"Oh, BTW, Reagan was also so stupid that he couldn't tie his own shoes." I think we'd need a citation for that... however, given his early onset Alzheimer during his presidency, it's plausible. "Everything bad that has ever occurred in the 20th century is due to Reagan and Reagan alone." I think you're not really giving credit to many other Republicans who came after and expanded his policies. Both Bushes are prime examples... also, the enablers, Rove, McCain, Gingrich and the whacko Koch Tea Party. There's lots of people who can take credit for destroying our democracy.
I think I'd allow that Reagan could tie his own shoes. But as a definite 1-percenter, I'd wager that he had a flunky doing it for him. Being senile didn't help, but his greatest sin was in enabling Gingrich, who I personally blame for the all-or-nothing approach to politics that ultimately cultivated in the recent shutdown.
McCain was a fairly positive force before the millennium - excepting the Keating affair. After the century rolled over, however, he went downhill fast.
Actually, there aren't any ways to address government abuse of power, except whistleblowing.
Oh, I can think of another, but IMO modern Americans are entirely too coddled and pussified to ever take up arms in significant enough numbers to make a difference.
The only thing I can think of that would save us from ourselves at this point would be a benevolent military coup.
Welllll.... We might just try voting for people instead of parties and ideologies.
Are you really stupid enough to think that if someone attacks you they don't have intent to kill? I surely hope that you are cleaned out of the gene pool because all that evolution clearly produced an anomaly. You don't consider a possible family, you consider your life at that moment. There is no such thing as honor in the real world, if you abandon an overwhelming advantage in a battle with your life on the line (like a gun) it's a gigantic display of arrogance and vanity. You anti-gun nuts are like bros in gyms thinking they can take on the world by flexing their pecs even though the mirror says otherwise. See how easy such one-sided biased stupidity can be turned around on someone?
And no, I don't own a gun and probably won't. So don't bother with the "Oh hurrrdurr you're a gun nut that'll pull it out whenever an argument happens" crap.
This may come as a shock, but sometimes I don't want to kill people. Just beat some sense into them.
I wonder if IMSAI 8080 paid for placement in WarGames?
They were not a big name by all means. I still have the IMSAI I put together from a kit sold out of San Leandro, California. I thought it was such a cool little machine.
"Cool little machine".
I worked for a small engineering company once developing firmware for process controllers. The development machine was that exact same hardware, right down to the disks. Except it had no speech synthesizer.
the power to say no then the boss wants stuff rushed or things like QA passed over.
I vote for something more like trade guilds myself.
If you're a guildsperson, you're independent and can pick and choose who to work for, when, where, and how.
If you're a union member, you're at the mercy of a single employer, and work the location and hours that the employer says. The union can intercede, but the final choice is a compromise between employer and union, not between client and worker.
This is not always a bad deal, I started out at the large organization I work for two years ago. They generally require most, if not all, IT staff to start out on a contract. I did this for a year and got an offered for a full time position last summer, which for this area, is highly competitive.
Oftentimes, theres a light at the end of the tunnel.
I know someone who did that. Then after 20 years or so, they dumped him on the street.
But it wasn't age discrimination, don't you know...
I'm betting that 18% includes people forced onto contracts because many companies no longer hire full time employees or require "contract" work before making a full time offer.
It includes people who are tired of obtaining a "permanent" position only to have the entire department liquidated 2-3 years later. Repeatedly. As a contractor, I can have multiple clients, which makes it less likely for them to all "fire" me at the same time.
I've formed an S Corporation and worked independently twice, once in the late 90's and around 2005. It is perfectly legal and legit. Both times I worked with an attorney to form the corp, and an accountant to review my books and prepare financial statements. I did the bookkeeping myself using QuickBooks. It is completely legit.
I formed an S Corporation, but it was because I had shareholders and they wanted the liability protection of a Corporation without the double-taxation of a full corporation.
I don't think that in my locality, at least, I would be gaining any benefit as a single contractor over simply operating as a Sole Proprietorship, drawing a salary from assets accumulated.
That's not the surveillance harming you. It's the driver of the black SUV, the corrupt arresting officer, or even the flag-raising system, none of which should ever have access to the database without judicial review.
Only a fool thinks that "having access" is something that can be properly enforced. I have personal experience of how relatively low-level people can use and abuse data that they "don't have access to". And if you don't believe me, then consider Edward Snowden.
