You're right, but I just want to clarify what you're saying so that everyone understands it.
Here are the ideas you have to accept as fact for this to make sense.
People who are exposed (via tv, movies, video games, etc.) to violent content are more likely to commit violent crimes.
People that are exposed to nudity are more likely to commit sex crimes, or behave in other sexual ways that are seen as deviant to the norm and thus, a problem for society.
It's more important to stop sex crimes and deviancy than it is to stop violent crimes.
If you accept those ideas as fact, then keeping people from seeing naked bodies in a video game is more important than keeping people from being exposed to violence.
IMO, it's idiocy, but it's important to understand the other side's position.
I don't think our desire to have fewer injuries changes with the cost of the health care, it changes with how much we value our health. Look at teen-agers and college students. No money. Lots of high risk behavior because they think they are going to live forever. As people get older, they get more careful with choices that could affect their health. That is usually accompanied by an increase in wealth which makes health care more affordable. Why don't they become more willing to risk their health if it's tied to ability to pay for health care?
We don't make cars safer to decrease health care costs, we make them safer because we don't want to die in an accident.
Granted, a few people might be less likely to ride in an automobile if they lose their health insurance and had to pay full prices for health care resulting from an accident, but the number is so small as to have no impact on the discussion.
For all intents and purposes, the the demand for health care is so inelastic, it can be treated as static.
His example is flawed? Look at your own. Do you really think that cheap health care does/would make people more willing to work in a place where they are likely to get a broken leg? That's nonsense.
It may be true that if you pay me more, I'll be willing to work in a dangerous environment, but I won't be willing to work in a more dangerous environment just because you pay for all my health care if I get injured. The trade off isn't worth it. I gain nothing and I've had a painful experience.
Ah, the vision of god as a cosmic watchmaker. Not a "banannas" view at all. It's actually one that's been around for centuries, probably most associated with the French Enlightment era of thought. It is a pointless vision, though.
The problem with the cosmic watchmaker idea is that though it sounds rational, it isn't. It can easily be used to support any idea you want. Don't believe in evolution? An intelligent designer created everything, thus evolution didn't happen. Believe in evolution? The watchmaker made the system that we now understand as evolution. Don't believe in abortion? The designer wanted you to have your baby. Believe in abortion? The watchmaker gave you the choice to terminate your pregnancy.
If there is a god that set everything in motion, but no longer takes a part in the world, how is that different from no god at all? Or, the flip side, if god set everything in motion, isn't it incumbent on us to fulfill his will?
It's not crazy to believe in a cosmic watchmaker, just pointless. It allows you to be both intellectually lazy (Don't understand what caused the the big bang? Don't do more research, just decide that god did it!) and religiously lazy (Don't know what is right and what is wrong? Whatever you do, that's part of god's design!).
Take a look at Oracle's OSS page for more projects. One of the biggest is OCFS, Oracle's clustering file system which they released with a GPL license.
Sure most of it is to make it easier for them to sell software for Linux users, but it's out there, with various OSS licenses.
In my experience, support provided by developers is usually not very good. Think how foolish your comment would sound if you wrote, "MySQL's marketing material is much better than Oracle's because it's written by the developers" (I doubt it is, I'm just making an analogy).
Developers are good at developing software. They usually aren't the best people to handle support (or write marketing material). The developer should only get involved if there is code-level support needed by the end-user.
I'm not saying that MySQL support is bad. I don't know, having never used it. But if it is support provided by the MySQL developers, than it probably isn't as good as Oracle's support. Besides, I'd prefer the developers were working on the software, rather than helping someone with their support needs.
The law is difficult to understand because it's a complicated subject.
I agree that using terms unfamiliar to those outside of the legal rhetorical community does make it harder to understand, but using common terminolgy doesn't make it easy.
Well, let's see, JDeveloper, which this is based on, has been free for what, 5 years?
Look, the Oracle database can be very expensive. You want a high performance database with high quality support, you're going to pay for it. That said, automatically associating Oracle with high priced software is stupid.
I'm not trying to say that Oracle is being altruistic. Free tools that only work with the Oracle database help keep the Oracle database the market leader, but assuming that Oracle hasn't learned from IBM (Eclispe, anyone?) is asinine.
