You are so wrong. Cubicles, when done RIGHT, are wonderful.
Take mine for example. Six foot tall cubicle walls filled with sound-deadening material. Frosted windows in front, bordering the cubicle row. A large wraparound desk surface with two sets of drawers, shelves, and a lockable book cabinet. All in navy blue and composite gray with walnut trim.
I've got a hundred square feet, or thereabouts. It's around ten by ten.
And the walls are set up so you can use clips to hang things. Calendars, project dates, etc.
Yeah, but this time, Mr. Stallman is right. The cloud is a dumb idea.
Think about it this way:
I can buy a regular laptop or netbook, put Ubuntu on it, download some apps I need like OpenOffice and NetBeans, and happily compute away whether I have a network connection or not. I don't have to rely on the goodwill of a private company, which may or may not be in business next year. I don't have to worry about whether a company is going to decide this "cloud" stuff isn't profitable enough and shut down a department I rely on. I can just compute away, happily, no matter where I am or what the network looks like.
With Google's craptacular half-a-laptop, I'm dependent on network conditions as well as Google's goodwill, and at any time some other company or the government can decide that I need to be shut down and talk to Google about doing so. Or the government can read all my documents. Or a hacker can.
Yeah, thanks but no thanks, I'll stick with my full-power laptop and Ubuntu.
OK, here's my problem with Kurzweil in a nutshell. He likes to think up wild things we may be able to do at some time in the future, like "reverse engineering the brain" and creating a real A.I. And he assumes that Moore's law will give us enough computing power to do things like that. But I don't think one leads to the other at ALL. More computing power doesn't make our scientists any smarter, or wiser, it just gets them their results more quickly. So what? It's not a shortcut, for crying out loud. Someone still has to spend years in the lab looking for that "aha!" moment of insight that leads to a breakthrough.
Take the "reverse engineering the brain" thing. Moore's law doesn't help you there. The brain is a horribly complex biological system, not a motherboard. Our best surgeons and psychiatrists have been studying it for a few hundred years now, and we STILL don't know how the damn thing works. The best we can do after hundreds of years of lab work is identify which gross physical structures seem to be involved with different processing tasks, like speech. We can alter brain chemistry with drugs to get desired results, and USUALLY things turn out as we expect them to, but that's about it.
If all you needed to do is throw a computer at the brain and get A.I, we would have had it back in the 1970's when the first Crays came out.
Bottom line, Kurzweil has always reminded me of a guy who can't tell where the line between Science Fiction/Fantasy ends and the real world begins. An author can say "in 2029, A.I. was born!" do a little hand waving, and have a great story. Here in the real world, it's going to take a hundred years of hard work by computer scientists in their under-funded labs before we have anything approaching A.I, and it's going to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything so prosaic as a human brain.
NO, the best thing to do is eliminate ALL of these "guest worker" visas, and go straight to giving green cards to people you deem valuable enough to bring to the U.S, as I've discussed with another person in this thread.
By giving them green cards instead of H-1B visas, you allow immigrants to compete fairly with Americans and get paid an American wage. This eliminates global labor arbitrage and levels the playing field. It's good for Americans, and good for immigrants.
As for shipping jobs overseas, you can eliminate that by simply taxing companies at the full domestic rate for all employees, regardless of where they're physically located.
None of these things will ever happen, because the government is in the pocket of the corporations.
Yes, but previously, people who didn't WANT a "master" job, people who only wanted to work with technology, had a clear, profitable career path. It wasn't a "serf" job either, it was more similar to "wizard", "Knight", "castle architect" or "armorer".
When everything has been outsourced EXCEPT "king", you've got a weak kingdom indeed.
Dang. I type too fast for my own good. "Give Green Cards to people who would be worth bringing into the U.S." is what I meant to say. Green card holders may be useful once you've got a green card to put in them, but not before!
Eliminate all guest visas and give green card holders to people who would be worth bringing into the U.S? Sure, I'd go for that. That would solve most of the problems of the tech industry, because these people would earn normal U.S. wages and compete fairly with other Americans.
That'd take a miracle, though. The real purpose of the visa programs has always been global labor arbitrage. Corporations and the politicians they have purchased would never let such a change happen.
As for your challenge to the TSA, you're biting off your nose to spite your face. They're NEVER going to live up to your goal. You might as well file for citizenship and be done with it.
Nonsense! The only "economic reality" here is that Globalism is an ARTIFICIALLY CREATED PHENOMENON, designed by politicians and corporations specifically to wipe out the bargaining power of the U.S. middle class. It has always been about global labor arbitrage.
Don't pretend this is some natural phenomenon! It is NOT. This is simply the greedy rich destroying their own country's economy to benefit themselves at everyone else's expense.
Global labor arbitrage is an evil thing. It's nothing more or less than a race to the bottom.
I see you've read Brave New World too. I think virtually all of his predictions are coming true. Soma, alphas, betas, you name it. Only we don't have to manufacture people, we can do it with educational differences between private and public schools.