Only a fool thinks that black SUVs are likely to go around randomly without some level of higher-level control or that there will never be a time when that higher-level control won't intersect with the set of people who do have access.
Only a fool thinks that you have nothing to hide if you are innocent, because "innocent" isn't an absolute. You can always be found guilty of something, even if it's only complaining about the weather. Someone else gets to determine whether complaining about the weather is legal, and someone else will make the determination of whether your comments about the heat and humidity make you guilty.
The surest way to prevent abuse of data is not to collect it at all.
The second-surest way is to put as many obstacles in the path of getting it as is possible, making clear audits and controls, checks and balances. This is what the FISA courts were supposed to be part of. They failed. This is why demanding real-time feeds of telephone and email meta-data is not as good as having it obtained from the telcos and ISPs on display of a specific warrant.
The third-surest way is to put a define set of bounds on the data. In particular, data should be destroyed after its immediate applicability, not retained forever "just in case". Just in case some statistical analysis happens to turn up that you were standing within 500 meters of a Socialist Workers rally (on the other side of a 10-foot brick wall) when you were in 5th grade and one of the rally participants turns out to be the next Osama bin Laden 15 years later.
If we have to destroy our way of life to "preserve" it, then manifestly the whole democracy experiment has been a failure and we should stop with the hypocrisy already.
I'm definitely in the "no" camp on this one, but how about after-market, open-source firmware? I run DD-WRT on my good ol' WRT54G, which I trust a heck of a lot more than the OEM code. How far does replacing the stock firmware go towards securing my home network?
It goes as far as you can trust your replacement code.
It won't protect you from hardware-based exploits except to the degree that you use the hardware in unexploitable ways. It won't protect you from fifth-column code in your OS if you use that code without inspecting it. But at least you should have a reasonably degree of trust in your own code.
And yes, I know the theory behind malware-injecting compilers, linkers and debuggers. But as long as you're not operating in a monocultural environment, there are simply too many ways that fifth-column software tools can fail, and fail in ways that make it obvious that there's something seriously wrong.
If you replace a hardware router with a PC, you have to trust
CPU
Motherboard
BIOS
Storage device
Storage controller
Network interface
Operating system
If any of the above is compromised, you are no better off than with a hardware based router.
If you by hardware router mean a device that truly forwards packets in hardware without involving any sort of CPU, then your best guarantee is the economical one. It is cheaper for the vendor to manufacture hardware without snooping capabilities than with.
The flip side of that is that if you are a powerful agency - one powerful enough to control what's going on in overseas fabrication plants and suppress any signals coming out of them, you have to be able to set up a scheme that's subtle enough to go undetected without it either being subverted by or corrupting the:
CPU
Motherboard
BIOS
Storage device
Storage controller
Network interface
Operating system
Because Chthulhu knows, it's hard enough to get that stack operating reliably even without a secret agenda. If just one component in there doesn't operate precisely like its Secret Masters expect it to - whether due to local customization or even simple software upgrades, it's likely to explode very messily.
Because since protons prefer round, smooth booties, they won't date neutrons, which then fly off into space to shop. Didn't you learn anything in science class?
I hate to break the news to you , but "old-fashioned police work" also involved wire tapping and intercepting post. Its whats known as gaining evidence. Now in a perfect world it wouldn't be necessary , but unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world and a lot of people don't play by the rules and oddly enough they usually say "no" if someone asks if they've commited a crime. Therefor the authorities have to get information on their activities, a lot of which comes from correspondence in whatever form it takes.
Hope that clears things up for you since you're clearly new to this reality.
Whoosh!
target individuals they suspect rather than mass collect everything
Nothing was said about no longer doing wire tapping etc. Merely that the mere act of existence should no longer make you a suspect on equal footing with the senior counsel of Al-Qaeda.
Still, not everyone has the same preferences as me. There's room for all of us.
I have heard a velocity sensitive player piano impression that Maurice Ravel actually did of his famous Pavane pour une infante défunte piano solo. It was like listening to a ghost playing, strangely compelling and yet haunting as the piece indeed was intended to be. Thank you for expressing this important sentiment and bringing clarity to this discussion!
