I agree with much of what you said, but I'm not sure you fully understand the issue.
Keep in mind that somebody has the keys to the data. There's no way to enforce proper behavior short of assigning someone to monitor him 24/7. And there are always holes.
I agree with this, but also keep in mind that the fewer number of "sombodies" there are, the less the chances are of a leak.
For anyone that doesn't have the keys to the data, banning storage devices does no good; they theoretically can't get to the data anyway.
Yes, this is true. But the issue isn't for those that don't have keys to the data. There are many different keys (or access levels) involved, and there are plenty of employees who NEED access to certain data, but certainly don't need any way to store that data on another device. So, banning (or technically removing) the ability to connect external storage devices helps make sure that they people who need to see certain data don't take a copy of it with them. Of course any technological means of preventing people from copying the data can be bypassed, but most of the people accessing the data don't have the knowledge (or the determination) to circumvent protection systems. However, if it's as easy as popping a disk into the floppy drive or inserting a USB flash device, there doesn't need to be a lot of knowledge or determination to take home a copy of the data.
Your best bet is to restrict data access to those few who need it (the gatekeeper), and then get to know/monitor/know you can trust the guy.
This doesn't really work. The guy you can trust today may not be trustworthy tomorrow. I all depends on what is happening in the rest of his life. Your best bet is to use a combination of techniques. Restrict access to only those who truly needed it, make it "difficult" to use that access level for things that those people don't need to do, and finally monitor everything you can so that if you get bitten you can at least track down who the culprit might have been.
It's all really a game of probabilities. The goal is to reduce the probability of liability while at the same time balancing that against your impact on employee productivity.
Just because you wish that employees be treated as automatons with no ability to make intelligent choices doesn't mean you should.
Sometimes you don't have any choice.
If you want employees to be effective and efficient they need to be empowered to do their work. Putting in artificial roadblocks is just red tape. You need to justify that policies will do what you want them to do. Otherwise, they just get in the way of good people trying to do their work.
There is no doubt that when you eliminate the technical freedoms of your employees, you create roadblocks to getting work done. However, many times a company doesn't have any choice. For example, I used to work for a health care company about the time that HIPA was coming into enforcement. There were very specific rules around protection of patient information, and the company positively could not afford for someone to be caught breaking those rules. Based on this, the company was forced to perform a balancing act between empowering their employees and limiting freedoms that can do severe damage. Locking down the computers to avoid creating copies that can be transported out of the facility is an example. It might force a support call to IT everytime an employee has a legitimate need to copy data somewhere, but this sacrifice also reduces the possibility of transporting data for illegitimate purposes.
Here's another example for you. At every company at which I have been employed, there was at one time or another a security audit. Each time, one of the most important points was the need to reduce the number of people who had administrator-level access to the computer systems. Now, for those of us that provide support (particularly off-hours), such high-level access can make it much easier for us to do our job. However, the results of someone misusing that access can be completely catastrophic to the company. Therefore, it seems to be wise to restrict that level of access to only a small handful of people who need to be contacted by other support staff in the event that such access is needed. Yes, it slows down the troubleshooting process. Yes, it frustrates the heck out of otherwise great employees. But think of the consequences of giving the wrong person administrator-level access to your systems. The problem is, you never know who the "wrong person" is until it is too late.
Apparently you've never used free college internet access.
Actually, I have and there were no problems with speed. But when I was at the University (back in the dark ages), the WWW was just beginning to take off, there were no P2P applications, and nobody even dreamed of downloading video or more than a few seconds worth of audio.
Personally, I am a bit surprised why they did not upgrade to 802.11A where there is so much more bandwidth or simply require that the students use it
Actually, they are suggesting that the students use 802.11a for their private wireless if they don't want to string up CAT-5 wiring. But my real question is, if the University is already providing wireless internet access, why on earth are the students paying for private access via either cable or DSL? Too much money to burn?
Vendor A likes Distro 1, vendor B wants winblows, vendor C wants Solaris.
This kind of conundrum usually only happens with smaller vendors. But in this case, if you have multiple products that require different distributions, you are correct in that you need to please yourself and dump any vendor not willing to work with you.
In this case, IBM does not specify a single distribution and does work hard to please their customers.
Based on the original posting, I was under the impression that IBM specifies a list of distributions, and Debian is not on it.
All the distros use the same packages because the free ones end up being the best in the long run.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with this. They definitely don't all use the same packages, and if a couple popular "commercial" distributions start using non-free packages, you'll see less emphasis on the free ones. Like you, I hope they stay with the free packages, but they truly are going to use what they think is best. And the best package in the long run will be the one that gets development attention, regardless of whether it is free.
