There's plenty of duties and privileges that you get automatically with marriage, and that are difficult or impossible to get without:
The right for your wife/husband to live with you, even if she's from a country from which immigration would normally be restricted. The right to inherit from the one who dies first. The right to be recognized as next-of-kin. Shared parental rights for any children born by default. (the "pater est" rule) Adjustments of tax-brackets if your partner earns substantially less than you. The duty to support eachother. Simplification of owning joint property. Waving of certain legal fees. The right to refuse to witness against your spouse in a court of law. In some jurisdictions part of the shortest-livings pension-benefits are transfered to the longest-living.
The details vary by jurisdiction, but generally speaking marriage is a "package deal" that considers many of the topics relevant to a long-lasting partnership. Some fraction of it can be gotten in other ways (i.e. by contracts), and other parts cannot.
Perhaps "usually" but like I already said, RennesÃy is an island of the south-western coast of Norway. It is surrounded by seawater on all sides and on the entire west-side, the next landmass is Scottland.
We're not talking about a gazillion terawatts here either, but just cooling for a datacenter. A few megawatts mixed won't heat open sea noticeably, even very modest movement of water will suffice to reduce heating to a miniscule fraction of a degree for anything that's not within a few meters of the heat-release. (for the extremely-local zone I guess heating-effects are likely)
Almost agree. Minor nitpick: The religious angle isn't of importance. There's been long-term formalised bonds between husband and wife across a wide spectrum of different religions and cultures, enough so that I'd argue that the concept of "marriage", along with "funeral", "name-giving-ceremony" and "coming-of-age-ceremony" are near-universal in human culture.
Marriage is a formal announcement of a couples intention to stay together long-term. With this announcement comes certain duties, and certain priviledges. If you're cynical about it, you could say that you should marry if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks - I did, but religion wasn't a relevant part of that question (we're both atheists)
You are right. Words have power. To be able to talk about something, you need words for it. You could try describing what you mean, but the problem is you'll always be side-tracked.
If you start describing the ban on bringing coke-bottles onto planes, you'll end up discussing if that particular ban (the ban on fluids) makes sense or not. While perhaps interesting, this is a different discussion from the one about security theatre. By using the phrase, you can talk about the general concept: security-measures that are very visible, and frequently annoying, while having questionable impact on actual security, without getting into specifics about precisely *which* policies you consider to be security-theatre.
Similarily, if you want to discuss the problems of excess political correctness, you cannot do so by using a single (or multiple) examples of silly statements that you consider to be PC-nonsense, because doing so would have a near-unity chance of derailing into a discussion of your particular example as opposed to the general tendency.
Other examples ? racist (1871), sexist (1965), prude (1704), apatheist (new, not found a definitice source for first appearance), shill (1916), fundamentalist (1920), neocon (1979 neo-conservative, a decade later shortened)
Each of these words are useful, because they let you talk of a phenomenon (or an ideology or idea) as a whole, without needing to resort to explaining-by-example, which has a huge risk of turning into a discussion about the example instead of discussion about the phenomenon.
Security theatre is well-defined, the meaning of the term is clear, and it describes a tendency that it's useful to be able to talk-about. As such, there's no reason to be skeptical of the word just because it evoked an emotion in you. (I bet "shill" and "racist" also evokes an emotion, they are still useful words though)
The right way of adjusting that, is to have a price-tag. Employment has various benefits and various costs, but overall it's fair to say that the primary components is time (yours) in exchange for money (employers). These two components are thus the most important parts of an work-contract, so a contract that fails to specify one of them, is crap.
The only workers where it makes sense to have no stipulations on hours, are those who *truly* are in an independent position where they have considerable leeway and influence on their own workday and their own responsibilities. If you're the CEO, it makes sense that your contract doesn't stipulate how many hours you work.
If you are, however, one out of 5 programmers in a team, with 3 levels of management above you and someone else is setting priorities, tasks and deadlines, then most definitely your contract should say how many hours a day/week/year you work for.
The same is true for after-hours calls. "Only call if it's important" does not tend to work, because emailing the photo to his nephew is super-important. Money works here too. My employer *can* call me any time he wants, and ask me to do anything that falls within my area of expertise and that he considers worthwhile.
However; there's +50% overtime (+100% if it's after 9pm or on a holiday), time is always rounded *up* to the next full hour, and there's 1 hour added. In short, he can call me and interrupt whatever I'm doing. It's going to cost a minimum of 3 hours pay (a few minutes, rounds up to 1 hour, add 1 hour for 2, +50% to arrive at 3)
"Only call if it's important" doesn't tend to work.
