If your college can't provide completely separate facilities for smokers where they can kill themselves without affecting others, the only logical solution is to ban smokers from the premises.
I don't see why an office or school shuld facilitate self destroying activities of people that are better practised in private, where such pitiful spectacle is spared to the rest of the population...
We decided to move away from one of the "Asian Tigers" to the UK (in spite of the weather!).
The reason: the standard of living was dreadful for us: no culture, censorship, no democracy (not that it mattered to us, we were foreigners, but we could not stand all the simulation) and constant religious adoctrination in favour of one religion ignoring all the others. We were making loads of money, but it was not worth it.
In the UK our standard of living is more modest but just the TV, books and net access make it worthwhile.
I would recommend Europe to everyboy over the US: excellent level of life, culture, arts, football (the real one), and you are always one hour away of at least 10 great places (fancy a weekend break in Paris, Rome, Barcelona or Berlin?). Another important thing is safety: guns are banned here in the UK: it is a relief to know you are unlikely to be gunned down by a crazy driver or a derided thieve.
The first time you're asked to be in the office for 10-12 hour days, seven days a week for months on end to meet that all important deadline (or the company runs out of money and folds), romantic notions will be the furthest things from your mind
and then this:
I won't hire the most brilliant rookie 3D programmer in the industry if he doesn't have any social skills
It seems to me like the aim of a Game company is to destroy the few skills a rookie programmer could have left!
Honestly, I think the best avenue is to develop games for fun, as a passtime, that way one gets all the good bits and avoids all the bad ones of game developping.
God made it if you wish. But god's land ends there, far away from any relevant knowledge about the Universe and firmly in the place of useless especulation.
What will win that war is systemic, on message and practical stuff about pertinent American values- in this case, free enterprise.
Free software gurantees free enterprise. Other types of licensing block enterprising by locking you out of the market not because you are worst technicaly but because you don't hold part of the market already.
I still find excesive the death penalty as punishment for spionage(human right's respecting countries don't have this dilema).
Knowing the blured morality an espy has to deal with lineancy will be fairer and more useful: an spy that fooled people, specialy one without principles (that is what the evidence is implying this guy to be) can be locked for the rest of his/her life and could earn an early release teaching other spies how he managed to fool them.
It is fine if you retreat to the instant before the big-bang (which in itself is meaningless, there was no time before the big bang). But from the big-bang onwards we don't require from a god to explain the Universe. Some brilliant minds are already sniffing around how to probe a god is not necessary for the Universe to be the way it is, life and evolution included.
The religious people can have all the unprobed phenomena for themselves and their faith, that is fine. What they can't have is the truth in matters were there is compeling evidence divine intervention is not necessary to explain how things happened.
We know what is going on: friends of GB v.1.0 & v2.0 in the arms industry need boost, GB v.2.0 pushes for it, friends in arms industry get richer.
Surely the US needs to defend themselves against "rogue" states (ahem, like who? Irak that stalmated against that military power known as Iran? Cuba where the few cars around are from the 50s? North Korea that is dying of starvation? China or India? How many bombs do you need to destroy China or India without harming yourself in the process).
So basicaly it is a pointless excercise. The worst atack against US interests had come from run of the mill terrorists with just normal bombs. If those guys arm an atomic bomb they will not deliver it with a misile, they will build it in downtown NY or Washingnton and will deliver it in a Domino's Pizza van...... in less than 30 minutes...
I mean, honest, he is pushing for more nukes all around the place, no matter that it will start a new arms race and that it would violate treaties signed by the US, and all of the sudden: "look, look, here, we found a spy, and he sold all our secrets, we are compromissed , our current systems are useless....."
Far toooooo convenient.
And give me a break/. guys: you don't have to try to mask this as a technology issue, technology here is the least important thing of the matter.
The fact that there are brilliant people that are accomplished in different fields does not mean that whatever they do in one field has value in another. Had Picasso been a brilliant Civil Engineer his enginnering efforts would perhaps had been complemented with artistic stuff, but that art has a name, it is called architecture and surely had he built one of those horrid appartment buildings devoided of all humanity, those would not have any artistic value, not mattering the engineer had been Don Pablo.
