Look, I think Bill has hit the nail on the head with this right here. I mean, let us really sit down and think this through: How in the hell is this so-called "internet balloon" suppose to help anyone? It's not as though someone suffering from diarrhea could use internet access to gain knowledge about the causes and treatments for diarrhea. It's not like they could even use the internet to locate a hospital or aid station that could help them in anyway. And they certainly couldn't use the internet to communicate with doctors or medical staff of any kind. Such an idea would be quite absurd don't you think, Bill? What's that, Bill? Oh, right, malaria. Yeah, based on all those previous examples, it also logically follows that people couldn't use the internet to find hospitals or aid stations that are administering malaria vaccinations and people certainly couldn't use the internet to learn exactly how dangerous malaria is or how imperative it is to get a vaccination for it if available.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Unless you going to supply the computers for them to access the wifi, and teach them how to read and type?
What if I told you that there is free online courseware that doesn't even require a teacher to teach, just a cheap PC and access to the web... Perhaps if their people had some degree of education they could create solutions to their problems faster than only relying on others for direction and assistance?
A cheap PC that nobody in the poor regions can afford. Websites written in English that nobody can understand.
You can't just go online and learn without a teacher without knowing at least one written language -- i.e. "basic-fucking-literacy" (what you quoted). How come it's so hard to get this point across?
Well clearly, until we find a charity that is perfect in all regards we should only give our money towards getting faster internet.
With faster internet, *I* can upload my narcissistic blogs, photos and videos of myself even faster, and it is the best charity that mankind has ever known.
So you're saying having second and third world countries becoming dependent on first world internet/information is better?
Ideally, having drugs on things like **keeping people alive and healthy** can be provided to establish self-sufficiency. If you're struggling to keep yourself and your family against diseases daily, do you think you'd have the strength to actually attain basic literacy and scientific knowledge, learn a foreign language (English), and buy one of those expensive things called computers to learn how to make purified water?
You idiots just get it backwards. Not all the woes of this world is just caused by a lack of information. Otherwise there won't be any poor/stupid/sick people on the internet.
Look, I know Google, Facebook and other big tech companies hires entry level software engineers at roughly $100k. The top law firms, after 3 extra years in law school and massive debt, hire their entry level lawyers at about $130k. Factor in the hours, and the pay is actually worse in the law firms.
There is a well documented oversupply of lawyers in the US market, and many recent graduates struggle to find jobs. On the other hand, somehow programmers who can't write anything beyond Hello World seem to be able to make a living.
I have a law degree (in a jurisdiction where the legal job market is better than the one in US). And society seems to value me (in terms of money) when I spend my time writing software. After 8-12 years I probably will have enough money to think about doing something else just for fun, like, maybe actually becoming a lawyer or something.
1. Graduating from a whatever degree does not have any bearing whatsoever to the skills of a person. If in doubt, ask the interviewers who rant about candidates with a CS degree (or a masters even!) that can't program beyond the Hello World.
2. You probably don't know what PhDs are. PhDs are a program where a graduate student does a bunch of highly specialized niche research that may or may not have any value in the Real World. You'd be crazy to think that all molecular biology PhDs are equally valuable.
3. The world economy may be in a recession, but the software business is booming like crazy. Some say it's Bubble 2.0 even.
4. You don't realize that people are born with different talents. I consider myself doing quite well as a software engineer. But if somebody wanted to train me to become a salesperson, a musician, an actor, or whatever, I probably die before being successful at those jobs. I can't say about "STEM" in general, but programming requires a specific mindset, attitude and philosophy, that you can't just take somebody and train them to become a good programmer. Otherwise, there's no reason large tech companies in the US pay ~$100k for their graduate hires. If there isn't a shortage, that number would probably get slashed to half that.
If there was a way of screening H1B applicants for qualifications before granting the visa, it might make more sense. Perhaps require that they have a job offer waiting from someone who wants to hire them first.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about? What you wrote is precisely how H1B works today. You might be justified in the mistake because you can't imagine how somebody who can barely write Hello World can land a programming job, but hey, that's why they're going around interviewing in the first place...