Debian has been getting things done and companies like IBM are going to be using it and liking what their customers use and like. This guy is just ahead of the heard and IBM is not going to punish him for it.
Debian is a mainstream distribution, and I fully believe that IBM will provide as much support as they possibly can, but if Debian is not on the list of recommended distributions, you can't really expect IBM to be able to respond as quickly to support needs. And this is the point I was originally making. If you have downtime on a productive system, you will be calling your vendor for support. If the Linux distribution you chose is not one they recommended, any good company will help you to the best of their ability, but you have to expect it to take longer because they are working in territory with which they are less familiar. The extended downtime in such cases can turn a company who has decided to give Linux away from ever doing so again.
I work for a large software company that has a long list of approved hardware and OS vendors. If one of our customers chooses something else, we are willing to work with them, but you can bet that in our contract we'll have all kinds of modifications to the service level agreements to reflect the fact that we're being asked to support something outside of the "norm."
Before everyone starts flaming, everything in the documentary was 'facts'.
Perhaps, but unlike you I consider the deceptive practice of providing only the 'facts' that you want known without the very important related 'facts' that you don't want to be known to be every bit as much of a lie as intentionally providing incorrect information. And yes, because of this position I consider both sides of the argument to be full of lies.
My concerns are more about persuading management that an "unsupported" distribution could be a goer, and what I expect to be a small number if contacts with IBM support.
You need to decide what your goal is. If your goal is to begin using Linux in a productive environment, I cannot recommend enough that you use a distribution supported by the vendor of any software you want to run. If you choose to go with an unsupported distribution, regardless of your reasons, you need to realize that a failure will make absolutely certain that your company never tries to run anything on Linux again.
Pray, what's the point in adopting a standard today, that most common devices that need internet access (read PCs) can't even dream of attaining?
Remember that this is an experiment, and getting speeds like these into widespread availability is pretty far in the future. By the time such speeds are available, the computing power to take advantage of them probably will be too. If they don't start the research now, we'll have very powerful computers that come to a screeching halt everytime they have to retrieve data from the 'net.
but many professors give me the blank stare if I ask them to help me edit a paper.
I hate to say it, but if these are math professors, it might be time to drop in to the Dean's office and complain about the quality of the instructors. I would expect any instructor in the Sciences and Mathematics fields to know how to use document formatting tools like LaTeX. I would be suspicious of the level of education of any who didn't.
And has your ticket price gone down at all since they started showing ads? Concessions gotten any cheaper? No. Prices still continue to climb.
I have absolutely no support for the MPAA and the tactics of movie theaters, but one thing you have to factor into the equation is that the cost of making a movie is astronomically higher now than it was in the 1980's, not to mention the equipment required to show them. Special effects, digital processing and incredible sound are in high demand now. Given this, the revenues from advertising may be holding the prices down some, but I don't think there's any way of knowing for sure.
If you killed all the lawyers, who'd be there to protect your interests from all the freakin' jerks suing you...
If we killed off all the lawyers, how would you expect somebody to sue me?? On their own? At least then we are on even playing ground and not paying out tons of legal fees.
...the power-grubbing politicians trying to take away your rights?
Power-grubbing politicians are nothing without lawyers to stand behind. It would be different if they could actually agree with each other and get organized, but I doubt that's likely to happen.
Soviets took care of their people well and their medicine was top.
Which explains why doctors were some of the lower-paid people in the USSR? My friends from the former Soviet Union would definitely have a different opinion... not to say that their medicine was truly bad, but certainly not top notch.
And - if this really hits the Republicans, it won't be long before Bush's spin-doctors claim the whole idea was, in fact, initiated by Al Qaeda members.
Actually, it's more likely that it will be blamed on an organized effort sanctioned (in secret) by the Democratic party. The folks organizing this are idiots -- it will only give the Republics fodder for campaigning, and will help to associate Democrats with criminals in the public mind.
Doesn't this void your privacy requirements you previously mentioned.
For those of you with privacy concerns and questioning the use of Windows for the target platform, I'd like to submit that maybe the intent is to let those participating in the study run the program to extract the desired snippets and send them in, which mitigates somewhat the privacy concerns and probably *would* require that the app run on Windows.
Not trying to point the finger at FerretFrottage...just a convenient reply point...
Don't try to blame the rise of the Japanese Automakers on the unions.