I don't think it's possible to completely extinguish the "Fuck you, I'll do it myself" attitude at the core of our American culture, however. There will always be people who go off the ranch and do their own thing. Hackers, "makers", inventors, and other misfits are pretty hard to beat down. Their whole subculture is already underground as it is.
But as far as the culture as a whole goes, I'm with you. I think we're already 3/4 of the way towards fascism, if not the totalitarianism desired by the right wing. Here's an interesting question, though: our ancestors left oppressive regimes to come here, but where can WE go to avoid what's going on? It's more or less global at this point, isn't it? What countries are worth emigrating to?
How about we eliminate H1-B and L-1 visas and start hiring Americans again?
The economy is going down the tubes because greedy corporations aren't willing to pay a living wage. They don't even want to hire Americans, because the indentured servitude of the H1-B visa is too attractive to them. This is the primary reason why the middle class is shrinking: there aren't that many good jobs left (unless you're an ivy-league child of the rich, in which case "daddy" or one of his friends will make room for you somewhere).
Between the end of WWII and the start of this outsourcing nonsense, spending by the middle class was the engine that drove our economy. Now that the middle class is in rapid decline, corporations are trying to expand third-world markets to preserve their profits. So Congress is writing love letters to India and China by doing things like expanding foreign-worker visa programs.
This in turn is eliminating any desire for young people to study science or technology. Why should they, when all those jobs have moved overseas or are being handed out to visa holders? The kids are going to study law or business, things they can use in a third world economy (i.e. the future America).
The corporations are run by idiots who think the executive levels are the only important parts of the corporation to keep in the U.S. They are going to find out the hard way that they should have kept their tech staff on board, when India Inc. and China realize that they can manufacture their own executives TOO. All they have to do is drop-kick American corporations out of the country, and replace them with home-grown alternatives. This will happen within a decade, I think.
By then, there won't be ANY Americans bothering to study STEM subjects in our schools -- it'll be nothing but foreign kids, who will go right back where they came from when they graduate. We Americans are already a minority in graduate programs here. And it'll simply be too late. The professors are all foreign. The kids are all foreign. When they all go home, we won't have anything left at all.
It's all so pathetic. Rich people are so petty and stingy they're destroying their own future to make a little extra bread in the present. If they weren't destroying our future as well, I'd wish them bon voyage, but as it is they're taking the whole country down the tubes.
The only ones among us who will still know anything are hobbyists and small-scale manufacturers and hackers. And we aren't going to be inclined to try and help the corporations when they finally realize they need us.
Yeah, no kidding. My boss asked me about this a couple of years ago, and I answered thusly:
"The cloud is a huge scam. Basically, it's the same sort of people who created the dot-com disaster back in 2000. They're not that bright, but they have some money, and they think that if they come up with a wonky idea, hire some college kids to develop it, and do a lot of hand waving, they'll be the next Bill Gates. All nonsense, basically. Best ignore it."
"But," he asked, "what IS it? I mean the idea itself."
"Oh," I replied, "they want you to farm out your email, accounting, human resources, and all your other business plumbing to external sites, which will host some sort of web-based self-service apps. Basically, it's a ridiculous idea; what kind of idiot would let an external company handle all his human resources and accounting? If the site went out of business or their servers got hacked, you'd be hosed. You'd have to be a lunatic to go along with that. The only service in the cloud I approve of is Gmail, since it's useful and low-risk."
"OK," he said, "but what is this internal cloud business???"
"An internal cloud is where you're still putting all your stuff in a web-based system, but you buy it from one of these guys as a software package and host it on your own server. So it's not in the cloud at ALL, and really you're only buying a second-rate package to replace your own, already tested and working package. You have to lay out a load of money to get started, both for the app itself and the training for your staff, and you don't really gain anything from it."
Nobody around here has mentioned "the cloud" since then.
Why do YOU care if it says Oracle made it? Why do YOU care what kind of splash screen appears when you start up the software? You're letting your dislike of Oracle influence your thinking in non-advantageous ways.
Listen, here's a prescription from Dr. Hermit:
FOR NOW, keep using your Oracle-branded Open Office. Meanwhile, keep an eye on LibreOffice, which is the obvious next step.
IN A YEAR, when they've got all the kinks worked out of LibreOffice, uninstall OpenOffice and switch over.
Relax. You can use C and GTK for desktop apps, and PhP for web pages. And if you want to use C#, you can find a port of Mono for all of those platforms, I'm sure.
To quote: "Even if the JCP dissolves, many developers will be left with few alternatives, with.Net offering little advantage, and Perl, Python, and Ruby unable to match Java's performance."
What nonsense.
The person who wrote the above quoted statement discards.Net because HE doesn't like MICROSOFT, not because there's anything wrong with.Net. The "advantage" he seeks is probably supposed to be "more freedom" but Java and Mono are BOTH GPL; I smell straw somewhere around here...
I find it funny that he bemoans the fact we can't switch to the Slashdot-approved scripting languages because they're not as good as Java. Nobody seems to have picked up on that. I thought all the Perl, Python, and Ruby guys thought their languages were BETTER than Java!