"Only call if solving this problem -now- is worth $200+ to you."
Works. Two ways even. First because it tends to discourage non-important calls (somehow "ultra-important life-and-death situation" translates to "not worth $200" fairly often, go figure) Second because even if he *did* call for some stupid reason, I'd not be very annoyed at it, doing stupid work for good pay is less frustrating by far than doing stupid work for free.
"someone" is key though. OpenID is open and distributed, so yes you need an account with *someone*, but the key distinction is that you are free to pick anyone you want as your provider, and if none of them suits your needs, you are even free to set up your own provider. (no it's not difficult)
This is parallell to email: *someone* must run a mailserver for you, but you're free to pick who, and if none of them suits your needs, you're free to set up your own email-server.
If you believe the marketing-spiel, sure. In real life, this is just a flash-triggered-flash, i.e. it's got a fast photosensor and a few leds that fire when detecting a flash.
That's not magic, and infact "any piece of crap" describes it pretty well.
fibre-optical low-latency high-bandwith symetrical broadband ain't precisely cheap here either, for 25Mbps/symetrical you pay $65/month. You have to discount that somewhat for the fact that Norway is a high-salary high-cost country though. Afterall what matters isn't how much something costs in cash, but how long you must work to pay for something. (if prices and salary are both double, that doesn't really matter to anyone)
If you compensate for the difference in earnings, paying $65/month in Norway is equivalent to paying $40/month in USA.
Why would venting heat to the atmosphere be unproblematic but venting it to seawater be potentially problematic ?
RennesÃy isn't some deep-and-narrow inlet, infact it's hardly in a fjord at all, but more akin to in open ocean. Have a look at the map: http://g.co/maps/ucfvs
Heating the ocean itself by dumping waste heat, would take *tremendous* amounts of power, many orders of magnitude more energy than any data-center could possibly use.
The point of (1) isn't to plug a cable into your shoe to harvest power. The point is to let low-power-devices run for longer, perhaps indefinitely without needing recharging. A mobile phone or music-player or whatever that can run forever without needing to be charged by collecting energy from for example the shaking it gets as you move, would be a hit.
I already have 2 square-inches of solarcells on my backpack, which provides enough of a charge to let me use my GPS indefinitely while in the bush in summer without needing to replace batteries. (I don't keep it on all the time, I just turn it on for a few minutes now and then as needed)
As for the digital divide, it depends on which poor you're talking of. Most people in the bottom-quarter of Norways or USAs population, will be able to afford some kind of internet-connection, but the same will not be true for the poor in a global perspective. There's millions of people who live on less than a dollar a day, facing hunger and lacking even the most basic stuff, it's not plausible that all of these will have internet-connectivity. (and even if they somehow did, there'd still be a divide between "I used the internet-cafe for an hour last monday, it's got 8 machines and a ISDN-line" and "I've got a dozen internet-connected machines in my home, we're hooked up by 1Gbps fibre-optical link."
You can't change them. They're not secret. Anyone can copy them. But at the same time it's not convenient to share them when you do want to share them. (people let other people borrow their keys and/or know their passwords all the time, for all sorts of reasons)
Indeed. This argument does nothing to diminish the usefulness of crypto.
Yes people can force you to do various things, but the likeliness of that is lower than the chance that they'll do the same thing secretly if they can get away with it.
Just because someone can hit you with a wrench and take your card-key, it doesn't follow that locking your house is useless. Just because someone can hit you with a wrench until you give up your PIN-code, it doesn't follow that having the card be pin-protected is useless.
That something doesn't protect against -all- threaths, doesn't make it useless. It's still useful if it protects against *some* threaths.
Where there's a camera today, in most cases a person with two eyes would do the same, or even a superior job, but the camera is *much* cheaper, so you install 20 cameras and hire one guy to watch the screens, instead of hiring 20 guys.
The same principle may very well apply to drones. Autonomous camera-equipped drones patrolling an area may well turn out to be much cheaper than policemen - and even if that's not true today, it's pretty likely it'll be true soon - technology tends to get dramatically cheaper over time.
It probably works reasonably well *if* the photo is a flash-photo, and taken from precisely such a direction that the beer-cooler is directly between your face and the camera.
This might be the case for some fraction of embarassing photos, but certainly not 95%.
In -some- countries sure. But actually on the average, the opposite is true. Compared to other countries of comparable wealth and development, USA has poor broadband-penetration and low average speeds.
