I had similar issues coming in to my current job. I am also aware, however, that many employers today do credit reports as part of their background checks. I had some credit dings, but the way I approached their request not only worked out fine but earned me some accolades right out of the chute for honesty and diplomacy. More on that later, but first...
The only problem I see is that they waited until after you started your job to ask for it. What would happen if you did not meet their standards, would you be tossed? Better check with a lawyer on this, because if you had known about this requirement in advance you could have kept your old job.
Still, all that aside, a more pragmatic approach might be to be honest about any potential issues in your credit report, and negotiate up front what might be grounds for not hiring you (or in this case dismissing you). Come to agreement on what will and will not cause problems, and disclose to them up front what problems you have, and confirm that these will not be issues to them. By this point, everyone's on the same page and the actual running of the report is just a simple mechanical one... assuming both of you have been honest, nobody is going to be hurt.
The bigger issue, that of privacy, is one you have to decide for yourself. It's a tough economy, many open jobs have lots of resumes waiting, and besides that many companies started running these checks before the downturn, and they're not likely to make exceptions now. If you feel strongly, and you can't negotiate specific issues to confirm on your credit report and possible consequences, then maybe you have to make a stand that could cost you the job.
You're looking at it from the wrong direction. I'm not saying it's right or wrong; in fact, I'm fairly agnostic about the whole concept of corporate right vs. wrong. But, in a capitalist society, the shareholder is the top of the food chain. Consumers, and fulfilling consumer demand, is not the first and foremost requirement of captialism. Capitalism is all about raising, well, capital. To do that, you need shareholders. Without shareholders, you have no product to sell, and consumers lose. Again, right or wrong, that's the way it is.
Not that consumers don't count into the picture. Capital-providers require return on investment. Consumers provide the return on investment. Don't even get me started on Elasticity of Demand, but suffice to say that there are some macro market-driven limiters that control the balance of consumer vs. company. Still, the point is, if we as consumers don't like what is being sold to us, we stop buying and shareholders stop getting (as big) dividend checks, or share value growth. Shareholders will then leave the market (or on a micro level, the company they have invested in) and put their money where it earns more. Consumers have probably already started buying that new company's product, or will very soon, and shareholders continue to receive value increases or dividends.
How does all this apply to the RIAA? Forget about encouraging artists to not sign with RIAA labels; they are on the supply side and ne're shall demand and supply cross-contaminate each other. Concentrate on the demand side. Don't buy albums from RIAA-affiliated labels. If there aren't any, start one. If you don't have the money, get some. If you can't, well... sorry! (Hey, that's capitalism.) Maybe someone else with your passion and a few more bucks will.
I agree with you, but I have to point out that, at least in the enterprise, software licensing fees aren't usually the first thing companies think about. Sure, it's a great consumer benefit (for Linux) but in the enterprise, the more important expense is hardware investment and ongoing maintenance.
This is where Linux is a big win in the server market, and why companies like Dell and (apparently) RH are targetting those markets. It's hard for Sun or HP to compete, when their low-end servers (up to 4 procs) are sometimes 4 times as costly to buy as a commodity x86 server.
But on the other hand, the desktop market is already deeply steeped in cheap, commodity x86 boxes. What OS an enterprise chooses to put on it really boils down to support, since the few hundred bucks for a license doesn't really show up on the balance sheet after the first year. Maintenance, however, keeps going (and it's cost rising) as the box gets older.
It's going to take a strong, stable company that can attract enterprise buyers and managers to sell the Linux desktop into the environment. So from what I see of this, RH is saying "Don't look at us just yet."
My story starts in 1986. This is an anecdotal account of how I got where I am today.
I started in an entry level operators job, on mainframes. I guess the only applicable education at that point was my college work on IBM mini's, but even that is questionable. When I started at the company, every desk had a 3279 terminal on it and the conduits were bulging with serial cables.
When the company I worked for went to a PC network environment (based on Netware), nobody knew how to maintain them. I had just purchased a PC, and had spent several days learning DOS at home, so I was the expert. Soon, I was the "PC Technician", as well as the Netware admin. I learned Netware from books.
Later, our company adopted a somewhat distributed platform, after having learned what I told them years earlier... Netware is not an application server platform. So they started buying IBM RS/6000 hardware and AIX. They did hire a hot-shot AIX admin to take care of things, but when he moved on to the next job-du-jour, I inherited his spot. One programmer there was a Unix sage, and I credit him with giving me advice and help that began my on-the-job learning process. He introduced me to concepts such as "less is more", "no response is good", and mainly, shell scripting.
