This is no different. M$'s "prize" is less than it would cost to PAY people to conduct the equivalent research. This kind of "contest" which is really "exploitation" should be considered an(other) unfair labour practice.
I didn't say it didn't have a point. I said it's been overvalued out of great proportions.
Sure, your incident happens to involve a "cyber" stalker. But first, it could happen just as easily in the non-cyber world.
Next, the largely anonymous nature of the current internet, makes the likelyhood of social intervention less likely, which is a danger. In the real world with real communities-- which seem to be drifting away in the the US-- the defense against the insane/deranged/stalker is that others know who both of you are, and work to moderate or correct the behavior.
In a largely anonymous internet, this isn't possible. No one knows you, no one knows the woman, no one but perhaps the FBI can intervene:). That's a worst-case internet in my opinion.
The problem with your argument is that privacy is not the solution; it buttresses the private sector behaviors you list. One counter-solution is the light of day and not allowing such organizations to, for instance, have an opaque process which allows them to assume "red cup in hand" means drinking-- not that it's any of their business if a person was drinking in private! Ditto your extreme ma & pa in the bible belt example: its not that extreme, and reasonable privacy as an option (not default) can defend against problems; on the other hand, maybe the bible belt could use a few less filters on the information that reaches it. Perhaps pa's in the closet:).
>The internet is designed for privacy, not security. Pretending otherwise just makes you look like a fool
As a student of a few of those designers (at MIT), I can assure you it was designed for neither. The protocols were open and subject to inspection as they passed any party. There was a default assumption that you'd know the identify of any part on the network. More recent events have added layers of both privacy and security of certain sorts, but you have to rise out of the abyss of vague generalizations before you can say anything meaningful about either.
Sure, it has its uses, which are pointed out in the OP. If you're trying to whistleblow on an oppressive Middle Eastern government, it's useful.
However, 99999.8 out of 100,000 people don't need this. They need good online communities, which rely on identities and trust.
Sure, there were BBSes with anon ids. They weren't exactly the whole internet, were they? Just as well, there were places such as the Well, which relied more on getting to know who people WERE.
Prior to 1995 or so, it was also *almost* impossible (ie, difficult) to operate on the real internet, without a real, verifiable, traceable ID-- university, government, or corporate. One thus knew that one was accountable for one's actions and could be reached if one went beyond the pale (spam, viruses, scams, or just abuse).
Today's internet is sadly lacking these features, and this is one reason so much of it is described as a "pit." Ironically, the destruction of the Penet and other anon services in Finland, seem to have accelerated this.
Again, anonymity has its place. It should be defended. It, however, should not be the default assumption. It's not *that* important, no more than anonymity in the real work (big cities, etc.), which has decidedly negative and socially divisive effects.
Yes, obviously, they did think about this for more that 5 seconds:), and perhaps yielded interesting results about linguistic differences (though one would have to look at and think about their methods, for more than 5 seconds, to see if this is more than self-confirming prophecy).
My offhand comment is that, in terms of p factor etc, depending on how you measure it, their methods may not be all that valid -- though I'm not claiming that they are not. Without looking at the details, (ie, maybe they have), they should perform some in-depth regression analysis to see if there are other, more effective groupings than male/female, to explain these differences.
For instance, many of the indicators they use (emoticons, !!!) are quite common and typical of the early-ish internet; they're simply conventions, perhaps effective communications strategies, and I certainly knew/know many males who used them. Perhaps all that's being measured here, is that in the twitter sample, females adapt or have adapted to these conventions "faster." This then becomes a "local" observance more than a general one.
As background, there is always Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" and "Wonderful Life," both of which are both nuanced and at the same time well-written expositions of the problems, for "general audiences."
FWIW, I haven't looked at the study yet, and it may not make the generalization errors that the post seems to make.
Well, it is *possible* that "his" in "his basement" refers to someone in the film and not the owner of the smartphone, but it certainly seems like the speaker means to imply that the owner of the phone is doing the beheading or whatever:). It's poor journalism, which I suppose we have plenty of.