Programming is not art by itself alone, as it is not the production of brushes for painters, of walls for architects, of hammers for sculptors or of printed music for performers.
Programming is a tool, a mean, a craft. The final product could be art like a computer game, computer generated images, electronic music and anything else that goes beyond being useful. A payroll program and its results, no matter how clever, neat and well done is, is not art.
I read many comments here implying that because something is dificult then it is artistic. It is like if the plumbers of would all of the sudden demand to be considered artist because they contributed to build such a marvel and because their craft is quite difficult to master, what would be absolut nonsense of course.
That is just a bunch of sexist rubish and Cosmpolitan like propaganda. If somebody ever needed probe that "geeks" need go out and get some fresh air the previous message will probe it beyond reasonable doubt.
There are 2 characteristics that can define what most people agree that Art is:
-Any form of art can be appreciated by people that are not artists.
-Art influences our emotions and is aiming to do so.
Now, a C++ piece of code can be ingenious, even beautiful (beautiful in terms of what? Of how it looks? Of how efficent it is?) but it can't be appreciated by somebody that does not understand this technical artifact. As art it is useless. I would also question the sanity of somebody that feels such a thing has infatuated its senses in the same way a painting, a movie or a book will do.
A mathematical equation like E=m*c*c is beautiful for its simplicity, elegance and representative power, but again, its aim is not to touch our aesthetic senses, its aim is to explain a concept, and as such it is as artistic as the address written in an enveloppe.
Now, if you talk about a computer game (the final product you see and experience) then I agree it could be considered a form of art, after all it is like an interactive opera.
And of course if you make a painting with only Einstein's famous equation, then it becomes art because the artist is trying to make an statement about something.
So no guys, as much as most of you would like to believe you are like Beethoven, Picasso, Kubrik, Cervantes, Pavlova or Rodin, no you are not.
But be not sad! You are all great technicians and engineers, which is not small achievement.
This is the worst definition of music I ever read.
If you thing music is just "mathematics" of some sort then you have no idea what Music is all about, and how it is produced and how it evolves.
Sorry for being a reactionary conservative prick, but I think that there is such a thing as obscene material,
Please define "obscene material".
And what if your definition is too wide for my taste?
Or to narrow?
Why should I accept your defintion?
Or why should you accept mine?
For many fundamentalistic societies women in miniskirst are obscene, if a fundamentalist minded party wins the election in Australia or the US, should pictures of women in miniskirt be banned ?(I know, they would ban "worst" stuff first, but I hope I explain myself)
Should a Communist party win an election, then should they decide what is good for the people?
Don't you understand that defending "obscenity" with todays benign rulers is to give carte-blanche to the would be tyrants of the future?
and would not have a particularly high opinion of anyone that thought pictures of, say, an 8 year old orphan being forced to have anal sex should be defended on some pathetic "free speech" principle.
That is an extreme case, but still such material should not be banned on the basis of "obscenity" or even worst "morality". It should be deemed to be evidence of abuse, and as such any person in posession of such material should be held responsible for witholding criminal evidence. But that person should not be declared a criminal because he is "obscene" or "immoral", obscenity is a term that changes from individual to individual, from time to time, and from country to country. Obscenity is a relative concept, and as such it is the worst candidate to make a fair law.
I'm willing to bet that was not what the writers of the US Constitution had in mind.
Whatever the US founding bunch had in mind, the circumstances of today's World demand different actions. Where it was appropriate to grant everybody arms to defend themselves in the middle of nowhere it becomes nonsense where at any given time you are sorrounded by people with a gun in a innercity area.
Where mild provisions for free speech were made, now it is necesary a radical upholding of free speech no matter what. You are either free or not free to say what you think. There is not such a thing as half freedom of speech.
People today have to make their own laws using the experience of 225 years of more human experience than that the US founding people could not even see coming. The US founding people solved the problems of their time, and are very useful as a reference, but they were not gods, and as the humans they were, they commited mistakes and could not see the future.
