when the economy turns down and it's an employer's market,
The business cycle is inevitable. The transition to employer's market is not. The [perceived] shortage of IT workers is going to continue. A recession will not necessarily cause temp/contractor/consultant work to dry up, forcing those types to seem permanant positions. In the past, recessions have increased employer's reliance on those types, as they don't want to take on permanent employees they might have to lay off.
The trend towards temp/contractor people is largely generated from employers like yourself, who look for people whose resumes fit ridiculous molds. Example: HR demands Java programmers with 3 years of Java experience. When they don't get anyone at their price, they fall back on contractors. Contractor whorehouses will outfit you with programmers who went to week-long Java seminars. Bad tech managers don't know the difference anyway; and if they do, there's nothing they can do about it because hiring practices are mandated from above.
As an employer, I look for quality people from diverse backgrounds, who don't necessarily want to do exactly what they've been doing for years, who appreciate an employer who overlooks their background or lack of it.
All the people I have hired have been consistent job-hoppers with resume gaps. Why were they job-hoppers? Because employers routinely suck. Because in most places politics is more important than excellence. Because most employers don't think loyalty is a two-way street.
You want loyal employees? Take any group of people and be loyal to them. And honestly loyal, not just lip service. Care about them and their concerns. Make things right. Be up front about everything.
As it is, you may be self-selecting a group of people whose major traits include conformity, an unwillingness to question authority, a lack of ability to assert themselves, an odd approach to keeping their job at all costs, and/or people who have been unable to get other work for some reason. Their "loyalty" may be simple inertia.
Good luck! --
Consider that their competition IS Microsoft; a few years ago Palm developers figured they had about a year to migrate over to WinCE.
Consider that Palm is one of the few vendors out there that has totally blown Microsoft away.
Consider that most Palm owners are loaded with either corporate expense report money or spare cash, already having paid up to $450 to replace their $20 DayTimer.
Consider that most Palms will do exactly what their owners want *without* the upgrade, and that's what they paid big money for.
Anyone paying the tiniest bit of attention, whether it be on/. or no, has seen that MS's history is chock-full of sneaky, underhanded, borg-like practices. It's hard to even figure out where to begin. Let's see, do we have to rehash the DR-DOS "error" message? The details that came out after the first trial? The MS "tax" forcing retailers to buy licenses? The Spyglass manuever that got them IE in the first place? The Halloween memo?
And this is just the very tip of the iceberg of the shit we know about.
Coming across what appears to be, at first glance, another MS ploy amongst the thousands that we've already seen, it's not hard to make that assumption that they're at it again. And if they appear to be at it again, it behooves/. to try to get to the details. and if there's a little backlash of any sort, it's just the Slashdaughters demanding accuracy out of/. and wanting to prove how bright they are.
And you could have taken advantage of that by gently nudging, saying something like "Just because it's MS, don't assume the worst!" That might have prevented the next MS expose. But you went off the deep end. trying to paint MS as Apple-like and noble, which is quite frankly naive. Just a few penniless guys in their garage -- out of Harvard with rich, connected and powerful parents like the rest of us. No more dirty tricks than any other company? Pfaugghh! They tried to play dirty tricks during their own federal anti-trust trial!
And as far as Win2000 goes, since MS-DOS 2.1, the hype always says that the next MS operating system is always supposed to be the "really good one". There are 65535 bugs that tell us to reserve granting that title to this one.
Study history, pal, or you'd better keep good backups.
--
So is this a game or a puzzle then? When I lose to GNU Chess is this really any differnt than when I lose to a human on FICS?
My take is that it's a puzzle if you can detect/develop a set pattern for which the program can be beaten. When the program can detect that you've found its weakness, and evolve/change to beat you by anticipating your exploit of it, it'll be a game again!