The most telling part of the above quote is this: he doesn't mention the OBVIOUS fallback positions for a Java programmer: C and C++. I'm a Java programmer, and if I ever found myself unable to work in Java, I'd work in C. It has the same syntax, and it's simpler philosophically because it's procedural. I've got K&R at home, I could dust it off and re-read over a weekend.
The only difficulty would be that I'd have to figure out a nice way to do GUI's. Would I roll a Perl-TK front-end and call C on the backend? Or would I bite the bullet and learn GTK? I hear GTK works on different platforms... I could use QT, or go to hell with myself and do something really flashy with OpenGL. So many choices...
It doesn't really matter anyway, because Java and Mono are GPL, so they can't be taken away.
Everybody relax and let Apache do their thing. I hope they win.
We shouldn't be worried according to Obama... According to His Changeness, outsourcing is GOOD for us. After all, if we destroy our middle class and send all our jobs and software development overseas, then MAYBE an unrelated sector that happens to do business with India will sell more widgets and everything will be O.K. for everybody. Our entire economy can survive based on a small number of suppliers that India will eventually replace. Of course! It makes perfect Obama-sense.
You know, I'm sure all the programmers, engineers, and quants who've been kicked out of the middle class by outsourcing and the H1-B visa are doing just fine. I'm sure that after their divorces, the loss of their homes, and their collapse into despair while living in a smaller apartment then they had in college, they'll derive a great amount of comfort knowing that somewhere, in some other state, some guy named Joe Bob has a job making widgets for India because their lives got ruined.
Obama just lost my vote. If I didn't already hate the Republicans, I'd give it to them out of spite. Maybe I'll vote for the Green party from now on. At least they haven't destroyed any lives yet.
You're wrong. Intellectual property cannot be enforced at ALL, no matter HOW you crack down on it. Ideas don't weigh anything, can't be seen, don't show up on scanners at airports... Attempts to control what other countries do with your ideas only work if the other country feels like cooperating. The USA is already doomed to second-tier economic status, no matter WHAT the rich try to do about intellectual property.
Sending almost all American manufacturing and engineering overseas proves how stupid and short-sighted the rich people who run things are. See, they USED to own big, physical things that couldn't be stolen. Millions of pounds of bricks, concrete and steel configured as manufacturing complexes and office buildings, filled with employees who were keeping an eye on them. They had CONTROL over these things, because they were physical, and right here, where they could be protected. In those days all they sent overseas was product, and back then, we didn't have ridiculous trade deficits. We were a manufacturing superpower. Number one in the WORLD from WWII up to the 1970's.
But the rich didn't like having to pay a living wage to their employees, and they hated having to comply with OSHA standards, and environmental regulations, and so on... So thinking they were getting away with something, they closed down all their easily-protected physical plants and moved all the things that made them rich overseas. About all they kept were the office buildings where their executives worked.
I suppose none of them ever read King Lear:
FOOL: Give me an egg, nuncle, and I'll give thee two crowns.
KING LEAR What two crowns shall they be?
FOOL Why, after I have cut the egg i' the middle, and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away.
Well, ok... You've got me there. But I look at it like this:
Let's say you work in an office where there's an annoying man who engages in all sorts of ridiculous douchebaggery. He runs riot all the time, making you and your coworkers miserable. The boss doesn't do anything about it because a long time ago, the boss made a sign that says "douchebaggery is encouraged" and now he's too embarrassed to change his mind, take down the sign, and fire the man.
Now, you can sit around and say it's the boss' fault AND the man's fault, and say they're both wrong and somebody should do something, while doing nothing as the douchebaggery continues. Most employees (like most companies) will take this tactic, and nothing will ever change.
Or, you could complain higher up the chain of command, and get your boss' boss to put up a sign that says "Douchebaggery will result in immediate termination".
This would actually work: the douchebaggery would cease. Or, of course, the guy would get fired for it. Either way, mission accomplished, right?
My point is, ignore the douchebag himself, and have the enabling situation altered to prevent further douchebaggery in the future. Go to the source, and ignore the symptom.
Of course, nobody likes a douchebag... It's just that the douchebag in question is besides the point and should be bypassed.
I agree. Patents in and of themselves could be wonderful things, as long as we constrain them to the realm where they actually do good for society.
Originally, I think the idea was that we would grant an engineer or scientist a temporary monopoly over a new invention or process in return for the guy recording in great detail how to make his idea work. After 17 years, anyone who wanted to learn and apply the concept could look it up in the patent archive; it would be permanently added to our culture. The patent archive would be like a modern version of Alexandria, collecting human knowledge for future use.
Look at the old patents on physical things; they come with wonderful engineering drawings, you can look up the design for a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor and build one if you're so inclined. That knowledge would have died with him if he hadn't recorded it.
But what good are software patents? Read them, they're all gobbledegook, written by lawyers, not engineers. It's all crap. We've taken what could have been the greatest contribution to human knowledge EVER and turned it into an ambulance chaser's filing cabinet!
Yes, but if software patents did not exist, Microsoft would be powerless to act against these companies.
The fact that the software patent attack is possible means that Microsoft, which is publicly traded and beholden to shareholders, almost has no choice BUT to act, even if the act itself is unsavory. To do otherwise would be for the CEO to be sued and perhaps dismissed.