Had the US founders known about the Internet, the global village, apartheid, Nazism, Communism, 1984, schoolchildren killed by schoolmates, proxy servers in some Asian countries and so on, perhaps they would had gone even further than you might think in the defense of free speech.
I know that some of the American libertarian types out there may not like this - but I look at it this way, when speech is as 'free' as it is in the US, it basically becomes meaningless.
And what does that mean? That the freedom looses its meaning? That what is said is devoid of meaning most of the time?
If everybody is using and encouraging freedom of speech, if it is part of daily life: how can that render it meaningless?
O boy, you would need to live in a place where you could loose your job, your country or your life to understand how important is freedom of speech, unsupervised by nobody if possible.
There are many other laws that would deal with undesirable stuff, you don't need to constraint freedom of speech for that.
At least in Australia, because we don't traditionally talk about having a 'right' to 'free speech' as such, it seems that we value using our speech wisely and responsibly _as well as_ valuing the freedom that we do have to speak our minds.
You trust too much: what gurantees that your goverment will not allow it in the future if there is not a legal frame that specificaly stops the goverment to meddle with the minds of the people?
This stuff is pushing into the United States. Look at "hate crime" legislation. Guess what that is? Pretty soon, you say the wrong joke or believe in the wrong thing or say the wrong thing and you will be fined and put in jail.
Althoug your example is extreme, I would ask you to tell us how would you defend the right of people from a minority community not to be insulted.
I hope you have never been in the not so funny side of the joke, one after another, all your life. Then you will know it is not funny and can make the life of many people really miserable.
The constitution doesn't *grant* any rights at all. It is merely a statement of our *intention* to preserve our rights, which are intrinsic to free people.
The right to bear arms is one's right to self-defense, whether from criminals, governments (I know, same thing), or even wild animals
There is nothing intrinsic to human freedoms about arms, specialy for "self defense" as you would call it.
Arms are artifacts, like a pot, a plough or any other tool. We make pots, they make life easier but they are not intrinsic to human freedom just because they make our life easier (or granting without conceeding, arms make your life safer, not for that they are intrinsic to freedom).
If Americans have decided that you need arms no matter what so be it and good luck, but what you are implying is that who advocates arm ownership no matters what has somehow a higher moral ground, which is absolutely ridiculous.
To many societies, including others as advanced as the US, the thought of arms for all is obscene and abhorrent and neither pro or anti arms people have a higher moral ground on the issue, just different preferences.
I used to be first a programmer and then a Sys Admin in a University that should remain nameless in a Latin-american country.
In the first job we had access as students/workers to the school records of the 300000+ students and who knows how many former students.
Although there is a conflict of interests, students where always under the supervision of full time senior staff and when something fishy happened (the kind of thing like releasing to the press school records of somebody famous) situations were always clarified and if somebody was guilty of something, that person was dismissed. A full time worker could have done that as well, so I don't see why to be a student should be an impediment.
In this kind of environment we have a win-win situation: the University (publicly founded) gets higly competent, motivated, curious workers that are not afraid to try new things (I implemented some compression algorithms to save disk space in the then valuable hard disk, saving the Uni many $$$$) and that are cheap, and the students get valuable experience that they would not get otherwise or that they will take longer to acquire.
After my Uni work I never looked back: the experience I gained leap-frogged me ahead of most of the chaps of my generation and I was doing better, more interesting work far sooner than most of my friends.
I am a programmer and my salary is an obscenity (too high). Period.
I am riding a lucky wave, hopefully it will not end, but if it does end I am prepared for that (both phsicolgicaly and profesionaly).
The original point to which I replied was that Open Software was bad, among other things, because it could make programmers poorer. I said that is not a bad thing in itslef and any way, sooner or later programming will be in the scrap yard of forgotten professions.
It is just disgusting to see how a whiz kid without any life or work experience can command much higher salaries than experiencied engineers in this or other fields and to read that they believe they inherently deserve it, to what I say: bollocks!
