I'd love to see someone implement a bittorrent client with an option to limit peers to other Comcast customers, and then see how they start redefining "internal traffic"...
Who puts Saverin's house out when it is burning out of control?
That's paid for by local property and sales taxes.
Who paves the roads and repairs the bridges that Saverin's luxury cars utilize every day?
That's paid for by gas taxes and tolls.
Who delivers the mail that Saverin relies on for his business and home operations?
Seriously? That's paid for by postage, come on.
Who manages the pipes and treatment of the shit that Saverin dumps down his toilets every day?
That's paid for by his water and sewer utility bill. This is getting ridiculous.
Who patrols the streets that Saverin lives and works on, protecting him from crime?
See above re: property and sales taxes.
Who watches and protects the nation of America when terrorists and other countries seek to destroy Saverin's way of life, property, and business interests?
Aha! You finally got one that the Federal government pays for with income taxes...
In Saverin's mind (and yours) all of these are freebies.. entitlements. No responsibility to maintain them whatsoever.
Apparently he is already going to pay over $360 million in taxes on his stock when he leaves. He is basically saving $60 million since he won't have to pay on any gains made before he sells, etc. I think $360M WAY MORE than covers his share of the one items above Federal incomes taxes pay for.
Not that I even really disagree with your general feelings towards Saverin renouncing citizenship for financial reasons (and I hope he is denied a visa if he ever tries to come back) it was just for all of the drama in your post you just didn't have a very good argument:)
He still has to pay taxes on the "fair market value" of the stock as of when he renounced citizenship. The difference is by the time he sells the stock it will likely be worth more, and he doesn't have to pay any US taxes on that.
(E) Former citizens who renounced citizenship to avoid taxation Any alien who is a former citizen of the United States who officially renounces United States citizenship and who is determined by the Attorney General to have renounced United States citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation by the United States is inadmissible.
So, what's the point of the "new" proposed law besides political grandstanding?
Except rangeCheck is a void that throws an exception. And "function" isn't even a Java keyword. Now go spend the next 10 minutes fixing it so it compiles:)
1/100th the rate? Where on earth did you get that number? CGI is currently the most time consuming and expensive part of most major movies these days. The reason they do it is not because it's cheaper, but because they can do things that are impossible or impractical with traditional film making. Sometimes because it's cheaper, as well, but a lot of times the real thing is still cheaper and of course looks better.
Watch a car blow up in a cheap cable TV show. Looks fake, like CGI? Yep, it was, and they paid crappy artists to do it quickly. Watch a car blow up in a $100M action movie. Looks real? That's because it was, and blowing up a bunch of cars was still cheaper and more realistic than what it would take to render a CGI scene of remotely similar quality...
Okay, an auto manufacturer has a computer in it's car. Is it a monopoly? Can you force the manufacturer to allow anyone who wants to make an operating system for the vehicle, to be allowed to do that?
If you want to use that analogy, it supports my statement, not yours. Auto manufacturers rarely write their own software. Bosch makes most of the software for onboard computers/ECUs, but they don't make the car. So under your analogy, the Bosch & the automotive industry is more like Microsoft than Apple!
And how could Microsoft have attempted to control the market for tablets when they aren't even IN that market yet!? We are talking about tablets and Windows RT here, RTFA. Mozilla is asking for Microsoft to be investigated for their policies (which are the same as Apple's) on WINDOWS RT, AN ARM-BASED TABLET OS. My preview comment was that it's a waste of time to investigate anti-trust for a company with no market share when one with a 70% market share has the similar policies. It may be a waste of time to investigate the latter, too, but that doesn't change the point.
And a 1998 antitrust suit for personal computer software has nothing to do with the 2012 tablet market. Total strawman.
Don't like Apple? Buy and use any of the other pads or computers.
Absolutely. And don't like Microsoft? Don't buy an upcoming Windows RT-based tablet. Don't like Android? Don't buy an Android tablet. Apple may not have a monopoly (and I never said they did), but Microsoft sure as hell doesn't. Their business practices 15 years ago are about at relevant as Kodak's 60 years ago.
Now if MS made the platforms that run it's various operating systems, they could mandate what software ran on it. IE only, no problem W8? You got it!
That makes no sense and really has no legal basis whatsoever. It's like arguing that AT&T runs their own phone network, and should be allowed to mandate the phones plugged into it. Oops, that was already an anti-trust issue that went *against* them.