And I hate to double-reply you, but it WAS a masterful troll with a heavy dose of sarcasm until you had to go and explain it all. Sigh... What is that thing they say about having to explain the joke?
Man, if you hadn't have come along and thrown a wet blanket on me, I might have gotten a date out of this. Now I'm "insensitive guy" and all the women are avoiding me.
If I understand the article correctly, Microsoft has software patents on a number of technologies related to smartphones, and is seeking royalties from some portable electronics companies for their use of technology covered by the patents.
Generally a "ho hum" situation, BUT, Microsoft seems to be using the situation to pressure the companies to stop using Android and Chrome on the devices. Seems to be.
If anything, rather than proving that Microsoft is some sort of terrible evil, this proves that SOFTWARE PATENTS are a terrible evil.
We should never allow ANYONE to patent something that is not a physical item or process. The idea that a company can write up a vague description of how some software product MIGHT work SOMEDAY, if SOMEONE decides to develop it, and get the patent office to grant them the right to act as a gatekeeper for that idea, should be abhorrent to all people with scientific and technical backgrounds.
I think that about sums up the situation.
Now, perhaps I'm wishing for the moon here, but if anyone from the patent office, Congress, or the Obama administration is a Slashdot reader, this would be an excellent situation to use to show the average representative in Congress why, exactly, software patents should be abolished. "Here are two companies that are not using Microsoft products, and not stealing secrets from Microsoft, and in fact not using any Microsoft property at ALL, whose businesses are being interfered with because Microsoft was granted some software patents and they're using them as bargaining chips. This situation is ridiculous and should be addressed. (Etc, etc)".
Oh, dear. You're not from here, are you? Let me explain America to you so you'll understand what you're up against.
America is divided into a number of broad regions, each of which has a VERY different culture. You can generally consider these regions to be: The Northeast, The West Coast, The Southwest, The Plains States, The Midwest, and the Deep South. With me so far?
Europeans would be quite comfortable on the West Coast, in the Northeast, and in parts of Arizona (which is in the Southwest but has quite a different flavor from most of it). People in these areas would generally despise a "kill switch" because they're generally against the government acting like jackbooted thugs. We do cherish our freedom, in these areas. We also tend to be fairly technically sophisticated.
Most people think of the West Coast as California and Seattle, Washington; however I hear there are other parts in the forest for those who wish to look (beware of bears, serial killers, and survivalists).
The Northeast starts at the Western border of the "Tri State Area" (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and extends all the way Northeast through Maine. Sometimes people include Pennsylvania in this because of the number of people from Manhattan who spend their weekends in the Poconos. I myself do not. However I hear nice things about Philadelphia.
Within Arizona, Flagstaff stands as the sole remaining nature preserve for what remains of our hippy population, carefully preserved by the Department of the Interior. Rather nice people, hippies; they are just as allergic to jackbooted thuggishness as the rest of us. There are also some very well educated, fine folks in Phoenix and Prescott. I can't report on Tuscon, as I have never ventured there.
This leaves us with the remaining areas of the country, which contain at least 61 percent of Americans.
Perhaps you see where I'm going with this? Put it this way: They were the knuckleheads who got Bush elected, not once but TWICE.
Now, as to your action plan to deal with this 61 percent who are causing all these problems: I heartily applaud your can-do attitude! While setting out on your quest to "forcefully indicate your opinion" please keep the following in mind:
1) Traveling into the "interior" is not particularly safe. The locals are VERY well armed and sometimes well organized. Attempts at forcefully expressing an opinion may be countered with such rhetorical mechanisms as "the hail of gunfire" and "the pick-axe handle to the head".
2) While most locals are very well behaved, some are not. There are three very well made documentaries about what one can expect from poorly behaved locals, with surprisingly good production values: for travel in the Deep South, I recommend "Deliverance" and "Southern Comfort", both of which were made by the tourism bureaus of their respective states. For information about poorly behaved locals in the Midwest, see "Fargo", a documentary made for University of Wisconsin Criminal Justice students about investigatory techniques.
Ah, well! Good luck with your "Forceful opinion delivery" mission! If you make it back alive, we'll buy you a beer!
Let me rephrase this concept from a programmer's perspective:
Unix Beard: "We don't need any programming staff! Anything requested by the business units can be done with a small shell script. GUIs are unnecessary. Analysis is unnecessary. All you need is a sysadmin!"
You old UNIX farts aren't the only people guilty of this sort of nonsense, either. I know a certain DBA that thinks all programming should be done in the database itself, BY DBAs, using stored procedures.
In BOTH cases, the subtext of the message is "Nobody should use any tools that are not provided on the command line, nobody should ever try to improve on what already exists, all this modern stuff programmers work with is scary and we old timers want everyone to stop using it and do things in a way we understand."
Pretty ridiculous if you ask me.
Let's make a new rule: We should all stick to what WE do, and leave everyone else alone to do what THEY do without constantly pestering them to let us expand our turf.
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You are so wrong. Cubicles, when done RIGHT, are wonderful.