Mind you, we're up to 1994 now.
I moved on from that company soon after, and became the NT/Sun/Netware admin/technician/CIO for a small software and trading and trader training upstart. You name it, I did it. One of their key applications was based on NeXTStep, so I became the expert. I was also getting well heeled in SunOS and later Solaris. All my training was on the job. I didn't much like the NT work, but that was mostly for office automation stuff. The "real" applications ran on Unix.
In 1997, long before the real dot-bomb, the software part of the company took a big hit and most technical support staff were layed off. I did a brief stint as a senior HP-UX admin, more or less a stepping stone into my current position.
My current employer hired me mainly because I know NeXTStep, although that constitutes little of my real work at this point. Now I'm a Unix Engineer. It's all Solaris, although we're looking at other platforms as well, including Linux. Now, I help produce the specs for the platforms we use; I develop testing procedures and reporting, and I evaluate new products for strategic advantage.
Along the way, I've taken countless classes and have been in and out of college several times. Although I would say that no particular class or course really put me where I am today, I must say that I got into the business way before anybody thought about what the qualifications for a SysAdmin should be.
It doesn't sound so much like you're asking "how do I get a job" as "how do I do *this* job", so I won't give my advice that in a bad economy, go back to school. Oops, sorry.:-)
My advice is: learn Unix. Linux is easy to work at home, but Solaris is available too. Get books from O'Reilly. Shell scripting, Perl, Python, Apache, sendmail, Bind, etc. etc. Concentrate on learning networking, TCP/IP, and all that goes into keeping that running. Read the books cover to cover. Try them out on your system. Break things. Fix them. Get experience.
Most employers I've worked for have some sort of technical "grilling" session for their SysAdmin postitions. If you know your stuff, it'll show and your lack of formal experience will take a back seat to your demonstrated skills.
Finally, don't try to start at the top. Go to smaller companies at first, or do end user support in a bigger company. Then, work your way up.
> That's a pretty long trek from the capitalist
> ethic that only a few years ago valued corporate
> loyalty as much as profits, and touted the
> company-employee bond.
From an economics standpoint, this is completely out of left field. The only "capitalist ethic" that exists, going way back to Keyes, is "Make money. Give money to investors. Repeat."
Aside from that inconsistency, this article reads like so much of tax-and-spend entitlement programs that the liberals tried to force upon us in the '90s.
In the late 90s and early 2000, the "labor" market had all the power and called the shots. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way. Boo hoo, get over it. Give it 3-8 years and it'll come back.
Oh, yeah... and the dot-com boom/bust is not alone since the Industrial revolution, Jon. Have a look at the chart price stocks of railroads in the 19th century sometime.
I think that, despite their historical involvement with the Gulf war, our leaders right now seem to know the difference between this situation and that one.
Colin Powell, for one, is an extremely intelligent fellow. And, he seems to be saying all the right things (if anyone would bother listening.) He just reiterated his take on the "war" today... here's a link and snippet...
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010923/ts/terr or ist_attacks_189.html
Powell said dismantling the al-Qaida network is the first goal. He also indicated that any military action in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding, will not be on the scale of the Gulf War.
"Let's not assume there will be a large-scale move," Powell said. "I don't think we should even consider a large-scale war at this point."
I agree with a healthy effort on the part of participants in government as well as world citizens debating this issue and providing their well-thought out input on the matter to forums like this. But I still think that too many people are simply assuming, without much extra thought, the type of response the U.S. will mount and complaining about something that even high-ranking officials in government are saying quite plainly is simply not going to happen.
I see a lot of talk on the Web and T.V. about this. Afghans seem to think that they are under attack now, even though (from all news accounts) the U.S. is not yet attacking Afghanistan (as of this writing.)
I am also disappointed that so many people seem to be assuming that a U.S. military response will be a brutish, heavy-handed attack on Afghanistan, the country.
By all accounts, the State Department, Department of Defense, and President Bush appear to know the difference between the Taliban and Afghanistan. He even made that point clear in his speech on Thursday night. Just because some neanderthals on radio (for crying out loud! like the government every listens to those bozos) espouse "bombing Afghanistan into the stone age" doesn't mean that it's a given. There are still some level-headed thinkers in Government and Defense, albeit arguably.