Programmers in particular, and most IT people in general, are in the right side of the offer-demand equation for the moment, and that is due to historical circumstances, nothing ot their individual own making.
So lets enjoy the ride, lets hope it lasts, something will come that will make our skills less valuable, but for god's sake, lets not believe that getting rich writing Java applets is a god sent right, it is just a very lucky privilege.
And what is the problem with programmers getting less money?
If what you are advocating is that free software is a bad thing because it does not protect the artificialy inflated salaries of a few lucky guys, then I strongly disagree.
If software is first class you still need to install it, configure it, spec it for your system, etc.
Perhaps the day will arrive when software will be soo good that it will do all those things itself: fully self repairing, self configurable, etc. And then what are you going to suggest: to stop it to keep the jobs of the few Sysadmins left? Guess what, it will be cheaper, and thus somebody will use such a system no matter what.
Your rants sound like those of the workers that didi not want automatization in the manufacturinbg industry exactly for the same reason: fearing they would loose their jobs. Unfortunately economics are brutal, so either fat cheque Joe Programmer learns to live with the fact that software engineering will be more efficient (sooner than he thinks) and thus less people will be needed for it or he lives deluding himself he can do something about it (like saying Open Source software is evil for example).
For god's sake, I could not help it, but the first time I saw how Gnutella works, without being a network specialist or a mathematician, it reminded me of those chain letters that promess you will become reach if you send the letter to other people and one buck to the person that sent it to you.
It does not work for your info, although you will find 2 or 3 guys that will swear they got the money.
We are clever people, most of us know some little maths. Please check your maths and recognize that something growing exponentially is deemed to fail if the supporting infraestructure (bandwith) does not grow at the same rate.
Slashdot Mirror
If your college can't provide completely separate facilities for smokers where they can kill themselves without affecting others, the only logical solution is to ban smokers from the premises.
I don't see why an office or school shuld facilitate self destroying activities of people that are better practised in private, where such pitiful spectacle is spared to the rest of the population...
We decided to move away from one of the "Asian Tigers" to the UK (in spite of the weather!).
The reason: the standard of living was dreadful for us: no culture, censorship, no democracy (not that it mattered to us, we were foreigners, but we could not stand all the simulation) and constant religious adoctrination in favour of one religion ignoring all the others. We were making loads of money, but it was not worth it.
In the UK our standard of living is more modest but just the TV, books and net access make it worthwhile.
I would recommend Europe to everyboy over the US: excellent level of life, culture, arts, football (the real one), and you are always one hour away of at least 10 great places (fancy a weekend break in Paris, Rome, Barcelona or Berlin?). Another important thing is safety: guns are banned here in the UK: it is a relief to know you are unlikely to be gunned down by a crazy driver or a derided thieve.
Software developers are not artists, they are highly creative technicians.
Funny, first this:
The first time you're asked to be in the office for 10-12 hour days, seven days a week for months on end to meet that all important deadline (or the company runs out of money and folds), romantic notions will be the furthest things from your mind
and then this:
I won't hire the most brilliant rookie 3D programmer in the industry if he doesn't have any social skills
It seems to me like the aim of a Game company is to destroy the few skills a rookie programmer could have left!
Honestly, I think the best avenue is to develop games for fun, as a passtime, that way one gets all the good bits and avoids all the bad ones of game developping.
God made it if you wish. But god's land ends there, far away from any relevant knowledge about the Universe and firmly in the place of useless especulation.
Why should anybody bother to kill something that does not exist?
What will win that war is systemic, on message and practical stuff about pertinent American values- in this case, free enterprise.
Free software gurantees free enterprise. Other types of licensing block enterprising by locking you out of the market not because you are worst technicaly but because you don't hold part of the market already.
I still find excesive the death penalty as punishment for spionage(human right's respecting countries don't have this dilema).
Knowing the blured morality an espy has to deal with lineancy will be fairer and more useful: an spy that fooled people, specialy one without principles (that is what the evidence is implying this guy to be) can be locked for the rest of his/her life and could earn an early release teaching other spies how he managed to fool them.