As long as Microsoft is no longer using anti-competitive practices to force their OS on someone's hardware (which they aren't, for quite a while now) then it has nothing to do with Microsoft. It's completely up to the hardware manufacturer.
You don't "buy Windows" on a Windows RT based tablet any more than you "buy iOS" or "buy Android" on those tablets. You get the software that the manufacturer created/licensed, ported, and installed, and trying to say a Windows RT or Android tablet is any different from an iOS tablet in this regard is absurd.
How about: Windows RT market share is currently ZERO. You can't have a monopoly until you actually have a product. Hence, no monopoly.
On the other hand, Apple has both a huge market share of tablets and a very closed system with absolute say of what goes on the hardware you own. Maybe Mozilla and the Senate should stop wasting their time and look into that, instead...
From everything I have seen (have a bunch of friends with MBAs) - an MBA (or JD) is a dime a dozen, and it's only likely to "get you a job" if you are from a top 20-ish school. There are a lot of new MBAs and lawyers (many of them very capable) graduating right now who aren't finding anything...
And I'd be surprised if a master's would pay itself off in 5 years, though. At most companies I have worked for (sometimes as a hiring manager) for compensation scales a masters has been equivalent to about 2 years experience and a PhD to 4-5. That's maybe $10k more than the engineer without one. *But* that engineer with a BS has both 2 more years of experience (making the base salary similar anyway), and 2 years of *income* the MS does not have (that latter of which would dwarf the former). Then again, this is in software engineering - other engineering fields value MS degrees more (partly because they actually *teach* you something that's relatively hard to learn on the job;)
What's you're definition of true entrepreneurship?
Specifically, high-tech Internet/software/IT entrepeneurship, since we have been talking about CS/IT degrees, pay attention here. I know Germany does very well in traditional manufacturing, but that's not what we were talking about and I said nothing about the German economy.
Apple: copied Xerox. Microsoft: copied CP/M, then copied Apple, and somewhere along the way copied umpteen others as well.
Yes, Apple and Microsoft's true success has come almost entirely from copying a few vague ideas 30 years ago. I mean, I can practically see the connection between a mouse and a $400B business with 75,000 employees! Thanks for parroting the usual/. bull, it's so relevant to the discussion.
Page, Brin, Yang, Filo - what they did is decide that their idea was worth dropping out of their PhD program, and their early investors and employees agreed with them rather than judging them for not getting a graduate degree. Semantics are aren't helpful here, either.
And bigot my ass. I work with 2 very intelligent and motivated German engineers, and we have discussed this very topic at length. Both of them are in the US because they wanted to work at innovative, fast moving Internet/software companies and they felt the opportunities for that in the US were (and still are) much better. In fact, both have co-founded and/or worked at several startups of various success; but that has been plenty enough success they own homes, have families, and have no plans to move back (and one even recently naturalized). In fact, a couple months ago he was saying he thought the traditional German educational and banking/venture capital/etc systems would have to undergo significant reform before you start seeing changes in that department...
But, if you don't want to to take the word of a second-hand conversation at face value, don't. Spend a couple minutes researching the topic yourself for the similar opinions.
Yes, I am a real bigot for pointing out a fact that many analysts, academics, and business executives (many of who are German, as in the above links) think there is a lack of entrepeneurship and development in Internet services in Germany, and the most likely causes are aversion to risk and too much adherence to traditional university educational system ("can't blame me for hiring him, he had a PhD!)" I just thought it was interesting that the GP demonstrated this attitude fairly well (and, yes, I think was a bit overly insulting to him as I was responding directly to his insulting comment on my post. Oh well).
Yeah, but we are talking about SOFTWARE/INTERNET//IT entrepeneurship and employment. Sure, Germany's economy is doing well, and in traditional product design and manufacturing (more hardware than software) they are excelling. But they sure are NOT leading the way in recent IT innovation.
That's because no one expects you to have a graduate degree to start a small/medium service or manufacturing business, but according to the attitude of the GP, making technical education available for more people has "ruined the educational system".
If he wanted a German-only opinion on it he should have asked a German site, not one where the vast majority of users are not German. The topics of career change and continuing education are relevant everywhere, and slashdot is a site for discussion where I would HOPE answers are supposed to be relevant to more than one person. I'm sure he's smart enough to pick and choose the pieces relevant to him.
And in the US, "college' and "university" are used interchangeably in everyday discussion.