25 Mbps symetrical, is the lowest available speed from my ISP, the other alternatives being 50, 100, 200 or 400Mbps, all symetrical.
This sort of thing is fairly rare in the USA in my experience. (either that, or my US-friends just have bad luck)
Activity is the biggie. I dunno about America, but here in Norway, the calorie-consumption pro-adult has not grown at all over the last 50 years, allthough obesity has grown. (not to US-levels, but higher than it used to be)
The main reason is simply that a lot less people have physical jobs. It makes a lot of difference if you're walking around and doing something for 8 hours a day, or if you're sitting at a desk.
printing 100000 books, doesn't add up to a lot for each book.
But packaging, storing and distributing that million books physically to 2000 bookstores, does cost quite a bit.
They're then laden onto the shelves, in a high-price central location in town, and sold over the counter in units of 1. This costs *substantially*, especially in high-cost locations.
Even if a bookstore sells 20 books/hour for each employee, that's still 1/20th hourly wage for each book sold, or where I'm at, about $3 to add to the price, and that's actually substantially *above* what especially smaller bookstores can hope to achieve.
It's not the print-run as such, printing a large number of books, is cheap, because it's done in bulk. Selling on main-street though, is expensive, and not done in bulk. It costs.
You use a public-facing app that requires authenthication, Dreamhost even has a one-click-installer for Gallery, which supports extensive access-controls.
It doesn't matter what something "is", only what it does. If you upload all your pictures to a gallery-installation on Dreamhost, they're available for download, should your local computer crash-and-burn.
I agree with that, but I think financial incentives aren't really "constricting" anything. Yes they do tilt the playing-field, but it's still a free choice.
Do you want the $5 snack, or the $10 book where mom will sponsor 50%?
You can still choose. Only difference is, there's incentives from other people for making choices those other people agree with. Life works like this in general, really.
And while choice is good, that doesn't mean it's an ideal as a parent to be a moral relativist of the "every choice is equally good" category, because that's just obviously patently not true.
It's significantly more expensive, yes, but not "a lot of capital".
We're talking a machine starting at $350 here. That's like 1-2 days pay.
I could buy a machine, use it for 1 day (during which I've split as much wood as a guy with an axe manages in a week!) toss it away, and still come out ahead of the axe-guy.
The break-even point depends on your salary-level. I earn around $50/hour. Thus if the job takes 9 hours with axe, and 2 hours with the splitter, I've saved 7 hours, and come out ahead.
A machine that breaks even after *2* hours of use is a nobrainer to buy.
You'd buy pre-cut and pre-split wood and do without either ? The person who *did* split that wood though, did so using a hydraulic splitter.
If you split your wood yourself, you either like splitting wood, value your time -very- lowly, or you buy a hydraulic splitter, yes. Sure, if it's a one-time tiny-amount exception kind of thing, an axe makes sense. But if you do a larger amount (as in the wood you'd need for a winter for an average house), then the splitter is *definitely* worth it.
It's not IT, as such. It's corporate America, especially those fractions of it that are easily outsourceable. But also other parts. Infact the average working American earns no more than he did 25 years ago, if you compensate for inflation, while those on the top, make more than triple what they earned back then.
It doesn't have to be like that, but those are the politics you've got, and it's hard to change since money and lobbying has such a huge influence on your politics, and the electoral system ensures it's a two-party-nation and not a diverse democracy.
An average IT-person with 5-10 years experience and a bachelors degree earns $80K - $125K/year over here, and I feel that's perfectly adequate, and fair compared to other similar jobs. (yes costs are higher than in USA, but even after you consider that, it's a good salary)
Strongly disagree with the latter. Knowledge is power. Whomever you're debating your new salary with, very likely knows the salaries of your entire department, while he very much prefers keeping you in the dark.
Sometimes being pissed off is a good thing: If you're genuinely underpaid, compared to other people of similar skill and responsibility, *knowing* that fact, is quite helpful in getting it rectified. It's a lot easier to say: "I don't feel that my current compensation is in line with with my responsibilities" if you already know that 8 of the 10 people in your department with comparable responsibilities earn substantially more.
I agree with the former though: seeking illegal access is a violation of trust, and it's reasonable for the employer to trust you a lot less if you're caught.