>'We were contacted by police who couldn't get a video to work on a handset â" >it turned out to be a bloke beheading someone in his garage,' >claimed another forensics expert."
The key word is "claimed," which may also apply to the speakers assertion of being a "forensic expert."
How many times does someone get beheaded in a garage in the UK? Doesn't it usually make the news?
Without some fact-checking and confirmation, sounds like self-promotional FUD to me.
I walk into an internet cafe and use a rootkit to install a keylogger, that's one thing. I use portable PhotoShop, that's another. C'mon. Insightful? C'mon.
>1.He installed unauthorized software on a computer not belonging to him, a security guard would not have the authority to give this person permission to do this, >the Security guard i bet technically doesn't work for Apple, but will work for a security firm that has a contract with the store.
Well feces. I walk into the store. I ask the big guy with the badge if it's OK for me to take pictures of the merchandise. What do you want, me to call up the corporate office in Shanghai?
BOTTOM LINE: FAIL.
>2.Yes in apple stores you can use the camera, but would you think it's ok for Apple to store those pictures and upload them to a public website, > no i doubt you would
You think Apple would get in legal trouble for it? FBI raid? C'mon.
To think of it differently, imagine that a bar posts pics of what's going on every 5 minutes on "check the bar out".com. Problem.
BOTTOM LINE: FAIL.
>3.Technically he is not in a public space, he is in a apple store who can prohibit people from taking pictures, >a lot of shops will not allow you to take pictures in there store.
Questionable. The shop can *ask* you to leave, but if they're in a state with public accommodation laws, they may not have the right to make you do so.
People have been arrested in "private" establishments based on "public" behavior laws such as public intoxication. A store operating in public is not private for purposed of "public space" laws just because of private *ownership*. And so on.
Looking at it the other way, if you take your iPhone into the Apple Store and snap a shot of your boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/collegue etc., with others in the background, and put in on Flick, do you think you should be arrested?
BOTTOM LINE: FAIL.
>4. It cannot be assumed people are aware there pictures are being taken, not everyone is computer literate and would notice things such as the camera light.
Who cares? Your photo is taken all the time. It's not your home or business. FAIL.
>5.There is nothing against the law of taking pictures of people on a beach for instance and posting them on the web, one it's a public area, and also would tend to be more obvious carrying around a camera taking snaps.
So? You fail to establish that the Apple Store is in any way substantively different than a public beach, or that there's an expectation of privacy at the Apple Store that's greater than the beach. If you take your clothes off and start humping a frog in an Apple Store, you think security can't photo it? Some guy in the store can'e?
That they have to have a 5lbs Nikon and make it obvious-- they can't use a lapel cam?
FAIL.
>6.there is very little difference legally had he set up a laptop in changing room and done the same thing
There's a big difference. There's an expectation of privacy in a changing room. You take your clothes off. It's entirely different.
You're the one who posted "Stupid" to what is a fairly standard (if not particularly brilliant) trope about information overload-- a sort of take off on Merlin Mann's intro to the "Inbox Zero" talk. You got the level in return.
Mann's point, like the above, is very simple-- hey, when all this stuff started, it was cool to get an email from someone sitting in another corporation or across the world. Until, of course, the entire world could send you email.
"Inbox Zero" is certainly one way of dealing or "managing" with that-- if a particularly spastic, attention deprived sort of one. It's primarily flaw is that since it is superficial-- you're trying to dispose of email as quickly as possible-- it tends to be myopic and miss critical details.
Our friends at FaceBook and Berkmann have shown us that human networks normally max out at 200 people or so-- the human mind really can't keep up with more contacts than that, naturally, without assistance.
The question becomes, what if you HAVE TO? The classic example is Vannevar Bush, who coined "information overload," after all, when he headed the US's scientific operations in WWII-- in brief, he just had an enormous amount and breadth of research coming at him. If you look at those as "contacts," and a human can manage 200 without assistance-- maybe Bush had 20,000 or 30,000 to follow.