Thank you. On the flip side, I listened to some Glenn Gould recordings on a concert grand piano. Gould had a reputation for being an outstanding pianist, but between the lifeless ambience of the recording studio and his utterly precise mechanical style of playing, no robot could have sounded more soulless.
The Apple Newton is important because it introduced the concept of a handheld. The industry learned from Apple. Without Newton's handwriting recognition failure, Jeff Hawkins would not have invented Graffiti, which was a "simpler" way of entering data into a handheld through a stylus. Graffiti worked until the Treo and Blackberry keyboards came along, followed by Apple's adaptive touchscreen.
Grafitti still works. I prefer it to touch keyboards, as I can enter text faster and more accurately using Grafitti.
The downside to Grafitti is the need for a stylus, since those critters are entirely too easy to lose. Fortunately a toothpick makes a good emergency substitute.
Why do so many people seem to have difficulty with the words "republic" and "democracy"? They're not mutually exclusive. The US is both - it is a republic with democracy. The fact you're banging on about the Bill of Rights and don't seem to even understand what sort of government you have speaks volumes about your education and arrogance.
Because to some True Believers, "democracy" reminds them too much of the word "Democrat", and to them Democraps (sic) are the Spawn of Satan.
Plus, the idea of the smelly rabble running things is offensive. Much better that we simply submit to our aristocratic masters. The select few (I started to say "elite", but that too is a political duckword). Who know how to run things properly if we'd just let them double down on their ideology.
I thought that Godwin's Law was simply an observation that in a given debate, the Nazis would eventually be brought up. I didn't think there was anything about it being the end of the discussion, just an observation that such a thing was bound to occur.
In theory. In fact, it's used as a blunt instrument or ad hominem
There really ought to be a Meta-Godwin law that says that invoking Godwin's Law does not excuse Nazi-like behavior.
but why would you bother trying to emulate the sounds of an orchestra or of any real instrument?
why, when those sounds are so limited in their expressiveness? the electronic music producer has a far wider tableau to play with than wobbling tubes and strings.
When I was much younger, my preferences ran to synthesizers and pipe organs because of their incredible range of timbres and didn't have much use for the piano. Gradually I learned to appreciate the nuances that a good piano performance can deliver.
Music is a discipline that covers an immense amount of territory. Sometimes it's good to be unsubtle, sometimes not. Sometimes you even blend the two, as Beethoven demonstrated so well. And, incidentally, Beethoven also composed one of the first works for "synthesizer" (Wellington's Victory).
Recorded music, whether as pure audio or as programmed via MIDI or similar is "dead" music. It may be very good music and worth listening to a thousand times, but it will always sound the same. Live music will always sound different. If nothing else, someone will accidentally kick over a cymbal stand in the middle, which makes it a bit of an adventure and an opportunity to explore alternative performances.
In short, live or canned, "natural" instruments, "prepared" instruments or synthetic ones, music is diverse and wonderful and always worth listening to. At least assuming that it appeals to you. I run from extended drum solos, rap, and other non-melodic stuff myself and opera... well, enough other people have said all that needs saying. Still, not everyone has the same preferences as me. There's room for all of us.
I'm surprised he did it from his dorm (if, indeed, he actually did it). I thought the sensible thing was to go down to the local public library and/or coffee shop (without cameras) and do your shit from there.
Well, assuming that there aren't cameras in the local public library or coffee ship, the challenge is in getting there without showing up on any intermediary cameras.
That, after all, was one of the first things they scoured after the Marathon bombing.
... and they are not going to use it for this kind of case.
Bomb threat from unknown source? Boston? Possible foreign connections? The NSA is allegedly supposed to be involved in investigation of terror threats. It's the other stuff they're doing that's got people upset.
OMG. If that is what Europe really wants, then they can keep it. Maybe they don't realize that workers don't magically become "productive" out of the womb. Nor do they when someone hands them a diploma. Productivity increases with experience.
Well, I guess someone should point that out to all the US corporations who consider their over-30 programmers to be out-of-code commodities to be disposed of.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh, BTW, Reagan was also so stupid that he couldn't tie his own shoes." I think we'd need a citation for that... however, given his early onset Alzheimer during his presidency, it's plausible.
"Everything bad that has ever occurred in the 20th century is due to Reagan and Reagan alone." I think you're not really giving credit to many other Republicans who came after and expanded his policies. Both Bushes are prime examples... also, the enablers, Rove, McCain, Gingrich and the whacko Koch Tea Party. There's lots of people who can take credit for destroying our democracy.