Maybe because those things wouldn't help it survive in it's current habitat? Evolution doesn't lead to all species becoming more similar, quite the opposite. Just because standing on our hind legs is a good trait for humans in our particular ecological niche, doesn't mean it's a good trait for every other species that inhabit other niches.
Is this article linked from some anti-evolution website, or what? I don't think I've ever seen so many posts by people that misunderstand evolution in one place.
The linked article talks about species that have changed little over long periods of time and then poses the question, "Why have these life-forms stayed the same for all that time?". The answer is "Why not?".
There's no explanation needed. Just because a species remains relatively unchanged for millions of years does not mean that evolution doesn't happen.
It's like talking about black holes and then calling cosmology into question because our sun hasn't become one.
BTW, the linked to article is a steaming pile of dung. If the rest of that periodical is written as poorly, I suggest you stop reading it. The linked article takes quotations from the New Scientist article out of context and implies that it was an article questioning evolution. It wasn't. There are lots of valid ways to question evolution, but twisting other people's words to support your point of view isn't one of them.
Answered "yes" to the "are you now or were you ever a member of the communist party" and legally nothing happened.
Answered yes, you risked going to jail under the Smith Act because the question didn't differentiate between membership in the 20's and membership during the HUAC days.
You're just flat wrong. You're not alone, though, a lot of other people believe this, too. It's part of an attempt to make the HUAC, and similar activities that try to hunt out "the bad guys" without regard to civil rights, seem like a positives, not amoral attacks on the foundations of this country. I'm not saying you believe that, but this is one of the beliefs of people that support the Patriot Act and other attacks on our freedoms.
Read about the Smith Act passed in 1940. Admit you're a member of the Communist party, a party which was equated with meaning "overthrowing and destroying the government of the United States by force and violence", and you could go to jail. Nearly 200 members of the Communist Party stood trial, and many were convicted, just because they were members of the organization, not because of any other action.
Also, the famous "Hollywood Ten" never said they were or were not part of the Communist party, yet they were convicted for contempt of Congress and were blacklisted.
Go back a little further and look at the Red Scare of the '20s, where things were even worse.
Nope, nice try, though. WordPerfect was the source of grey on blue. I believe they went with grey on blue in 1982 with 2.20, but they definitely had it in 1986. Word did imitate WordPerfect, just like WordPerfect imitated WordStart earlier.
You're right, you didn't say the mistake was one of grammar. My assumption was because you were referring to "the current ruleset", you meant the rules of grammar, not spelling. My mistake. I think you can understand why I made that mistake when you look at your post in the context of its parents.
I agree with your point that the grandparent poster was just trying to find an excuse to be lazy, but not the implication that people need to learn "the ruleset" to communicate effectively.
If you don't agree that children are grammar masters, go talk to one. Their speech may not follow such non-rules as "Don't end a sentence with a preposition", but it is surprisingly grammatically correct, often more correct than adults that have been taught such nonsensical rules. They do have a tendency to overgeneralize, especially when they are talking about past or future events (such as using "goed" rather than "went"), but that's rather minor, and is quickly corrected. Can they tell you the rules? Nope. But they sure can use them effectively.
Whether someone can spell or not has nothing to do with how well they use grammar. The affect/effect error is due to poor pronunciation (many people pronounce them nearly the same), not bad grammar. The words have nearly become homophones, and thus are frequently incorrectly spelled, just like "to", "too", and "two" are often incorrectly spelled.
Oh, and apostrophes? That's spelling, too, not grammar. This is especially true when you are talking about the different ways to use an apostrophe to indicate possession. The contraction "it's" is pronounced the same as the possessive "its". When someone writes "it's" as the possessive ("it's home was messy"), they don't mean to use the contraction. They weren't trying to say "it is home was messy", they just spelled possessive it incorrectly. Should they learn how to spell it right? Sure, but don't pretend you have taught them grammar when you teach them that. They already knew the grammar, just not how to indicate it in writing.