How? Email is a really crappy tool for doing so. When Bhushan & Co. sent the first packets around the world and wrote the mail protocols, they weren't really thinking about email in terms of information overload and management problems. They were thinking, "isn't it really amazing that we can communicate instantly with these guys in Russia?"
In reality, Crackberry, Twitter and FaceBook addicts aside, if you personally don't have an inbox overload problem, I suspect it is not because you're a "good manager" (or whatever the heck you are), but because you've limited your contacts and avoided the central problem of information overload-- that is, continueing access to "too much information" and the need to develop new tools to manage, understand and direct the flow. You've adopted the head-in-the-sand approach, which is common enough.
Well, shit. You don't get 400 emails a day, and you think anyone who does, is a jerk who hands out their email...
I get 400 emails a day. Why? Because I manage 5 corporate projects at a time. Because I'm a part of another five international teams. And so on-- I'm not even thinking of the mailing lists, many of which attach to projects and groups to whom I have specific responsibilities. 50 personal emails in a day, is not unheard of.
So fine-- it doesn't apply to you. Don't be an utter asshole and assume because you don't have an overload problem, that anyone and everyone who does, is twittering on FaceBook or the like. Many people simply have too much to deal with.
I can count on one hand the number of "newegg@mydomain.com" spam messages I've found. True... I don't use scum sites, but as far as I can see, the risk of spam from giving my email address out to sites, is essentially ZERO.
Goddard is the father of spaceflight for a reason. I won't explain it to you-- go read his patents, then read the interviews of the captured members of von Braun's team members when they were captured, and then look at the posthumous patents Goddard's wife published.
The US destroyed progress in rocket science after WWII, by making the international co-operation that drove it into treason, and then sending their resources down the terrible path dependency of massive rocket/engine design.
Centralized idiocracy-- only the Soviets could beat the US at that.
NASA has been a bloated government bureaucracy standing in the way of progress a half-century.
When did Goddard want to make it to Saturn? The 1970s! And we could have -- maybe if Goddard had lived, he would have pushed the US forward.
As it is, the US focused on a very narrow set of launch engine technologies-- essentially, nothing changed in engine design from Goddard's death until the mid-90s.
The shuttle, like everything else at NASA, was just squeezing these designs into new form-- not doing anything new. What do you expect from a government bureaucracy? It rewards mediocrity!
Now that NASA's big mouth is out of the way and not eating up all available resources, and there are other players out there, humanity may actually make it somewhere.
But all this concern about the "loss" is utter crud. What has NASA actually done? Engage in a political showmanship trip to the moon-- a half-century ago? I'm sure it played well to jingoist audiences back in the States, but big deal.
Moderately skilled people for moderately skilled work is the bread and butter of work life, not MIT and Stanford and Berkeley. If you have an application, and the boss says "we need a text field here that's stored in the customer database and goes on that report" you need someone to edit the GUI, modify the database, update the report. It won't be rocket science but it's work that needs doing by someone who's at least a little bit skilled at what he's doing
Pfft. This reminds me of one of our current contracts.
Your example is about to be as outdated as a "manager and a secretary."
Currently, we're converting an operation which-- literally, it's a semi-major website producing well over $1M/yr in profit, and it's running on, literally, [insert 1990s desktop db system] running on someone's desktop in their home-office, linked to a "webserver" running in his garage.
Sure, in this mess, when someone at the company wants a new field, they have to call this guy up (heck, maybe even email) and ask him to put in a new field-- five days later, after he figures out how to rewrite the spaghetti he's produced, all the way out to the GUI, he sends them a bill for $200.
In under a month, here's what's going to happen.
"Boss," who is not stupid, is going to click the equivalent of "add field." And its just going to happen. If he needs expert help, he's going to call the experts.
You sound like someone defending the secretaries' unions, five years after IBM released the first wordprocessor. Sorry, real "work" is going to become increasingly "expert," requiring expertise and brainpower-- heck, there's plenty of work in economics, that suggest we're already here.