Take mine for example. Six foot tall cubicle walls filled with sound-deadening material. Frosted windows in front, bordering the cubicle row. A large wraparound desk surface with two sets of drawers, shelves, and a lockable book cabinet. All in navy blue and composite gray with walnut trim.
I've got a hundred square feet, or thereabouts. It's around ten by ten.
And the walls are set up so you can use clips to hang things. Calendars, project dates, etc.
Cubicles can be excellent.
Yeah, but this time, Mr. Stallman is right. The cloud is a dumb idea.
Think about it this way:
I can buy a regular laptop or netbook, put Ubuntu on it, download some apps I need like OpenOffice and NetBeans, and happily compute away whether I have a network connection or not. I don't have to rely on the goodwill of a private company, which may or may not be in business next year. I don't have to worry about whether a company is going to decide this "cloud" stuff isn't profitable enough and shut down a department I rely on. I can just compute away, happily, no matter where I am or what the network looks like.
With Google's craptacular half-a-laptop, I'm dependent on network conditions as well as Google's goodwill, and at any time some other company or the government can decide that I need to be shut down and talk to Google about doing so. Or the government can read all my documents. Or a hacker can.
Yeah, thanks but no thanks, I'll stick with my full-power laptop and Ubuntu.
OK, here's my problem with Kurzweil in a nutshell. He likes to think up wild things we may be able to do at some time in the future, like "reverse engineering the brain" and creating a real A.I. And he assumes that Moore's law will give us enough computing power to do things like that. But I don't think one leads to the other at ALL. More computing power doesn't make our scientists any smarter, or wiser, it just gets them their results more quickly. So what? It's not a shortcut, for crying out loud. Someone still has to spend years in the lab looking for that "aha!" moment of insight that leads to a breakthrough.
Take the "reverse engineering the brain" thing. Moore's law doesn't help you there. The brain is a horribly complex biological system, not a motherboard. Our best surgeons and psychiatrists have been studying it for a few hundred years now, and we STILL don't know how the damn thing works. The best we can do after hundreds of years of lab work is identify which gross physical structures seem to be involved with different processing tasks, like speech. We can alter brain chemistry with drugs to get desired results, and USUALLY things turn out as we expect them to, but that's about it.
If all you needed to do is throw a computer at the brain and get A.I, we would have had it back in the 1970's when the first Crays came out.
Bottom line, Kurzweil has always reminded me of a guy who can't tell where the line between Science Fiction/Fantasy ends and the real world begins. An author can say "in 2029, A.I. was born!" do a little hand waving, and have a great story. Here in the real world, it's going to take a hundred years of hard work by computer scientists in their under-funded labs before we have anything approaching A.I, and it's going to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything so prosaic as a human brain.
NO, the best thing to do is eliminate ALL of these "guest worker" visas, and go straight to giving green cards to people you deem valuable enough to bring to the U.S, as I've discussed with another person in this thread.
By giving them green cards instead of H-1B visas, you allow immigrants to compete fairly with Americans and get paid an American wage. This eliminates global labor arbitrage and levels the playing field. It's good for Americans, and good for immigrants.
As for shipping jobs overseas, you can eliminate that by simply taxing companies at the full domestic rate for all employees, regardless of where they're physically located.
None of these things will ever happen, because the government is in the pocket of the corporations.
Sigh...
Yes, but previously, people who didn't WANT a "master" job, people who only wanted to work with technology, had a clear, profitable career path. It wasn't a "serf" job either, it was more similar to "wizard", "Knight", "castle architect" or "armorer".
When everything has been outsourced EXCEPT "king", you've got a weak kingdom indeed.
Dang. I type too fast for my own good. "Give Green Cards to people who would be worth bringing into the U.S." is what I meant to say. Green card holders may be useful once you've got a green card to put in them, but not before!
Eliminate all guest visas and give green card holders to people who would be worth bringing into the U.S? Sure, I'd go for that. That would solve most of the problems of the tech industry, because these people would earn normal U.S. wages and compete fairly with other Americans.
That'd take a miracle, though. The real purpose of the visa programs has always been global labor arbitrage. Corporations and the politicians they have purchased would never let such a change happen.
As for your challenge to the TSA, you're biting off your nose to spite your face. They're NEVER going to live up to your goal. You might as well file for citizenship and be done with it.
Nonsense! The only "economic reality" here is that Globalism is an ARTIFICIALLY CREATED PHENOMENON, designed by politicians and corporations specifically to wipe out the bargaining power of the U.S. middle class. It has always been about global labor arbitrage.
Don't pretend this is some natural phenomenon! It is NOT. This is simply the greedy rich destroying their own country's economy to benefit themselves at everyone else's expense.
Global labor arbitrage is an evil thing. It's nothing more or less than a race to the bottom.
I see you've read Brave New World too. I think virtually all of his predictions are coming true. Soma, alphas, betas, you name it. Only we don't have to manufacture people, we can do it with educational differences between private and public schools.
I don't think it's possible to completely extinguish the "Fuck you, I'll do it myself" attitude at the core of our American culture, however. There will always be people who go off the ranch and do their own thing. Hackers, "makers", inventors, and other misfits are pretty hard to beat down. Their whole subculture is already underground as it is.