I value good writing. It drives me crazy when someone complains about bad writing by saying it's ungrammatical. Usually it's just poorly written. The abstract for TFA was fairly well written, especially for./, but the writer made a common spelling error (among other errors [quick, spot the incomplete sentence!]). Big deal, it got the point across. If you want to complain about it, complain about what was said, not how a word was spelled.
We need to teach people how to write well (i.e., composition), not how to spout non-existent rules of a grammar.
In a surely wasted attempt to get back onto topic, let me ask, how different is the reuse talked about in TFA from newpapers and other new outlets rewriting wire stories?
Six year old children are masters of English grammar.
The error above is one of spelling, not of grammar. The defense of the spelling error also is not a defense of bad grammar, it's a defense of bad spelling.
Tech is a university as it offers undergraduate, post-graduate degrees, and has research facilities. That's the definition of a university.
If you look at the press release from Tech, and not the USA Today article, they never mention university, so your rant is a bit off base.
Oh, and BTW, I went to Tech, too. I still like to call it School of Mines, though, as it was one of the land grant colleges from back in the 1890's. Freshmen retention has always been a big issue for Tech because most classes were decreasing by 30-40% between their freshmen and sophmore year. In my time there, they were fine with that decrease if it was due to students being unable to maintain the required course load, but they were doing studies to make sure it wasn't due to other problems.
Read TFA. If Perfect 10 allowed Google to index their website there would be no case. The fact that your search returned no hits is favourable to Perfect 10.
Here's the case in a nutshell. Perfect 10's copyrighted images are being appropriated by others. Google indexes them and displays the thumbnails of them. Since Perfect 10 didn't give Google permission to display those images (as you noted in your post, they don't allow Google to index their images), when Google displays the thumbnails they are, under our current copyright laws, breaking the law.
This is similar to the case brought against Kinko's for creating coursepacks (see Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corporation. Kinko's made partial copies of course material and sold it to students. Kinko's believed these coursepacks were allowed by educational fair use rules. Kinko's, like Google in this case, didn't make complete copies. They only copied pieces of the material to help students get to the heart of the material. Google doesn't copy the entire copyrighted image, just enough to get the important part. The courts ruled against Kinko's, and the judge here said it's likely the courts will also rule against Google.
The biggest difference is, in the case against Kinko's, they were the ones taking direct action. The Kinko's case would apply more directly if someone had come to Kinko's and said, "Hey, we've got these great coursebooks for sale. If you point people our way, by giving away the first five pages with a link to us, we'll give you five cents for each copy we sell. You have to make copies of the first five pages yourself, though."
There are some other differences, too. Kinko's directly profited, whereas Google only indirectly profits (from advertising). The judge agreed that that part of the case is weak. But you don't have to make money to be infringing a copyright. That may help Google avoid paying as much in damages, but that's about all it means.
If you really want to dig into this topic, find out more about rhetorical communities. You are a member of many. Tony Long (TFA author) is a member of many, too. His rhetorical communities don't overlap well with people that communicate using other methods (such as SMS and email slang) and because of that, he thinks there's a problem.
His main thesis can be found in this paragraph.
Sadly, this devalues the thoughtful essayist and the sheer linguistic joy of the exposition. And the language dies a little more each day.
He doesn't back up the supposition that "the language" (English?) is dying at all except by talking about jargon and how people misunderstand each other's email.
Jargon is vocabulary, not de-evolution of a language. It's been around as long as language has existed. What one person calls jargon is, to a person in another rhetorical community, clear speech. If I call someone a hacker, it means one thing to RMS and his rhetorical community, another to my mother. TFA is full of jargon, too. What's a CEO? It's not described in the article. What does geeky mean to you? Is it the same as what it means to him? Regardless, Tony Long knows his audience will know those terms, and so he uses them appropriately.
As for misunderstanding what another person is saying, he's way off base. An evolving language is not the root cause of people misunderstanding each other. Communication is inexact, always has been, and always will be. If it weren't for misunderstood communication, Shakespeare's comedies would never have been written.
People are becoming members of more rhetorical communities, and that's presenting new challenges to communication. It's nothing new, though. The printing press brought many people into new rhetorical communities, so did the telephone. The emergence of other new forms of communication is bound to do that as well.