Yes, we do need to encourage our government to target their response as skillfully as possible. But approaching that argument from the presumption that the U.S. military will just simply attack Afghanistan, including it's oppressed people, will not accomplish anything.
I know you were replying to Mastoid, but since I brought on the discussion, I figured I should interject something here that I didn't make clear before. I don't speak for Mastoid.
I should have preceeded my comments with "for better or worse,..." because while I predict the coming of these measures in the U.S., I never intended to imply that I agree with them.
The important thing here is to not attack those who predict losses of liberty. They are not your enemy, nor are they to blame for it.
> Nah.. I'd rather die than live in either of
> those scenerios.
You make a very passionate statement here, and one that I'm sure you know has it's roots in American government philosophy. But as we are truly a nation of and for the people, it will be up to the people to decide how much of this we tolerate, and where we draw the line.
I predict, based entirely on historical study of partisan politics, that our current administration is far more concerned with security than liberty. But if we, the people, are clear that Bush's reaction now and in the coming years will define his presidency, I also predict that a country that has grown weary of the loss of our liberty because of the cowardly acts of some terrorists will do to him what they did to his father.
Again, for better or worse.
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
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Some very good points.
You would think that Bin Laden's followers, if they were truly interested in following Islamic principles, would question why their leader was essentially booted and banned from one of the most traditional Islamic countries in the world.
Re:Christians manage to bastardize "God's words",
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> I'd say it's time to outlaw religion and save
> some lives
Another country/political ideology tried that about eighty years ago; if you haven't heard, it didn't work out.
I've been elsewhere. I've seen how people around the world who have had to deal with the threat of terrorism all their lives have to put up with the loss of personal freedom. Yeah, and throwing in that "totalitarian" and "religious" state comment was interesting, albeit not what I suggested would happen.
I'm talking specifically about travel and communications. And I think as we begin to learn what we'll have to put up with to insure some semblance of safety for our citizens, "police state" will take on a very different meaning. Carnivore is nothing, a red herring. We'll get used to it.
There are plenty of "thinking" people in countries that have far less interest in civil liberties than us. Yes, they have to put up with some discomfort at having their thoughts (if they publish them on the Internet) scoured over by security forces. Yes, they have to put up with having their persons searched before they board a commercial airliner. But that doesn't keep them from thinking, it keeps them alive. I'm sure they appreciate that, although they don't like it anymore than anyone else.
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
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For U.S. citizens and residents, the word "civil liberties" will change forever. I'm not saying that Carnivore is here to stay. But we've lived in a country with at least an illusion of separation from the rest of the world for a long time, and now things will change. The biggest changes will occur in the areas of transportation and communications, which are usefull tools for terrorists.
In fact, I would not be at all surprised if inside ten years we see at least attempts to amend the constitution, where neccessary, to except those two areas... communications and transportation... from the application of civil liberty laws.
Get used to it, you live in the big bad world now.
Because the liberals/socialists want to be the "big brother" of society... they don't believe in people taking responsibility for themselves.
You're probably right.
In fact, they probably believe people are too stupid to take responsibility for themselves.
They're probably right.
There was a story here in NJ where a drunk fell over himself at a bar and sued the bar.
[...]
(or so the prosecution claimed).
Just a pointer, people suing others are "plantiffs", not "prosecutors." Prosecutors deal with criminal complaints. Criminal complaints don't involve insurance settlements.
the bar was "guilty of serving alcohol to a guy who was already drunk."
Don't know about New Jersey, but in most states this is, in fact, illegal.
This problem would also be solved if we had a better public transportation system in the U.S. If people relied more on public transportation than their own automobile to get around, we wouldn't have so many of these problems... but this is another subject altogether...
Alright, now those flashbacks to drunken trips on the Tube have all started again, thank you very much!
The data include Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, date of birth and credit card information - everything a criminal would need to open an online bank account, apply for a credit card, even create the paperwork necessary to smuggle illegal immigrants.
Uhh, what paperwork is necessary to smuggle illegal immigrants? does the government have a form for this?
>Of course, you also have to take inflation into
>account.
Um, not really... when they raise their product's price (as the article pointed out that they did) you change the elasticity of demand, and thus bring revenue changes upon yourself regardless of outside forces such as inflation. Adjust the numbers for price increases, then take into account for inflation, and then maybe you've got something. Even then, inflation has really only been active (in the U.S. anyway) in energy, housing and food. Two of three of those categories wouldn't even apply to record manufacturers, and I'm sure these numbers beat them handily.
