I disagree about the infrastructure projects. High-speed trains are of very limited use; instead, we need to be pouring R&D dollars into SkyTran, so we can replace personally-owned and driven automobiles with automatically-piloted cars which use a tiny fraction as much energy, make far less noise, and are far safer.
He's probably not pandering for positions, but for issues to build a platform on. There's a big difference. One is: "which issues are important to you, and should we research, decide on a position for, and try to build a campaign on?" The other is "which issues are important to you, and what position do you want us to take on these positions so we can get your votes?"
The first is fine: some issues are more important to your "base" than others, and you'll want to emphasize those more, perhaps try to push for legislation in that area, so that you build support with voters who share your ideals. The second is not: you're just doing whatever you can to get votes, and have no conscience of your own.
As some other responders said, this may or may not be due to the industry as much as the company itself. I've worked at six different companies over my working career, and the differences between them all was night and day. Some had terrible cultures, others had good ones, others had weird ones. Some were really good for women, others weren't. Many times, different workgroups had radically different cultures within the same company.
I don't think it's quite fair to make blanket statements about entire industries based on a sample size of one with each industry.
Hopefully in the future when the balance is closer to 50/50 it will be.
Why does it need to be 50/50? Why exactly do we need 50% of people in IT to be female?
Before you fire off an answer to that question, consider these questions: why don't we have a 50/50 ratio in other professions, such as nursing and elementary school teaching, and daycare work? And why isn't there a giant push to fix this "problem"? Why is it not a problem that men who try to become kindergarten teachers are highly discriminated against (they're seen as potential molesters), and that there's no big push to equalize the gender distribution in this profession? However, for IT and many other jobs which women apparently aren't that interested in, there's all kinds of debate about and pushing for equalization. Is grade school (e.g. K-8) teaching not important to society? If anything, it seems like it should be considered more important to society than working some boring IT job at some megacorporation. But instead, it's seen as pathetic, and only fit for women, and so no one cares that there's almost no men in it, and that any men who do try to go into it are reviled.
I don't see why we should push to have more women in male-only jobs as long as there's no equal push to have more men in female-only jobs.
> Typically you see a rule like "at least 10% of the workforce must be x% female".
But TFA Says
> Don’t lower hiring standards, or make exceptions or compromises
There's only two possibilities here, the way I see it:
1) You discriminate against men. If it comes down to two candidates, one male and one female, you choose the female because you want the numbers to look better, but this amounts to discrimination. Of course, many people, like "luis_a_espinal" in a comment below, think this is a perfectly fine solution and that men shouldn't mind being discriminated against.
2) You really do only hire the better candidate, in all cases, no exceptions. Then, if it comes down to the situation above, you simply don't hire either one if you can't show that one is really significantly better than the other. So you wait until a superior candidate comes along, or you wait for one of those two to drop out (i.e., they give up on waiting for you to make a decision, and accept a job elsewhere). Of course, this strategy may leave you chronically and horribly understaffed, or staffed with incompetents, because you'll have to continuously avoid any situation where there might be any bias, and so you only hire when it's obvious that there's no dilemma between equally-strong male and female candidates, and in doing so, you'll probably have all the good candidates move on to other jobs, leaving you with poor candidates of either sex.
WTF are you talking about? No one's requiring you to pay for your neighbor's health insurance (unless your neighbor is on Medicaid or one of the state-level insurance programs for the indigent, but that's unlikely). We don't have universal healthcare in this country, only 1) Medicare, which is paid for by people's own FICA tax contributions over their working career, and 2) Obamacare, which is nothing more than a requirement for you to buy your own insurance, at whatever rates the insurance companies feel like charging you (and if you've noticed, the rates have shot up astronomically in the last few years).
As for protecting your neighbor with a gun, many gun owners now will tell you that's a great way to land yourself in jail, and they specifically say they will not defend anyone else with their gun, only themselves and their immediate family members.
