Americans generally do not want to do STEM degrees, which many other cultures value more highly than we do.
But which came first, the chicken or the egg?
It's hardly surprising that most Americans aren't interested in STEM degrees when these jobs are constantly under attack by H-1Bs and offshoring. Whenever businesses bitch about wages going up in STEM, the government steps in to bring in more indentured guest workers. In contrast, medical school graduation has remained constant since the 1980s at about 16,000 a year, and physician wages have consequently remained very high and continued to outpace inflation. Given the choice, why should an intelligent young person in America select STEM over medicine or business? Somehow the central tenets of our capitalist religion – like the notion that you get more of what you incentivize – seem to be forgotten with all this BS about "worker shortages".
If Orth had been a rank-and-file developer, then firing him for these comments would have been overkill. But he's in a management role high enough in the Xbox hierarchy that anything he says in public might be interpreted as representing the company's official position. For someone like this, generating good PR is actually supposed to be a part of their job – and he obviously isn't any good at that. In Stan Lee's immortal words, with great power there must always come great responsibility.
If your job description requires Superman, then that's a problem with your job description, not the applicants. Split it up into manageable parts and hire multiple employees. And the H-1Bs aren't Superman either, no matter what their recruiters tell you. You do realize that the recruiters have their own agenda that doesn't match your company's, don't you?
If you have the skills you claim to have, you will have zero problem getting a $100k+ job in San Francisco or the Silicon Valley.
$100K in Silly Valley is equivalent to about $50K in most parts of the country. You're not coming out ahead when you have to spend three-quarters of your after-tax income for the rent on a crappy studio apartment.
What part of the First Amendment doesn't Diane Feinstein understand? The courts have (rightly) ruled that video games are a constitutionally protected art form. The government has no more right to censor video games than they do books, plays, movies, or any other type of media.
This is why Microsoft is losing market share and why so many analysts are worried about the company's long-term future. "Deal with it" seems to be Microsoft's mantra not just in the console market, but with Windows as well. They let their employees' pride and stubbornness override basic business considerations. Metro must be shoved down everyone's throat, even if not a single desktop user wants it. Because if they backed down, then the people who worked on Metro would feel bad, and we can't have that, can we? The thing is, Microsoft can no longer get away with this kind of behavior. They're being pressured in the consumer space by tablets and smartphones and in the business space by evangelists of "the cloud". Just as Windows started out as a toy and then grew to dominate the market, we may see the same thing happen with Android – especially since, as an open-source product, anyone (not just Google) can take it in the direction they see fit.
Orth, Ballmer, and those who think like them are soon going to figure out that "deal with it" isn't an acceptable answer when you're trying to get people to buy your stuff.
This wasn't mentioned in the article or the summary, but Washington State has apparently already completed the selection process. The contract was awarded to BOTEC Analysis, a consulting firm run by drug policy analyst and blogger Mark Kleiman. You can watch a CNN interview with Kleiman here. Kleiman's blog posts on drug policy are archived here.
Rather than try to use technological stopgaps, this should be treated as a law enforcement issue. The purpose of these robocalls is to get people to pay money to the scammers running the operations. Follow the money, and you find the scammers. The FCC should get a surveillance warrant ahead of time, then call up pretending to be a normal customer interested in whatever product or service they're hawking, and pay with a traceable bank account. Find out where the money is going and you've got your perps.
One of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence was that the British government was "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences". The Founders believed that any alleged crimes should be prosecuted in the jurisdiction where they occurred and that defendants should be tried by a jury of their peers. This was codified in the Sixth Amendment: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed..."
It seems clear that this section of the Constitution was violated here. Anaya was prosecuted in Kansas, a state where he had apparently never set foot, on the grounds that some of his customers had smuggled drugs there using his secret compartments. But this meant that he would not be tried by a jury of his peers – Californians who are racially diverse, familiar with high tech, and understand that rubbing elbows with the occasional shady person doesn't mean you are necessarily a criminal yourself. Instead he would be tried by a jury in Kansas, a state which is almost all-white and which is full of (let's be honest) fascists.
This is far from the only outrage in this case – it never should have been prosecuted in the first place, and the 24-year sentence is utterly absurd for any offense that doesn't involve death or serious bodily harm – but it's one that hasn't been mentioned so far, and may have been key to Anaya's conviction.
I suspect this claim comes from this page by the late John J. McCarthy. He summarizes the views of Bernard Cohen, which include specific figures for both the availability and price of uranium. (The cost figures presumably would have changed, as the article is 3 decades old, but the physics would not have.)
1366x768? Really? That's bad enough on cheap laptops, but on a product costing over $1800, it's absolutely unacceptable. This resolution really needs to die.