> Also, we're talking revenue, not profits
Maybe, if you're thinking about buying stock in an entity. However, when you're gaging the impact a competitor on your business, your costs have no bearing since you (not your competitor) control your own costs. So, what would you suggest -- that if RIAA members went on a hiring spree they could claim that the lower profits were Napster's fault? No, when comparing two competitors the only factor is revenue.
Did anyone else get the significance of this quote:
"As technology gets better, our concerns get greater," said Hemanshu Nigam, the Motion Picture Association of America's new director of Internet enforcement. "When a technology gets better, uses of it get more diversified and more prevalent."
I don't recall that anyone in the DeCSS / RIAA case actually admitted that technology scares them. In fact, IIRC, RIAA's response to "this is the way the industry is going, and you're just scared because you're behind" is that it's not about technology, it's about IP. But this guy comes close to saying that it's really about the fact that technology is advancing faster than they can (cough!) control it.
As a supporter of the DeCSS and similar cases, I've always been of the mind that I don't support the case because I disdain IP (although others do hold this belief); I support the case because it's a hack attempt by an industry that's been caught off-guard by technology, and rather than trying to catch up, they want to squash it.
Taking this a bit further, it's not hard to conceive that the same guy who would admit that they are scared of being left behind in tech advances might be the same guy who makes the next logical jump and goes on a crusade to get his member's executive boards to put more emphasis on developing technology that competitively answers MP3, DeCSS, and now DivX than to try and squash it.
Does anyone else think that this statement signals a turning point in that regard? Is it significant?
So far, Linux has spent $0 in usability studies in comparison to the millions that Microsoft has spent
Linux has spent $0, eh? So what are you suggesting, that our kernel should spontaneously animate and then get a job, earn some money, and then spend it? ON USABILITY STUDIES????
EH?
I hear your Windows box calling you. It's needs you to reboot it. While you're there, ask your Windows kernel how much it's spent on usability studies.
There are two distinct (for me, anyway) topics: stocks and jobs. Since I don't depend on the stock market for my income (and yes, I do realize that I'm different than some IT folk in that regard) what the stock market does has little impact on my quality of life.
That said, there are still some great tech stocks out there, maybe not all on the Nasdaq, but good all the same. Even at today's low-end pricing, my holdings in JNPR would have to halve before I'd see a loss, and the upside potential is still great despite the market burp. AAPL was and is a great buy, rarely do we get the opportunity to buy what was an $80 stock a few months ago for 1/4 of that price. 'Course, that assumes that it'll someday become an $80 stock again -- a leap of faith I'm willing to take given the miniscule downside risk. On the NYSE, my TWX and VZ aren't superstars, but they're up from where I bought them -- not bad, given the bleed-out of late.
There are good technology companies out there, but investors who have never evaluated stocks based on quality, value, and business acumen have no idea how to find them. Having invested since '82 and lived through '87, I'm having a field day on the buy side. Cheap, cheap, cheap!
On the topic of work, while my technology employer has had some troubles this year, they have not been laying off the way that their peers have. My options are worthless right now, but I'm still at work, still making decent money.
Let's put this into perspective. The labor (and I think Commerce) department(s) keeps track of the "IT Sector"'s shorthandedness fairly closely. The last number I heard was that the U.S. would continue to fall short of supply (e.g. workers) for new IT jobs at a 25,000 per year clip. Per year! I went through all the articles I could find on Yahoo and Fucked Company and added up the losses -- about 5000, maybe 8K. 10 at best, given that I probably didn't find them all. So, a little more than 1/3 of our job surplus for one year has been eaten up by tech layoffs. And, consolidation will soon enough kick in and the tide will slow.
I realize my advice isn't much solace to the folks at Britannia.com who just lost their jobs. But, for quality workers (or contractors) who know what they're doing, there is more work out there than workers. I think that at best a tightening of the market will help sort out the wheat from the chaff, and allow employers to be more selective than "do you have a pulse?" That will make the sector even more efficient and competitive, and we'll all benefit from that. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there'll be another boom in the IT sector, just as soon as this consolidation completes it's cycle.
Does anyone else find it incredibly ironic that
the brothers Daley would be on national media crying about election irregularities? Just for the record, their father stole the 1960 presidential election for Kennedy away from Nixon.