The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H). It allows US employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring employer, the worker must either apply for and be granted a change of status to another non-immigrant status, find another employer (subject to application for adjustment of status and/or change of visa), or leave the US.
Seriously, put together a 2000 calorie diet that gets 100% of the RDA for all those vitamins and minerals
That's begging the question. I'm personally not too much a believer of RDA, but that's neither here nor there. I guess the GP is just saying, forget the vitamins, RDA or not.
It's not like humans ever had to meet RDA values withs a 2000 calorie diet in the past million years or so, there's no reason to think that multivitamins are suddenly required for our health starting from the last century.
I'm pretty sure we can trivially find a proof that most forms of mathematics is NP-Hard. (No kidding -- determining whether there are mathematical proofs of length N is NP-Complete)
Are there subjects that are harder than exponential? Probably not that many.
Irrelevant. What's relevant: if there's little need in the US (or any other country) economy for software people, it is likely there will be no winners from US in the ACM competition (or winning will happen only as an exception rather than the norm).
And yet the fact is the US has a huge appetite for software people. I know a bunch of ACM ICPC world finalists (like around 20), and at least half of them at one point in their lives ended up in the Bay Area working on software for some large tech company (yes, on H1Bs).
You can flame all you want about them "taking your jobs", but the fact is that there's a truly felt shortage of actually good programmers in the US. And it's not felt as strongly in other parts of the world, or at least that is my anecdotal experience.
If you consider the Earth as a giant planetary scale simulation for DNA evolution, then you'd entertain the possibility that building a machine to run the model simulations might be computationally expensive enough for them to actually hop around planets to get what they'd need.
Successful people with fulfilling lives generally don't like to whine on Slashdot.
The sample is necessarily screwed. The people unhappy about their jobs will whine, and the people happy generally don't write a passionate post on how happy they are at being a corporate drone.
I'm a bottom rung software engineer, and I for one certainly wouldn't want to do "professional trade certifications" (here, take this meaningless exam), "continuing education" (compulsory course on "introducing ruby on rails", by some "professional" instructor who hasn't written code in 10 years), and dealing with all those bureaucratic crap if it can be avoided.
Potential benefits my ass. Maybe you're the type that likes to be able to pretend to be a "professional" with all those fancy certifications and titles, but as far as I've seen, the software/tech industry has one of the highest concentration of people who hates such red tape with a passion.
One of the first things you learn in law school is that you sue the one with the most money. If the law allows you to go after <rich corporation>, you don't go after the manufacturers that can't cough up a billion dollars in damages. I agree that in these cases (and many others) patent law really sucks, but that's how the game is played.
Designing good algorithms and writing reasonably bug free programs is probably NP-hard. I'm not sure whether they are even in NP actually. (Might sound a bit tongue in cheek, but computational complexity theory isn't just for Google interviews -- it's pretty useful sometimes to get a rough idea how hard something is....)
If there is a panacea to parallel programming, it would have been expressed as a framework already.
The problem is inherently hard, and while there are a lot of good guidelines on what *not* to do, there aren't a lot of good guidelines on how one should do things, especially if the task is rather complex. For purely computational work (i.e. not much input/output), a functional language might help you a bit. Otherwise you'd need to have a strong CS background and/or a lot of experience with designing and writing multithreaded/distributed-computing code.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as it's on Slashdot, don't even bother arguing with iHaters.
Am I reading the same wiki page as you?
Canada, 11%-15% (federal) + 5%-16% (provincial), which works out to 16%-31%
Russia, 20% (13% for SME, 0% for education and healthcare industries), 6% for small business
Both are above your 15%, which, if I may say, means practically nothing, if most of the companies actually pay a rate closer to 51% than 15%.
I just thought it strange that you specifically quoted *Canada* as a low tax country. It's anything but.