--
"Anyways, I was your friend at the beginning of this, really thinking that you were a true friend. I was willing to be sitting there and put you next to me. At that time you were sweeter than me. I'm not a very openly nice person. I'm just frank, foreward, and tell ya it the way it is. To have you sit there next to me, and me lose $900,000 just to stomp on somebody like this [pointing to Rich]. But as the game went along and the two tribes merged, you lied to me, which showed me what the true person that you are. You're very two-faced and manipulative to get where you're at anywhere in life. That is why you fail all the time.
So, at that point in the game I decided then to just go out with my alliance to my family and just to hold my dignity and values in check, and hoping I hadn't lost to many of them, and uh... play the game just as long as possible and hang in there as long as possible.
But, Kelly, go back to a couple times Jeff said to you what goes around comes around. It's here. You will not get my vote. My vote will go to Richard. And I hope that is the one vote that makes you lose the money. If it's not, I'll shake your hand, and I'll go on from here, but if I were to ever pass you along in life again, and you were laying there dying of thirst, I would not give you a drink of water. I would let the vultures take you and do whatever they want with ya... with no ill regrets.
I plead to the jury tonight to think a little bit about the island we have been on. This island is pretty much full of only two things: snakes and rats. And in the end of mother nature, we have Richard the snake who knowingly went after prey, and Kelly who turned into the rat, that ran around like the rats do on this island, trying to run from the snake. I feel we owe it to the island's... spirits... that we have come to know to let it be in the end the way mother nature intended it to be, for the snake to eat the rat."
Text adventures are not games; they are puzzles. Games cannot be solved, only won.
Single-player FPSes are puzzles that are so intricately molded that you can't tell they are puzzles. There is typically one solution ("kill the boss!"), but hundreds of ways to get to that solution ("Let's just use the pea-shooter this time!"). The more interesting single-player FPSes hide the nature of the puzzle by improving the AI to the point where you can't see any obvious patterns.
Other single-player games become too puzzle-like when the AI is crap. In various incarnations of EA Sports' NHL series, for example, the game is fun until you find one type of shot that always works for a goal. At that point, you have "solved" the "game" because the goalie bites on your deke move (or whatever) every time.
Multi-player computer games are GAMES. And in my very extremely humble opinion, gamers graduate to the point where computer AI is no longer interesting and the only solution is to add humans.
This is why the consoles must eventually be netted; not because the net will become utterly ubiquitous, but because AIs will always be harder to make interesting than other humans. --
To fully enjoy the fruits of this net rag's labors, go to their search box and enter "y2k".
You'll find hundreds WND stories on Y2K and every single one of them utterly alarmist.
WND also ran banner ads on many of these stories, offering sets of videotapes on y2k preparation - including some really survivalist nonsense - for hundreds of dollars. The videotapes and other survivalist nonsense were produced by... you guessed it, WND.
--
Typically your desktop is under your monitor, raising the height of your monitor. Well I have a 21" monitor, which means that if I want to open a desktop case, I have to lift this roughly 75 pound beast and put it somewhere else on my desk. And I'm a geek, which means that I'm unable to do that without endangering the monitor, endangering myself, and endangering my desktop.
--
What's more, so many sites are ignoring 8-bit color at this point that users of the older technologies are used to seeing everything dithered and cruddy. This doesn't mean it's not a consideration, but...
Audio engineers, for example, should generally base their production work on studio "reference" monitors even though a lot of people are going to listen to their work through old 3" car speakers. It won't sound bad to those listeners, because to those listeners everything sounds equally bad.
--
Aw hell. I wrote a big ol' novel, because I have so many thoughts on the topic - as a fellow geek and radio nut.
I think Curry has gotten it right, but at the same time, I bemoan the loss of real, old-fashioned, free broadcasting.
I loved doing college radio, because every show was basically sharing songs and getting excited about music. Now that we have the net, we have the ability for a LOT of people to share songs with us.
But more likely to evolve is some sort of XML-based jug of songs with other stuff mixed in. (But not NEWS, Curry; when we want news we go to the news channels. Does anyone else get irritated that, when a news channel has "traffic on the 2s", you know that you have to wait as long as nine minutes - an eternity for our supposedly-connected age.)