For Android gaming to go mainstream, it will have to start supporting input methods other than the touchscreen. Fortunately, Samsung is coming out with a gamepad for its Galaxy devices, so hopefully they will have enough market power to get app vendors to start supporting them. Other vendors are going to be releasing Android gamepads as well; hopefully they will be compatible.
I've occasionally wondered why the Mozilla gang hasn't charged MS with trademark infringement for such monkey-wrench tactics. After all, if I were to start providing a browser whose default User-Agent string included the "MSIE" token, MS's lawyers would be all over me. But they use their main competitor's brand name with impunity. If the Mozilla crowd weren't such nice guys as to allow this, life might be a bit easy for web developers everywhere.
The Sega v. Accolade case held that it was not copyright or trademark infringement for an unlicensed third party to use the string 'SEGA' in a cartridge ROM without authorization when it was technically necessary for interoperability purposes. Presumably the same logic would apply to user agent strings.
No it wont, because even if IE11 now works exactly like Firefox (which it probably doesn't) you'll still have a million custom CSS tricks to make Firefox and Chrome display a site the same.
Or what, you thought Firefox and Chrome consistently implemented the HTML/CSS standards? Oh, sorry to burst your bubble - no, Firefox/Chrome/Safari et. al. all require just as many hacks as modern IE versions to ensure consistency across all browsers to the greatest extent possible.
That has not been my experience. What I usually find is that if I develop using standard HTML/CSS and test in Chrome, I almost always get the same results in Firefox. IE9 sometimes displays a bit differently and requires a workaround of some sort with trickier CSS layouts and/or features, but usually not that much. IE8 requires extensive hacking (e.g. css3pie if you want rounded corners or gradients) and any version below that I won't even bother attempting to support.
Several sites have screenshots from the build; Hot Hardware says "Assuming this is all completely legitimate, the most obvious change pertains to the Metro UI, including greater flexibility in sizing Live Tiles and customizing the Start screen, particularly as the Personalize setting (among others, including Devices and Share) is now under the Settings charm. The Name Group feature for the Start menu looks a little more polished, too."
They don't get it, do they? Power users and most business users don't want to tinker with the Metro UI. We want to be able to get rid of it and boot straight into the Desktop with a traditional Start Menu.
Guess what? Consumers generally consumes content on their computers... you know, the vast majority of human beings.
And most of those consumers have already largely switched to smartphones and tablets. In a vain attempt to win them back, Microsoft has sacrificed their competitive advantage with business users – you know, the ones who actually pay the vast majority of their licensing fees...
You know what the easiest way is to solve this problem? Completely separate the business of providing cell/wireless service from the business of providing the actual phones. If you want an iPhone, you buy it from Apple at whatever they are actually charging (none of this "subsidized" multi-year contract BS). Then you buy a service package for whatever carrier you want. Either month-to-month or long-term.
Bundling the phone and service together has been horrible for consumers (we get locked-down devices loaded with crapware and stuck with terrible contracts) and now even the carriers don't like it? Enough.
I don't know who this "whistle blower" was (likely a government official who they didn't bribe well enough), but EVERY company that does business in China bribes. It's more than a way of life there, it's absolutely ubiquitous. The only reason you don't have to pay bribes to breathe there is because no government official has found a way to extract them yet (and they would if at all possible). To do business there, you have to start with the knowledge that the whole goddamn country is built on two things: bribes and lies. And if you're lucky, a generous enough bribe MIGHT get you SOME of the truth every now and then. It's worse than India and Russia combined.
Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, paying bribes to officials overseas is a violation of American law if it's done by a U.S. business. While there are a few exceptions to this ("facilitation payments" for non-discretionary bureaucratic work, for example) they are very narrow and often fail to cover the wide range of situations where real-world foreign officials demand handouts. The result is that it's often illegal to be the victim of a shakedown if you're doing business overseas. Now it's certainly possible that Microsoft is as much perpetrator as victim in this case, but the FCPA is far too broad and really needs to be substantially revisited.
If your input field doesn't accept ); anymore, the probability of an user starting an SQL injection attack intentionally or involuntarily sinks drastically.
Or you could use parameterized queries, and then it won't matter if you forgot one of the possible escape sequences, since the whole input string will be treated as data rather than code.
2) Many implementations restrict the number of characters that I can use for a password. This is downright stupid, as it prevents xkcd/936 compliance.
Worse, it implies that the password may be stored in the database in clear text (since if they're storing a hash, why would they care what the length of the input password was?)
And, compared to the cost of cleaning up an incident, it's STILL infinitesimally small.
All it takes is one single employee to ignore or disregard the training, and you'll still be paying that cleanup cost. That's Bruce Schneider's point: it's a structural problem, not one that can be fixed by placing more burdens on end users.
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Americans generally do not want to do STEM degrees, which many other cultures value more highly than we do.
But which came first, the chicken or the egg?