But as far as the culture as a whole goes, I'm with you. I think we're already 3/4 of the way towards fascism, if not the totalitarianism desired by the right wing. Here's an interesting question, though: our ancestors left oppressive regimes to come here, but where can WE go to avoid what's going on? It's more or less global at this point, isn't it? What countries are worth emigrating to?
I'm not at all sure there's anywhere left to go.
How about we eliminate H1-B and L-1 visas and start hiring Americans again?
The economy is going down the tubes because greedy corporations aren't willing to pay a living wage. They don't even want to hire Americans, because the indentured servitude of the H1-B visa is too attractive to them. This is the primary reason why the middle class is shrinking: there aren't that many good jobs left (unless you're an ivy-league child of the rich, in which case "daddy" or one of his friends will make room for you somewhere).
Between the end of WWII and the start of this outsourcing nonsense, spending by the middle class was the engine that drove our economy. Now that the middle class is in rapid decline, corporations are trying to expand third-world markets to preserve their profits. So Congress is writing love letters to India and China by doing things like expanding foreign-worker visa programs.
This in turn is eliminating any desire for young people to study science or technology. Why should they, when all those jobs have moved overseas or are being handed out to visa holders? The kids are going to study law or business, things they can use in a third world economy (i.e. the future America).
The corporations are run by idiots who think the executive levels are the only important parts of the corporation to keep in the U.S. They are going to find out the hard way that they should have kept their tech staff on board, when India Inc. and China realize that they can manufacture their own executives TOO. All they have to do is drop-kick American corporations out of the country, and replace them with home-grown alternatives. This will happen within a decade, I think.
By then, there won't be ANY Americans bothering to study STEM subjects in our schools -- it'll be nothing but foreign kids, who will go right back where they came from when they graduate. We Americans are already a minority in graduate programs here. And it'll simply be too late. The professors are all foreign. The kids are all foreign. When they all go home, we won't have anything left at all.
It's all so pathetic. Rich people are so petty and stingy they're destroying their own future to make a little extra bread in the present. If they weren't destroying our future as well, I'd wish them bon voyage, but as it is they're taking the whole country down the tubes.
The only ones among us who will still know anything are hobbyists and small-scale manufacturers and hackers. And we aren't going to be inclined to try and help the corporations when they finally realize they need us.
Yeah, no kidding. My boss asked me about this a couple of years ago, and I answered thusly:
"The cloud is a huge scam. Basically, it's the same sort of people who created the dot-com disaster back in 2000. They're not that bright, but they have some money, and they think that if they come up with a wonky idea, hire some college kids to develop it, and do a lot of hand waving, they'll be the next Bill Gates. All nonsense, basically. Best ignore it."
"But," he asked, "what IS it? I mean the idea itself."
"Oh," I replied, "they want you to farm out your email, accounting, human resources, and all your other business plumbing to external sites, which will host some sort of web-based self-service apps. Basically, it's a ridiculous idea; what kind of idiot would let an external company handle all his human resources and accounting? If the site went out of business or their servers got hacked, you'd be hosed. You'd have to be a lunatic to go along with that. The only service in the cloud I approve of is Gmail, since it's useful and low-risk."
"OK," he said, "but what is this internal cloud business???"
"An internal cloud is where you're still putting all your stuff in a web-based system, but you buy it from one of these guys as a software package and host it on your own server. So it's not in the cloud at ALL, and really you're only buying a second-rate package to replace your own, already tested and working package. You have to lay out a load of money to get started, both for the app itself and the training for your staff, and you don't really gain anything from it."
Nobody around here has mentioned "the cloud" since then.
Result!
Why do YOU care if it says Oracle made it? Why do YOU care what kind of splash screen appears when you start up the software? You're letting your dislike of Oracle influence your thinking in non-advantageous ways.
Listen, here's a prescription from Dr. Hermit:
FOR NOW, keep using your Oracle-branded Open Office. Meanwhile, keep an eye on LibreOffice, which is the obvious next step.
IN A YEAR, when they've got all the kinks worked out of LibreOffice, uninstall OpenOffice and switch over.
Problem solved! And wasn't that easy?
Relax. You can use C and GTK for desktop apps, and PhP for web pages. And if you want to use C#, you can find a port of Mono for all of those platforms, I'm sure.
To quote: "Even if the JCP dissolves, many developers will be left with few alternatives, with .Net offering little advantage, and Perl, Python, and Ruby unable to match Java's performance."
What nonsense.
The person who wrote the above quoted statement discards .Net because HE doesn't like MICROSOFT, not because there's anything wrong with .Net. The "advantage" he seeks is probably supposed to be "more freedom" but Java and Mono are BOTH GPL; I smell straw somewhere around here...
I find it funny that he bemoans the fact we can't switch to the Slashdot-approved scripting languages because they're not as good as Java. Nobody seems to have picked up on that. I thought all the Perl, Python, and Ruby guys thought their languages were BETTER than Java!