Depends on the exact law, how much that country prosecutes "law-breaking" that occurs outside their borders (and of that particular law), and also if they have some way of even knowing that you in fact committed that "crime". Of course, it also depends on if this is criminal or civil law we're talking about.
So copying a bunch of US-copyrighted stuff, while living in Russia (or some other place where presumably US copyright laws aren't valid) may potentially get you in trouble in the US (and I'm not really sure about that), but if the US border agents have no way of knowing that you made copies of 5 CDs or DVDs while you were in Russia, when what's the problem? However, if you're an American and hire a child prostitute while on vacation in Thailand and take a bunch of photos of it and bring them back with you on your cellphone, expect there to be a good chance that you might get caught and sent to prison (even though child prostitution is legal in Thailand, there's a specific law that forbids Americans from engaging in sex acts with them, even while outside American borders). Moreover, even if the border agents caught (somehow) both the Russian guy who copied 5 DVDs, and the American sex tourist, most likely they wouldn't give two shits about the Russian who just copied a handful of DVDs and wasn't engaged in some massive "piracy" operation, while they would most likely be very, very zealous about prosecuting someone who hired child prostitutes and then brought back child porn (the photos of the act) into the US with them.
I'm not saying the US is a perfectly safe place for anyone to visit (just ask Dmitry Sklyarov), but you do need to be realistic about what the authorities will and will not waste their time on. Similarly, alcohol is illegal is Islamic countries, but I've never heard of any of them arresting foreigners for having consumed alcohol in their home countries, however if you're famous for writing books criticizing Islam or drawing cartoons denigrating the "prophet", expect some harsh treatment from them if you ever visit those countries.
With additional taxes levied on possessions like stocks and houses on top of that.
We Americans have taxes on houses too; they're called "property taxes" and are levied at the local level by counties or municipalities. In many places, they're fairly insignificant, in others (like New Jersey) they're quite high (at least by our standards). They're used mainly to pay for local services like police and fire.
We don't have stock taxes (though that's probably a good idea), only "capital gains" taxes if you sell your stocks for a profit. There has been an idea floated around in recent years to have a small tax not on stocks, but on stock trades, to discourage day-trading and short-term holding of stocks (such as done by automated systems at very high frequency), and I think it's a great idea.
Fine, then why should I not just go pirate the latest [insert name of big US recording star here] if I am only violating US law and I am not a US citizen ?
It depends on your local laws. If you're just violating US law, then go ahead; US law doesn't apply outside of US borders (even though the US government surely disagrees).
However, if your country has some kind of treaty or reciprocal law in place, so that stuff that's copyrighted in the US also enjoys copyright protection in your own country, then you need to follow that law (the one in your own country) or else risk punishment. However, if your country has no such agreement, and US-copyrighted stuff has zero protection in your country, then you can do what you want. It doesn't matter if this is supposedly a "global world"; laws only apply to certain places, and differ from place to place. You only need to follow the laws in the place where you are now.
Should all the emails, PDF and whatnots that somehow pass through that country X have to carry that silly and provocative slogan??
Yes, of course they should. It's the law. If that's the law of the land, it doesn't matter if it's silly, you need to follow the law. Why wouldn't you?
Outside the borders of country X, you don't have to follow the silly law. But inside its borders, yes you do.
By expecting them to offer me a service with no benefits for themselves would the the equivalent of MS offering to pay you in exchange for you using Windows.
Have you not seen Windows 8 yet? MS should be paying people to use that thing!
Exactly. The guy was bashing Germans for being German. Obviously, he's an American, but there's a good chance that he himself is partly German, as are many Americans, and if not, there's very likely some English or French or other northern/western European there. I've never heard of it being "racist" for an Englishman to deride Germans, or for Germans to insult French, etc., since most people consider them all to be the same "race". These types of insults are nationalist, not racist.
What's next, calling a man a "racist" because they said something derogatory about women?
As for the "fascism" label, I myself have been corrected on here for throwing that term around, and what the correctors will say is that America is the opposite of fascism. In a fascist country like 1940 Germany, the government controls the corporations. In America, the corporations control the government; it's the other way around. So the proper term is supposedly "mercantilist". Or perhaps simply "corrupt".