And what did they have to do with the 1960 election that precludes them from complaining about election irregularities today? Hmmm?
Slashdot Mirror
How about "Security-By-Not-Having-Anything-Of-Any-Real-Inter est-To-Crack" on my system?
I had similar issues coming in to my current job. I am also aware, however, that many employers today do credit reports as part of their background checks. I had some credit dings, but the way I approached their request not only worked out fine but earned me some accolades right out of the chute for honesty and diplomacy. More on that later, but first...
The only problem I see is that they waited until after you started your job to ask for it. What would happen if you did not meet their standards, would you be tossed? Better check with a lawyer on this, because if you had known about this requirement in advance you could have kept your old job.
Still, all that aside, a more pragmatic approach might be to be honest about any potential issues in your credit report, and negotiate up front what might be grounds for not hiring you (or in this case dismissing you). Come to agreement on what will and will not cause problems, and disclose to them up front what problems you have, and confirm that these will not be issues to them. By this point, everyone's on the same page and the actual running of the report is just a simple mechanical one... assuming both of you have been honest, nobody is going to be hurt.
The bigger issue, that of privacy, is one you have to decide for yourself. It's a tough economy, many open jobs have lots of resumes waiting, and besides that many companies started running these checks before the downturn, and they're not likely to make exceptions now. If you feel strongly, and you can't negotiate specific issues to confirm on your credit report and possible consequences, then maybe you have to make a stand that could cost you the job.
You're looking at it from the wrong direction. I'm not saying it's right or wrong; in fact, I'm fairly agnostic about the whole concept of corporate right vs. wrong. But, in a capitalist society, the shareholder is the top of the food chain. Consumers, and fulfilling consumer demand, is not the first and foremost requirement of captialism. Capitalism is all about raising, well, capital. To do that, you need shareholders. Without shareholders, you have no product to sell, and consumers lose. Again, right or wrong, that's the way it is.
Not that consumers don't count into the picture. Capital-providers require return on investment. Consumers provide the return on investment. Don't even get me started on Elasticity of Demand, but suffice to say that there are some macro market-driven limiters that control the balance of consumer vs. company. Still, the point is, if we as consumers don't like what is being sold to us, we stop buying and shareholders stop getting (as big) dividend checks, or share value growth. Shareholders will then leave the market (or on a micro level, the company they have invested in) and put their money where it earns more. Consumers have probably already started buying that new company's product, or will very soon, and shareholders continue to receive value increases or dividends.
How does all this apply to the RIAA? Forget about encouraging artists to not sign with RIAA labels; they are on the supply side and ne're shall demand and supply cross-contaminate each other. Concentrate on the demand side. Don't buy albums from RIAA-affiliated labels. If there aren't any, start one. If you don't have the money, get some. If you can't, well... sorry! (Hey, that's capitalism.) Maybe someone else with your passion and a few more bucks will.
... you didn't like the movie.
I agree with you, but I have to point out that, at least in the enterprise, software licensing fees aren't usually the first thing companies think about. Sure, it's a great consumer benefit (for Linux) but in the enterprise, the more important expense is hardware investment and ongoing maintenance.
This is where Linux is a big win in the server market, and why companies like Dell and (apparently) RH are targetting those markets. It's hard for Sun or HP to compete, when their low-end servers (up to 4 procs) are sometimes 4 times as costly to buy as a commodity x86 server.
But on the other hand, the desktop market is already deeply steeped in cheap, commodity x86 boxes. What OS an enterprise chooses to put on it really boils down to support, since the few hundred bucks for a license doesn't really show up on the balance sheet after the first year. Maintenance, however, keeps going (and it's cost rising) as the box gets older.
It's going to take a strong, stable company that can attract enterprise buyers and managers to sell the Linux desktop into the environment. So from what I see of this, RH is saying "Don't look at us just yet."
Hmmm. Maybe IBM?
My story starts in 1986. This is an anecdotal account of how I got where I am today.
:-)
:-)
I started in an entry level operators job, on mainframes. I guess the only applicable education at that point was my college work on IBM mini's, but even that is questionable. When I started at the company, every desk had a 3279 terminal on it and the conduits were bulging with serial cables.
When the company I worked for went to a PC network environment (based on Netware), nobody knew how to maintain them. I had just purchased a PC, and had spent several days learning DOS at home, so I was the expert. Soon, I was the "PC Technician", as well as the Netware admin. I learned Netware from books.