It's hardly surprising that most Americans aren't interested in STEM degrees when these jobs are constantly under attack by H-1Bs and offshoring. Whenever businesses bitch about wages going up in STEM, the government steps in to bring in more indentured guest workers. In contrast, medical school graduation has remained constant since the 1980s at about 16,000 a year, and physician wages have consequently remained very high and continued to outpace inflation. Given the choice, why should an intelligent young person in America select STEM over medicine or business? Somehow the central tenets of our capitalist religion – like the notion that you get more of what you incentivize – seem to be forgotten with all this BS about "worker shortages".
Obviously the customers don't like it, but does MS care what it's customers want?
If they did, they wouldn't have released Windows 8.
If Orth had been a rank-and-file developer, then firing him for these comments would have been overkill. But he's in a management role high enough in the Xbox hierarchy that anything he says in public might be interpreted as representing the company's official position. For someone like this, generating good PR is actually supposed to be a part of their job – and he obviously isn't any good at that. In Stan Lee's immortal words, with great power there must always come great responsibility.
The jobs that can be reasonably outsourced to India already have been. If an IT job is still being done in the US, it's being done here for a reason.
If your job description requires Superman, then that's a problem with your job description, not the applicants. Split it up into manageable parts and hire multiple employees. And the H-1Bs aren't Superman either, no matter what their recruiters tell you. You do realize that the recruiters have their own agenda that doesn't match your company's, don't you?
If you have the skills you claim to have, you will have zero problem getting a $100k+ job in San Francisco or the Silicon Valley.
$100K in Silly Valley is equivalent to about $50K in most parts of the country. You're not coming out ahead when you have to spend three-quarters of your after-tax income for the rent on a crappy studio apartment.
What part of the First Amendment doesn't Diane Feinstein understand? The courts have (rightly) ruled that video games are a constitutionally protected art form. The government has no more right to censor video games than they do books, plays, movies, or any other type of media.
This is why Microsoft is losing market share and why so many analysts are worried about the company's long-term future. "Deal with it" seems to be Microsoft's mantra not just in the console market, but with Windows as well. They let their employees' pride and stubbornness override basic business considerations. Metro must be shoved down everyone's throat, even if not a single desktop user wants it. Because if they backed down, then the people who worked on Metro would feel bad, and we can't have that, can we? The thing is, Microsoft can no longer get away with this kind of behavior. They're being pressured in the consumer space by tablets and smartphones and in the business space by evangelists of "the cloud". Just as Windows started out as a toy and then grew to dominate the market, we may see the same thing happen with Android – especially since, as an open-source product, anyone (not just Google) can take it in the direction they see fit.
Orth, Ballmer, and those who think like them are soon going to figure out that "deal with it" isn't an acceptable answer when you're trying to get people to buy your stuff.
This wasn't mentioned in the article or the summary, but Washington State has apparently already completed the selection process. The contract was awarded to BOTEC Analysis, a consulting firm run by drug policy analyst and blogger Mark Kleiman. You can watch a CNN interview with Kleiman here. Kleiman's blog posts on drug policy are archived here.
Rather than try to use technological stopgaps, this should be treated as a law enforcement issue. The purpose of these robocalls is to get people to pay money to the scammers running the operations. Follow the money, and you find the scammers. The FCC should get a surveillance warrant ahead of time, then call up pretending to be a normal customer interested in whatever product or service they're hawking, and pay with a traceable bank account. Find out where the money is going and you've got your perps.
Was this one of those "no-show jobs" we sometimes hear about?
One of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence was that the British government was "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences". The Founders believed that any alleged crimes should be prosecuted in the jurisdiction where they occurred and that defendants should be tried by a jury of their peers. This was codified in the Sixth Amendment: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed..."
It seems clear that this section of the Constitution was violated here. Anaya was prosecuted in Kansas, a state where he had apparently never set foot, on the grounds that some of his customers had smuggled drugs there using his secret compartments. But this meant that he would not be tried by a jury of his peers – Californians who are racially diverse, familiar with high tech, and understand that rubbing elbows with the occasional shady person doesn't mean you are necessarily a criminal yourself. Instead he would be tried by a jury in Kansas, a state which is almost all-white and which is full of (let's be honest) fascists.
This is far from the only outrage in this case – it never should have been prosecuted in the first place, and the 24-year sentence is utterly absurd for any offense that doesn't involve death or serious bodily harm – but it's one that hasn't been mentioned so far, and may have been key to Anaya's conviction.
So, how do you "short sell" Bitcoin? I'd like to make a few bucks from this ridiculous bubble when it pops.
Care to back up that claim with solid data?
I suspect this claim comes from this page by the late John J. McCarthy. He summarizes the views of Bernard Cohen, which include specific figures for both the availability and price of uranium. (The cost figures presumably would have changed, as the article is 3 decades old, but the physics would not have.)