What's missing is a human touch. I don't want a channel that programs ballads every 25 minutes. I want a human, who programs ballads because s/he feels like shit, who programs love songs because s/he's in love. I want someone who appreciates the same key changes I do.
Before radio was taken over by big business, it did nothing less than spark a cultural revolution. Now radio is a soundtrack to a bad movie. Maybe the *real* reason that Napster et al have become so popular is because our ESTHETIC/ARTISTIC NEEDS are not being met by the corporate world.
--
The countless quality comments that I have written to Slashdot over the years have added a great deal of value to the property.
This can be objectively proven by the anonymous moderating Slashdot users, who characterize the majority of my comments as high quality; and exactly the sort of content they are interested in reading: funny, informative, interesting and/or insightful.
My content has both increased the number of people who are interested in reading the site, and the "stickiness" of the Slashdot site. Also, the fact that my comments have been archived indicates that Slashdot is leveraging all my work, despite the fact Slashdot freely admits that as the poster of my comments, I own them.
Therefore, I am hereby declaring that I am a de-facto worker for Slashdot. My demands are not high... I only expect to be paid what I have been worth to the company. Since I've been posting these highly valuable comments for well before it became valuable, was sold/partnered and subsequently IPO'd, I shall accept nothing less than 0.01% of VA Linux stock.
I shall expect further instructions on how we can both codify our contract with each other. However, lack of response to my message by September 29, 2000 shall represent a de-facto acceptance of my terms.
I want loot by the end of the month, or you'll be hearing from my attorneys. Gentlemen, have a nice day.
--
That's no good. Your strawberries will be the first to pick up all the instructions from the aliens. (They may be organic, but little do the masses understand that man-made chemicals cause those instructions to be blotted out entirely -- in effect saving most of us from the raging hordes of death that will reign over much of the earth in the upcoming years.)
Furthermore, you have unwittingly given the strawberries a bully pulpit into the sky. By allowing them to send *their* messages out -- typically extremely simple messages, as far as we know -- many cultures out there are going to think that berries are the dominant earth culture. And when other berry cultures visit us, and see products like "Boo-Berry" and "Crunchberries", they'll be quite justified in wiping out all non-berry organisms on the planet.
Isn't it bad enough that we broadcast Tony Danza TV movies? Think of the consequences of your actions!
--
If a vendor in East Podunk, IA sells a system to me in Oaks, PA, and I find it a lemon, PA state law is irrelevant. PA law has no bearing on anyone in any other state.
This is far different from state lemon laws on cars, since 99% of PA-driven cars are sold by PA car dealerships.
This will hurt places like CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, Rat Shack, and might drive out of business some of the small ma-and-pa places. Meanwhile, it'll help every business outside of the state. The "computer fairs", full of out-of-state gypsies, might have better deals than retail again.
Meanwhile, our state legislature has proven itself incompetent once again, writing cruddy law that hurts businesses in the state. Unlike many states, the PA pols are highly-paid full-timers. That's supposed to make them better legislators, but in reality, it only makes them able to stick their fingers everywhere they shouldn't be.
--
How will that happen? Who is going to shut down the other 97 channels? Who is going to decide which three channels to keep? I doubt you will find any consensus among the populace about which channels they are willing to give up to achieve their desired commonality.
Who will shut down the other 97 channels? The people, that's who, insisting on conformity and singularity of thought.
Remember when all men wore hats - identical hats - to work? We are on the other end of that pendulum swing right now. Strauss and Howe argue that history is cyclic in nature and that we are inevitably going to see that pendulum swing back.
In the 30s, 100,000 school children gathered on Boston Commons to chant in unison that they would help President Roosevelt make the country better and stronger. Today we can't imagine that sort of conformist indoctrination, especially in support of a politician. But those children were in the midst of a crisis cycle.