Later, our company adopted a somewhat distributed platform, after having learned what I told them years earlier... Netware is not an application server platform. So they started buying IBM RS/6000 hardware and AIX. They did hire a hot-shot AIX admin to take care of things, but when he moved on to the next job-du-jour, I inherited his spot. One programmer there was a Unix sage, and I credit him with giving me advice and help that began my on-the-job learning process. He introduced me to concepts such as "less is more", "no response is good", and mainly, shell scripting.
Mind you, we're up to 1994 now.
I moved on from that company soon after, and became the NT/Sun/Netware admin/technician/CIO for a small software and trading and trader training upstart. You name it, I did it. One of their key applications was based on NeXTStep, so I became the expert. I was also getting well heeled in SunOS and later Solaris. All my training was on the job. I didn't much like the NT work, but that was mostly for office automation stuff. The "real" applications ran on Unix.
In 1997, long before the real dot-bomb, the software part of the company took a big hit and most technical support staff were layed off. I did a brief stint as a senior HP-UX admin, more or less a stepping stone into my current position.
My current employer hired me mainly because I know NeXTStep, although that constitutes little of my real work at this point. Now I'm a Unix Engineer. It's all Solaris, although we're looking at other platforms as well, including Linux. Now, I help produce the specs for the platforms we use; I develop testing procedures and reporting, and I evaluate new products for strategic advantage.
Along the way, I've taken countless classes and have been in and out of college several times. Although I would say that no particular class or course really put me where I am today, I must say that I got into the business way before anybody thought about what the qualifications for a SysAdmin should be.
It doesn't sound so much like you're asking "how do I get a job" as "how do I do *this* job", so I won't give my advice that in a bad economy, go back to school. Oops, sorry.
My advice is: learn Unix. Linux is easy to work at home, but Solaris is available too. Get books from O'Reilly. Shell scripting, Perl, Python, Apache, sendmail, Bind, etc. etc. Concentrate on learning networking, TCP/IP, and all that goes into keeping that running. Read the books cover to cover. Try them out on your system. Break things. Fix them. Get experience.
Most employers I've worked for have some sort of technical "grilling" session for their SysAdmin postitions. If you know your stuff, it'll show and your lack of formal experience will take a back seat to your demonstrated skills.
Finally, don't try to start at the top. Go to smaller companies at first, or do end user support in a bigger company. Then, work your way up.
Finally, consider therapy.
> That's a pretty long trek from the capitalist
> ethic that only a few years ago valued corporate
> loyalty as much as profits, and touted the
> company-employee bond.
From an economics standpoint, this is completely out of left field. The only "capitalist ethic" that exists, going way back to Keyes, is "Make money. Give money to investors. Repeat."
Aside from that inconsistency, this article reads like so much of tax-and-spend entitlement programs that the liberals tried to force upon us in the '90s.
In the late 90s and early 2000, the "labor" market had all the power and called the shots. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way. Boo hoo, get over it. Give it 3-8 years and it'll come back.
Oh, yeah... and the dot-com boom/bust is not alone since the Industrial revolution, Jon. Have a look at the chart price stocks of railroads in the 19th century sometime.
Colin Powell, for one, is an extremely intelligent fellow. And, he seems to be saying all the right things (if anyone would bother listening.) He just reiterated his take on the "war" today... here's a link and snippet...
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010923/ts/ter
Powell said dismantling the al-Qaida network is the first goal. He also indicated that any military action in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding, will not be on the scale of the Gulf War.
"Let's not assume there will be a large-scale move," Powell said. "I don't think we should even consider a large-scale war at this point."
I agree with a healthy effort on the part of participants in government as well as world citizens debating this issue and providing their well-thought out input on the matter to forums like this. But I still think that too many people are simply assuming, without much extra thought, the type of response the U.S. will mount and complaining about something that even high-ranking officials in government are saying quite plainly is simply not going to happen.
I see a lot of talk on the Web and T.V. about this. Afghans seem to think that they are under attack now, even though (from all news accounts) the U.S. is not yet attacking Afghanistan (as of this writing.)
I am also disappointed that so many people seem to be assuming that a U.S. military response will be a brutish, heavy-handed attack on Afghanistan, the country.