If we're going to insult each other around here, let's make sure we at least use the correct terminology.
I don't see how Linux "hijacked" the FSF cause: the Linux kernel uses the GPL (v2) license. If anything, it's a smashing success for the GPL as a license, the license which the FSF prefers the most. The only thing Linux made the FSF look bad on was the HURD project, and they kinda stole their thunder as "Linux" became a catch-all term to describe systems using the Linux kernel (except Android of course), while almost no one refers much to GNU.
The GPL can't be used if you want to produce software for sale, true. However it's not just hobbyists and software-sellers who produce software. A huge amount of software is made by companies for internal use only, something that many people around here seem to keep forgetting. For that, GPL is fine: since the GPL only requires you to distribute source code to users that you distribute the binary code to, for internal use, that amounts only to making the source code available to your coworkers, which is already a given in a company.
It's just another stupid food fad for people with too much money on their hands, like "truffles": horribly-expensive mushrooms that just taste like dirt.
Exactly. Using an older computer as a router is a massive waste of power (and space). Get something that's designed specifically for the purpose: a modern router like a typical Linksys unit uses a tiny amount of power and is very small. And the software side isn't a problem: just install DD-WRT on it.
I used to subscribe to Linux Journal when it still had a paper version, and then they went paperless. When my subscription expired, I didn't bother to renew it. Now I'm getting advertisements to resubscribe for half-price; it looks like they're getting desperate.
I didn't fail to resubscribe because of the new paperless nature, however; the magazine itself has gone downhill over the years, and that was the final nail in the coffin. Of course, it doesn't help that Linux-land has been going downhill too, thanks to Unity and Gnome3. Linux was a lot more fun back in the mid-2000s.
I agree. When someone mugs me, I don't blame the mugger. I blame the police. Maybe we should put the police in prison?
If the mugger mugs you while the policeman stands by him, because the mugger is his good buddy, and the policeman threatens to shoot you dead if you try to defend yourself against the mugger, then yes, the policeman should be put in prison.
It takes two sides to sign an exclusivity contract; only blaming one side is odd. And since most cities had the option of either giving an exclusive contract or their citizens not getting cable, I sympathize with their dilemma.
Cities never needed to sign any such contracts. "Not getting cable" was never an option. If the cable companies don't care to compete, and require exclusivity contracts to provide service there, then let them go without. How exactly is a cable company going to make any money if they don't install cable service? Surely the cities could allow the cable companies to install cable without an exclusivity contract. If cable company A refuses to install a system, then maybe cable companies B, C, or D would like to install theirs. If they do, they have a shot at getting paying customers. If they refuse, then they're not going to make any money at all.
3. Anti-competitive behavior. Existing ISPs will do anything they can to derail any challenge to their "high-speed" ISP access monopoly. Yes, DSL and satellite are available, but they don't offer the same speeds.
And this is a governmental problem. Why are existing companies allowed to "derail" anyone who wants to compete with them? Obviously, countries such as Japan and Sweden don't have this problem; if some company wants to set up a new ISP service, they just do so, which is why they aren't stuck with dog-slow speeds and insanely-high prices like we Americans are.
It all comes down to corruption. The USA is as corrupt as Mexico, where rich corporations use the government to set up effective monopolies and prevent any competition. Then we stupid Americans run around complaining about government "regulation" (which is what you need to ensure competition in the first place).
Well according to TFS, it's twice as fast as competing services in Japan. So apparently 1Gbps connections aren't uncommon over there. Of course, TFS doesn't say what the competing services cost, but I suspect that if this one is only a measly $51 (compared to the outrageous prices we pay here in the USA), the competing services probably are pretty cheap too.
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I disagree about the infrastructure projects. High-speed trains are of very limited use; instead, we need to be pouring R&D dollars into SkyTran, so we can replace personally-owned and driven automobiles with automatically-piloted cars which use a tiny fraction as much energy, make far less noise, and are far safer.