It is fine if you retreat to the instant before the big-bang (which in itself is meaningless, there was no time before the big bang). But from the big-bang onwards we don't require from a god to explain the Universe. Some brilliant minds are already sniffing around how to probe a god is not necessary for the Universe to be the way it is, life and evolution included.
The religious people can have all the unprobed phenomena for themselves and their faith, that is fine. What they can't have is the truth in matters were there is compeling evidence divine intervention is not necessary to explain how things happened.
So what?
We know what is going on: friends of GB v.1.0 & v2.0 in the arms industry need boost, GB v.2.0 pushes for it, friends in arms industry get richer.
Surely the US needs to defend themselves against "rogue" states (ahem, like who? Irak that stalmated against that military power known as Iran? Cuba where the few cars around are from the 50s? North Korea that is dying of starvation? China or India? How many bombs do you need to destroy China or India without harming yourself in the process).
So basicaly it is a pointless excercise. The worst atack against US interests had come from run of the mill terrorists with just normal bombs. If those guys arm an atomic bomb they will not deliver it with a misile, they will build it in downtown NY or Washingnton and will deliver it in a Domino's Pizza van...... in less than 30 minutes...
I mean, honest, he is pushing for more nukes all around the place, no matter that it will start a new arms race and that it would violate treaties signed by the US, and all of the sudden: "look, look, here, we found a spy, and he sold all our secrets, we are compromissed , our current systems are useless....."
/. guys: you don't have to try to mask this as a technology issue, technology here is the least important thing of the matter.
Far toooooo convenient.
And give me a break
The fact that there are brilliant people that are accomplished in different fields does not mean that whatever they do in one field has value in another. Had Picasso been a brilliant Civil Engineer his enginnering efforts would perhaps had been complemented with artistic stuff, but that art has a name, it is called architecture and surely had he built one of those horrid appartment buildings devoided of all humanity, those would not have any artistic value, not mattering the engineer had been Don Pablo.
Programming is not art by itself alone, as it is not the production of brushes for painters, of walls for architects, of hammers for sculptors or of printed music for performers.
Programming is a tool, a mean, a craft. The final product could be art like a computer game, computer generated images, electronic music and anything else that goes beyond being useful. A payroll program and its results, no matter how clever, neat and well done is, is not art.
I read many comments here implying that because something is dificult then it is artistic. It is like if the plumbers of would all of the sudden demand to be considered artist because they contributed to build such a marvel and because their craft is quite difficult to master, what would be absolut nonsense of course.
That is just a bunch of sexist rubish and Cosmpolitan like propaganda. If somebody ever needed probe that "geeks" need go out and get some fresh air the previous message will probe it beyond reasonable doubt.
Girls aroused by source code, yeah.
That is painting.
The artist decided to use a program in VB (he,he) in place of paint and brushes and the interaction of another person to produce intereting results.
The code here is akin to the brushes, and as far as I know brush making is not yet an art form....
There are 2 characteristics that can define what most people agree that Art is:
-Any form of art can be appreciated by people that are not artists.
-Art influences our emotions and is aiming to do so.
Now, a C++ piece of code can be ingenious, even beautiful (beautiful in terms of what? Of how it looks? Of how efficent it is?) but it can't be appreciated by somebody that does not understand this technical artifact. As art it is useless. I would also question the sanity of somebody that feels such a thing has infatuated its senses in the same way a painting, a movie or a book will do.
A mathematical equation like E=m*c*c is beautiful for its simplicity, elegance and representative power, but again, its aim is not to touch our aesthetic senses, its aim is to explain a concept, and as such it is as artistic as the address written in an enveloppe.
Now, if you talk about a computer game (the final product you see and experience) then I agree it could be considered a form of art, after all it is like an interactive opera.
And of course if you make a painting with only Einstein's famous equation, then it becomes art because the artist is trying to make an statement about something.
So no guys, as much as most of you would like to believe you are like Beethoven, Picasso, Kubrik, Cervantes, Pavlova or Rodin, no you are not.