That same generation produced survivor "Rudy" -- whose word is good no matter what, who would lay down and give his life for his fellow navy seals, but at the same time who is relentlessly bigoted and unaccepting of behavior one notch away from the norm.
We can only hope that crisis doesn't lead to his sort of shutdown of individual choice. We don't know what sort of common approach will be celebrated, though. Instead of insisting on the racial/sexual/etc bigotry of yesteryear, the new commonality might be the political correctness of today, or something we can't possibly anticipate.
In any case you can see the whole thing starting; today's kids are definitely more cared-for and thus more carefully indoctrinated than they were 20 years ago.
--
What this really means, of course, is that your Monday morning chat around the water-cooler will be highly eclectic,
because there won't be any "Friends" or "Seinfelds" - we'll move in different circles.
Which would continue what has been a generational shift away from group-think, when three channels were enough for anyone, towards individuality where 100 channels are no longer enough. The Internet clearly has the capability to increase the number of channels, to the point where if I don't like YOUR reality-based show I'll just produce my own.
The next question is how long society will tolerate this before reverting back to conformity and three "channels" again. If our only common experience is that we were lied to by the same politicians and corporations, then when a real crisis occurs, our fractured society will urgently look to find commonality wherever it can, including in its entertainment.
For more on this topic, please see The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe.
--
As soon as at least 128k/sec wireless bandwidth is combined with flat rates for 2-3 hours/day, there will no longer be so much need for conventional radio, eh? Get ready for the next big paradigm shift.
--
The smarter an employee is, the more dangerous s/he is
It makes you sound smart if you say "Linux should not be a part of the business process," as opposed to saying something simpler such as "Don't use Linux."
Giving employees tools that they prefer causes them to "tinker" instead of developing interesting new methods to improve your business
Finding the best tool to solve a problem is less important than finding one that keeps your employees at bay
Yup, except for the war on drugs, the Republicans are pretty libertarian.
Oh, except for corporate welfare. Except for the war on drugs and corporate welfare, the Republicans are pretty libertarian.
Oh, yes, and federal involvement in education.
...
OK, except for the war on drugs, corporate welfare, federal involvement in education, interventionist foreign policy, marital and other rights of homosexuals, internet censorship, ballot access, medicare and medicaid privatization, separation of church and state, the nature of juries, abortion rights, immigration, protectionist trade policies, victimless crimes, property tax, zoning, suicide rights, and flag burning, the Republicans are pretty libertarian.
But they do drive SAABs, I'll grant you that. (Post-GM SAABs, which are SAAB-lites.)
--
Slashdot Mirror
The business cycle is inevitable. The transition to employer's market is not. The [perceived] shortage of IT workers is going to continue. A recession will not necessarily cause temp/contractor/consultant work to dry up, forcing those types to seem permanant positions. In the past, recessions have increased employer's reliance on those types, as they don't want to take on permanent employees they might have to lay off.
The trend towards temp/contractor people is largely generated from employers like yourself, who look for people whose resumes fit ridiculous molds. Example: HR demands Java programmers with 3 years of Java experience. When they don't get anyone at their price, they fall back on contractors. Contractor whorehouses will outfit you with programmers who went to week-long Java seminars. Bad tech managers don't know the difference anyway; and if they do, there's nothing they can do about it because hiring practices are mandated from above.
As an employer, I look for quality people from diverse backgrounds, who don't necessarily want to do exactly what they've been doing for years, who appreciate an employer who overlooks their background or lack of it.
All the people I have hired have been consistent job-hoppers with resume gaps. Why were they job-hoppers? Because employers routinely suck. Because in most places politics is more important than excellence. Because most employers don't think loyalty is a two-way street.
You want loyal employees? Take any group of people and be loyal to them. And honestly loyal, not just lip service. Care about them and their concerns. Make things right. Be up front about everything.