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There's plenty of duties and privileges that you get automatically with marriage, and that are difficult or impossible to get without:
The right for your wife/husband to live with you, even if she's from a country from which immigration would normally be restricted. The right to inherit from the one who dies first. The right to be recognized as next-of-kin. Shared parental rights for any children born by default. (the "pater est" rule) Adjustments of tax-brackets if your partner earns substantially less than you. The duty to support eachother. Simplification of owning joint property. Waving of certain legal fees. The right to refuse to witness against your spouse in a court of law. In some jurisdictions part of the shortest-livings pension-benefits are transfered to the longest-living.
The details vary by jurisdiction, but generally speaking marriage is a "package deal" that considers many of the topics relevant to a long-lasting partnership. Some fraction of it can be gotten in other ways (i.e. by contracts), and other parts cannot.
Perhaps "usually" but like I already said, RennesÃy is an island of the south-western coast of Norway. It is surrounded by seawater on all sides and on the entire west-side, the next landmass is Scottland.
We're not talking about a gazillion terawatts here either, but just cooling for a datacenter. A few megawatts mixed won't heat open sea noticeably, even very modest movement of water will suffice to reduce heating to a miniscule fraction of a degree for anything that's not within a few meters of the heat-release. (for the extremely-local zone I guess heating-effects are likely)
Almost agree. Minor nitpick: The religious angle isn't of importance. There's been long-term formalised bonds between husband and wife across a wide spectrum of different religions and cultures, enough so that I'd argue that the concept of "marriage", along with "funeral", "name-giving-ceremony" and "coming-of-age-ceremony" are near-universal in human culture.
Marriage is a formal announcement of a couples intention to stay together long-term. With this announcement comes certain duties, and certain priviledges. If you're cynical about it, you could say that you should marry if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks - I did, but religion wasn't a relevant part of that question (we're both atheists)
You are right. Words have power. To be able to talk about something, you need words for it. You could try describing what you mean, but the problem is you'll always be side-tracked.
If you start describing the ban on bringing coke-bottles onto planes, you'll end up discussing if that particular ban (the ban on fluids) makes sense or not. While perhaps interesting, this is a different discussion from the one about security theatre. By using the phrase, you can talk about the general concept: security-measures that are very visible, and frequently annoying, while having questionable impact on actual security, without getting into specifics about precisely *which* policies you consider to be security-theatre.
Similarily, if you want to discuss the problems of excess political correctness, you cannot do so by using a single (or multiple) examples of silly statements that you consider to be PC-nonsense, because doing so would have a near-unity chance of derailing into a discussion of your particular example as opposed to the general tendency.
Other examples ? racist (1871), sexist (1965), prude (1704), apatheist (new, not found a definitice source for first appearance), shill (1916), fundamentalist (1920), neocon (1979 neo-conservative, a decade later shortened)
Each of these words are useful, because they let you talk of a phenomenon (or an ideology or idea) as a whole, without needing to resort to explaining-by-example, which has a huge risk of turning into a discussion about the example instead of discussion about the phenomenon.
Security theatre is well-defined, the meaning of the term is clear, and it describes a tendency that it's useful to be able to talk-about. As such, there's no reason to be skeptical of the word just because it evoked an emotion in you. (I bet "shill" and "racist" also evokes an emotion, they are still useful words though)
The right way of adjusting that, is to have a price-tag. Employment has various benefits and various costs, but overall it's fair to say that the primary components is time (yours) in exchange for money (employers). These two components are thus the most important parts of an work-contract, so a contract that fails to specify one of them, is crap.
The only workers where it makes sense to have no stipulations on hours, are those who *truly* are in an independent position where they have considerable leeway and influence on their own workday and their own responsibilities. If you're the CEO, it makes sense that your contract doesn't stipulate how many hours you work.
If you are, however, one out of 5 programmers in a team, with 3 levels of management above you and someone else is setting priorities, tasks and deadlines, then most definitely your contract should say how many hours a day/week/year you work for.
The same is true for after-hours calls. "Only call if it's important" does not tend to work, because emailing the photo to his nephew is super-important. Money works here too. My employer *can* call me any time he wants, and ask me to do anything that falls within my area of expertise and that he considers worthwhile.
However; there's +50% overtime (+100% if it's after 9pm or on a holiday), time is always rounded *up* to the next full hour, and there's 1 hour added. In short, he can call me and interrupt whatever I'm doing. It's going to cost a minimum of 3 hours pay (a few minutes, rounds up to 1 hour, add 1 hour for 2, +50% to arrive at 3)
"Only call if it's important" doesn't tend to work.
"Only call if solving this problem -now- is worth $200+ to you."