But be not sad! You are all great technicians and engineers, which is not small achievement.
This is the worst definition of music I ever read.
If you thing music is just "mathematics" of some sort then you have no idea what Music is all about, and how it is produced and how it evolves.
Sorry for being a reactionary conservative prick, but I think that there is such a thing as obscene material,
Please define "obscene material".
And what if your definition is too wide for my taste?
Or to narrow?
Why should I accept your defintion?
Or why should you accept mine?
For many fundamentalistic societies women in miniskirst are obscene, if a fundamentalist minded party wins the election in Australia or the US, should pictures of women in miniskirt be banned ?(I know, they would ban "worst" stuff first, but I hope I explain myself)
Should a Communist party win an election, then should they decide what is good for the people?
Don't you understand that defending "obscenity" with todays benign rulers is to give carte-blanche to the would be tyrants of the future?
and would not have a particularly high opinion of anyone that thought pictures of, say, an 8 year old orphan being forced to have anal sex should be defended on some pathetic "free speech" principle.
That is an extreme case, but still such material should not be banned on the basis of "obscenity" or even worst "morality". It should be deemed to be evidence of abuse, and as such any person in posession of such material should be held responsible for witholding criminal evidence. But that person should not be declared a criminal because he is "obscene" or "immoral", obscenity is a term that changes from individual to individual, from time to time, and from country to country. Obscenity is a relative concept, and as such it is the worst candidate to make a fair law.
I'm willing to bet that was not what the writers of the US Constitution had in mind.
Whatever the US founding bunch had in mind, the circumstances of today's World demand different actions. Where it was appropriate to grant everybody arms to defend themselves in the middle of nowhere it becomes nonsense where at any given time you are sorrounded by people with a gun in a innercity area.
Where mild provisions for free speech were made, now it is necesary a radical upholding of free speech no matter what. You are either free or not free to say what you think. There is not such a thing as half freedom of speech.
People today have to make their own laws using the experience of 225 years of more human experience than that the US founding people could not even see coming. The US founding people solved the problems of their time, and are very useful as a reference, but they were not gods, and as the humans they were, they commited mistakes and could not see the future.
Had the US founders known about the Internet, the global village, apartheid, Nazism, Communism, 1984, schoolchildren killed by schoolmates, proxy servers in some Asian countries and so on, perhaps they would had gone even further than you might think in the defense of free speech.
I know that some of the American libertarian types out there may not like this - but I look at it this way, when speech is as 'free' as it is in the US, it basically becomes meaningless.
And what does that mean? That the freedom looses its meaning? That what is said is devoid of meaning most of the time?
If everybody is using and encouraging freedom of speech, if it is part of daily life: how can that render it meaningless?
O boy, you would need to live in a place where you could loose your job, your country or your life to understand how important is freedom of speech, unsupervised by nobody if possible.
There are many other laws that would deal with undesirable stuff, you don't need to constraint freedom of speech for that.
At least in Australia, because we don't traditionally talk about having a 'right' to 'free speech' as such, it seems that we value using our speech wisely and responsibly _as well as_ valuing the freedom that we do have to speak our minds.
You trust too much: what gurantees that your goverment will not allow it in the future if there is not a legal frame that specificaly stops the goverment to meddle with the minds of the people?
This stuff is pushing into the United States. Look at "hate crime" legislation. Guess what that is? Pretty soon, you say the wrong joke or believe in the wrong thing or say the wrong thing and you will be fined and put in jail.
Althoug your example is extreme, I would ask you to tell us how would you defend the right of people from a minority community not to be insulted.
I hope you have never been in the not so funny side of the joke, one after another, all your life. Then you will know it is not funny and can make the life of many people really miserable.
The constitution doesn't *grant* any rights at all. It is merely a statement of our *intention* to preserve our rights, which are intrinsic to free people.
The right to bear arms is one's right to self-defense, whether from criminals, governments (I know, same thing), or even wild animals
There is nothing intrinsic to human freedoms about arms, specialy for "self defense" as you would call it.
