So there's no really good way for a system to differentiate what's not really supposed to be there from something that was deliberately put there by the user.
Thats not a good way to categorize things, given the number of malware and trojans "deliberately" installed by the user. Rather, we should identify the malware based on its behavior: Does it alter other executables not installed with it? Does it connect to one site repeatedly? Many sites rapidly? Does it attempt to access the addressbook? Mail itself out? Make multiple copies of itself in the windows directory? Edit registry settings it doesn't create? Remove or replace other files that weren't installed with it? And so on...
Once we look at it that way, its fairly simple to identify malware as its operating, and once its identified, the cleanup process can begin.
Actually, the myth that a 3rd party vote is wasted needs to be dispelled. Reaching a certain percentage of voters for an office means that that party will be automatically carried to the ballot on the next election. From the top of my head, the percentage required varies from office to office (and possibly state to state), but 5% of the vote for the presidency gets your party relisted and access to receive public funding for the next election (see here).
I tried that back when I graduated, and all three jobs I applied for requiring clearance told me they weren't taking anyone without it regardless of how good they were. They weren't even willing to tell me how to get a clearance by myself without a company backing me (It appears that you can't).
Of course, this was a couple of years ago when they probably DID have a hundred other applicants with all of the clearances and ten years more experience than I had.
Apple set out to make itunes promote the ipod, but after porting it to another OS and selling over a million songs, it appears to have reached the point where it makes a tiny profit of its own.
How am I less responsible by paying money into a corporation that does the same?
You paid money into a corporation? Wow, I can nearly guarantee that every single share I own was bought from another person selling their shares (and in your world, their liability. Perfect idea for CEOs that want to be evil: cash out before the company dumps that green sludge!).
This is aside from the fact that Libertarians want to abolish government oversight that would make it possible for people to pay attention to what their money was doing. Enron kept a perfectly reputable set of books, everything else was done out of the investors view.
one that tried to push a dangerous drug would be doomed, because everyone would be afraid to touch their stuff forever after.
Forever after? Is that like how Coca-cola got its name because it used cocaine as an ingredient for years? Or how strychnine has been used as medicine throughout history?
People who are dying tend to either be unconscious or not be rational about the choices they make. Completely abolishing the safeguards that prevent companies from preying on these irrational people does not help anyone.
But if the government wasn't so confiscatory we'd have charity hospitals
This is the only problem with the Libertarians I have, and its keeping me from voting for this man this year. This single concept has to be the biggest bunch of hoo-haa the Libertarians spout. It sounds great, and I'm sure it gives the Libertarians warm-fuzzies but then you realize that if you look at the current tax laws, we'd already have these charity hospitals.
One of the easiest "anticonfiscants" (also known as a "tax deduction") is CHARITY. So, where are our multimillionaire funded hospitals? People should be fighting tooth and nail to give away their money for the tax deduction! These people can deduct up to 50% of their annual gross income in donations to public charities and 30% to private ones.
In reality, it seems to be the Libertarian version of "passing the buck": the people: This system will suck! We'll be defenseless against big powerful corporations who will revert to abusing the little people like the industrial revolution proved they would! the Libertarians: Not our problem. If the big powerful corporations don't donate money back to help the little people they screw over, then they're doodoo heads, but its entirely not our fault.
foster an enormous "shadow" market of independent content producers who still treat their customers like customers, and not like consumers. Sounds like a good thing to me...
And how are these producers going to get their files out? Using windows XP SP1 for the rest of their lives? Do you think that these DRM schemes are going to let you record to a non-protected file and distribute it? Do you think they'll let users play non-protected files? After all, you could be playing Metallica and recording that, and that unprotected mp3 could be Metallica!
in general, it defines a function called ":", which when executed, executes ":" and ":" and then backgrounds. Then it runs ":" and all hell breaks loose.
You know what sucks? NEITHER major candidate for president has any real plan for our country.