The most telling part of the above quote is this: he doesn't mention the OBVIOUS fallback positions for a Java programmer: C and C++. I'm a Java programmer, and if I ever found myself unable to work in Java, I'd work in C. It has the same syntax, and it's simpler philosophically because it's procedural. I've got K&R at home, I could dust it off and re-read over a weekend.
The only difficulty would be that I'd have to figure out a nice way to do GUI's. Would I roll a Perl-TK front-end and call C on the backend? Or would I bite the bullet and learn GTK? I hear GTK works on different platforms... I could use QT, or go to hell with myself and do something really flashy with OpenGL. So many choices...
It doesn't really matter anyway, because Java and Mono are GPL, so they can't be taken away.
Everybody relax and let Apache do their thing. I hope they win.
We shouldn't be worried according to Obama... According to His Changeness, outsourcing is GOOD for us. After all, if we destroy our middle class and send all our jobs and software development overseas, then MAYBE an unrelated sector that happens to do business with India will sell more widgets and everything will be O.K. for everybody. Our entire economy can survive based on a small number of suppliers that India will eventually replace. Of course! It makes perfect Obama-sense.
You know, I'm sure all the programmers, engineers, and quants who've been kicked out of the middle class by outsourcing and the H1-B visa are doing just fine. I'm sure that after their divorces, the loss of their homes, and their collapse into despair while living in a smaller apartment then they had in college, they'll derive a great amount of comfort knowing that somewhere, in some other state, some guy named Joe Bob has a job making widgets for India because their lives got ruined.
Obama just lost my vote. If I didn't already hate the Republicans, I'd give it to them out of spite. Maybe I'll vote for the Green party from now on. At least they haven't destroyed any lives yet.
You're wrong. Intellectual property cannot be enforced at ALL, no matter HOW you crack down on it. Ideas don't weigh anything, can't be seen, don't show up on scanners at airports... Attempts to control what other countries do with your ideas only work if the other country feels like cooperating. The USA is already doomed to second-tier economic status, no matter WHAT the rich try to do about intellectual property.
Sending almost all American manufacturing and engineering overseas proves how stupid and short-sighted the rich people who run things are. See, they USED to own big, physical things that couldn't be stolen. Millions of pounds of bricks, concrete and steel configured as manufacturing complexes and office buildings, filled with employees who were keeping an eye on them. They had CONTROL over these things, because they were physical, and right here, where they could be protected. In those days all they sent overseas was product, and back then, we didn't have ridiculous trade deficits. We were a manufacturing superpower. Number one in the WORLD from WWII up to the 1970's.
But the rich didn't like having to pay a living wage to their employees, and they hated having to comply with OSHA standards, and environmental regulations, and so on... So thinking they were getting away with something, they closed down all their easily-protected physical plants and moved all the things that made them rich overseas. About all they kept were the office buildings where their executives worked.
I suppose none of them ever read King Lear:
FOOL: Give me an egg, nuncle, and I'll give thee two crowns.
KING LEAR What two crowns shall they be?
FOOL Why, after I have cut the egg i' the middle, and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away.
Well, ok... You've got me there. But I look at it like this:
Let's say you work in an office where there's an annoying man who engages in all sorts of ridiculous douchebaggery. He runs riot all the time, making you and your coworkers miserable. The boss doesn't do anything about it because a long time ago, the boss made a sign that says "douchebaggery is encouraged" and now he's too embarrassed to change his mind, take down the sign, and fire the man.
Now, you can sit around and say it's the boss' fault AND the man's fault, and say they're both wrong and somebody should do something, while doing nothing as the douchebaggery continues. Most employees (like most companies) will take this tactic, and nothing will ever change.
Or, you could complain higher up the chain of command, and get your boss' boss to put up a sign that says "Douchebaggery will result in immediate termination".
This would actually work: the douchebaggery would cease. Or, of course, the guy would get fired for it. Either way, mission accomplished, right?
My point is, ignore the douchebag himself, and have the enabling situation altered to prevent further douchebaggery in the future. Go to the source, and ignore the symptom.
Of course, nobody likes a douchebag... It's just that the douchebag in question is besides the point and should be bypassed.
I agree. Patents in and of themselves could be wonderful things, as long as we constrain them to the realm where they actually do good for society.
Originally, I think the idea was that we would grant an engineer or scientist a temporary monopoly over a new invention or process in return for the guy recording in great detail how to make his idea work. After 17 years, anyone who wanted to learn and apply the concept could look it up in the patent archive; it would be permanently added to our culture. The patent archive would be like a modern version of Alexandria, collecting human knowledge for future use.
Look at the old patents on physical things; they come with wonderful engineering drawings, you can look up the design for a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor and build one if you're so inclined. That knowledge would have died with him if he hadn't recorded it.
But what good are software patents? Read them, they're all gobbledegook, written by lawyers, not engineers. It's all crap. We've taken what could have been the greatest contribution to human knowledge EVER and turned it into an ambulance chaser's filing cabinet!
Sigh...
Yes, but if software patents did not exist, Microsoft would be powerless to act against these companies.
The fact that the software patent attack is possible means that Microsoft, which is publicly traded and beholden to shareholders, almost has no choice BUT to act, even if the act itself is unsavory. To do otherwise would be for the CEO to be sued and perhaps dismissed.