Arms are artifacts, like a pot, a plough or any other tool. We make pots, they make life easier but they are not intrinsic to human freedom just because they make our life easier (or granting without conceeding, arms make your life safer, not for that they are intrinsic to freedom).
If Americans have decided that you need arms no matter what so be it and good luck, but what you are implying is that who advocates arm ownership no matters what has somehow a higher moral ground, which is absolutely ridiculous.
To many societies, including others as advanced as the US, the thought of arms for all is obscene and abhorrent and neither pro or anti arms people have a higher moral ground on the issue, just different preferences.
Other distiguihsed mebers are Singapore, China, Sauid Arabia and a score of other countries where the goverment knows waht is better for you.
Congrats.
I used to be first a programmer and then a Sys Admin in a University that should remain nameless in a Latin-american country.
In the first job we had access as students/workers to the school records of the 300000+ students and who knows how many former students.
Although there is a conflict of interests, students where always under the supervision of full time senior staff and when something fishy happened (the kind of thing like releasing to the press school records of somebody famous) situations were always clarified and if somebody was guilty of something, that person was dismissed. A full time worker could have done that as well, so I don't see why to be a student should be an impediment.
In this kind of environment we have a win-win situation: the University (publicly founded) gets higly competent, motivated, curious workers that are not afraid to try new things (I implemented some compression algorithms to save disk space in the then valuable hard disk, saving the Uni many $$$$) and that are cheap, and the students get valuable experience that they would not get otherwise or that they will take longer to acquire.
After my Uni work I never looked back: the experience I gained leap-frogged me ahead of most of the chaps of my generation and I was doing better, more interesting work far sooner than most of my friends.
So as you see I thoroughly reccomend it.
I am a programmer and my salary is an obscenity (too high). Period.
I am riding a lucky wave, hopefully it will not end, but if it does end I am prepared for that (both phsicolgicaly and profesionaly).
The original point to which I replied was that Open Software was bad, among other things, because it could make programmers poorer. I said that is not a bad thing in itslef and any way, sooner or later programming will be in the scrap yard of forgotten professions.
It is just disgusting to see how a whiz kid without any life or work experience can command much higher salaries than experiencied engineers in this or other fields and to read that they believe they inherently deserve it, to what I say: bollocks!
Programmers in particular, and most IT people in general, are in the right side of the offer-demand equation for the moment, and that is due to historical circumstances, nothing ot their individual own making.
So lets enjoy the ride, lets hope it lasts, something will come that will make our skills less valuable, but for god's sake, lets not believe that getting rich writing Java applets is a god sent right, it is just a very lucky privilege.
And what is the problem with programmers getting less money?
If what you are advocating is that free software is a bad thing because it does not protect the artificialy inflated salaries of a few lucky guys, then I strongly disagree.
If software is first class you still need to install it, configure it, spec it for your system, etc.
Perhaps the day will arrive when software will be soo good that it will do all those things itself: fully self repairing, self configurable, etc. And then what are you going to suggest: to stop it to keep the jobs of the few Sysadmins left? Guess what, it will be cheaper, and thus somebody will use such a system no matter what.
Your rants sound like those of the workers that didi not want automatization in the manufacturinbg industry exactly for the same reason: fearing they would loose their jobs. Unfortunately economics are brutal, so either fat cheque Joe Programmer learns to live with the fact that software engineering will be more efficient (sooner than he thinks) and thus less people will be needed for it or he lives deluding himself he can do something about it (like saying Open Source software is evil for example).
For god's sake, I could not help it, but the first time I saw how Gnutella works, without being a network specialist or a mathematician, it reminded me of those chain letters that promess you will become reach if you send the letter to other people and one buck to the person that sent it to you.
It does not work for your info, although you will find 2 or 3 guys that will swear they got the money.
We are clever people, most of us know some little maths. Please check your maths and recognize that something growing exponentially is deemed to fail if the supporting infraestructure (bandwith) does not grow at the same rate.