As it is, you may be self-selecting a group of people whose major traits include conformity, an unwillingness to question authority, a lack of ability to assert themselves, an odd approach to keeping their job at all costs, and/or people who have been unable to get other work for some reason. Their "loyalty" may be simple inertia. Good luck!
--
Consider that Palm is one of the few vendors out there that has totally blown Microsoft away.
Consider that most Palm owners are loaded with either corporate expense report money or spare cash, already having paid up to $450 to replace their $20 DayTimer.
Consider that most Palms will do exactly what their owners want *without* the upgrade, and that's what they paid big money for.
I just can't find any outrage here.
--
Sorry man, that's Microsoft's reported number, not mine, from a ZDNet news story.
SP1 for W2K was released to fix approximately 200 issues, many bugs and some cosmetics. That's it. That's all they could find and all anyone reported.
So now you know: there are still about 65000 bugs in your OS. And how much did you pay?
--
And this is just the very tip of the iceberg of the shit we know about.
Coming across what appears to be, at first glance, another MS ploy amongst the thousands that we've already seen, it's not hard to make that assumption that they're at it again. And if they appear to be at it again, it behooves /. to try to get to the details. and if there's a little backlash of any sort, it's just the Slashdaughters demanding accuracy out of /. and wanting to prove how bright they are.
And you could have taken advantage of that by gently nudging, saying something like "Just because it's MS, don't assume the worst!" That might have prevented the next MS expose. But you went off the deep end. trying to paint MS as Apple-like and noble, which is quite frankly naive. Just a few penniless guys in their garage -- out of Harvard with rich, connected and powerful parents like the rest of us. No more dirty tricks than any other company? Pfaugghh! They tried to play dirty tricks during their own federal anti-trust trial!
And as far as Win2000 goes, since MS-DOS 2.1, the hype always says that the next MS operating system is always supposed to be the "really good one". There are 65535 bugs that tell us to reserve granting that title to this one.
Study history, pal, or you'd better keep good backups.
--
My take is that it's a puzzle if you can detect/develop a set pattern for which the program can be beaten. When the program can detect that you've found its weakness, and evolve/change to beat you by anticipating your exploit of it, it'll be a game again!
--
So, at that point in the game I decided then to just go out with my alliance to my family and just to hold my dignity and values in check, and hoping I hadn't lost to many of them, and uh... play the game just as long as possible and hang in there as long as possible.
But, Kelly, go back to a couple times Jeff said to you what goes around comes around. It's here. You will not get my vote. My vote will go to Richard. And I hope that is the one vote that makes you lose the money. If it's not, I'll shake your hand, and I'll go on from here, but if I were to ever pass you along in life again, and you were laying there dying of thirst, I would not give you a drink of water. I would let the vultures take you and do whatever they want with ya... with no ill regrets.
I plead to the jury tonight to think a little bit about the island we have been on. This island is pretty much full of only two things: snakes and rats. And in the end of mother nature, we have Richard the snake who knowingly went after prey, and Kelly who turned into the rat, that ran around like the rats do on this island, trying to run from the snake. I feel we owe it to the island's... spirits... that we have come to know to let it be in the end the way mother nature intended it to be, for the snake to eat the rat."
Eudora Score: 2 red peppers
"I fuckin love you man! You are the shit!"
Eudora Score: 3 red peppers
--
(...note to self... invest in stock of hard drive manufacturers.)
--
This brings new meaning to the marketing phrase "A little bit of us goes into everything we make."
--
Text adventures are not games; they are puzzles. Games cannot be solved, only won.
Single-player FPSes are puzzles that are so intricately molded that you can't tell they are puzzles. There is typically one solution ("kill the boss!"), but hundreds of ways to get to that solution ("Let's just use the pea-shooter this time!"). The more interesting single-player FPSes hide the nature of the puzzle by improving the AI to the point where you can't see any obvious patterns.