I think I'd allow that Reagan could tie his own shoes. But as a definite 1-percenter, I'd wager that he had a flunky doing it for him. Being senile didn't help, but his greatest sin was in enabling Gingrich, who I personally blame for the all-or-nothing approach to politics that ultimately cultivated in the recent shutdown.
McCain was a fairly positive force before the millennium - excepting the Keating affair. After the century rolled over, however, he went downhill fast.
Will you teach your children to flake flint hand axes?
Thought not.
Around here, if you dig deep enough, you'll hit limestone. Other than that, all we got is sand. No granite, no quartz, no flint. #$@$#@!!
Actually, there aren't any ways to address government abuse of power, except whistleblowing.
Oh, I can think of another, but IMO modern Americans are entirely too coddled and pussified to ever take up arms in significant enough numbers to make a difference.
The only thing I can think of that would save us from ourselves at this point would be a benevolent military coup.
Welllll.... We might just try voting for people instead of parties and ideologies.
Specifically, people likely to change things.
Which makes you a complete idiot, because a huge number of people have died from being punched in the head once.
That's not to mention how you can blind them, create permanent disabilities etc.
And you know, on top of "beat some sense into them" as a worldview making you functionally indistinguishable to fascists.
sarcasm detector: failure indicated.
It is incredibly easy to be smarter and more moral than anyone in the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the government.
General opinion is that even used-car salesman can do as much.
Are you really stupid enough to think that if someone attacks you they don't have intent to kill? I surely hope that you are cleaned out of the gene pool because all that evolution clearly produced an anomaly. You don't consider a possible family, you consider your life at that moment. There is no such thing as honor in the real world, if you abandon an overwhelming advantage in a battle with your life on the line (like a gun) it's a gigantic display of arrogance and vanity. You anti-gun nuts are like bros in gyms thinking they can take on the world by flexing their pecs even though the mirror says otherwise. See how easy such one-sided biased stupidity can be turned around on someone?
And no, I don't own a gun and probably won't. So don't bother with the "Oh hurrrdurr you're a gun nut that'll pull it out whenever an argument happens" crap.
This may come as a shock, but sometimes I don't want to kill people. Just beat some sense into them.
I wonder if IMSAI 8080 paid for placement in WarGames?
They were not a big name by all means. I still have the IMSAI I put together from a kit sold out of San Leandro, California. I thought it was such a cool little machine.
"Cool little machine".
I worked for a small engineering company once developing firmware for process controllers. The development machine was that exact same hardware, right down to the disks. Except it had no speech synthesizer.
We need an union hiring hall system for IT with
real job training
some kind of an apprenticeship system.
workers rights
the power to say no then the boss wants stuff rushed or things like QA passed over.
I vote for something more like trade guilds myself.
If you're a guildsperson, you're independent and can pick and choose who to work for, when, where, and how.
If you're a union member, you're at the mercy of a single employer, and work the location and hours that the employer says. The union can intercede, but the final choice is a compromise between employer and union, not between client and worker.
This is not always a bad deal, I started out at the large organization I work for two years ago. They generally require most, if not all, IT staff to start out on a contract. I did this for a year and got an offered for a full time position last summer, which for this area, is highly competitive.
Oftentimes, theres a light at the end of the tunnel.
I know someone who did that. Then after 20 years or so, they dumped him on the street.
But it wasn't age discrimination, don't you know...
I'm betting that 18% includes people forced onto contracts because many companies no longer hire full time employees or require "contract" work before making a full time offer.
It includes people who are tired of obtaining a "permanent" position only to have the entire department liquidated 2-3 years later. Repeatedly. As a contractor, I can have multiple clients, which makes it less likely for them to all "fire" me at the same time.
I've formed an S Corporation and worked independently twice, once in the late 90's and around 2005. It is perfectly legal and legit. Both times I worked with an attorney to form the corp, and an accountant to review my books and prepare financial statements. I did the bookkeeping myself using QuickBooks. It is completely legit.
I formed an S Corporation, but it was because I had shareholders and they wanted the liability protection of a Corporation without the double-taxation of a full corporation.
I don't think that in my locality, at least, I would be gaining any benefit as a single contractor over simply operating as a Sole Proprietorship, drawing a salary from assets accumulated.