He's probably not pandering for positions, but for issues to build a platform on. There's a big difference. One is: "which issues are important to you, and should we research, decide on a position for, and try to build a campaign on?" The other is "which issues are important to you, and what position do you want us to take on these positions so we can get your votes?"
The first is fine: some issues are more important to your "base" than others, and you'll want to emphasize those more, perhaps try to push for legislation in that area, so that you build support with voters who share your ideals. The second is not: you're just doing whatever you can to get votes, and have no conscience of your own.
As some other responders said, this may or may not be due to the industry as much as the company itself. I've worked at six different companies over my working career, and the differences between them all was night and day. Some had terrible cultures, others had good ones, others had weird ones. Some were really good for women, others weren't. Many times, different workgroups had radically different cultures within the same company.
I don't think it's quite fair to make blanket statements about entire industries based on a sample size of one with each industry.
Hopefully in the future when the balance is closer to 50/50 it will be.
Why does it need to be 50/50? Why exactly do we need 50% of people in IT to be female?
Before you fire off an answer to that question, consider these questions: why don't we have a 50/50 ratio in other professions, such as nursing and elementary school teaching, and daycare work? And why isn't there a giant push to fix this "problem"? Why is it not a problem that men who try to become kindergarten teachers are highly discriminated against (they're seen as potential molesters), and that there's no big push to equalize the gender distribution in this profession? However, for IT and many other jobs which women apparently aren't that interested in, there's all kinds of debate about and pushing for equalization. Is grade school (e.g. K-8) teaching not important to society? If anything, it seems like it should be considered more important to society than working some boring IT job at some megacorporation. But instead, it's seen as pathetic, and only fit for women, and so no one cares that there's almost no men in it, and that any men who do try to go into it are reviled.
I don't see why we should push to have more women in male-only jobs as long as there's no equal push to have more men in female-only jobs.
> Typically you see a rule like "at least 10% of the workforce must be x% female".
But TFA Says
> Don’t lower hiring standards, or make exceptions or compromises
There's only two possibilities here, the way I see it:
1) You discriminate against men. If it comes down to two candidates, one male and one female, you choose the female because you want the numbers to look better, but this amounts to discrimination. Of course, many people, like "luis_a_espinal" in a comment below, think this is a perfectly fine solution and that men shouldn't mind being discriminated against.
2) You really do only hire the better candidate, in all cases, no exceptions. Then, if it comes down to the situation above, you simply don't hire either one if you can't show that one is really significantly better than the other. So you wait until a superior candidate comes along, or you wait for one of those two to drop out (i.e., they give up on waiting for you to make a decision, and accept a job elsewhere). Of course, this strategy may leave you chronically and horribly understaffed, or staffed with incompetents, because you'll have to continuously avoid any situation where there might be any bias, and so you only hire when it's obvious that there's no dilemma between equally-strong male and female candidates, and in doing so, you'll probably have all the good candidates move on to other jobs, leaving you with poor candidates of either sex.
WTF are you talking about? No one's requiring you to pay for your neighbor's health insurance (unless your neighbor is on Medicaid or one of the state-level insurance programs for the indigent, but that's unlikely). We don't have universal healthcare in this country, only 1) Medicare, which is paid for by people's own FICA tax contributions over their working career, and 2) Obamacare, which is nothing more than a requirement for you to buy your own insurance, at whatever rates the insurance companies feel like charging you (and if you've noticed, the rates have shot up astronomically in the last few years).
As for protecting your neighbor with a gun, many gun owners now will tell you that's a great way to land yourself in jail, and they specifically say they will not defend anyone else with their gun, only themselves and their immediate family members.
Depends on the exact law, how much that country prosecutes "law-breaking" that occurs outside their borders (and of that particular law), and also if they have some way of even knowing that you in fact committed that "crime". Of course, it also depends on if this is criminal or civil law we're talking about.