By all accounts, the State Department, Department of Defense, and President Bush appear to know the difference between the Taliban and Afghanistan. He even made that point clear in his speech on Thursday night. Just because some neanderthals on radio (for crying out loud! like the government every listens to those bozos) espouse "bombing Afghanistan into the stone age" doesn't mean that it's a given. There are still some level-headed thinkers in Government and Defense, albeit arguably.
Yes, we do need to encourage our government to target their response as skillfully as possible. But approaching that argument from the presumption that the U.S. military will just simply attack Afghanistan, including it's oppressed people, will not accomplish anything.
I know you were replying to Mastoid, but since I brought on the discussion, I figured I should interject something here that I didn't make clear before. I don't speak for Mastoid.
I should have preceeded my comments with "for better or worse,..." because while I predict the coming of these measures in the U.S., I never intended to imply that I agree with them.
The important thing here is to not attack those who predict losses of liberty. They are not your enemy, nor are they to blame for it.
> Nah.. I'd rather die than live in either of
> those scenerios.
You make a very passionate statement here, and one that I'm sure you know has it's roots in American government philosophy. But as we are truly a nation of and for the people, it will be up to the people to decide how much of this we tolerate, and where we draw the line.
I predict, based entirely on historical study of partisan politics, that our current administration is far more concerned with security than liberty. But if we, the people, are clear that Bush's reaction now and in the coming years will define his presidency, I also predict that a country that has grown weary of the loss of our liberty because of the cowardly acts of some terrorists will do to him what they did to his father.
Again, for better or worse.
Some very good points.
You would think that Bin Laden's followers, if they were truly interested in following Islamic principles, would question why their leader was essentially booted and banned from one of the most traditional Islamic countries in the world.
> I'd say it's time to outlaw religion and save
> some lives
Another country/political ideology tried that about eighty years ago; if you haven't heard, it didn't work out.
I've been elsewhere. I've seen how people around the world who have had to deal with the threat of terrorism all their lives have to put up with the loss of personal freedom. Yeah, and throwing in that "totalitarian" and "religious" state comment was interesting, albeit not what I suggested would happen.
I'm talking specifically about travel and communications. And I think as we begin to learn what we'll have to put up with to insure some semblance of safety for our citizens, "police state" will take on a very different meaning. Carnivore is nothing, a red herring. We'll get used to it.
There are plenty of "thinking" people in countries that have far less interest in civil liberties than us. Yes, they have to put up with some discomfort at having their thoughts (if they publish them on the Internet) scoured over by security forces. Yes, they have to put up with having their persons searched before they board a commercial airliner. But that doesn't keep them from thinking, it keeps them alive. I'm sure they appreciate that, although they don't like it anymore than anyone else.
For U.S. citizens and residents, the word "civil liberties" will change forever. I'm not saying that Carnivore is here to stay. But we've lived in a country with at least an illusion of separation from the rest of the world for a long time, and now things will change. The biggest changes will occur in the areas of transportation and communications, which are usefull tools for terrorists.
In fact, I would not be at all surprised if inside ten years we see at least attempts to amend the constitution, where neccessary, to except those two areas... communications and transportation... from the application of civil liberty laws.
Get used to it, you live in the big bad world now.
You're probably right.
In fact, they probably believe people are too stupid to take responsibility for themselves.
They're probably right.
There was a story here in NJ where a drunk fell over himself at a bar and sued the bar. [...] (or so the prosecution claimed).
Just a pointer, people suing others are "plantiffs", not "prosecutors." Prosecutors deal with criminal complaints. Criminal complaints don't involve insurance settlements.
the bar was "guilty of serving alcohol to a guy who was already drunk."
Don't know about New Jersey, but in most states this is, in fact, illegal.
This problem would also be solved if we had a better public transportation system in the U.S. If people relied more on public transportation than their own automobile to get around, we wouldn't have so many of these problems... but this is another subject altogether...
Alright, now those flashbacks to drunken trips on the Tube have all started again, thank you very much!
Just in case I was being naive, I checked INS.
/ qu ery.asp)
(http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/exec/whereis
"form to smuggle illegal immigrants": No documents matched the query.
Uhh, what paperwork is necessary to smuggle illegal immigrants? does the government have a form for this?
>Of course, you also have to take inflation into
>account.
Um, not really... when they raise their product's price (as the article pointed out that they did) you change the elasticity of demand, and thus bring revenue changes upon yourself regardless of outside forces such as inflation. Adjust the numbers for price increases, then take into account for inflation, and then maybe you've got something. Even then, inflation has really only been active (in the U.S. anyway) in energy, housing and food. Two of three of those categories wouldn't even apply to record manufacturers, and I'm sure these numbers beat them handily.