That's not the surveillance harming you. It's the driver of the black SUV, the corrupt arresting officer, or even the flag-raising system, none of which should ever have access to the database without judicial review.
Only a fool thinks that "having access" is something that can be properly enforced. I have personal experience of how relatively low-level people can use and abuse data that they "don't have access to". And if you don't believe me, then consider Edward Snowden.
Only a fool thinks that black SUVs are likely to go around randomly without some level of higher-level control or that there will never be a time when that higher-level control won't intersect with the set of people who do have access.
Only a fool thinks that you have nothing to hide if you are innocent, because "innocent" isn't an absolute. You can always be found guilty of something, even if it's only complaining about the weather. Someone else gets to determine whether complaining about the weather is legal, and someone else will make the determination of whether your comments about the heat and humidity make you guilty.
The surest way to prevent abuse of data is not to collect it at all.
The second-surest way is to put as many obstacles in the path of getting it as is possible, making clear audits and controls, checks and balances. This is what the FISA courts were supposed to be part of. They failed. This is why demanding real-time feeds of telephone and email meta-data is not as good as having it obtained from the telcos and ISPs on display of a specific warrant.
The third-surest way is to put a define set of bounds on the data. In particular, data should be destroyed after its immediate applicability, not retained forever "just in case". Just in case some statistical analysis happens to turn up that you were standing within 500 meters of a Socialist Workers rally (on the other side of a 10-foot brick wall) when you were in 5th grade and one of the rally participants turns out to be the next Osama bin Laden 15 years later.
If we have to destroy our way of life to "preserve" it, then manifestly the whole democracy experiment has been a failure and we should stop with the hypocrisy already.
I'm definitely in the "no" camp on this one, but how about after-market, open-source firmware? I run DD-WRT on my good ol' WRT54G, which I trust a heck of a lot more than the OEM code. How far does replacing the stock firmware go towards securing my home network?
It goes as far as you can trust your replacement code.
It won't protect you from hardware-based exploits except to the degree that you use the hardware in unexploitable ways. It won't protect you from fifth-column code in your OS if you use that code without inspecting it. But at least you should have a reasonably degree of trust in your own code.
And yes, I know the theory behind malware-injecting compilers, linkers and debuggers. But as long as you're not operating in a monocultural environment, there are simply too many ways that fifth-column software tools can fail, and fail in ways that make it obvious that there's something seriously wrong.
If you replace a hardware router with a PC, you have to trust
If any of the above is compromised, you are no better off than with a hardware based router.
If you by hardware router mean a device that truly forwards packets in hardware without involving any sort of CPU, then your best guarantee is the economical one. It is cheaper for the vendor to manufacture hardware without snooping capabilities than with.
The flip side of that is that if you are a powerful agency - one powerful enough to control what's going on in overseas fabrication plants and suppress any signals coming out of them, you have to be able to set up a scheme that's subtle enough to go undetected without it either being subverted by or corrupting the:
Because Chthulhu knows, it's hard enough to get that stack operating reliably even without a secret agenda. If just one component in there doesn't operate precisely like its Secret Masters expect it to - whether due to local customization or even simple software upgrades, it's likely to explode very messily.
Because since protons prefer round, smooth booties, they won't date neutrons, which then fly off into space to shop. Didn't you learn anything in science class?
Neutrons just don't want to get involved.
I hate to break the news to you , but "old-fashioned police work" also involved wire tapping and intercepting post. Its whats known as gaining evidence. Now in a perfect world it wouldn't be necessary , but unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world and a lot of people don't play by the rules and oddly enough they usually say "no" if someone asks if they've commited a crime. Therefor the authorities have to get information on their activities, a lot of which comes from correspondence in whatever form it takes.
Hope that clears things up for you since you're clearly new to this reality.
Whoosh!
target individuals they suspect rather than mass collect everything
Nothing was said about no longer doing wire tapping etc. Merely that the mere act of existence should no longer make you a suspect on equal footing with the senior counsel of Al-Qaeda.
Still, not everyone has the same preferences as me. There's room for all of us.
I have heard a velocity sensitive player piano impression that Maurice Ravel actually did of his famous Pavane pour une infante défunte piano solo. It was like listening to a ghost playing, strangely compelling and yet haunting as the piece indeed was intended to be. Thank you for expressing this important sentiment and bringing clarity to this discussion!