Works. Two ways even. First because it tends to discourage non-important calls (somehow "ultra-important life-and-death situation" translates to "not worth $200" fairly often, go figure) Second because even if he *did* call for some stupid reason, I'd not be very annoyed at it, doing stupid work for good pay is less frustrating by far than doing stupid work for free.
"someone" is key though. OpenID is open and distributed, so yes you need an account with *someone*, but the key distinction is that you are free to pick anyone you want as your provider, and if none of them suits your needs, you are even free to set up your own provider. (no it's not difficult)
This is parallell to email: *someone* must run a mailserver for you, but you're free to pick who, and if none of them suits your needs, you're free to set up your own email-server.
If you believe the marketing-spiel, sure. In real life, this is just a flash-triggered-flash, i.e. it's got a fast photosensor and a few leds that fire when detecting a flash.
That's not magic, and infact "any piece of crap" describes it pretty well.
fibre-optical low-latency high-bandwith symetrical broadband ain't precisely cheap here either, for 25Mbps/symetrical you pay $65/month. You have to discount that somewhat for the fact that Norway is a high-salary high-cost country though. Afterall what matters isn't how much something costs in cash, but how long you must work to pay for something. (if prices and salary are both double, that doesn't really matter to anyone)
If you compensate for the difference in earnings, paying $65/month in Norway is equivalent to paying $40/month in USA.
Why would venting heat to the atmosphere be unproblematic but venting it to seawater be potentially problematic ?
RennesÃy isn't some deep-and-narrow inlet, infact it's hardly in a fjord at all, but more akin to in open ocean. Have a look at the map: http://g.co/maps/ucfvs
Heating the ocean itself by dumping waste heat, would take *tremendous* amounts of power, many orders of magnitude more energy than any data-center could possibly use.
The point of (1) isn't to plug a cable into your shoe to harvest power. The point is to let low-power-devices run for longer, perhaps indefinitely without needing recharging. A mobile phone or music-player or whatever that can run forever without needing to be charged by collecting energy from for example the shaking it gets as you move, would be a hit.
I already have 2 square-inches of solarcells on my backpack, which provides enough of a charge to let me use my GPS indefinitely while in the bush in summer without needing to replace batteries. (I don't keep it on all the time, I just turn it on for a few minutes now and then as needed)
As for the digital divide, it depends on which poor you're talking of. Most people in the bottom-quarter of Norways or USAs population, will be able to afford some kind of internet-connection, but the same will not be true for the poor in a global perspective. There's millions of people who live on less than a dollar a day, facing hunger and lacking even the most basic stuff, it's not plausible that all of these will have internet-connectivity. (and even if they somehow did, there'd still be a divide between "I used the internet-cafe for an hour last monday, it's got 8 machines and a ISDN-line" and "I've got a dozen internet-connected machines in my home, we're hooked up by 1Gbps fibre-optical link."
It's worse than that:
You can't change them. They're not secret. Anyone can copy them. But at the same time it's not convenient to share them when you do want to share them. (people let other people borrow their keys and/or know their passwords all the time, for all sorts of reasons)
Indeed. This argument does nothing to diminish the usefulness of crypto.
Yes people can force you to do various things, but the likeliness of that is lower than the chance that they'll do the same thing secretly if they can get away with it.
Just because someone can hit you with a wrench and take your card-key, it doesn't follow that locking your house is useless. Just because someone can hit you with a wrench until you give up your PIN-code, it doesn't follow that having the card be pin-protected is useless.
That something doesn't protect against -all- threaths, doesn't make it useless. It's still useful if it protects against *some* threaths.
math is nuts, but argument is sane.
Where there's a camera today, in most cases a person with two eyes would do the same, or even a superior job, but the camera is *much* cheaper, so you install 20 cameras and hire one guy to watch the screens, instead of hiring 20 guys.
The same principle may very well apply to drones. Autonomous camera-equipped drones patrolling an area may well turn out to be much cheaper than policemen - and even if that's not true today, it's pretty likely it'll be true soon - technology tends to get dramatically cheaper over time.
It doesn't, offcourse.
It probably works reasonably well *if* the photo is a flash-photo, and taken from precisely such a direction that the beer-cooler is directly between your face and the camera.
This might be the case for some fraction of embarassing photos, but certainly not 95%.
In -some- countries sure. But actually on the average, the opposite is true. Compared to other countries of comparable wealth and development, USA has poor broadband-penetration and low average speeds.
25 Mbps symetrical, is the lowest available speed from my ISP, the other alternatives being 50, 100, 200 or 400Mbps, all symetrical.