DNC in a nutshell: "<bush sucks> <bush sucks> <Medicare/SS plan that wont work>"
RNC in a nutshell: "<I'm awesome> <I'm awesome> <Economy is doing great so I don't need a plan> <Medicare/SS plan that wont work> <Iraq> <Iraq> <war> <war> <war> <war> <war> <war>"
So tell me, when we're done with Iraq, Mr. Bush, what are you going to do? From where I stand, I see he has nothing at all lined up to prevent him from dropping to <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselectio ns/2003-01-13-bush-poll_x.htm">his pre-war 51% approval rating</a>. Other than to make sure we never quit going to war (and that plan doesn't appear to be working too well).
If the damn office gets around to mailing my registration card, I'm voting for Nader because in a two party take-all system where my state has already chosen Bush, my vote for Nader really does count, since he only needs 5% to be automatically approved as a party for next year.
"Well, I've setup a nifty Perl hack to fix that problem . . you just need these 4 libraries and then write your own XML commands."
Well, I found a windows program to do the same thing, you just have to download this.exe file, scan it three times for viruses and trojans, strip out the malware with adaware (voiding the eula) and somehow locate copies of msvcrt40.dll, olepro32.dll, and vbrun200.dll.
True. Instead, they'll have to air shows that people will want to watch, and then charge based on popularity. (Plus some for having a known audience, minus some for a handful of people skipping commercials, it'll even out in the end)
I give up. You can't make me not be a bitter cynic, but you can make me concede.
As for Nursing being the "next IT", I predict this being truer than you think. Hospitals continue to trim staff, and currently nursing schools are filled to the brim. As these people graduate they'll quickly fill a demand that is only assumed to be there (sure there's lots of old people... how many of them have the money for nursing care, especially after the dotcom/enron bust?)
This wasn't the way to go about grounding the shuttle. If the shuttle itself were damaged, then recovering would be easy, perhaps even with a new fleet of something better.
But, if that building had been destroyed, where would we build that new fleet?
You're still comparing apples and oranges. Lets say in both cases the choice was made by the corporation and I have no say in the matter.
In one scenario, the company choses to use open source tools to implement Project X. My choice is to either retrain to learn the given open source tools and keep my job (assuming I didn't know them), or move on. I face this constantly at work, I'm squirming to learn C# for webservices as fast as I can because the new hire, a Masters, thinks.net is the best thing since sliced bread and can fix all our problems easily.
Now, in the other scenario, the company decides to lay me off and have someone else implement Project X. Assuming I'm fully qualified to implement Project X, I'd be pissed regardless of whether the guy was my neighbor, or in a different country entirely. I'd be doubly pissed if the company hired someone with half my experience and a quarter of my pay. Triple that if they had the gall to tell me I was overpaid, but didn't bring a paycut to the table as an alternative.
Now, do you see why people are so upset about opensource vs. outsource? It is entirely a selfish argument, but when has that stopped anyone on any side of any argument?
As for the FDA, where did the money for that $1000 device go? Does the FDA really charge per item sold? Or are corporations using its existance as an excuse to push inflated prices on everyone?
You're still not educating me. I'm seriously open to what a CEO really does. If you're unwilling or nable to tell me yourself, you could at least point out sources you'd consider reliable. Personally I'd be happy if you told me what the hell my boss does beyond calling in randomly to make sure we're still there, changing the pricing scheme of our product every few months, and overriding every offer our salesperson offers to other companies, then firing the salesperson when none of the companies deal with us. Granted, he's just the president and founder of the company, and only the de-facto CEO since we lack a board, but insight into his behavior would be appreciated.
Hm, the AC who botched responding to you has a point, the people who aren't complaining about the Mercedes Benz plant are the Americans driving the Mercedes made by other Americans. The people complaining about outsourcing are doing so because the trend historically has been for the corporation to absorb 100% of the profit. Can you show me the day that Nike shoes went from $100 to $10 when they moved their production to China and paid a dollar a day for a person to churn them out by the dozens?
Second, in EVERY wave of outsourcing in the past, both the government and the corporations have been there to provide retraining programs and a safety net for those between whole new careers. Low rate loans for returning to college, placement support for finding the displaced people new jobs. When textiles were lost long ago, these people who operated looms and presses were retrained to operate other machinery and moved into better paying jobs. When the manufacturing sector really started to bite the dust, you could open a paper on just about any given day and see articles about what the government was doing for you, and articles about how this company or that company was offering its laid off workers workshops in moving up to higher-paid white collar positions.