I'm not. I fully blame the decisions made by the auto manufacturers -- they had a choice. Although, I *may* end up blaming the unions on the failure of US Airways, if and when it happens. Don't get me wrong. Unions have done a lot for workers, and not every union is "evil." However, I contend that there are a number of unions that abuse their power in much the same way the wealthy companies do.
The primary reason is that the Japanese thought for the long term and the American auto makers thought for the short term.
No. The primary reason is that Japanese cars were being sold for significantly less than American cars. By the time people realized that the Japanese autos were much more reliable, most of the damage had already been done. The reliability factor just helped to keep the dominance of the Japanese manufacturers firmly in place after the prices of their cars rose.
By the way, you mentioned "planned obsolescence" and short-term thinking as the primary reason for failure. However, surely you must realize that American consumers suffer from the same short-sightedness, right? This weakness in our society is what I blame most for the declining power of the union.
Unions got you the 40 hour work week, vacations, unemployment insurance, work-place safety, end of child-labor, end of the 16 hour mandatory work day. The worst thing for the economy has been the decline in worker power in the last 30 years. It has allowed concentration of wealth at unprecedented levels.
Unions are only useful when a company has little or no other place to which to turn. Since labor markets started opening up overseas, the power of the Union has declined dramatically. Funny how the movement of labor to overseas started at about the 30 year-ago-mark that you cited for the beginning of the decline.
I agree with you that the power of the Union has declined. I agree that the wealthy have taken unprecedented advantage of it. However, I'd like to point out that the rise to power of Japanese automobile manufacturers is a perfect example of what happens when American companies try to "play ball" with the unions. The only reason that American automobile companies are beginning to compete again is because the cost of manufacturing has risen dramatically in Japan.
Eventually "white collar" workers will realize that unions are the only way to resist.
All this would do is move jobs to India and China at a faster pace. If you really want to fix the problem, you have to get people to start paying attention to the employment practices of companies from which they purchase goods and services. All of those on-strike unionized workers continued to buy products from other companies who were treating their employees pretty much the same way. If you don't break this cycle, your union has no power at all, and only serves to give the company a reason to start offshoring.
what are the chance that Bush would take this as a terroist threat and use it as an excuse to go and bomb the shit out of the country that said it?
None. Don't be silly. Although I can guarantee you that the reaction in the US would depend highly on which country makes the threat. If it was the EU, Bush would probably make lots of noise and then bow and scrape. If Iran makes a similar threat, Bush will say "go ahead" and then later try harder to get them slapped with economic sanctions over their nuclear policies....
But the rest of the world's economy would take a severe hit if they were cut of from America even in limited fashion like email.
Yes, most likely, but since the impact to the American economy would be similar, it's unlikely that the US would let that happen. Somebody ought to do a comparison analysis between the impact of loss of connectivity and the impact that fighting spam has right now. A few days of lost connectivity may very well be worth the cost savings to companies that have to spend money on dealing with spam.
We should add the entire American IP address range to the great blacklist and move along!:)
I know your comment was meant to be funny, but that's EXACTLY what I think other countries should do. They should contact the US government and tell them they have 30 days to fix the spam problem before a nationwide block goes into place. I predict the end to most of the spam within 5 to 10 days. I'm an American, BTW, and I don't think my country should be treated with any more consideration than some of the Asian countries we've advocated taking this approach with.
Unfortunately, nobody takes the idea of capital punishment for spammers seriously.
There are worse fates than death. Instead of executing spammers (and earning the ire of the international community), we should send them to an "old-fashioned" prison that isn't like staying at a resort. Make them work at strenuous manual labor for about 5 years without any eligibility for parole, and I seriously doubt they will go back to spamming after they get out. You don't need Bubba and you don't need death sentences. You just need hard, decisive and quickly executed justice.
they expect you to have strong reading comprehension of technical manuals.
Most also expect you to be able to communicate with other people, which quite frankly doesn't seem to be taught in high schools, and certain isn't learned in a curriculum focused entirely on CS courses. I've seen plenty of people come through our office with exactly this kind of degree. Most of them came (recently) from somewhere near Bangalor. Most of them were technically very capable. Most of them could speak English pretty well. Most of them were almost entirely useless because they had no training whatsoever in communicating with other folks in a business environment.
On top of this, business generally like to hire people who are capable of understanding the business and translating user requirements into technical and functional specifications. Sorry, but you get what you pay for.