Other single-player games become too puzzle-like when the AI is crap. In various incarnations of EA Sports' NHL series, for example, the game is fun until you find one type of shot that always works for a goal. At that point, you have "solved" the "game" because the goalie bites on your deke move (or whatever) every time.
Multi-player computer games are GAMES. And in my very extremely humble opinion, gamers graduate to the point where computer AI is no longer interesting and the only solution is to add humans.
This is why the consoles must eventually be netted; not because the net will become utterly ubiquitous, but because AIs will always be harder to make interesting than other humans.
--
You'll find hundreds WND stories on Y2K and every single one of them utterly alarmist.
WND also ran banner ads on many of these stories, offering sets of videotapes on y2k preparation - including some really survivalist nonsense - for hundreds of dollars. The videotapes and other survivalist nonsense were produced by... you guessed it, WND.
--
Typically your desktop is under your monitor, raising the height of your monitor. Well I have a 21" monitor, which means that if I want to open a desktop case, I have to lift this roughly 75 pound beast and put it somewhere else on my desk. And I'm a geek, which means that I'm unable to do that without endangering the monitor, endangering myself, and endangering my desktop.
--
Audio engineers, for example, should generally base their production work on studio "reference" monitors even though a lot of people are going to listen to their work through old 3" car speakers. It won't sound bad to those listeners, because to those listeners everything sounds equally bad.
--
Got a girlfriend?
--
I think Curry has gotten it right, but at the same time, I bemoan the loss of real, old-fashioned, free broadcasting.
I loved doing college radio, because every show was basically sharing songs and getting excited about music. Now that we have the net, we have the ability for a LOT of people to share songs with us.
But more likely to evolve is some sort of XML-based jug of songs with other stuff mixed in. (But not NEWS, Curry; when we want news we go to the news channels. Does anyone else get irritated that, when a news channel has "traffic on the 2s", you know that you have to wait as long as nine minutes - an eternity for our supposedly-connected age.)
What's missing is a human touch. I don't want a channel that programs ballads every 25 minutes. I want a human, who programs ballads because s/he feels like shit, who programs love songs because s/he's in love. I want someone who appreciates the same key changes I do.
Before radio was taken over by big business, it did nothing less than spark a cultural revolution. Now radio is a soundtrack to a bad movie. Maybe the *real* reason that Napster et al have become so popular is because our ESTHETIC/ARTISTIC NEEDS are not being met by the corporate world.
--
This can be objectively proven by the anonymous moderating Slashdot users, who characterize the majority of my comments as high quality; and exactly the sort of content they are interested in reading: funny, informative, interesting and/or insightful.
My content has both increased the number of people who are interested in reading the site, and the "stickiness" of the Slashdot site. Also, the fact that my comments have been archived indicates that Slashdot is leveraging all my work, despite the fact Slashdot freely admits that as the poster of my comments, I own them.
Therefore, I am hereby declaring that I am a de-facto worker for Slashdot. My demands are not high... I only expect to be paid what I have been worth to the company. Since I've been posting these highly valuable comments for well before it became valuable, was sold/partnered and subsequently IPO'd, I shall accept nothing less than 0.01% of VA Linux stock.
I shall expect further instructions on how we can both codify our contract with each other. However, lack of response to my message by September 29, 2000 shall represent a de-facto acceptance of my terms.
I want loot by the end of the month, or you'll be hearing from my attorneys. Gentlemen, have a nice day.
--
Furthermore, you have unwittingly given the strawberries a bully pulpit into the sky. By allowing them to send *their* messages out -- typically extremely simple messages, as far as we know -- many cultures out there are going to think that berries are the dominant earth culture. And when other berry cultures visit us, and see products like "Boo-Berry" and "Crunchberries", they'll be quite justified in wiping out all non-berry organisms on the planet.
Isn't it bad enough that we broadcast Tony Danza TV movies? Think of the consequences of your actions!
--
As long as you don't need anyone to remember the URL.
And as long as you don't need to use it with an email address on cards, since it's so long.