This sort of thing is fairly rare in the USA in my experience. (either that, or my US-friends just have bad luck)
Activity is the biggie. I dunno about America, but here in Norway, the calorie-consumption pro-adult has not grown at all over the last 50 years, allthough obesity has grown. (not to US-levels, but higher than it used to be)
The main reason is simply that a lot less people have physical jobs. It makes a lot of difference if you're walking around and doing something for 8 hours a day, or if you're sitting at a desk.
printing 100000 books, doesn't add up to a lot for each book.
But packaging, storing and distributing that million books physically to 2000 bookstores, does cost quite a bit.
They're then laden onto the shelves, in a high-price central location in town, and sold over the counter in units of 1. This costs *substantially*, especially in high-cost locations.
Even if a bookstore sells 20 books/hour for each employee, that's still 1/20th hourly wage for each book sold, or where I'm at, about $3 to add to the price, and that's actually substantially *above* what especially smaller bookstores can hope to achieve.
It's not the print-run as such, printing a large number of books, is cheap, because it's done in bulk. Selling on main-street though, is expensive, and not done in bulk. It costs.
You use a public-facing app that requires authenthication, Dreamhost even has a one-click-installer for Gallery, which supports extensive access-controls.
It doesn't matter what something "is", only what it does. If you upload all your pictures to a gallery-installation on Dreamhost, they're available for download, should your local computer crash-and-burn.
indeed. And that's the reason any kid will think lighter objects fall faster. Because in everyday experience, i.e. in AIR they actually do.
Lead weights -do- outrace feathers by a significant margin, in air at standard atmospheric pressure.
I agree with that, but I think financial incentives aren't really "constricting" anything. Yes they do tilt the playing-field, but it's still a free choice.
Do you want the $5 snack, or the $10 book where mom will sponsor 50%?
You can still choose. Only difference is, there's incentives from other people for making choices those other people agree with. Life works like this in general, really.
And while choice is good, that doesn't mean it's an ideal as a parent to be a moral relativist of the "every choice is equally good" category, because that's just obviously patently not true.
It's significantly more expensive, yes, but not "a lot of capital".
We're talking a machine starting at $350 here. That's like 1-2 days pay.
I could buy a machine, use it for 1 day (during which I've split as much wood as a guy with an axe manages in a week!) toss it away, and still come out ahead of the axe-guy.
The break-even point depends on your salary-level. I earn around $50/hour. Thus if the job takes 9 hours with axe, and 2 hours with the splitter, I've saved 7 hours, and come out ahead.
A machine that breaks even after *2* hours of use is a nobrainer to buy.
You'd buy pre-cut and pre-split wood and do without either ? The person who *did* split that wood though, did so using a hydraulic splitter.
If you split your wood yourself, you either like splitting wood, value your time -very- lowly, or you buy a hydraulic splitter, yes. Sure, if it's a one-time tiny-amount exception kind of thing, an axe makes sense. But if you do a larger amount (as in the wood you'd need for a winter for an average house), then the splitter is *definitely* worth it.
Yeah, there's various optimizations possible. But the general guesstimate as to approximate OOM of memory-consumption, is still valid.
It's not IT, as such. It's corporate America, especially those fractions of it that are easily outsourceable. But also other parts. Infact the average working American earns no more than he did 25 years ago, if you compensate for inflation, while those on the top, make more than triple what they earned back then.
It doesn't have to be like that, but those are the politics you've got, and it's hard to change since money and lobbying has such a huge influence on your politics, and the electoral system ensures it's a two-party-nation and not a diverse democracy.
An average IT-person with 5-10 years experience and a bachelors degree earns $80K - $125K/year over here, and I feel that's perfectly adequate, and fair compared to other similar jobs. (yes costs are higher than in USA, but even after you consider that, it's a good salary)
Strongly disagree with the latter. Knowledge is power. Whomever you're debating your new salary with, very likely knows the salaries of your entire department, while he very much prefers keeping you in the dark.
Sometimes being pissed off is a good thing: If you're genuinely underpaid, compared to other people of similar skill and responsibility, *knowing* that fact, is quite helpful in getting it rectified. It's a lot easier to say: "I don't feel that my current compensation is in line with with my responsibilities" if you already know that 8 of the 10 people in your department with comparable responsibilities earn substantially more.
I agree with the former though: seeking illegal access is a violation of trust, and it's reasonable for the employer to trust you a lot less if you're caught.