Each time, this was hailed as an advancement for the people being displaced. Sure, it sucked for them at the time, but they had something to look forward to, and help in getting from where they were to where they were going.
When the dotcom boom died, there was still the corporate placement efforts, but the government had largely quit caring. People lined up for unemployment, but damned if you could get a scholarship or a loan to learn a new profession. The dot com bust was a correction of an over-saturated sector of the economy. Now that its corrected though, we're asked to tolerate additional losses.
Are we given some light at the end of the tunnel? Are we moving up? No, instead we're told to smile when we say "would you like fries with that?" and that in the long term after we're all dead, things will be OK. Better paying jobs? Doing what? The best answer so far is that the cream of the crop will float to the top and hold onto jobs paying better than ever, the rest? Well, they can go pump out people's toilets. Assuming of course they can get retrained for that, given the apprenticeship and licensing barriers of entry into plumbing, carpentry, and electricial work in most states. The worst answer so far, which nearly everyone offers is "I don't know." What can Americans do to have a stable non-outsourceable income now that all production industries have left? "I don't know."
The difference really is in the hoping. Before, people could aspire to something better and were at least given a good show of it. Now, we're all bitter cynics without even hollow promises of a better future.
Ask yourself why they are over-the-top? Having worked with a doctor who pays $1 million a year in liability coverage (she's an OB/GYN, the most expensive field, being that people sue 16 years later for brain damage when their kids don't get into Yale) I can pretty much say that real tort reform (ie, not the Republican's "lawsuits suck, so companies should never have to deal with them" version of it) could fix this, but you don't see any of the lawyers on either side in Congress jumping up to be the first to cap lawyer's fees (gee, maybe lawyers wouldn't push for those ridiculous multimillion settlements if they didn't get 50%), or move to a tort system where all the lawyers involved are salaried.
the obscene cost-ballooning effects of out-of-control FDA bureaucrats.
Because clearly making sure that quacks don't prey on people by peddling untested remedies is out-of-control.
Obviously, they do absolutely nothing
Ah, thank you mr. informative. Care to elucidate? From what I've seen of them, their entire purpose appears to be to sign whatever papers the board votes as appropriate and to network. They occasionally write press releases, or at least sign the ones their PR department writes for them, and make "executive decisions" about the company that don't appear to be grounded in the company's reality. The ones who are overpaid for all of these services tend to serve on their buddies' incestuous boards where all the good 'ol guys get together and vote each other giant raises and bonuses.
So tell me seriously this time, what do they do to bring as much value to the company as over 100 of their average employees?
In fact, open source may even be a stronger reducer, because it's pitting the professional programmer against free instead of a low-paid Indian.
So in other words, my professional programming skills are no match for the power of the GCC compiler. Or something like that. Or did you not notice that nearly all open source developed to date are merely tools by which professionals produce something of value?
Your argument makes as much sense as claiming that giving away hammers for free will devestate the carpentry profession.
No matter how complex or comprehensive opensource gets, there will always be a way for someone to turn that to a profitable end, whether its running a sales site using a LAMP with an open source shopping cart solution or using Linux + KDE + Open Office to write your grant proposal to the US government for using postgresql+PostGIS to develop new geographical services.
There may be creativity in the other country, but that's not outsourcing.
So wait, if my company fires its entire R&D staff and hires people in another country, thats not outsourcing because
A) its "creative" B) Instead of calling it R&D its now D&R C) The little fairy told me so D) Oh wait, it IS outsourcing!
The current administration gets its outsourcing numbers from voluntary reports from companies who do so. And there are companies that cut entire departments, only to later create entirely new divisons that have the exact same purpose, but with a different title so its clearly not outsourcing. Just how much underreporting is going on, considering the current backlash against the behavior?
If quality suffers, there will be companies that provide good American quality at a premium like in every other industry.
What, you mean like how companies showed up and steamrolled the existing buggy operating system offering with a far superior one? Would you like an order of government monopoly-busting power to go with your dreamworld?