Language exists to communicate and people are communicating more than every before. If people are communicating more effectively, where is the problem? Really, articles like this boil down to the same kind of screeds as "What are kids these days listening to anyway? In my day we had good music".
Don't misunderstand me, I write for a living, and I cherish good writing (take a look at Brevity for what I'm reading right now). TFA's author thinks there's only one kind of good writing, and he's wrong about that.
I agree, don't lie, but don't tell the truth either.
Here's the best salary advice anyone has ever given me - make them talk numbers first.
Yes, you can do this. It's part of the process. If they are talking money, they want to hire you, but they, of course, want to get you as cheaply as they can to make you happy. Don't ever give in first. If you do, you won't get paid as much as they are willing to pay you.
Worst case scenario is that they won't give a number without you giving a number. That's rare, and the sign of a cagey (or stubborn) hiring manager. If it gets to that point, don't tell them what you are making, tell them what you want to make to change jobs. Go high, higher than you really need, but not outrageously high, and then say, "But, that depends on the situation, and I don't want you to not offer me a position here because of the salary. If I'm a good fit for you, and you're a good fit for me, which is how it feels now, I'm sure we can work out the details", and take a big drink of the water that you have sitting on the table. Then, now that you've got your breathe back, look them in the eye and smile. The ball is in their court, which is where you want it to be.
Also, don't be afraid to negotiate after they make the offer. If they make an offer, they want you, and they've put a lot of effort into interviewing you, following up on references, making the offer letter, etc. I had a friend tell me never to take the first offer. I don't know if I agree with that, but usually you can get a few extra grand by working them post-offer.
Will the hiring manager be a bit pissed on your first day? Probably. If you did it right, you won, and that's always a pisser for the loser. Usually you don't get to be a hiring manager by losing. But, if you show them that you are worth it, that feeling will quickly change to "How can I keep this guy for what I pay him?". Managers understand much better than ICs that salary negotiations are business, not personal.
Oh, and don't tell anyone, except your spouse, what you make. Nobody. That will only lead to pain.
This has the be the most ignorant comment I've seen on Slashdot since the last thread.
If you live in nearly any country in the world you benefit from the government that you pay your taxes to. How you ask? Medical care so you don't catch TB walking down the street. Police services so you don't get shot by someone taking the law into their own hands. Emergency services like the fire department so your house doesn't burn down when your idiot neighbor falls asleep smoking and starts his house on fire. Government isn't perfect, just like any other large organizations, but it's better than not having any government. Vigilantism is rule by the mob, not by justice.
Society benefits from a government that is concerned with the well being of the people in society. State sponsored education, penal systems, and transportation networks all have great positive benefits on the quality of life of every person in a society. Education is the number one method to decrease crime. Public education assists you if you own anything, even if you don't have any children yourself.
In addition, because most governments regulate commerce, individual members of society are protected from unethical and hazardous business practices.
From the sound of your post either you understand this and you were just trying to yank someone's chain or you are some kind of anti-government zealot that belive governments are the root of all evil in society. If the former, nice troll. If the latter, get educated and stop spouting nonsense.
I remember the time when this letter was written and although I don't agree with his position, I think the tone of his letter was appropriate.
At the time nobody took seriously the idea that someone should be paid for software. We didn't pay for what was on the disk, we paid for the disk. Once we owned the disk, we felt anything on it was ours. The position of people like Bill Gates was very different, and he had to make a strong statement to get his point across.
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Even DocBook doesn't have completely clean model, but it's much further along the path than TeX.
Here are the ideas you have to accept as fact for this to make sense.
If you accept those ideas as fact, then keeping people from seeing naked bodies in a video game is more important than keeping people from being exposed to violence.
IMO, it's idiocy, but it's important to understand the other side's position.
or Powers
We don't make cars safer to decrease health care costs, we make them safer because we don't want to die in an accident.
Granted, a few people might be less likely to ride in an automobile if they lose their health insurance and had to pay full prices for health care resulting from an accident, but the number is so small as to have no impact on the discussion.
For all intents and purposes, the the demand for health care is so inelastic, it can be treated as static.