Your elitist attitude towards education in general really demonstrates why there is so little true entrepeneurship in Germany. It's striking how many of the biggest tech companies around today (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and I could go on) were founded by innovators who dropped out of college/university/whatever to pursue their ideas. Luckily there are enough people who are more impressed by ideas and hard work than your pile of Bologna.
Under your logic, if most CEOs are MBA's, and most MBA's destroy their companies at their own benefit, most companies shouldn't exist.
So then, as for "MBAs being a bad idea", can we stop making stupid generalizations and understand that good or bad management is about the person, not the degree?
You will need an undergraduate degree before an MBA
That's a good point. And I don't know what college expenses are like in Germany, but in the US 6 years of college (the last of which, the MBA, are usually $$$) would probably set you back so far you'd never be able to work long enough to pay for it anyway (assuming you did ever get the job you wanted afterwards).
And if you don't have the money saved up to afford going to school full-time without working, make that more like 10+ years, so if you are already in youd mid 40's you are going to be nearing retirement age by the time you even finish.
Moral is, if you don't even have a bachelor's/associate/whatever at this point, I'd think HARD before deciding an MBA should be your final goal...
Yeah, that's because the original article was written by a best-selling, Pulitzer prize nominated author, and the counterargument was written by timothy.
This is the most amazingly bizarre modded thread ever. It may be one of the first time I have seen half the posts rated positively and yet Troll/Flamebait at the same time.
In fact, I have mod points but I gave up using them on this article since the points would probably be better spent closing my eyes and clicking...
Actually, from TFA it sounds like they meant to say it prevents employers from accessing personal information on any computer that isn't owned or controlled by an employer. I'm pretty sure the intent is that an employer should still be able to access and demand passwords to servers it owns, even if the employee runs them, etc, and anything else is none of their business.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see someone implement a bittorrent client with an option to limit peers to other Comcast customers, and then see how they start redefining "internal traffic"...
Who puts Saverin's house out when it is burning out of control?
That's paid for by local property and sales taxes.
Who paves the roads and repairs the bridges that Saverin's luxury cars utilize every day?
That's paid for by gas taxes and tolls.
Who delivers the mail that Saverin relies on for his business and home operations?
Seriously? That's paid for by postage, come on.
Who manages the pipes and treatment of the shit that Saverin dumps down his toilets every day?
That's paid for by his water and sewer utility bill. This is getting ridiculous.
Who patrols the streets that Saverin lives and works on, protecting him from crime?
See above re: property and sales taxes.
Who watches and protects the nation of America when terrorists and other countries seek to destroy Saverin's way of life, property, and business interests?
Aha! You finally got one that the Federal government pays for with income taxes...
In Saverin's mind (and yours) all of these are freebies.. entitlements. No responsibility to maintain them whatsoever.
Apparently he is already going to pay over $360 million in taxes on his stock when he leaves. He is basically saving $60 million since he won't have to pay on any gains made before he sells, etc. I think $360M WAY MORE than covers his share of the one items above Federal incomes taxes pay for.
Not that I even really disagree with your general feelings towards Saverin renouncing citizenship for financial reasons (and I hope he is denied a visa if he ever tries to come back) it was just for all of the drama in your post you just didn't have a very good argument :)
He still has to pay taxes on the "fair market value" of the stock as of when he renounced citizenship. The difference is by the time he sells the stock it will likely be worth more, and he doesn't have to pay any US taxes on that.
From 8 USC 1182 - INADMISSIBLE ALIENS:
(E) Former citizens who renounced citizenship to avoid taxation
Any alien who is a former citizen of the United States who officially renounces United States citizenship and who is determined by the Attorney General to have renounced United States citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation by the United States is inadmissible.
So, what's the point of the "new" proposed law besides political grandstanding?
Except rangeCheck is a void that throws an exception. And "function" isn't even a Java keyword. Now go spend the next 10 minutes fixing it so it compiles :)
1/100th the rate? Where on earth did you get that number? CGI is currently the most time consuming and expensive part of most major movies these days. The reason they do it is not because it's cheaper, but because they can do things that are impossible or impractical with traditional film making. Sometimes because it's cheaper, as well, but a lot of times the real thing is still cheaper and of course looks better.
Watch a car blow up in a cheap cable TV show. Looks fake, like CGI? Yep, it was, and they paid crappy artists to do it quickly. Watch a car blow up in a $100M action movie. Looks real? That's because it was, and blowing up a bunch of cars was still cheaper and more realistic than what it would take to render a CGI scene of remotely similar quality...