> Also, we're talking revenue, not profits
Maybe, if you're thinking about buying stock in an entity. However, when you're gaging the impact a competitor on your business, your costs have no bearing since you (not your competitor) control your own costs. So, what would you suggest -- that if RIAA members went on a hiring spree they could claim that the lower profits were Napster's fault? No, when comparing two competitors the only factor is revenue.
I will not rest until I have a 36 bit operating system written in base. TOPS-10 ALL THE WAY!!!!
I don't recall that anyone in the DeCSS / RIAA case actually admitted that technology scares them. In fact, IIRC, RIAA's response to "this is the way the industry is going, and you're just scared because you're behind" is that it's not about technology, it's about IP. But this guy comes close to saying that it's really about the fact that technology is advancing faster than they can (cough!) control it.
As a supporter of the DeCSS and similar cases, I've always been of the mind that I don't support the case because I disdain IP (although others do hold this belief); I support the case because it's a hack attempt by an industry that's been caught off-guard by technology, and rather than trying to catch up, they want to squash it.
Taking this a bit further, it's not hard to conceive that the same guy who would admit that they are scared of being left behind in tech advances might be the same guy who makes the next logical jump and goes on a crusade to get his member's executive boards to put more emphasis on developing technology that competitively answers MP3, DeCSS, and now DivX than to try and squash it.
Does anyone else think that this statement signals a turning point in that regard? Is it significant?
Linux has spent $0, eh? So what are you suggesting, that our kernel should spontaneously animate and then get a job, earn some money, and then spend it? ON USABILITY STUDIES????
EH?
I hear your Windows box calling you. It's needs you to reboot it. While you're there, ask your Windows kernel how much it's spent on usability studies.
There are two distinct (for me, anyway) topics: stocks and jobs. Since I don't depend on the stock market for my income (and yes, I do realize that I'm different than some IT folk in that regard) what the stock market does has little impact on my quality of life.
That said, there are still some great tech stocks out there, maybe not all on the Nasdaq, but good all the same. Even at today's low-end pricing, my holdings in JNPR would have to halve before I'd see a loss, and the upside potential is still great despite the market burp. AAPL was and is a great buy, rarely do we get the opportunity to buy what was an $80 stock a few months ago for 1/4 of that price. 'Course, that assumes that it'll someday become an $80 stock again -- a leap of faith I'm willing to take given the miniscule downside risk. On the NYSE, my TWX and VZ aren't superstars, but they're up from where I bought them -- not bad, given the bleed-out of late.
There are good technology companies out there, but investors who have never evaluated stocks based on quality, value, and business acumen have no idea how to find them. Having invested since '82 and lived through '87, I'm having a field day on the buy side. Cheap, cheap, cheap!
On the topic of work, while my technology employer has had some troubles this year, they have not been laying off the way that their peers have. My options are worthless right now, but I'm still at work, still making decent money.
Let's put this into perspective. The labor (and I think Commerce) department(s) keeps track of the "IT Sector"'s shorthandedness fairly closely. The last number I heard was that the U.S. would continue to fall short of supply (e.g. workers) for new IT jobs at a 25,000 per year clip. Per year! I went through all the articles I could find on Yahoo and Fucked Company and added up the losses -- about 5000, maybe 8K. 10 at best, given that I probably didn't find them all. So, a little more than 1/3 of our job surplus for one year has been eaten up by tech layoffs. And, consolidation will soon enough kick in and the tide will slow.
I realize my advice isn't much solace to the folks at Britannia.com who just lost their jobs. But, for quality workers (or contractors) who know what they're doing, there is more work out there than workers. I think that at best a tightening of the market will help sort out the wheat from the chaff, and allow employers to be more selective than "do you have a pulse?" That will make the sector even more efficient and competitive, and we'll all benefit from that. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there'll be another boom in the IT sector, just as soon as this consolidation completes it's cycle.
And what did they have to do with the 1960 election that precludes them from complaining about election irregularities today? Hmmm?
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/001031/n31270103.html
...it says as much in the article.
Hey, good thing for Napster. They wanted to wake up the music distribution business I think, and if that's the case this is their first major success.
Bad thing for the freebies,eh? Yeah, I guess. But if it results in a system whereby I can pay less for a song or two than for a whole CD, I'd use it.