Thank you. On the flip side, I listened to some Glenn Gould recordings on a concert grand piano. Gould had a reputation for being an outstanding pianist, but between the lifeless ambience of the recording studio and his utterly precise mechanical style of playing, no robot could have sounded more soulless.
I would argue Wolfenstein 3D before Doom.
The Apple Newton is important because it introduced the concept of a handheld. The industry learned from Apple. Without Newton's handwriting recognition failure, Jeff Hawkins would not have invented Graffiti, which was a "simpler" way of entering data into a handheld through a stylus. Graffiti worked until the Treo and Blackberry keyboards came along, followed by Apple's adaptive touchscreen.
Grafitti still works. I prefer it to touch keyboards, as I can enter text faster and more accurately using Grafitti.
The downside to Grafitti is the need for a stylus, since those critters are entirely too easy to lose. Fortunately a toothpick makes a good emergency substitute.
Why do so many people seem to have difficulty with the words "republic" and "democracy"? They're not mutually exclusive. The US is both - it is a republic with democracy. The fact you're banging on about the Bill of Rights and don't seem to even understand what sort of government you have speaks volumes about your education and arrogance.
Because to some True Believers, "democracy" reminds them too much of the word "Democrat", and to them Democraps (sic) are the Spawn of Satan.
Plus, the idea of the smelly rabble running things is offensive. Much better that we simply submit to our aristocratic masters. The select few (I started to say "elite", but that too is a political duckword). Who know how to run things properly if we'd just let them double down on their ideology.
I thought that Godwin's Law was simply an observation that in a given debate, the Nazis would eventually be brought up. I didn't think there was anything about it being the end of the discussion, just an observation that such a thing was bound to occur.
In theory. In fact, it's used as a blunt instrument or ad hominem
There really ought to be a Meta-Godwin law that says that invoking Godwin's Law does not excuse Nazi-like behavior.
Only crooks can become the POTUS.
Not entirely true. There was Jimmy Carter.
Unfortunately, it appears that crooks make better presidents, though.
but why would you bother trying to emulate the sounds of an orchestra or of any real instrument?
why, when those sounds are so limited in their expressiveness? the electronic music producer has a far wider tableau to play with than wobbling tubes and strings.
When I was much younger, my preferences ran to synthesizers and pipe organs because of their incredible range of timbres and didn't have much use for the piano. Gradually I learned to appreciate the nuances that a good piano performance can deliver.
Music is a discipline that covers an immense amount of territory. Sometimes it's good to be unsubtle, sometimes not. Sometimes you even blend the two, as Beethoven demonstrated so well. And, incidentally, Beethoven also composed one of the first works for "synthesizer" (Wellington's Victory).
Recorded music, whether as pure audio or as programmed via MIDI or similar is "dead" music. It may be very good music and worth listening to a thousand times, but it will always sound the same. Live music will always sound different. If nothing else, someone will accidentally kick over a cymbal stand in the middle, which makes it a bit of an adventure and an opportunity to explore alternative performances.
In short, live or canned, "natural" instruments, "prepared" instruments or synthetic ones, music is diverse and wonderful and always worth listening to. At least assuming that it appeals to you. I run from extended drum solos, rap, and other non-melodic stuff myself and opera... well, enough other people have said all that needs saying. Still, not everyone has the same preferences as me. There's room for all of us.
I'm surprised he did it from his dorm (if, indeed, he actually did it). I thought the sensible thing was to go down to the local public library and/or coffee shop (without cameras) and do your shit from there.
Well, assuming that there aren't cameras in the local public library or coffee ship, the challenge is in getting there without showing up on any intermediary cameras.
That, after all, was one of the first things they scoured after the Marathon bombing.
... and they are not going to use it for this kind of case.
Bomb threat from unknown source? Boston? Possible foreign connections? The NSA is allegedly supposed to be involved in investigation of terror threats. It's the other stuff they're doing that's got people upset.
OMG. If that is what Europe really wants, then they can keep it. Maybe they don't realize that workers don't magically become "productive" out of the womb. Nor do they when someone hands them a diploma. Productivity increases with experience.
Well, I guess someone should point that out to all the US corporations who consider their over-30 programmers to be out-of-code commodities to be disposed of.