As for all your firewall/DMZ stuff, we'll see. I suspect your example is somewhat like an auto shop I knew in a little town which called itself [Pink Bird] Motors-- I once took a car with a horrible high-pitched grinding metal-scraping-metal sound in, and after an hour of hemming and hawing about how they'd never heard such a sound, and driving it and testing and sticking their ears and brains too close to a running motor for safety, they declared it had to be in the transmission and it was about to fly apart.
Come to find out, the problem was the alternator-- one of the disks was out of place and scaping the casing. It broke, it got replaced-- for about a twentieth the cost of pulling the tranny.
My point here is that one person, of limited capacity, can look at what they see of a problem all they want-- and expend a lot of effort and misdirection trying to solve the problem they don't recognize.
Firewall? ACME Super Networking Company(tm) is just going to come in, install that layer, look across their entire network of installs, run some AI bunk over it, and largely auto-configure. (Um, have you seen Cisco's Management console for a network of 10K machines?)
Like everything else, it's going to become higher level, and require less labour, and produce more for less.
You are right of course-- in saying that it's possible to stay in the same field "all your life." Sure it is possible-- but the point there is, it's increasingly rare. One in twenty? One in fifty? I haven't read the literature closely enough to guess.
Yet -- well, I was going to say "we keep preparing people for a world in which it was common"-- but I know a number of high school teachers in the Metro system around me, and that's not what they're telling their students.
They're telling them "prepare to change careers and paths multiple times."
Well, I'll put it this way. If you're "looking for a break," you probably won't find one. It's kind of like the guy I knew who quit a $50K/yr sales job, to go to Nashville, play music and "see if something happens."
You've got to take some responsibility to make it happen yourself.
Otherwise, there are plenty of places with companies with HR departments with quotas to fill. Doesn't mean they're good opportunities, but they may pay the rent for a year or so.
>If you want to develop you can be a software engineer all your life >. If you know how to manage a database you can be a DBA, > if you know how to setup networks you can do that.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are three separate career paths needing lifetime commitment? Anyone worth their salt can master all three at a general level of competence in under two years. Anyone worth their salt ought to be generally competent in all three. And in five to ten years, it's all going to change.
>They'll always need people for that, no matter how often the company logo changes.
You think? Of these, network administration has a good chance of not existing in a decade-- it's going to become an off-the-shelf commodity, "order a network, push the button, deploy" except at the highest level.
You seem to be shooting for the level of people who go to local tech college and think they're learning something. They're not. They're learning stuff that's five years out of date and going to change. Sure there are a lot of half-and-quarter assed operations out there, who hire that level, but they're going to be the losers.
The boys and girls at the MITs and Stanford and Berkeleys are learning the real stuff, and anyone who doesn't get the difference and what it means for them, is preparing for nothing expect to be left behind.
Please mod the above down;// it's just not that interesting, "worthless non-core classes" drivel
"Intended career?" Are you fucking kidding? This isn't 1950. The average American changes jobs/job categories every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s. "Intended career" is BS from job placement offices at Unis that are behind the curve. Unless you want to become a physician etc., you need to prepare yourself for work in a variety of fields which are themselves changing, not an "intended career" in a field that won't even exist in five years.
For that, an internship as a paid slave is worth... exactly how much?
Except what you're doing isn't beating on rocks, and requires a bit of a brain.
Unpaid "internships" are generally illegal-- repeat after me. If you're doing work, in the US or EU, you have to be paid. The vast majority of "internships" are not really internships, but fraud/scams to get free labour.
> It's next to impossible to get an entry level IT job as a junior admin anymore if all you have is talent and no experience.
Heh, where the hell do you live? The guy next to me on the porch at [identity revealing location removed] was hiring anyone with "six months linux experience" (that means, running it on a laptop, etc. "just to fill the seats." C'mon.
Slashdot Mirror
http://no-spec.com/ [no-spec.com]
This is no different. M$'s "prize" is less than it would cost to PAY people to conduct the equivalent research. This kind of "contest" which is really "exploitation" should be considered an(other) unfair labour practice.