Libertarians have a really nice idea, I'm all for the reduction of government meddling across the board. Shame that human greed masked behind the "corporate veil" would lead to abuses of power the likes of which haven't been seen since early coal mining days when people were basically sent to their deaths en masse. Our product sucks? Too bad, you'll take it and you'll like it, because you've got a job that pays too little to afford the "premium" version.
As for you going back to school, I'm glad you can afford that. Me? I'm living in my parent's house trying to pay off the $15K in loans from my last round of schooling. My parent's can barely support the extra mouth and certainly can't afford to pay my loans for me.
Oh, and if you do happen to come by the McD I work at, I just thought you should know that being uninsured, I haven't had the money or the time to have someone look at the rashes on my hands. Thats ok though, because the government makes sure I wear gloves while preparing your meal.
I am forced to remain in the US where I cannot compete with "Baboo". If I attempt to leave, I am threatened with physical removal from my new homeland of choice.
Until this threat is gone, "Bob" can never compete without superhuman capabilities (can YOU do 4 8-hour shifts in a day? After all, thats what corporations get out of hiring 4 "Baboo"s for the cost of one "Bob")
Right, and how am I supposed to act? I can't pack up and move to where the jobs are, thats not legal. I probably can't even buy the cheap third world goods (What do you want to bet that Windows 3RD World Edition will have "Not for sale in the US" stamped on it?) I can't legally view media purchased from overseas (hooray for DMCA, region coding, and "Access Control").
Maybe I could retrain. Yeah, go another $80k in debt, become a doctor, and discover that Americans are leaving the country to have surgeries performed by the Asian guy who was #2 in my class back in his native country, in modern facilities paid for by locals flush with outsourced American cash? After that, I could go another $120k in debt for law school, only to find that theres nothing stopping someone in another country from writing contracts too.
About the only thing I have left that pays more than minimum wage is running for President.
That's the risk you run being in a footloose sector. There are no physical requirements for the IT work
The most amusing part of the whole thing was that maybe 3-4 years ago, people were discussing how IT personnel could improve their lifestyle and cut costs by telecommuting from home. On the whole, the corporations refused citing this or that policy about control of the workforce.
Slashdot Mirror
So there's no really good way for a system to differentiate what's not really supposed to be there from something that was deliberately put there by the user.
Thats not a good way to categorize things, given the number of malware and trojans "deliberately" installed by the user. Rather, we should identify the malware based on its behavior: Does it alter other executables not installed with it? Does it connect to one site repeatedly? Many sites rapidly? Does it attempt to access the addressbook? Mail itself out? Make multiple copies of itself in the windows directory? Edit registry settings it doesn't create? Remove or replace other files that weren't installed with it? And so on...
Once we look at it that way, its fairly simple to identify malware as its operating, and once its identified, the cleanup process can begin.
Actually, the myth that a 3rd party vote is wasted needs to be dispelled. Reaching a certain percentage of voters for an office means that that party will be automatically carried to the ballot on the next election. From the top of my head, the percentage required varies from office to office (and possibly state to state), but 5% of the vote for the presidency gets your party relisted and access to receive public funding for the next election (see here).
I tried that back when I graduated, and all three jobs I applied for requiring clearance told me they weren't taking anyone without it regardless of how good they were. They weren't even willing to tell me how to get a clearance by myself without a company backing me (It appears that you can't).
Of course, this was a couple of years ago when they probably DID have a hundred other applicants with all of the clearances and ten years more experience than I had.
Apple set out to make itunes promote the ipod, but after porting it to another OS and selling over a million songs, it appears to have reached the point where it makes a tiny profit of its own.
How am I less responsible by paying money into a corporation that does the same?
You paid money into a corporation? Wow, I can nearly guarantee that every single share I own was bought from another person selling their shares (and in your world, their liability. Perfect idea for CEOs that want to be evil: cash out before the company dumps that green sludge!).
This is aside from the fact that Libertarians want to abolish government oversight that would make it possible for people to pay attention to what their money was doing. Enron kept a perfectly reputable set of books, everything else was done out of the investors view.
one that tried to push a dangerous drug would be doomed, because everyone would be afraid to touch their stuff forever after.
Forever after? Is that like how Coca-cola got its name because it used cocaine as an ingredient for years? Or how strychnine has been used as medicine throughout history?