It may be true that if you pay me more, I'll be willing to work in a dangerous environment, but I won't be willing to work in a more dangerous environment just because you pay for all my health care if I get injured. The trade off isn't worth it. I gain nothing and I've had a painful experience.
Ah, the vision of god as a cosmic watchmaker. Not a "banannas" view at all. It's actually one that's been around for centuries, probably most associated with the French Enlightment era of thought. It is a pointless vision, though.
The problem with the cosmic watchmaker idea is that though it sounds rational, it isn't. It can easily be used to support any idea you want. Don't believe in evolution? An intelligent designer created everything, thus evolution didn't happen. Believe in evolution? The watchmaker made the system that we now understand as evolution. Don't believe in abortion? The designer wanted you to have your baby. Believe in abortion? The watchmaker gave you the choice to terminate your pregnancy.
If there is a god that set everything in motion, but no longer takes a part in the world, how is that different from no god at all? Or, the flip side, if god set everything in motion, isn't it incumbent on us to fulfill his will?
It's not crazy to believe in a cosmic watchmaker, just pointless. It allows you to be both intellectually lazy (Don't understand what caused the the big bang? Don't do more research, just decide that god did it!) and religiously lazy (Don't know what is right and what is wrong? Whatever you do, that's part of god's design!).
Take a look at Oracle's OSS page for more projects. One of the biggest is OCFS, Oracle's clustering file system which they released with a GPL license.
Sure most of it is to make it easier for them to sell software for Linux users, but it's out there, with various OSS licenses.
Developers are good at developing software. They usually aren't the best people to handle support (or write marketing material). The developer should only get involved if there is code-level support needed by the end-user.
I'm not saying that MySQL support is bad. I don't know, having never used it. But if it is support provided by the MySQL developers, than it probably isn't as good as Oracle's support. Besides, I'd prefer the developers were working on the software, rather than helping someone with their support needs.
But you can (could?) find the DC version on P2P sites.
It was Pow! on 6th and Mission. Sadly, defunct as of November 2003.
I agree that using terms unfamiliar to those outside of the legal rhetorical community does make it harder to understand, but using common terminolgy doesn't make it easy.
Look, the Oracle database can be very expensive. You want a high performance database with high quality support, you're going to pay for it. That said, automatically associating Oracle with high priced software is stupid.
I'm not trying to say that Oracle is being altruistic. Free tools that only work with the Oracle database help keep the Oracle database the market leader, but assuming that Oracle hasn't learned from IBM (Eclispe, anyone?) is asinine.
Is this article linked from some anti-evolution website, or what? I don't think I've ever seen so many posts by people that misunderstand evolution in one place.
There's no explanation needed. Just because a species remains relatively unchanged for millions of years does not mean that evolution doesn't happen.
It's like talking about black holes and then calling cosmology into question because our sun hasn't become one.
BTW, the linked to article is a steaming pile of dung. If the rest of that periodical is written as poorly, I suggest you stop reading it. The linked article takes quotations from the New Scientist article out of context and implies that it was an article questioning evolution. It wasn't. There are lots of valid ways to question evolution, but twisting other people's words to support your point of view isn't one of them.
Read about the Smith Act passed in 1940. Admit you're a member of the Communist party, a party which was equated with meaning "overthrowing and destroying the government of the United States by force and violence", and you could go to jail. Nearly 200 members of the Communist Party stood trial, and many were convicted, just because they were members of the organization, not because of any other action.
Also, the famous "Hollywood Ten" never said they were or were not part of the Communist party, yet they were convicted for contempt of Congress and were blacklisted.
Go back a little further and look at the Red Scare of the '20s, where things were even worse.
Nope, nice try, though. WordPerfect was the source of grey on blue. I believe they went with grey on blue in 1982 with 2.20, but they definitely had it in 1986. Word did imitate WordPerfect, just like WordPerfect imitated WordStart earlier.
You're right, you didn't say the mistake was one of grammar. My assumption was because you were referring to "the current ruleset", you meant the rules of grammar, not spelling. My mistake. I think you can understand why I made that mistake when you look at your post in the context of its parents.
I agree with your point that the grandparent poster was just trying to find an excuse to be lazy, but not the implication that people need to learn "the ruleset" to communicate effectively.