So I blame the software patents construct itself.
And I hate to double-reply you, but it WAS a masterful troll with a heavy dose of sarcasm until you had to go and explain it all. Sigh... What is that thing they say about having to explain the joke?
Man, if you hadn't have come along and thrown a wet blanket on me, I might have gotten a date out of this. Now I'm "insensitive guy" and all the women are avoiding me.
Back to the basement I guess.
If I understand the article correctly, Microsoft has software patents on a number of technologies related to smartphones, and is seeking royalties from some portable electronics companies for their use of technology covered by the patents.
Generally a "ho hum" situation, BUT, Microsoft seems to be using the situation to pressure the companies to stop using Android and Chrome on the devices. Seems to be.
If anything, rather than proving that Microsoft is some sort of terrible evil, this proves that SOFTWARE PATENTS are a terrible evil.
We should never allow ANYONE to patent something that is not a physical item or process. The idea that a company can write up a vague description of how some software product MIGHT work SOMEDAY, if SOMEONE decides to develop it, and get the patent office to grant them the right to act as a gatekeeper for that idea, should be abhorrent to all people with scientific and technical backgrounds.
I think that about sums up the situation.
Now, perhaps I'm wishing for the moon here, but if anyone from the patent office, Congress, or the Obama administration is a Slashdot reader, this would be an excellent situation to use to show the average representative in Congress why, exactly, software patents should be abolished. "Here are two companies that are not using Microsoft products, and not stealing secrets from Microsoft, and in fact not using any Microsoft property at ALL, whose businesses are being interfered with because Microsoft was granted some software patents and they're using them as bargaining chips. This situation is ridiculous and should be addressed. (Etc, etc)".
I live in New York. I was going for "humor". :)
Oh, dear. You're not from here, are you? Let me explain America to you so you'll understand what you're up against.
America is divided into a number of broad regions, each of which has a VERY different culture. You can generally consider these regions to be: The Northeast, The West Coast, The Southwest, The Plains States, The Midwest, and the Deep South. With me so far?
Europeans would be quite comfortable on the West Coast, in the Northeast, and in parts of Arizona (which is in the Southwest but has quite a different flavor from most of it). People in these areas would generally despise a "kill switch" because they're generally against the government acting like jackbooted thugs. We do cherish our freedom, in these areas. We also tend to be fairly technically sophisticated.
Most people think of the West Coast as California and Seattle, Washington; however I hear there are other parts in the forest for those who wish to look (beware of bears, serial killers, and survivalists).
The Northeast starts at the Western border of the "Tri State Area" (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and extends all the way Northeast through Maine. Sometimes people include Pennsylvania in this because of the number of people from Manhattan who spend their weekends in the Poconos. I myself do not. However I hear nice things about Philadelphia.
Within Arizona, Flagstaff stands as the sole remaining nature preserve for what remains of our hippy population, carefully preserved by the Department of the Interior. Rather nice people, hippies; they are just as allergic to jackbooted thuggishness as the rest of us. There are also some very well educated, fine folks in Phoenix and Prescott. I can't report on Tuscon, as I have never ventured there.
This leaves us with the remaining areas of the country, which contain at least 61 percent of Americans.
Perhaps you see where I'm going with this? Put it this way: They were the knuckleheads who got Bush elected, not once but TWICE.
Now, as to your action plan to deal with this 61 percent who are causing all these problems: I heartily applaud your can-do attitude! While setting out on your quest to "forcefully indicate your opinion" please keep the following in mind:
1) Traveling into the "interior" is not particularly safe. The locals are VERY well armed and sometimes well organized. Attempts at forcefully expressing an opinion may be countered with such rhetorical mechanisms as "the hail of gunfire" and "the pick-axe handle to the head".
2) While most locals are very well behaved, some are not. There are three very well made documentaries about what one can expect from poorly behaved locals, with surprisingly good production values: for travel in the Deep South, I recommend "Deliverance" and "Southern Comfort", both of which were made by the tourism bureaus of their respective states. For information about poorly behaved locals in the Midwest, see "Fargo", a documentary made for University of Wisconsin Criminal Justice students about investigatory techniques.
Ah, well! Good luck with your "Forceful opinion delivery" mission! If you make it back alive, we'll buy you a beer!
Let me rephrase this concept from a programmer's perspective:
Unix Beard: "We don't need any programming staff! Anything requested by the business units can be done with a small shell script. GUIs are unnecessary. Analysis is unnecessary. All you need is a sysadmin!"
You old UNIX farts aren't the only people guilty of this sort of nonsense, either. I know a certain DBA that thinks all programming should be done in the database itself, BY DBAs, using stored procedures.
In BOTH cases, the subtext of the message is "Nobody should use any tools that are not provided on the command line, nobody should ever try to improve on what already exists, all this modern stuff programmers work with is scary and we old timers want everyone to stop using it and do things in a way we understand."
Pretty ridiculous if you ask me.
Let's make a new rule: We should all stick to what WE do, and leave everyone else alone to do what THEY do without constantly pestering them to let us expand our turf.