People who are dying tend to either be unconscious or not be rational about the choices they make. Completely abolishing the safeguards that prevent companies from preying on these irrational people does not help anyone.
Reform the FDA, but don't destroy it.
But if the government wasn't so confiscatory we'd have charity hospitals
This is the only problem with the Libertarians I have, and its keeping me from voting for this man this year. This single concept has to be the biggest bunch of hoo-haa the Libertarians spout. It sounds great, and I'm sure it gives the Libertarians warm-fuzzies but then you realize that if you look at the current tax laws, we'd already have these charity hospitals.
One of the easiest "anticonfiscants" (also known as a "tax deduction") is CHARITY. So, where are our multimillionaire funded hospitals? People should be fighting tooth and nail to give away their money for the tax deduction! These people can deduct up to 50% of their annual gross income in donations to public charities and 30% to private ones.
In reality, it seems to be the Libertarian version of "passing the buck":
the people: This system will suck! We'll be defenseless against big powerful corporations who will revert to abusing the little people like the industrial revolution proved they would!
the Libertarians: Not our problem. If the big powerful corporations don't donate money back to help the little people they screw over, then they're doodoo heads, but its entirely not our fault.
foster an enormous "shadow" market of independent content producers who still treat their customers like customers, and not like consumers. Sounds like a good thing to me...
And how are these producers going to get their files out? Using windows XP SP1 for the rest of their lives? Do you think that these DRM schemes are going to let you record to a non-protected file and distribute it? Do you think they'll let users play non-protected files? After all, you could be playing Metallica and recording that, and that unprotected mp3 could be Metallica!
in general, it defines a function called ":", which when executed, executes ":" and ":" and then backgrounds. Then it runs ":" and all hell breaks loose.
You know what sucks? NEITHER major candidate for president has any real plan for our country.
o ns/2003-01-13-bush-poll_x.htm">his pre-war 51% approval rating</a>. Other than to make sure we never quit going to war (and that plan doesn't appear to be working too well).
DNC in a nutshell: "<bush sucks> <bush sucks> <Medicare/SS plan that wont work>"
RNC in a nutshell: "<I'm awesome> <I'm awesome> <Economy is doing great so I don't need a plan> <Medicare/SS plan that wont work> <Iraq> <Iraq> <war> <war> <war> <war> <war> <war>"
So tell me, when we're done with Iraq, Mr. Bush, what are you going to do? From where I stand, I see he has nothing at all lined up to prevent him from dropping to <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselecti
If the damn office gets around to mailing my registration card, I'm voting for Nader because in a two party take-all system where my state has already chosen Bush, my vote for Nader really does count, since he only needs 5% to be automatically approved as a party for next year.
"Well, I've setup a nifty Perl hack to fix that problem . . you just need these 4 libraries and then write your own XML commands."
.exe file, scan it three times for viruses and trojans, strip out the malware with adaware (voiding the eula) and somehow locate copies of msvcrt40.dll, olepro32.dll, and vbrun200.dll.
Well, I found a windows program to do the same thing, you just have to download this
True. Instead, they'll have to air shows that people will want to watch, and then charge based on popularity. (Plus some for having a known audience, minus some for a handful of people skipping commercials, it'll even out in the end)
I give up. You can't make me not be a bitter cynic, but you can make me concede.
As for Nursing being the "next IT", I predict this being truer than you think. Hospitals continue to trim staff, and currently nursing schools are filled to the brim. As these people graduate they'll quickly fill a demand that is only assumed to be there (sure there's lots of old people... how many of them have the money for nursing care, especially after the dotcom/enron bust?)
This wasn't the way to go about grounding the shuttle. If the shuttle itself were damaged, then recovering would be easy, perhaps even with a new fleet of something better.
But, if that building had been destroyed, where would we build that new fleet?
You're still comparing apples and oranges. Lets say in both cases the choice was made by the corporation and I have no say in the matter.
.net is the best thing since sliced bread and can fix all our problems easily.