So copying a bunch of US-copyrighted stuff, while living in Russia (or some other place where presumably US copyright laws aren't valid) may potentially get you in trouble in the US (and I'm not really sure about that), but if the US border agents have no way of knowing that you made copies of 5 CDs or DVDs while you were in Russia, when what's the problem? However, if you're an American and hire a child prostitute while on vacation in Thailand and take a bunch of photos of it and bring them back with you on your cellphone, expect there to be a good chance that you might get caught and sent to prison (even though child prostitution is legal in Thailand, there's a specific law that forbids Americans from engaging in sex acts with them, even while outside American borders). Moreover, even if the border agents caught (somehow) both the Russian guy who copied 5 DVDs, and the American sex tourist, most likely they wouldn't give two shits about the Russian who just copied a handful of DVDs and wasn't engaged in some massive "piracy" operation, while they would most likely be very, very zealous about prosecuting someone who hired child prostitutes and then brought back child porn (the photos of the act) into the US with them.
I'm not saying the US is a perfectly safe place for anyone to visit (just ask Dmitry Sklyarov), but you do need to be realistic about what the authorities will and will not waste their time on. Similarly, alcohol is illegal is Islamic countries, but I've never heard of any of them arresting foreigners for having consumed alcohol in their home countries, however if you're famous for writing books criticizing Islam or drawing cartoons denigrating the "prophet", expect some harsh treatment from them if you ever visit those countries.
With additional taxes levied on possessions like stocks and houses on top of that.
We Americans have taxes on houses too; they're called "property taxes" and are levied at the local level by counties or municipalities. In many places, they're fairly insignificant, in others (like New Jersey) they're quite high (at least by our standards). They're used mainly to pay for local services like police and fire.
We don't have stock taxes (though that's probably a good idea), only "capital gains" taxes if you sell your stocks for a profit. There has been an idea floated around in recent years to have a small tax not on stocks, but on stock trades, to discourage day-trading and short-term holding of stocks (such as done by automated systems at very high frequency), and I think it's a great idea.
Fine, then why should I not just go pirate the latest [insert name of big US recording star here] if I am only violating US law and I am not a US citizen ?
It depends on your local laws. If you're just violating US law, then go ahead; US law doesn't apply outside of US borders (even though the US government surely disagrees).
However, if your country has some kind of treaty or reciprocal law in place, so that stuff that's copyrighted in the US also enjoys copyright protection in your own country, then you need to follow that law (the one in your own country) or else risk punishment. However, if your country has no such agreement, and US-copyrighted stuff has zero protection in your country, then you can do what you want. It doesn't matter if this is supposedly a "global world"; laws only apply to certain places, and differ from place to place. You only need to follow the laws in the place where you are now.
Should all the emails, PDF and whatnots that somehow pass through that country X have to carry that silly and provocative slogan??
Yes, of course they should. It's the law. If that's the law of the land, it doesn't matter if it's silly, you need to follow the law. Why wouldn't you?
Outside the borders of country X, you don't have to follow the silly law. But inside its borders, yes you do.
"Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
"Why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own?"
By expecting them to offer me a service with no benefits for themselves would the the equivalent of MS offering to pay you in exchange for you using Windows.
Have you not seen Windows 8 yet? MS should be paying people to use that thing!
Exactly. The guy was bashing Germans for being German. Obviously, he's an American, but there's a good chance that he himself is partly German, as are many Americans, and if not, there's very likely some English or French or other northern/western European there. I've never heard of it being "racist" for an Englishman to deride Germans, or for Germans to insult French, etc., since most people consider them all to be the same "race". These types of insults are nationalist, not racist.
What's next, calling a man a "racist" because they said something derogatory about women?
As for the "fascism" label, I myself have been corrected on here for throwing that term around, and what the correctors will say is that America is the opposite of fascism. In a fascist country like 1940 Germany, the government controls the corporations. In America, the corporations control the government; it's the other way around. So the proper term is supposedly "mercantilist". Or perhaps simply "corrupt".