So, after a quick search here are some free on-line typing tests:
I was a little apprehensive about trying TypingTest.com because it's been a while since I took a test. But it looks like I've gotten faster (less programming and more emails lately). Thanks for the links. I scored 103 wpm with 98% accuracy (2 errors) for a net of 101 wpm. I may try again tomorrow with my normal keyboard instead of my laptop.
Uh, isn't the entire point of these pumps to REPLACE the damaged heart?
Nope. From the article:
The VentrAssist, which is made by Australian company Ventracor, is of a type known as left ventricular assist devices. LVADs are not designed to replace the heart but are implanted alongside it under the rib cage. They augment the pumping action of the left ventricle - the heart's main chamber and the one that is responsible for 90 per cent of heart failure cases.
Cross-infection is only taken for granted by those pitching it to politicians or who were in favor of the mass wholesale slaughter of every cow in UK and Europe several years ago.
Well, at least they didn't follow the same procedure that was used by france. Personal, I think we have an historic moment where the politicians actually got something right... although most likely for the wrong reasons.
Simply because someone raises an issue that concerns them without having a (stated) solution does not constitute complaining nor whining.
Actually, by definition complaining would include raising an issue that causes concern. But I agree that you shouldn't call this whining -- that would usually require voicing the complaint in a childish manner.
However, generally when one wants a problem to be corrected, suggesting a method (or two) of correction is much more helpful than merely pointing out the problem. If you're going to take the time to put together a website addressing an issue, you might as well add a couple ideas about how to correct it. In support of Glen, I see that he at least tried to contact some of the official military agencies, so that was a potential course for correction.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that somebody has the keys to the data. There's no way to enforce proper behavior short of assigning someone to monitor him 24/7. And there are always holes.
I agree with this, but also keep in mind that the fewer number of "sombodies" there are, the less the chances are of a leak.
For anyone that doesn't have the keys to the data, banning storage devices does no good; they theoretically can't get to the data anyway.
Yes, this is true. But the issue isn't for those that don't have keys to the data. There are many different keys (or access levels) involved, and there are plenty of employees who NEED access to certain data, but certainly don't need any way to store that data on another device. So, banning (or technically removing) the ability to connect external storage devices helps make sure that they people who need to see certain data don't take a copy of it with them. Of course any technological means of preventing people from copying the data can be bypassed, but most of the people accessing the data don't have the knowledge (or the determination) to circumvent protection systems. However, if it's as easy as popping a disk into the floppy drive or inserting a USB flash device, there doesn't need to be a lot of knowledge or determination to take home a copy of the data.
Your best bet is to restrict data access to those few who need it (the gatekeeper), and then get to know/monitor/know you can trust the guy.
This doesn't really work. The guy you can trust today may not be trustworthy tomorrow. I all depends on what is happening in the rest of his life. Your best bet is to use a combination of techniques. Restrict access to only those who truly needed it, make it "difficult" to use that access level for things that those people don't need to do, and finally monitor everything you can so that if you get bitten you can at least track down who the culprit might have been.
It's all really a game of probabilities. The goal is to reduce the probability of liability while at the same time balancing that against your impact on employee productivity.
Sometimes you don't have any choice.
If you want employees to be effective and efficient they need to be empowered to do their work. Putting in artificial roadblocks is just red tape. You need to justify that policies will do what you want them to do. Otherwise, they just get in the way of good people trying to do their work.
There is no doubt that when you eliminate the technical freedoms of your employees, you create roadblocks to getting work done. However, many times a company doesn't have any choice. For example, I used to work for a health care company about the time that HIPA was coming into enforcement. There were very specific rules around protection of patient information, and the company positively could not afford for someone to be caught breaking those rules. Based on this, the company was forced to perform a balancing act between empowering their employees and limiting freedoms that can do severe damage. Locking down the computers to avoid creating copies that can be transported out of the facility is an example. It might force a support call to IT everytime an employee has a legitimate need to copy data somewhere, but this sacrifice also reduces the possibility of transporting data for illegitimate purposes.
Here's another example for you. At every company at which I have been employed, there was at one time or another a security audit. Each time, one of the most important points was the need to reduce the number of people who had administrator-level access to the computer systems. Now, for those of us that provide support (particularly off-hours), such high-level access can make it much easier for us to do our job. However, the results of someone misusing that access can be completely catastrophic to the company. Therefore, it seems to be wise to restrict that level of access to only a small handful of people who need to be contacted by other support staff in the event that such access is needed. Yes, it slows down the troubleshooting process. Yes, it frustrates the heck out of otherwise great employees. But think of the consequences of giving the wrong person administrator-level access to your systems. The problem is, you never know who the "wrong person" is until it is too late.