No. Need elaboration? :)
I didn't say it didn't have a point. I said it's been overvalued out of great proportions.
Sure, your incident happens to involve a "cyber" stalker. But first, it could happen just as easily in the non-cyber world.
Next, the largely anonymous nature of the current internet, makes the likelyhood of social intervention less likely, which is a danger. In the real world with real communities-- which seem to be drifting away in the the US-- the defense against the insane/deranged/stalker is that others know who both of you are, and work to moderate or correct the behavior.
In a largely anonymous internet, this isn't possible. No one knows you, no one knows the woman, no one but perhaps the FBI can intervene :). That's a worst-case internet in my opinion.
The problem with your argument is that privacy is not the solution; it buttresses the private sector behaviors you list. One counter-solution is the light of day and not allowing such organizations to, for instance, have an opaque process which allows them to assume "red cup in hand" means drinking-- not that it's any of their business if a person was drinking in private! Ditto your extreme ma & pa in the bible belt example: its not that extreme, and reasonable privacy as an option (not default) can defend against problems; on the other hand, maybe the bible belt could use a few less filters on the information that reaches it. Perhaps pa's in the closet :).
>The internet is designed for privacy, not security. Pretending otherwise just makes you look like a fool
As a student of a few of those designers (at MIT), I can assure you it was designed for neither. The protocols were open and subject to inspection as they passed any party. There was a default assumption that you'd know the identify of any part on the network. More recent events have added layers of both privacy and security of certain sorts, but you have to rise out of the abyss of vague generalizations before you can say anything meaningful about either.
Anonymity is overrated.
Sure, it has its uses, which are pointed out in the OP. If you're trying to whistleblow on an oppressive Middle Eastern government, it's useful.
However, 99999.8 out of 100,000 people don't need this. They need good online communities, which rely on identities and trust.
Sure, there were BBSes with anon ids. They weren't exactly the whole internet, were they? Just as well, there were places such as the Well, which relied more on getting to know who people WERE.
Prior to 1995 or so, it was also *almost* impossible (ie, difficult) to operate on the real internet, without a real, verifiable, traceable ID-- university, government, or corporate. One thus knew that one was accountable for one's actions and could be reached if one went beyond the pale (spam, viruses, scams, or just abuse).
Today's internet is sadly lacking these features, and this is one reason so much of it is described as a "pit." Ironically, the destruction of the Penet and other anon services in Finland, seem to have accelerated this.
Again, anonymity has its place. It should be defended. It, however, should not be the default assumption. It's not *that* important, no more than anonymity in the real work (big cities, etc.), which has decidedly negative and socially divisive effects.
Yes, obviously, they did think about this for more that 5 seconds :), and perhaps yielded interesting results about linguistic differences (though one would have to look at and think about their methods, for more than 5 seconds, to see if this is more than self-confirming prophecy).
My offhand comment is that, in terms of p factor etc, depending on how you measure it, their methods may not be all that valid -- though I'm not claiming that they are not. Without looking at the details, (ie, maybe they have), they should perform some in-depth regression analysis to see if there are other, more effective groupings than male/female, to explain these differences.
For instance, many of the indicators they use (emoticons, !!!) are quite common and typical of the early-ish internet; they're simply conventions, perhaps effective communications strategies, and I certainly knew/know many males who used them. Perhaps all that's being measured here, is that in the twitter sample, females adapt or have adapted to these conventions "faster." This then becomes a "local" observance more than a general one.
As background, there is always Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" and "Wonderful Life," both of which are both nuanced and at the same time well-written expositions of the problems, for "general audiences."
FWIW, I haven't looked at the study yet, and it may not make the generalization errors that the post seems to make.
72.8% of tweets are sent by men. Simply identifying all tweets from a sample as 'male' would yield a higher success rate.
Oh, NOTHING racist in the OP. Nothing at all.
*barf*
Well, it is *possible* that "his" in "his basement" refers to someone in the film and not the owner of the smartphone, but it certainly seems like the speaker means to imply that the owner of the phone is doing the beheading or whatever :). It's poor journalism, which I suppose we have plenty of.