Look, I think Bill has hit the nail on the head with this right here. I mean, let us really sit down and think this through: How in the hell is this so-called "internet balloon" suppose to help anyone? It's not as though someone suffering from diarrhea could use internet access to gain knowledge about the causes and treatments for diarrhea. It's not like they could even use the internet to locate a hospital or aid station that could help them in anyway. And they certainly couldn't use the internet to communicate with doctors or medical staff of any kind. Such an idea would be quite absurd don't you think, Bill? What's that, Bill? Oh, right, malaria. Yeah, based on all those previous examples, it also logically follows that people couldn't use the internet to find hospitals or aid stations that are administering malaria vaccinations and people certainly couldn't use the internet to learn exactly how dangerous malaria is or how imperative it is to get a vaccination for it if available.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Unless you going to supply the computers for them to access the wifi, and teach them how to read and type?
What if I told you that there is free online courseware that doesn't even require a teacher to teach, just a cheap PC and access to the web... Perhaps if their people had some degree of education they could create solutions to their problems faster than only relying on others for direction and assistance?
A cheap PC that nobody in the poor regions can afford.
Websites written in English that nobody can understand.
You can't just go online and learn without a teacher without knowing at least one written language -- i.e. "basic-fucking-literacy" (what you quoted). How come it's so hard to get this point across?
Well clearly, until we find a charity that is perfect in all regards we should only give our money towards getting faster internet.
With faster internet, *I* can upload my narcissistic blogs, photos and videos of myself even faster, and it is the best charity that mankind has ever known.
So you're saying having second and third world countries becoming dependent on first world internet/information is better?
Ideally, having drugs on things like **keeping people alive and healthy** can be provided to establish self-sufficiency. If you're struggling to keep yourself and your family against diseases daily, do you think you'd have the strength to actually attain basic literacy and scientific knowledge, learn a foreign language (English), and buy one of those expensive things called computers to learn how to make purified water?
You idiots just get it backwards. Not all the woes of this world is just caused by a lack of information. Otherwise there won't be any poor/stupid/sick people on the internet.
When you get to that, then it's the GP turn to have no idea what the article is writing about.
I took a glance at it. Probably don't really understand it unless I spend a week or two seriously reading it thoroughly and its cited articles...
Look, I know Google, Facebook and other big tech companies hires entry level software engineers at roughly $100k. The top law firms, after 3 extra years in law school and massive debt, hire their entry level lawyers at about $130k. Factor in the hours, and the pay is actually worse in the law firms.
There is a well documented oversupply of lawyers in the US market, and many recent graduates struggle to find jobs. On the other hand, somehow programmers who can't write anything beyond Hello World seem to be able to make a living.
I have a law degree (in a jurisdiction where the legal job market is better than the one in US). And society seems to value me (in terms of money) when I spend my time writing software. After 8-12 years I probably will have enough money to think about doing something else just for fun, like, maybe actually becoming a lawyer or something.
No I didn't make that up.
1. Graduating from a whatever degree does not have any bearing whatsoever to the skills of a person. If in doubt, ask the interviewers who rant about candidates with a CS degree (or a masters even!) that can't program beyond the Hello World.
2. You probably don't know what PhDs are. PhDs are a program where a graduate student does a bunch of highly specialized niche research that may or may not have any value in the Real World. You'd be crazy to think that all molecular biology PhDs are equally valuable.
3. The world economy may be in a recession, but the software business is booming like crazy. Some say it's Bubble 2.0 even.
4. You don't realize that people are born with different talents. I consider myself doing quite well as a software engineer. But if somebody wanted to train me to become a salesperson, a musician, an actor, or whatever, I probably die before being successful at those jobs. I can't say about "STEM" in general, but programming requires a specific mindset, attitude and philosophy, that you can't just take somebody and train them to become a good programmer. Otherwise, there's no reason large tech companies in the US pay ~$100k for their graduate hires. If there isn't a shortage, that number would probably get slashed to half that.
If there was a way of screening H1B applicants for qualifications before granting the visa, it might make more sense. Perhaps require that they have a job offer waiting from someone who wants to hire them first.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about? What you wrote is precisely how H1B works today. You might be justified in the mistake because you can't imagine how somebody who can barely write Hello World can land a programming job, but hey, that's why they're going around interviewing in the first place...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H). It allows US employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring employer, the worker must either apply for and be granted a change of status to another non-immigrant status, find another employer (subject to application for adjustment of status and/or change of visa), or leave the US.
The question is of course how much of that is attributable to the use of vitamins.