And as long as you don't have to write that abomination by hand more than once a day.
E T C .
--
The state can ask the other state for extradition. But the state can't cross state lines and arrest someone, fine someone, etc.
--
This is far different from state lemon laws on cars, since 99% of PA-driven cars are sold by PA car dealerships.
This will hurt places like CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, Rat Shack, and might drive out of business some of the small ma-and-pa places. Meanwhile, it'll help every business outside of the state. The "computer fairs", full of out-of-state gypsies, might have better deals than retail again.
Meanwhile, our state legislature has proven itself incompetent once again, writing cruddy law that hurts businesses in the state. Unlike many states, the PA pols are highly-paid full-timers. That's supposed to make them better legislators, but in reality, it only makes them able to stick their fingers everywhere they shouldn't be.
--
Who will shut down the other 97 channels? The people, that's who, insisting on conformity and singularity of thought.
Remember when all men wore hats - identical hats - to work? We are on the other end of that pendulum swing right now. Strauss and Howe argue that history is cyclic in nature and that we are inevitably going to see that pendulum swing back.
In the 30s, 100,000 school children gathered on Boston Commons to chant in unison that they would help President Roosevelt make the country better and stronger. Today we can't imagine that sort of conformist indoctrination, especially in support of a politician. But those children were in the midst of a crisis cycle.
That same generation produced survivor "Rudy" -- whose word is good no matter what, who would lay down and give his life for his fellow navy seals, but at the same time who is relentlessly bigoted and unaccepting of behavior one notch away from the norm.
We can only hope that crisis doesn't lead to his sort of shutdown of individual choice. We don't know what sort of common approach will be celebrated, though. Instead of insisting on the racial/sexual/etc bigotry of yesteryear, the new commonality might be the political correctness of today, or something we can't possibly anticipate.
In any case you can see the whole thing starting; today's kids are definitely more cared-for and thus more carefully indoctrinated than they were 20 years ago.
--
Which would continue what has been a generational shift away from group-think, when three channels were enough for anyone, towards individuality where 100 channels are no longer enough. The Internet clearly has the capability to increase the number of channels, to the point where if I don't like YOUR reality-based show I'll just produce my own.
The next question is how long society will tolerate this before reverting back to conformity and three "channels" again. If our only common experience is that we were lied to by the same politicians and corporations, then when a real crisis occurs, our fractured society will urgently look to find commonality wherever it can, including in its entertainment.
For more on this topic, please see The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe.
--
As soon as at least 128k/sec wireless bandwidth is combined with flat rates for 2-3 hours/day, there will no longer be so much need for conventional radio, eh? Get ready for the next big paradigm shift.
--
Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi!!!! Whoooooa! Pant-pant-pant-drool-drool-drool etc.
(thanx TA for the link)
--
- Their tech staff is boldly irresponsible
- Their tech staff is generally against the company
- The smarter an employee is, the more dangerous s/he is
- It makes you sound smart if you say "Linux should not be a part of the business process," as opposed to saying something simpler such as "Don't use Linux."
- Giving employees tools that they prefer causes them to "tinker" instead of developing interesting new methods to improve your business
- Finding the best tool to solve a problem is less important than finding one that keeps your employees at bay
- The "cool" factor is inherently a negative
Now... who put these assholes in charge?--
Oh, except for corporate welfare. Except for the war on drugs and corporate welfare, the Republicans are pretty libertarian.
Oh, yes, and federal involvement in education.
OK, except for the war on drugs, corporate welfare, federal involvement in education, interventionist foreign policy, marital and other rights of homosexuals, internet censorship, ballot access, medicare and medicaid privatization, separation of church and state, the nature of juries, abortion rights, immigration, protectionist trade policies, victimless crimes, property tax, zoning, suicide rights, and flag burning, the Republicans are pretty libertarian.
But they do drive SAABs, I'll grant you that. (Post-GM SAABs, which are SAAB-lites.)
--