Actually, I have and there were no problems with speed. But when I was at the University (back in the dark ages), the WWW was just beginning to take off, there were no P2P applications, and nobody even dreamed of downloading video or more than a few seconds worth of audio.
Actually, they are suggesting that the students use 802.11a for their private wireless if they don't want to string up CAT-5 wiring. But my real question is, if the University is already providing wireless internet access, why on earth are the students paying for private access via either cable or DSL? Too much money to burn?
This kind of conundrum usually only happens with smaller vendors. But in this case, if you have multiple products that require different distributions, you are correct in that you need to please yourself and dump any vendor not willing to work with you.
In this case, IBM does not specify a single distribution and does work hard to please their customers.
Based on the original posting, I was under the impression that IBM specifies a list of distributions, and Debian is not on it.
All the distros use the same packages because the free ones end up being the best in the long run.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with this. They definitely don't all use the same packages, and if a couple popular "commercial" distributions start using non-free packages, you'll see less emphasis on the free ones. Like you, I hope they stay with the free packages, but they truly are going to use what they think is best. And the best package in the long run will be the one that gets development attention, regardless of whether it is free.
Debian has been getting things done and companies like IBM are going to be using it and liking what their customers use and like. This guy is just ahead of the heard and IBM is not going to punish him for it.
Debian is a mainstream distribution, and I fully believe that IBM will provide as much support as they possibly can, but if Debian is not on the list of recommended distributions, you can't really expect IBM to be able to respond as quickly to support needs. And this is the point I was originally making. If you have downtime on a productive system, you will be calling your vendor for support. If the Linux distribution you chose is not one they recommended, any good company will help you to the best of their ability, but you have to expect it to take longer because they are working in territory with which they are less familiar. The extended downtime in such cases can turn a company who has decided to give Linux away from ever doing so again.
I work for a large software company that has a long list of approved hardware and OS vendors. If one of our customers chooses something else, we are willing to work with them, but you can bet that in our contract we'll have all kinds of modifications to the service level agreements to reflect the fact that we're being asked to support something outside of the "norm."
Perhaps, but unlike you I consider the deceptive practice of providing only the 'facts' that you want known without the very important related 'facts' that you don't want to be known to be every bit as much of a lie as intentionally providing incorrect information. And yes, because of this position I consider both sides of the argument to be full of lies.
You need to decide what your goal is. If your goal is to begin using Linux in a productive environment, I cannot recommend enough that you use a distribution supported by the vendor of any software you want to run. If you choose to go with an unsupported distribution, regardless of your reasons, you need to realize that a failure will make absolutely certain that your company never tries to run anything on Linux again.
Remember that this is an experiment, and getting speeds like these into widespread availability is pretty far in the future. By the time such speeds are available, the computing power to take advantage of them probably will be too. If they don't start the research now, we'll have very powerful computers that come to a screeching halt everytime they have to retrieve data from the 'net.
I hate to say it, but if these are math professors, it might be time to drop in to the Dean's office and complain about the quality of the instructors. I would expect any instructor in the Sciences and Mathematics fields to know how to use document formatting tools like LaTeX. I would be suspicious of the level of education of any who didn't.
I have absolutely no support for the MPAA and the tactics of movie theaters, but one thing you have to factor into the equation is that the cost of making a movie is astronomically higher now than it was in the 1980's, not to mention the equipment required to show them. Special effects, digital processing and incredible sound are in high demand now. Given this, the revenues from advertising may be holding the prices down some, but I don't think there's any way of knowing for sure.
If we killed off all the lawyers, how would you expect somebody to sue me?? On their own? At least then we are on even playing ground and not paying out tons of legal fees.
Power-grubbing politicians are nothing without lawyers to stand behind. It would be different if they could actually agree with each other and get organized, but I doubt that's likely to happen.
Which explains why doctors were some of the lower-paid people in the USSR? My friends from the former Soviet Union would definitely have a different opinion... not to say that their medicine was truly bad, but certainly not top notch.
Actually, it's more likely that it will be blamed on an organized effort sanctioned (in secret) by the Democratic party. The folks organizing this are idiots -- it will only give the Republics fodder for campaigning, and will help to associate Democrats with criminals in the public mind.
For those of you with privacy concerns and questioning the use of Windows for the target platform, I'd like to submit that maybe the intent is to let those participating in the study run the program to extract the desired snippets and send them in, which mitigates somewhat the privacy concerns and probably *would* require that the app run on Windows.