1366x768? Really? That's bad enough on cheap laptops, but on a product costing over $1800, it's absolutely unacceptable. This resolution really needs to die.
For Android gaming to go mainstream, it will have to start supporting input methods other than the touchscreen. Fortunately, Samsung is coming out with a gamepad for its Galaxy devices, so hopefully they will have enough market power to get app vendors to start supporting them. Other vendors are going to be releasing Android gamepads as well; hopefully they will be compatible.
I've occasionally wondered why the Mozilla gang hasn't charged MS with trademark infringement for such monkey-wrench tactics. After all, if I were to start providing a browser whose default User-Agent string included the "MSIE" token, MS's lawyers would be all over me. But they use their main competitor's brand name with impunity. If the Mozilla crowd weren't such nice guys as to allow this, life might be a bit easy for web developers everywhere.
The Sega v. Accolade case held that it was not copyright or trademark infringement for an unlicensed third party to use the string 'SEGA' in a cartridge ROM without authorization when it was technically necessary for interoperability purposes. Presumably the same logic would apply to user agent strings.
No it wont, because even if IE11 now works exactly like Firefox (which it probably doesn't) you'll still have a million custom CSS tricks to make Firefox and Chrome display a site the same. Or what, you thought Firefox and Chrome consistently implemented the HTML/CSS standards? Oh, sorry to burst your bubble - no, Firefox/Chrome/Safari et. al. all require just as many hacks as modern IE versions to ensure consistency across all browsers to the greatest extent possible.
That has not been my experience. What I usually find is that if I develop using standard HTML/CSS and test in Chrome, I almost always get the same results in Firefox. IE9 sometimes displays a bit differently and requires a workaround of some sort with trickier CSS layouts and/or features, but usually not that much. IE8 requires extensive hacking (e.g. css3pie if you want rounded corners or gradients) and any version below that I won't even bother attempting to support.
Several sites have screenshots from the build; Hot Hardware says "Assuming this is all completely legitimate, the most obvious change pertains to the Metro UI, including greater flexibility in sizing Live Tiles and customizing the Start screen, particularly as the Personalize setting (among others, including Devices and Share) is now under the Settings charm. The Name Group feature for the Start menu looks a little more polished, too."
They don't get it, do they? Power users and most business users don't want to tinker with the Metro UI. We want to be able to get rid of it and boot straight into the Desktop with a traditional Start Menu.
Guess what? Consumers generally consumes content on their computers... you know, the vast majority of human beings.
And most of those consumers have already largely switched to smartphones and tablets. In a vain attempt to win them back, Microsoft has sacrificed their competitive advantage with business users – you know, the ones who actually pay the vast majority of their licensing fees...
You know what the easiest way is to solve this problem? Completely separate the business of providing cell/wireless service from the business of providing the actual phones. If you want an iPhone, you buy it from Apple at whatever they are actually charging (none of this "subsidized" multi-year contract BS). Then you buy a service package for whatever carrier you want. Either month-to-month or long-term.
Bundling the phone and service together has been horrible for consumers (we get locked-down devices loaded with crapware and stuck with terrible contracts) and now even the carriers don't like it? Enough.
I don't know who this "whistle blower" was (likely a government official who they didn't bribe well enough), but EVERY company that does business in China bribes. It's more than a way of life there, it's absolutely ubiquitous. The only reason you don't have to pay bribes to breathe there is because no government official has found a way to extract them yet (and they would if at all possible). To do business there, you have to start with the knowledge that the whole goddamn country is built on two things: bribes and lies. And if you're lucky, a generous enough bribe MIGHT get you SOME of the truth every now and then. It's worse than India and Russia combined.
Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, paying bribes to officials overseas is a violation of American law if it's done by a U.S. business. While there are a few exceptions to this ("facilitation payments" for non-discretionary bureaucratic work, for example) they are very narrow and often fail to cover the wide range of situations where real-world foreign officials demand handouts. The result is that it's often illegal to be the victim of a shakedown if you're doing business overseas. Now it's certainly possible that Microsoft is as much perpetrator as victim in this case, but the FCPA is far too broad and really needs to be substantially revisited.
If your input field doesn't accept ); anymore, the probability of an user starting an SQL injection attack intentionally or involuntarily sinks drastically.
Or you could use parameterized queries, and then it won't matter if you forgot one of the possible escape sequences, since the whole input string will be treated as data rather than code.
2) Many implementations restrict the number of characters that I can use for a password. This is downright stupid, as it prevents xkcd/936 compliance.
Worse, it implies that the password may be stored in the database in clear text (since if they're storing a hash, why would they care what the length of the input password was?)
And, compared to the cost of cleaning up an incident, it's STILL infinitesimally small.
All it takes is one single employee to ignore or disregard the training, and you'll still be paying that cleanup cost. That's Bruce Schneider's point: it's a structural problem, not one that can be fixed by placing more burdens on end users.