In one scenario, the company choses to use open source tools to implement Project X. My choice is to either retrain to learn the given open source tools and keep my job (assuming I didn't know them), or move on. I face this constantly at work, I'm squirming to learn C# for webservices as fast as I can because the new hire, a Masters, thinks
Now, in the other scenario, the company decides to lay me off and have someone else implement Project X. Assuming I'm fully qualified to implement Project X, I'd be pissed regardless of whether the guy was my neighbor, or in a different country entirely. I'd be doubly pissed if the company hired someone with half my experience and a quarter of my pay. Triple that if they had the gall to tell me I was overpaid, but didn't bring a paycut to the table as an alternative.
Now, do you see why people are so upset about opensource vs. outsource? It is entirely a selfish argument, but when has that stopped anyone on any side of any argument?
As for the FDA, where did the money for that $1000 device go? Does the FDA really charge per item sold? Or are corporations using its existance as an excuse to push inflated prices on everyone?
You're still not educating me. I'm seriously open to what a CEO really does. If you're unwilling or nable to tell me yourself, you could at least point out sources you'd consider reliable. Personally I'd be happy if you told me what the hell my boss does beyond calling in randomly to make sure we're still there, changing the pricing scheme of our product every few months, and overriding every offer our salesperson offers to other companies, then firing the salesperson when none of the companies deal with us. Granted, he's just the president and founder of the company, and only the de-facto CEO since we lack a board, but insight into his behavior would be appreciated.
Hm, the AC who botched responding to you has a point, the people who aren't complaining about the Mercedes Benz plant are the Americans driving the Mercedes made by other Americans. The people complaining about outsourcing are doing so because the trend historically has been for the corporation to absorb 100% of the profit. Can you show me the day that Nike shoes went from $100 to $10 when they moved their production to China and paid a dollar a day for a person to churn them out by the dozens?
Second, in EVERY wave of outsourcing in the past, both the government and the corporations have been there to provide retraining programs and a safety net for those between whole new careers. Low rate loans for returning to college, placement support for finding the displaced people new jobs. When textiles were lost long ago, these people who operated looms and presses were retrained to operate other machinery and moved into better paying jobs. When the manufacturing sector really started to bite the dust, you could open a paper on just about any given day and see articles about what the government was doing for you, and articles about how this company or that company was offering its laid off workers workshops in moving up to higher-paid white collar positions.
Each time, this was hailed as an advancement for the people being displaced. Sure, it sucked for them at the time, but they had something to look forward to, and help in getting from where they were to where they were going.
When the dotcom boom died, there was still the corporate placement efforts, but the government had largely quit caring. People lined up for unemployment, but damned if you could get a scholarship or a loan to learn a new profession. The dot com bust was a correction of an over-saturated sector of the economy. Now that its corrected though, we're asked to tolerate additional losses.
Are we given some light at the end of the tunnel? Are we moving up? No, instead we're told to smile when we say "would you like fries with that?" and that in the long term after we're all dead, things will be OK. Better paying jobs? Doing what? The best answer so far is that the cream of the crop will float to the top and hold onto jobs paying better than ever, the rest? Well, they can go pump out people's toilets. Assuming of course they can get retrained for that, given the apprenticeship and licensing barriers of entry into plumbing, carpentry, and electricial work in most states. The worst answer so far, which nearly everyone offers is "I don't know." What can Americans do to have a stable non-outsourceable income now that all production industries have left? "I don't know."
The difference really is in the hoping. Before, people could aspire to something better and were at least given a good show of it. Now, we're all bitter cynics without even hollow promises of a better future.
over-the-top liability costs
Ask yourself why they are over-the-top? Having worked with a doctor who pays $1 million a year in liability coverage (she's an OB/GYN, the most expensive field, being that people sue 16 years later for brain damage when their kids don't get into Yale) I can pretty much say that real tort reform (ie, not the Republican's "lawsuits suck, so companies should never have to deal with them" version of it) could fix this, but you don't see any of the lawyers on either side in Congress jumping up to be the first to cap lawyer's fees (gee, maybe lawyers wouldn't push for those ridiculous multimillion settlements if they didn't get 50%), or move to a tort system where all the lawyers involved are salaried.
the obscene cost-ballooning effects of out-of-control FDA bureaucrats.
Because clearly making sure that quacks don't prey on people by peddling untested remedies is out-of-control.