If you don't agree that children are grammar masters, go talk to one. Their speech may not follow such non-rules as "Don't end a sentence with a preposition", but it is surprisingly grammatically correct, often more correct than adults that have been taught such nonsensical rules. They do have a tendency to overgeneralize, especially when they are talking about past or future events (such as using "goed" rather than "went"), but that's rather minor, and is quickly corrected. Can they tell you the rules? Nope. But they sure can use them effectively.
Whether someone can spell or not has nothing to do with how well they use grammar. The affect/effect error is due to poor pronunciation (many people pronounce them nearly the same), not bad grammar. The words have nearly become homophones, and thus are frequently incorrectly spelled, just like "to", "too", and "two" are often incorrectly spelled.
Oh, and apostrophes? That's spelling, too, not grammar. This is especially true when you are talking about the different ways to use an apostrophe to indicate possession. The contraction "it's" is pronounced the same as the possessive "its". When someone writes "it's" as the possessive ("it's home was messy"), they don't mean to use the contraction. They weren't trying to say "it is home was messy", they just spelled possessive it incorrectly. Should they learn how to spell it right? Sure, but don't pretend you have taught them grammar when you teach them that. They already knew the grammar, just not how to indicate it in writing.
I value good writing. It drives me crazy when someone complains about bad writing by saying it's ungrammatical. Usually it's just poorly written. The abstract for TFA was fairly well written, especially for ./, but the writer made a common spelling error (among other errors [quick, spot the incomplete sentence!]). Big deal, it got the point across. If you want to complain about it, complain about what was said, not how a word was spelled.
We need to teach people how to write well (i.e., composition), not how to spout non-existent rules of a grammar.
In a surely wasted attempt to get back onto topic, let me ask, how different is the reuse talked about in TFA from newpapers and other new outlets rewriting wire stories?
The error above is one of spelling, not of grammar. The defense of the spelling error also is not a defense of bad grammar, it's a defense of bad spelling.
If you look at the press release from Tech, and not the USA Today article, they never mention university, so your rant is a bit off base.
Oh, and BTW, I went to Tech, too. I still like to call it School of Mines, though, as it was one of the land grant colleges from back in the 1890's. Freshmen retention has always been a big issue for Tech because most classes were decreasing by 30-40% between their freshmen and sophmore year. In my time there, they were fine with that decrease if it was due to students being unable to maintain the required course load, but they were doing studies to make sure it wasn't due to other problems.
Here's the case in a nutshell. Perfect 10's copyrighted images are being appropriated by others. Google indexes them and displays the thumbnails of them. Since Perfect 10 didn't give Google permission to display those images (as you noted in your post, they don't allow Google to index their images), when Google displays the thumbnails they are, under our current copyright laws, breaking the law.
This is similar to the case brought against Kinko's for creating coursepacks (see Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corporation. Kinko's made partial copies of course material and sold it to students. Kinko's believed these coursepacks were allowed by educational fair use rules. Kinko's, like Google in this case, didn't make complete copies. They only copied pieces of the material to help students get to the heart of the material. Google doesn't copy the entire copyrighted image, just enough to get the important part. The courts ruled against Kinko's, and the judge here said it's likely the courts will also rule against Google.
The biggest difference is, in the case against Kinko's, they were the ones taking direct action. The Kinko's case would apply more directly if someone had come to Kinko's and said, "Hey, we've got these great coursebooks for sale. If you point people our way, by giving away the first five pages with a link to us, we'll give you five cents for each copy we sell. You have to make copies of the first five pages yourself, though."
There are some other differences, too. Kinko's directly profited, whereas Google only indirectly profits (from advertising). The judge agreed that that part of the case is weak. But you don't have to make money to be infringing a copyright. That may help Google avoid paying as much in damages, but that's about all it means.
If you really want to dig into this topic, find out more about rhetorical communities. You are a member of many. Tony Long (TFA author) is a member of many, too. His rhetorical communities don't overlap well with people that communicate using other methods (such as SMS and email slang) and because of that, he thinks there's a problem.
His main thesis can be found in this paragraph.