Okay, an auto manufacturer has a computer in it's car. Is it a monopoly? Can you force the manufacturer to allow anyone who wants to make an operating system for the vehicle, to be allowed to do that?
If you want to use that analogy, it supports my statement, not yours. Auto manufacturers rarely write their own software. Bosch makes most of the software for onboard computers/ECUs, but they don't make the car. So under your analogy, the Bosch & the automotive industry is more like Microsoft than Apple!
And how could Microsoft have attempted to control the market for tablets when they aren't even IN that market yet!? We are talking about tablets and Windows RT here, RTFA. Mozilla is asking for Microsoft to be investigated for their policies (which are the same as Apple's) on WINDOWS RT, AN ARM-BASED TABLET OS. My preview comment was that it's a waste of time to investigate anti-trust for a company with no market share when one with a 70% market share has the similar policies. It may be a waste of time to investigate the latter, too, but that doesn't change the point.
And a 1998 antitrust suit for personal computer software has nothing to do with the 2012 tablet market. Total strawman.
Don't like Apple? Buy and use any of the other pads or computers.
Absolutely. And don't like Microsoft? Don't buy an upcoming Windows RT-based tablet. Don't like Android? Don't buy an Android tablet. Apple may not have a monopoly (and I never said they did), but Microsoft sure as hell doesn't. Their business practices 15 years ago are about at relevant as Kodak's 60 years ago.
Now if MS made the platforms that run it's various operating systems, they could mandate what software ran on it. IE only, no problem W8? You got it!
That makes no sense and really has no legal basis whatsoever. It's like arguing that AT&T runs their own phone network, and should be allowed to mandate the phones plugged into it. Oops, that was already an anti-trust issue that went *against* them.
As long as Microsoft is no longer using anti-competitive practices to force their OS on someone's hardware (which they aren't, for quite a while now) then it has nothing to do with Microsoft. It's completely up to the hardware manufacturer.
You don't "buy Windows" on a Windows RT based tablet any more than you "buy iOS" or "buy Android" on those tablets. You get the software that the manufacturer created/licensed, ported, and installed, and trying to say a Windows RT or Android tablet is any different from an iOS tablet in this regard is absurd.
That's because Apple has spent a lot more money on political campaign contributions than Microsoft.
Citation? Brief search so far has indicated that's completely false.
How about: Windows RT market share is currently ZERO. You can't have a monopoly until you actually have a product. Hence, no monopoly.
On the other hand, Apple has both a huge market share of tablets and a very closed system with absolute say of what goes on the hardware you own. Maybe Mozilla and the Senate should stop wasting their time and look into that, instead...
From everything I have seen (have a bunch of friends with MBAs) - an MBA (or JD) is a dime a dozen, and it's only likely to "get you a job" if you are from a top 20-ish school. There are a lot of new MBAs and lawyers (many of them very capable) graduating right now who aren't finding anything...
And I'd be surprised if a master's would pay itself off in 5 years, though. At most companies I have worked for (sometimes as a hiring manager) for compensation scales a masters has been equivalent to about 2 years experience and a PhD to 4-5. That's maybe $10k more than the engineer without one. *But* that engineer with a BS has both 2 more years of experience (making the base salary similar anyway), and 2 years of *income* the MS does not have (that latter of which would dwarf the former). Then again, this is in software engineering - other engineering fields value MS degrees more (partly because they actually *teach* you something that's relatively hard to learn on the job ;)
What's you're definition of true entrepreneurship?
Specifically, high-tech Internet/software/IT entrepeneurship, since we have been talking about CS/IT degrees, pay attention here. I know Germany does very well in traditional manufacturing, but that's not what we were talking about and I said nothing about the German economy.
Apple: copied Xerox. Microsoft: copied CP/M, then copied Apple, and somewhere along the way copied umpteen others as well.
Yes, Apple and Microsoft's true success has come almost entirely from copying a few vague ideas 30 years ago. I mean, I can practically see the connection between a mouse and a $400B business with 75,000 employees! Thanks for parroting the usual /. bull, it's so relevant to the discussion.
Page, Brin, Yang, Filo - what they did is decide that their idea was worth dropping out of their PhD program, and their early investors and employees agreed with them rather than judging them for not getting a graduate degree. Semantics are aren't helpful here, either.
