid points, although I do think that, as others have noted, unions can get slightly insane sometimes and forget about what's in the interest of the whole company, such as letting the company fire the lazy or incompetent.
BUT. The biggest reason FOR unions in the software world is HOURS. If every full-time job I get demands unlimited hours, I can't remain healthy, and I can't take care of the rest of my life. I have been there. How many of you remember heading to work with a quad venti latte at 10am after only getting home at 5am? Lots, I'll bet.
I've been through periods where that went on far too long, but it seemed like everywhere else my friends were working was the same way. This is just too much for anyone. It's not healthy or sustainable. 60hr weeks are one thing. 100+hr weeks are too much. The software industry needs to get its hours under control. I have nothing against working hard, believe me. But destroying our health is not a desirable goal.
The Supreme Court has been dealing with these sorts of definitions for quite a while now, and although I can't say they've done such a great job, there are many good ideas in first amendment case law.
For instance, just to take a stab using some of these ideas, you could use a definition like this:
"Any visual depiction of a sexual act (defined elsewhere), breasts, or genitals, which appeals or is directed to appeal primarily to the prurient interest, and lacks substantial literary, artistic, cultural, or scientific value."
Then people there should change the laws. Even if not, it wouldn't be the end of the world to lose access to porn.
So what is a "clinical trial"? An experiment in a "clinic"? I would expect most experiments to be done in a laboratory.
Well, China seems to be able to do it somehow.
That cost would be borne by the ISP. They would then have a good incentive to get rid of the problem.
Two steps to solve the problem:
1. An automated verification service for your ownership of domains.
2. An automated system that allows you to send requests to ISPs to block packets from certain people to your domains. The system would use a service to verify your ownership of your domains (with digital signatures), then add rules to block that spammer's traffic to your domains.
It's not a non-sequitur at all, if they only raided 1/7 of the establishments they were targeting. They are making estimates based on a limited sample size.
It sounds to me like they were actually trying to fudge the numbers DOWN rather than up, in this case. They are starting to get worried about their share prices.
Movies are one of the few good international businesses the US has left. I think it's important for us to preserve our dominance in this industry, and therefore to figure out ways to stop piracy.
Pirates are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. If this continues, eventually they'll just be sharing stupid home movies of people swinging light-sabers.
Your analogy is inapposite because no one is forcing you to actually buy the content. You are free to not buy anything you don't want. That was my point. In any case, I seem to recall that representative government might also have been a factor in that revolution.
Technically, sure, you can define capitalism as extreme laissez faire, but I was not using that definition. There are many sorts of capitalism, and I was talking about it as a mixed legal and economic system in which we recognize that property rights give rise to trade, and trade increases efficiency and thereby creates value. All property rights are an intervention in your sense, as are criminal laws, etc., but they are important to a balanced form of capitalism.