The summary proclaimeth:
>'We were contacted by police who couldn't get a video to work on a handset â"
>it turned out to be a bloke beheading someone in his garage,'
>claimed another forensics expert."
The key word is "claimed," which may also apply to the speakers assertion of being a "forensic expert."
How many times does someone get beheaded in a garage in the UK? Doesn't it usually make the news?
Without some fact-checking and confirmation, sounds like self-promotional FUD to me.
Welcome to Slashdot-2011-July!
I walk into an internet cafe and use a rootkit to install a keylogger, that's one thing. I use portable PhotoShop, that's another. C'mon. Insightful? C'mon.
Mod parent down.
No one said he lied. If Apple wants the systems secure, they should secure them. Did someone say dumbass?
Let's take these one by one:
>1.He installed unauthorized software on a computer not belonging to him, a security guard would not have the authority to give this person permission to do this,
>the Security guard i bet technically doesn't work for Apple, but will work for a security firm that has a contract with the store.
Well feces. I walk into the store. I ask the big guy with the badge if it's OK for me to take pictures of the merchandise. What do you want, me to call up the corporate office in Shanghai?
BOTTOM LINE: FAIL.
>2.Yes in apple stores you can use the camera, but would you think it's ok for Apple to store those pictures and upload them to a public website,
> no i doubt you would
You think Apple would get in legal trouble for it? FBI raid? C'mon.
To think of it differently, imagine that a bar posts pics of what's going on every 5 minutes on "check the bar out" .com. Problem.
BOTTOM LINE: FAIL.
>3.Technically he is not in a public space, he is in a apple store who can prohibit people from taking pictures,
>a lot of shops will not allow you to take pictures in there store.
Questionable. The shop can *ask* you to leave, but if they're in a state with public accommodation laws, they may not have the right to make you do so.
People have been arrested in "private" establishments based on "public" behavior laws such as public intoxication. A store operating in public is not private for purposed of "public space" laws just because of private *ownership*. And so on.
Looking at it the other way, if you take your iPhone into the Apple Store and snap a shot of your boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/collegue etc., with others in the background, and put in on Flick, do you think you should be arrested?
BOTTOM LINE: FAIL.
>4. It cannot be assumed people are aware there pictures are being taken, not everyone is computer literate and would notice things such as the camera light.
Who cares? Your photo is taken all the time. It's not your home or business. FAIL.
>5.There is nothing against the law of taking pictures of people on a beach for instance and posting them on the web, one it's a public area, and also would tend to be more obvious carrying around a camera taking snaps.
So? You fail to establish that the Apple Store is in any way substantively different than a public beach, or that there's an expectation of privacy at the Apple Store that's greater than the beach. If you take your clothes off and start humping a frog in an Apple Store, you think security can't photo it? Some guy in the store can'e?
That they have to have a 5lbs Nikon and make it obvious-- they can't use a lapel cam?
FAIL.
>6.there is very little difference legally had he set up a laptop in changing room and done the same thing
There's a big difference. There's an expectation of privacy in a changing room. You take your clothes off. It's entirely different.
FAIL.
Did I say I can't keep it organized?
You're the one who posted "Stupid" to what is a fairly standard (if not particularly brilliant) trope about information overload-- a sort of take off on Merlin Mann's intro to the "Inbox Zero" talk. You got the level in return.
Mann's point, like the above, is very simple-- hey, when all this stuff started, it was cool to get an email from someone sitting in another corporation or across the world. Until, of course, the entire world could send you email.
"Inbox Zero" is certainly one way of dealing or "managing" with that-- if a particularly spastic, attention deprived sort of one. It's primarily flaw is that since it is superficial-- you're trying to dispose of email as quickly as possible-- it tends to be myopic and miss critical details.
Our friends at FaceBook and Berkmann have shown us that human networks normally max out at 200 people or so-- the human mind really can't keep up with more contacts than that, naturally, without assistance.