And bigot my ass. I work with 2 very intelligent and motivated German engineers, and we have discussed this very topic at length. Both of them are in the US because they wanted to work at innovative, fast moving Internet/software companies and they felt the opportunities for that in the US were (and still are) much better. In fact, both have co-founded and/or worked at several startups of various success; but that has been plenty enough success they own homes, have families, and have no plans to move back (and one even recently naturalized). In fact, a couple months ago he was saying he thought the traditional German educational and banking/venture capital/etc systems would have to undergo significant reform before you start seeing changes in that department...
But, if you don't want to to take the word of a second-hand conversation at face value, don't. Spend a couple minutes researching the topic yourself for the similar opinions.
http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15126087,00.html
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~jmueller/its/conf/amsterdam06/downloads/papers/Weber.pdf
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/19/european-startups-lack-ambition
Yes, I am a real bigot for pointing out a fact that many analysts, academics, and business executives (many of who are German, as in the above links) think there is a lack of entrepeneurship and development in Internet services in Germany, and the most likely causes are aversion to risk and too much adherence to traditional university educational system ("can't blame me for hiring him, he had a PhD!)" I just thought it was interesting that the GP demonstrated this attitude fairly well (and, yes, I think was a bit overly insulting to him as I was responding directly to his insulting comment on my post. Oh well).
Yeah, but we are talking about SOFTWARE/INTERNET//IT entrepeneurship and employment. Sure, Germany's economy is doing well, and in traditional product design and manufacturing (more hardware than software) they are excelling. But they sure are NOT leading the way in recent IT innovation.
That's because no one expects you to have a graduate degree to start a small/medium service or manufacturing business, but according to the attitude of the GP, making technical education available for more people has "ruined the educational system".
You don't have to be an asshole about it.
If he wanted a German-only opinion on it he should have asked a German site, not one where the vast majority of users are not German. The topics of career change and continuing education are relevant everywhere, and slashdot is a site for discussion where I would HOPE answers are supposed to be relevant to more than one person. I'm sure he's smart enough to pick and choose the pieces relevant to him.
And in the US, "college' and "university" are used interchangeably in everyday discussion.
Your elitist attitude towards education in general really demonstrates why there is so little true entrepeneurship in Germany. It's striking how many of the biggest tech companies around today (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and I could go on) were founded by innovators who dropped out of college/university/whatever to pursue their ideas. Luckily there are enough people who are more impressed by ideas and hard work than your pile of Bologna.
If you are not being promoted because you don't have the credentials or experience, maybe you are just hitting a normal ceiling.
Under your logic, if most CEOs are MBA's, and most MBA's destroy their companies at their own benefit, most companies shouldn't exist.
So then, as for "MBAs being a bad idea", can we stop making stupid generalizations and understand that good or bad management is about the person, not the degree?
You will need an undergraduate degree before an MBA
That's a good point. And I don't know what college expenses are like in Germany, but in the US 6 years of college (the last of which, the MBA, are usually $$$) would probably set you back so far you'd never be able to work long enough to pay for it anyway (assuming you did ever get the job you wanted afterwards).
And if you don't have the money saved up to afford going to school full-time without working, make that more like 10+ years, so if you are already in youd mid 40's you are going to be nearing retirement age by the time you even finish.
Moral is, if you don't even have a bachelor's/associate/whatever at this point, I'd think HARD before deciding an MBA should be your final goal...
The counterargument here seems weak to me
Yeah, that's because the original article was written by a best-selling, Pulitzer prize nominated author, and the counterargument was written by timothy.
And the inverse is usually true as well: don't do something at all for a long time and you tend to forget how to do it - like calculus :)
No need for a motorcycle, this is Canada. Put on a goalie mask and say you just got back from the pond, eh.
This is the most amazingly bizarre modded thread ever. It may be one of the first time I have seen half the posts rated positively and yet Troll/Flamebait at the same time.
In fact, I have mod points but I gave up using them on this article since the points would probably be better spent closing my eyes and clicking...
No need for a password when you have access to the user database...
I also heard AWG makes a much better whooshing sound than metric cables when you swing them around over your head.
So, what do you end up doing with the ten-foot pole?
Actually, from TFA it sounds like they meant to say it prevents employers from accessing personal information on any computer that isn't owned or controlled by an employer. I'm pretty sure the intent is that an employer should still be able to access and demand passwords to servers it owns, even if the employee runs them, etc, and anything else is none of their business.