Obviously, they do absolutely nothing
Ah, thank you mr. informative. Care to elucidate? From what I've seen of them, their entire purpose appears to be to sign whatever papers the board votes as appropriate and to network. They occasionally write press releases, or at least sign the ones their PR department writes for them, and make "executive decisions" about the company that don't appear to be grounded in the company's reality. The ones who are overpaid for all of these services tend to serve on their buddies' incestuous boards where all the good 'ol guys get together and vote each other giant raises and bonuses.
So tell me seriously this time, what do they do to bring as much value to the company as over 100 of their average employees?
In fact, open source may even be a stronger reducer, because it's pitting the professional programmer against free instead of a low-paid Indian.
So in other words, my professional programming skills are no match for the power of the GCC compiler. Or something like that. Or did you not notice that nearly all open source developed to date are merely tools by which professionals produce something of value?
Your argument makes as much sense as claiming that giving away hammers for free will devestate the carpentry profession.
No matter how complex or comprehensive opensource gets, there will always be a way for someone to turn that to a profitable end, whether its running a sales site using a LAMP with an open source shopping cart solution or using Linux + KDE + Open Office to write your grant proposal to the US government for using postgresql+PostGIS to develop new geographical services.
There may be creativity in the other country, but that's not outsourcing.
So wait, if my company fires its entire R&D staff and hires people in another country, thats not outsourcing because
A) its "creative"
B) Instead of calling it R&D its now D&R
C) The little fairy told me so
D) Oh wait, it IS outsourcing!
The current administration gets its outsourcing numbers from voluntary reports from companies who do so. And there are companies that cut entire departments, only to later create entirely new divisons that have the exact same purpose, but with a different title so its clearly not outsourcing. Just how much underreporting is going on, considering the current backlash against the behavior?
If quality suffers, there will be companies that provide good American quality at a premium like in every other industry.
What, you mean like how companies showed up and steamrolled the existing buggy operating system offering with a far superior one? Would you like an order of government monopoly-busting power to go with your dreamworld?
Libertarians have a really nice idea, I'm all for the reduction of government meddling across the board. Shame that human greed masked behind the "corporate veil" would lead to abuses of power the likes of which haven't been seen since early coal mining days when people were basically sent to their deaths en masse. Our product sucks? Too bad, you'll take it and you'll like it, because you've got a job that pays too little to afford the "premium" version.
As for you going back to school, I'm glad you can afford that. Me? I'm living in my parent's house trying to pay off the $15K in loans from my last round of schooling. My parent's can barely support the extra mouth and certainly can't afford to pay my loans for me.
Oh, and if you do happen to come by the McD I work at, I just thought you should know that being uninsured, I haven't had the money or the time to have someone look at the rashes on my hands. Thats ok though, because the government makes sure I wear gloves while preparing your meal.
I am forced to remain in the US where I cannot compete with "Baboo". If I attempt to leave, I am threatened with physical removal from my new homeland of choice.
Until this threat is gone, "Bob" can never compete without superhuman capabilities (can YOU do 4 8-hour shifts in a day? After all, thats what corporations get out of hiring 4 "Baboo"s for the cost of one "Bob")
get used to it and act in consequence
Right, and how am I supposed to act? I can't pack up and move to where the jobs are, thats not legal. I probably can't even buy the cheap third world goods (What do you want to bet that Windows 3RD World Edition will have "Not for sale in the US" stamped on it?) I can't legally view media purchased from overseas (hooray for DMCA, region coding, and "Access Control").
Maybe I could retrain. Yeah, go another $80k in debt, become a doctor, and discover that Americans are leaving the country to have surgeries performed by the Asian guy who was #2 in my class back in his native country, in modern facilities paid for by locals flush with outsourced American cash? After that, I could go another $120k in debt for law school, only to find that theres nothing stopping someone in another country from writing contracts too.
About the only thing I have left that pays more than minimum wage is running for President.
That's the risk you run being in a footloose sector. There are no physical requirements for the IT work
The most amusing part of the whole thing was that maybe 3-4 years ago, people were discussing how IT personnel could improve their lifestyle and cut costs by telecommuting from home. On the whole, the corporations refused citing this or that policy about control of the workforce.
I guess it works out after all.