The question becomes, what if you HAVE TO? The classic example is Vannevar Bush, who coined "information overload," after all, when he headed the US's scientific operations in WWII-- in brief, he just had an enormous amount and breadth of research coming at him. If you look at those as "contacts," and a human can manage 200 without assistance-- maybe Bush had 20,000 or 30,000 to follow.
How? Email is a really crappy tool for doing so. When Bhushan & Co. sent the first packets around the world and wrote the mail protocols, they weren't really thinking about email in terms of information overload and management problems. They were thinking, "isn't it really amazing that we can communicate instantly with these guys in Russia?"
In reality, Crackberry, Twitter and FaceBook addicts aside, if you personally don't have an inbox overload problem, I suspect it is not because you're a "good manager" (or whatever the heck you are), but because you've limited your contacts and avoided the central problem of information overload-- that is, continueing access to "too much information" and the need to develop new tools to manage, understand and direct the flow. You've adopted the head-in-the-sand approach, which is common enough.
Well, shit. You don't get 400 emails a day, and you think anyone who does, is a jerk who hands out their email...
I get 400 emails a day. Why? Because I manage 5 corporate projects at a time. Because I'm a part of another five international teams. And so on-- I'm not even thinking of the mailing lists, many of which attach to projects and groups to whom I have specific responsibilities. 50 personal emails in a day, is not unheard of.
So fine-- it doesn't apply to you. Don't be an utter asshole and assume because you don't have an overload problem, that anyone and everyone who does, is twittering on FaceBook or the like. Many people simply have too much to deal with.
I have done this for at least 15 years.
Guess what?
I can count on one hand the number of "newegg@mydomain.com" spam messages I've found. True... I don't use scum sites, but as far as I can see, the risk of spam from giving my email address out to sites, is essentially ZERO.
History of flight not your thing?
Goddard is the father of spaceflight for a reason. I won't explain it to you-- go read his patents, then read the interviews of the captured members of von Braun's team members when they were captured, and then look at the posthumous patents Goddard's wife published.
The US destroyed progress in rocket science after WWII, by making the international co-operation that drove it into treason, and then sending their resources down the terrible path dependency of massive rocket/engine design.
Centralized idiocracy-- only the Soviets could beat the US at that.
NASA has been a bloated government bureaucracy standing in the way of progress a half-century.
When did Goddard want to make it to Saturn? The 1970s! And we could have -- maybe if Goddard had lived, he would have pushed the US forward.
As it is, the US focused on a very narrow set of launch engine technologies-- essentially, nothing changed in engine design from Goddard's death until the mid-90s.
The shuttle, like everything else at NASA, was just squeezing these designs into new form-- not doing anything new. What do you expect from a government bureaucracy? It rewards mediocrity!
Now that NASA's big mouth is out of the way and not eating up all available resources, and there are other players out there, humanity may actually make it somewhere.
But all this concern about the "loss" is utter crud. What has NASA actually done? Engage in a political showmanship trip to the moon-- a half-century ago? I'm sure it played well to jingoist audiences back in the States, but big deal.
Pfft. This reminds me of one of our current contracts.
Your example is about to be as outdated as a "manager and a secretary."
Currently, we're converting an operation which-- literally, it's a semi-major website producing well over $1M/yr in profit, and it's running on, literally, [insert 1990s desktop db system] running on someone's desktop in their home-office, linked to a "webserver" running in his garage.
Sure, in this mess, when someone at the company wants a new field, they have to call this guy up (heck, maybe even email) and ask him to put in a new field-- five days later, after he figures out how to rewrite the spaghetti he's produced, all the way out to the GUI, he sends them a bill for $200.
In under a month, here's what's going to happen.
"Boss," who is not stupid, is going to click the equivalent of "add field." And its just going to happen. If he needs expert help, he's going to call the experts.
You sound like someone defending the secretaries' unions, five years after IBM released the first wordprocessor. Sorry, real "work" is going to become increasingly "expert," requiring expertise and brainpower-- heck, there's plenty of work in economics, that suggest we're already here.