If we're going to insult each other around here, let's make sure we at least use the correct terminology.
For web code, they have the Affero GPL.
I don't see how Linux "hijacked" the FSF cause: the Linux kernel uses the GPL (v2) license. If anything, it's a smashing success for the GPL as a license, the license which the FSF prefers the most. The only thing Linux made the FSF look bad on was the HURD project, and they kinda stole their thunder as "Linux" became a catch-all term to describe systems using the Linux kernel (except Android of course), while almost no one refers much to GNU.
The GPL can't be used if you want to produce software for sale, true. However it's not just hobbyists and software-sellers who produce software. A huge amount of software is made by companies for internal use only, something that many people around here seem to keep forgetting. For that, GPL is fine: since the GPL only requires you to distribute source code to users that you distribute the binary code to, for internal use, that amounts only to making the source code available to your coworkers, which is already a given in a company.
It's just another stupid food fad for people with too much money on their hands, like "truffles": horribly-expensive mushrooms that just taste like dirt.
If I didn't have a Cisco/Linksys E1000 running DD-WRT, I'd definitely be getting a Buffalo just for their support of DD-WRT.
Exactly. Using an older computer as a router is a massive waste of power (and space). Get something that's designed specifically for the purpose: a modern router like a typical Linksys unit uses a tiny amount of power and is very small. And the software side isn't a problem: just install DD-WRT on it.
I used to subscribe to Linux Journal when it still had a paper version, and then they went paperless. When my subscription expired, I didn't bother to renew it. Now I'm getting advertisements to resubscribe for half-price; it looks like they're getting desperate.
I didn't fail to resubscribe because of the new paperless nature, however; the magazine itself has gone downhill over the years, and that was the final nail in the coffin. Of course, it doesn't help that Linux-land has been going downhill too, thanks to Unity and Gnome3. Linux was a lot more fun back in the mid-2000s.
Interesting point, but blaming Boston seems like blaming only triggers for guns being used in killing people.
I agree. When someone mugs me, I don't blame the mugger. I blame the police. Maybe we should put the police in prison?
If the mugger mugs you while the policeman stands by him, because the mugger is his good buddy, and the policeman threatens to shoot you dead if you try to defend yourself against the mugger, then yes, the policeman should be put in prison.
It takes two sides to sign an exclusivity contract; only blaming one side is odd. And since most cities had the option of either giving an exclusive contract or their citizens not getting cable, I sympathize with their dilemma.
Cities never needed to sign any such contracts. "Not getting cable" was never an option. If the cable companies don't care to compete, and require exclusivity contracts to provide service there, then let them go without. How exactly is a cable company going to make any money if they don't install cable service? Surely the cities could allow the cable companies to install cable without an exclusivity contract. If cable company A refuses to install a system, then maybe cable companies B, C, or D would like to install theirs. If they do, they have a shot at getting paying customers. If they refuse, then they're not going to make any money at all.
3. Anti-competitive behavior. Existing ISPs will do anything they can to derail any challenge to their "high-speed" ISP access monopoly. Yes, DSL and satellite are available, but they don't offer the same speeds.
And this is a governmental problem. Why are existing companies allowed to "derail" anyone who wants to compete with them? Obviously, countries such as Japan and Sweden don't have this problem; if some company wants to set up a new ISP service, they just do so, which is why they aren't stuck with dog-slow speeds and insanely-high prices like we Americans are.
It all comes down to corruption. The USA is as corrupt as Mexico, where rich corporations use the government to set up effective monopolies and prevent any competition. Then we stupid Americans run around complaining about government "regulation" (which is what you need to ensure competition in the first place).
Well according to TFS, it's twice as fast as competing services in Japan. So apparently 1Gbps connections aren't uncommon over there. Of course, TFS doesn't say what the competing services cost, but I suspect that if this one is only a measly $51 (compared to the outrageous prices we pay here in the USA), the competing services probably are pretty cheap too.
No, you and the other moronic Romney and Obama voters are the problem.