He doesn't back up the supposition that "the language" (English?) is dying at all except by talking about jargon and how people misunderstand each other's email.Jargon is vocabulary, not de-evolution of a language. It's been around as long as language has existed. What one person calls jargon is, to a person in another rhetorical community, clear speech. If I call someone a hacker, it means one thing to RMS and his rhetorical community, another to my mother. TFA is full of jargon, too. What's a CEO? It's not described in the article. What does geeky mean to you? Is it the same as what it means to him? Regardless, Tony Long knows his audience will know those terms, and so he uses them appropriately.
As for misunderstanding what another person is saying, he's way off base. An evolving language is not the root cause of people misunderstanding each other. Communication is inexact, always has been, and always will be. If it weren't for misunderstood communication, Shakespeare's comedies would never have been written.
People are becoming members of more rhetorical communities, and that's presenting new challenges to communication. It's nothing new, though. The printing press brought many people into new rhetorical communities, so did the telephone. The emergence of other new forms of communication is bound to do that as well.
Language exists to communicate and people are communicating more than every before. If people are communicating more effectively, where is the problem? Really, articles like this boil down to the same kind of screeds as "What are kids these days listening to anyway? In my day we had good music".
Don't misunderstand me, I write for a living, and I cherish good writing (take a look at Brevity for what I'm reading right now). TFA's author thinks there's only one kind of good writing, and he's wrong about that.
Here's the best salary advice anyone has ever given me - make them talk numbers first.
Yes, you can do this. It's part of the process. If they are talking money, they want to hire you, but they, of course, want to get you as cheaply as they can to make you happy. Don't ever give in first. If you do, you won't get paid as much as they are willing to pay you.
Worst case scenario is that they won't give a number without you giving a number. That's rare, and the sign of a cagey (or stubborn) hiring manager. If it gets to that point, don't tell them what you are making, tell them what you want to make to change jobs. Go high, higher than you really need, but not outrageously high, and then say, "But, that depends on the situation, and I don't want you to not offer me a position here because of the salary. If I'm a good fit for you, and you're a good fit for me, which is how it feels now, I'm sure we can work out the details", and take a big drink of the water that you have sitting on the table. Then, now that you've got your breathe back, look them in the eye and smile. The ball is in their court, which is where you want it to be.
Also, don't be afraid to negotiate after they make the offer. If they make an offer, they want you, and they've put a lot of effort into interviewing you, following up on references, making the offer letter, etc. I had a friend tell me never to take the first offer. I don't know if I agree with that, but usually you can get a few extra grand by working them post-offer.
Will the hiring manager be a bit pissed on your first day? Probably. If you did it right, you won, and that's always a pisser for the loser. Usually you don't get to be a hiring manager by losing. But, if you show them that you are worth it, that feeling will quickly change to "How can I keep this guy for what I pay him?". Managers understand much better than ICs that salary negotiations are business, not personal.
Oh, and don't tell anyone, except your spouse, what you make. Nobody. That will only lead to pain.
If you live in nearly any country in the world you benefit from the government that you pay your taxes to. How you ask? Medical care so you don't catch TB walking down the street. Police services so you don't get shot by someone taking the law into their own hands. Emergency services like the fire department so your house doesn't burn down when your idiot neighbor falls asleep smoking and starts his house on fire. Government isn't perfect, just like any other large organizations, but it's better than not having any government. Vigilantism is rule by the mob, not by justice.
Society benefits from a government that is concerned with the well being of the people in society. State sponsored education, penal systems, and transportation networks all have great positive benefits on the quality of life of every person in a society. Education is the number one method to decrease crime. Public education assists you if you own anything, even if you don't have any children yourself.
In addition, because most governments regulate commerce, individual members of society are protected from unethical and hazardous business practices.
From the sound of your post either you understand this and you were just trying to yank someone's chain or you are some kind of anti-government zealot that belive governments are the root of all evil in society. If the former, nice troll. If the latter, get educated and stop spouting nonsense.
At the time nobody took seriously the idea that someone should be paid for software. We didn't pay for what was on the disk, we paid for the disk. Once we owned the disk, we felt anything on it was ours. The position of people like Bill Gates was very different, and he had to make a strong statement to get his point across.