As for all your firewall/DMZ stuff, we'll see. I suspect your example is somewhat like an auto shop I knew in a little town which called itself [Pink Bird] Motors-- I once took a car with a horrible high-pitched grinding metal-scraping-metal sound in, and after an hour of hemming and hawing about how they'd never heard such a sound, and driving it and testing and sticking their ears and brains too close to a running motor for safety, they declared it had to be in the transmission and it was about to fly apart.
Come to find out, the problem was the alternator-- one of the disks was out of place and scaping the casing. It broke, it got replaced-- for about a twentieth the cost of pulling the tranny.
My point here is that one person, of limited capacity, can look at what they see of a problem all they want-- and expend a lot of effort and misdirection trying to solve the problem they don't recognize.
Firewall? ACME Super Networking Company(tm) is just going to come in, install that layer, look across their entire network of installs, run some AI bunk over it, and largely auto-configure. (Um, have you seen Cisco's Management console for a network of 10K machines?)
Like everything else, it's going to become higher level, and require less labour, and produce more for less.
You are right of course-- in saying that it's possible to stay in the same field "all your life." Sure it is possible-- but the point there is, it's increasingly rare. One in twenty? One in fifty? I haven't read the literature closely enough to guess.
Yet -- well, I was going to say "we keep preparing people for a world in which it was common"-- but I know a number of high school teachers in the Metro system around me, and that's not what they're telling their students.
They're telling them "prepare to change careers and paths multiple times."
Well, I'll put it this way. If you're "looking for a break," you probably won't find one. It's kind of like the guy I knew who quit a $50K/yr sales job, to go to Nashville, play music and "see if something happens."
You've got to take some responsibility to make it happen yourself.
Otherwise, there are plenty of places with companies with HR departments with quotas to fill. Doesn't mean they're good opportunities, but they may pay the rent for a year or so.
^^^ opineth:
>If you want to develop you can be a software engineer all your life
>. If you know how to manage a database you can be a DBA,
> if you know how to setup networks you can do that.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are three separate career paths needing lifetime commitment? Anyone worth their salt can master all three at a general level of competence in under two years. Anyone worth their salt ought to be generally competent in all three. And in five to ten years, it's all going to change.
>They'll always need people for that, no matter how often the company logo changes.
You think? Of these, network administration has a good chance of not existing in a decade-- it's going to become an off-the-shelf commodity, "order a network, push the button, deploy" except at the highest level.
You seem to be shooting for the level of people who go to local tech college and think they're learning something. They're not. They're learning stuff that's five years out of date and going to change. Sure there are a lot of half-and-quarter assed operations out there, who hire that level, but they're going to be the losers.
The boys and girls at the MITs and Stanford and Berkeleys are learning the real stuff, and anyone who doesn't get the difference and what it means for them, is preparing for nothing expect to be left behind.
Oh Jesus Christ. The idiots on Slashdot could argue with a mute mule after having beat it to it's thirteenth death.
Go look it up in Richard Florida. The term used in the literature is CAREER.
Please mod the above down; // it's just not that interesting, "worthless non-core classes" drivel
"Intended career?" Are you fucking kidding? This isn't 1950. The average American changes jobs/job categories every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s. "Intended career" is BS from job placement offices at Unis that are behind the curve. Unless you want to become a physician etc., you need to prepare yourself for work in a variety of fields which are themselves changing, not an "intended career" in a field that won't even exist in five years.
For that, an internship as a paid slave is worth... exactly how much?
Except what you're doing isn't beating on rocks, and requires a bit of a brain.
Unpaid "internships" are generally illegal-- repeat after me. If you're doing work, in the US or EU, you have to be paid. The vast majority of "internships" are not really internships, but fraud/scams to get free labour.
> It's next to impossible to get an entry level IT job as a junior admin anymore if all you have is talent and no experience.
Heh, where the hell do you live? The guy next to me on the porch at [identity revealing location removed] was hiring anyone with "six months linux experience" (that means, running it on a laptop, etc. "just to fill the seats." C'mon.