I don't know, do you?
Seriously, put together a 2000 calorie diet that gets 100% of the RDA for all those vitamins and minerals
That's begging the question. I'm personally not too much a believer of RDA, but that's neither here nor there. I guess the GP is just saying, forget the vitamins, RDA or not.
It's not like humans ever had to meet RDA values withs a 2000 calorie diet in the past million years or so, there's no reason to think that multivitamins are suddenly required for our health starting from the last century.
"You want to dump backwards compatibility? Windows? Our core product we sell everything else on top of? THAT HAS TO BE THE WORST IDEA EVER"
They might get away with hiring Linus Torvalds for this actually. (eg. http://marc.info/?l=linux-acpi&m=136157944603147&w=2 )
I've found a pointing the link to a datauri encoded html page with a meta tag to redirect works pretty well.
I'm pretty sure we can trivially find a proof that most forms of mathematics is NP-Hard. (No kidding -- determining whether there are mathematical proofs of length N is NP-Complete)
Are there subjects that are harder than exponential? Probably not that many.
Yes, the US has been outsourcing programming to Russia and Eastern Europe. And Japan. (Just RTFA instead of believing the outright wrong summary)
FYI, India is a non-competitor in these algorithmic competitions. Seriously, they suck at it. (See http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3959807&cid=44247721 )
Ironically, communication and teamwork is actually a part of this contest.
3 people in a team on one computer. Makes you think pair programming was inspired by them (given the long history of the competition).
Irrelevant. What's relevant: if there's little need in the US (or any other country) economy for software people, it is likely there will be no winners from US in the ACM competition (or winning will happen only as an exception rather than the norm).
And yet the fact is the US has a huge appetite for software people. I know a bunch of ACM ICPC world finalists (like around 20), and at least half of them at one point in their lives ended up in the Bay Area working on software for some large tech company (yes, on H1Bs).
You can flame all you want about them "taking your jobs", but the fact is that there's a truly felt shortage of actually good programmers in the US. And it's not felt as strongly in other parts of the world, or at least that is my anecdotal experience.
If you consider the Earth as a giant planetary scale simulation for DNA evolution, then you'd entertain the possibility that building a machine to run the model simulations might be computationally expensive enough for them to actually hop around planets to get what they'd need.
Successful people with fulfilling lives generally don't like to whine on Slashdot.
The sample is necessarily screwed. The people unhappy about their jobs will whine, and the people happy generally don't write a passionate post on how happy they are at being a corporate drone.
I'm a bottom rung software engineer, and I for one certainly wouldn't want to do "professional trade certifications" (here, take this meaningless exam), "continuing education" (compulsory course on "introducing ruby on rails", by some "professional" instructor who hasn't written code in 10 years), and dealing with all those bureaucratic crap if it can be avoided.
Potential benefits my ass. Maybe you're the type that likes to be able to pretend to be a "professional" with all those fancy certifications and titles, but as far as I've seen, the software/tech industry has one of the highest concentration of people who hates such red tape with a passion.
One of the first things you learn in law school is that you sue the one with the most money. If the law allows you to go after <rich corporation>, you don't go after the manufacturers that can't cough up a billion dollars in damages. I agree that in these cases (and many others) patent law really sucks, but that's how the game is played.
Why is this kind of programming so difficult
Designing good algorithms and writing reasonably bug free programs is probably NP-hard. I'm not sure whether they are even in NP actually. (Might sound a bit tongue in cheek, but computational complexity theory isn't just for Google interviews -- it's pretty useful sometimes to get a rough idea how hard something is....)
Well, at least every programmer should know enough about XML to avoid it.
The design of XML actually looks good on paper. So you got to actually *feel* the pain by using it. It's a initiation rite of sorts. (j/k)
If there is a panacea to parallel programming, it would have been expressed as a framework already.
The problem is inherently hard, and while there are a lot of good guidelines on what *not* to do, there aren't a lot of good guidelines on how one should do things, especially if the task is rather complex. For purely computational work (i.e. not much input/output), a functional language might help you a bit. Otherwise you'd need to have a strong CS background and/or a lot of experience with designing and writing multithreaded/distributed-computing code.