Not trying to point the finger at FerretFrottage...just a convenient reply point...
I'm not. I fully blame the decisions made by the auto manufacturers -- they had a choice. Although, I *may* end up blaming the unions on the failure of US Airways, if and when it happens. Don't get me wrong. Unions have done a lot for workers, and not every union is "evil." However, I contend that there are a number of unions that abuse their power in much the same way the wealthy companies do.
The primary reason is that the Japanese thought for the long term and the American auto makers thought for the short term.
No. The primary reason is that Japanese cars were being sold for significantly less than American cars. By the time people realized that the Japanese autos were much more reliable, most of the damage had already been done. The reliability factor just helped to keep the dominance of the Japanese manufacturers firmly in place after the prices of their cars rose.
By the way, you mentioned "planned obsolescence" and short-term thinking as the primary reason for failure. However, surely you must realize that American consumers suffer from the same short-sightedness, right? This weakness in our society is what I blame most for the declining power of the union.
Unions are only useful when a company has little or no other place to which to turn. Since labor markets started opening up overseas, the power of the Union has declined dramatically. Funny how the movement of labor to overseas started at about the 30 year-ago-mark that you cited for the beginning of the decline.
I agree with you that the power of the Union has declined. I agree that the wealthy have taken unprecedented advantage of it. However, I'd like to point out that the rise to power of Japanese automobile manufacturers is a perfect example of what happens when American companies try to "play ball" with the unions. The only reason that American automobile companies are beginning to compete again is because the cost of manufacturing has risen dramatically in Japan.
Eventually "white collar" workers will realize that unions are the only way to resist.
All this would do is move jobs to India and China at a faster pace. If you really want to fix the problem, you have to get people to start paying attention to the employment practices of companies from which they purchase goods and services. All of those on-strike unionized workers continued to buy products from other companies who were treating their employees pretty much the same way. If you don't break this cycle, your union has no power at all, and only serves to give the company a reason to start offshoring.
None. Don't be silly. Although I can guarantee you that the reaction in the US would depend highly on which country makes the threat. If it was the EU, Bush would probably make lots of noise and then bow and scrape. If Iran makes a similar threat, Bush will say "go ahead" and then later try harder to get them slapped with economic sanctions over their nuclear policies....
Yes, most likely, but since the impact to the American economy would be similar, it's unlikely that the US would let that happen. Somebody ought to do a comparison analysis between the impact of loss of connectivity and the impact that fighting spam has right now. A few days of lost connectivity may very well be worth the cost savings to companies that have to spend money on dealing with spam.
I know your comment was meant to be funny, but that's EXACTLY what I think other countries should do. They should contact the US government and tell them they have 30 days to fix the spam problem before a nationwide block goes into place. I predict the end to most of the spam within 5 to 10 days. I'm an American, BTW, and I don't think my country should be treated with any more consideration than some of the Asian countries we've advocated taking this approach with.
There are worse fates than death. Instead of executing spammers (and earning the ire of the international community), we should send them to an "old-fashioned" prison that isn't like staying at a resort. Make them work at strenuous manual labor for about 5 years without any eligibility for parole, and I seriously doubt they will go back to spamming after they get out. You don't need Bubba and you don't need death sentences. You just need hard, decisive and quickly executed justice.
Most also expect you to be able to communicate with other people, which quite frankly doesn't seem to be taught in high schools, and certain isn't learned in a curriculum focused entirely on CS courses. I've seen plenty of people come through our office with exactly this kind of degree. Most of them came (recently) from somewhere near Bangalor. Most of them were technically very capable. Most of them could speak English pretty well. Most of them were almost entirely useless because they had no training whatsoever in communicating with other folks in a business environment.
On top of this, business generally like to hire people who are capable of understanding the business and translating user requirements into technical and functional specifications. Sorry, but you get what you pay for.
I was a little apprehensive about trying TypingTest.com because it's been a while since I took a test. But it looks like I've gotten faster (less programming and more emails lately). Thanks for the links. I scored 103 wpm with 98% accuracy (2 errors) for a net of 101 wpm. I may try again tomorrow with my normal keyboard instead of my laptop.
Nope. From the article:
Well, at least they didn't follow the same procedure that was used by france. Personal, I think we have an historic moment where the politicians actually got something right ... although most likely for the wrong reasons.
Actually, by definition complaining would include raising an issue that causes concern. But I agree that you shouldn't call this whining -- that would usually require voicing the complaint in a childish manner.
However, generally when one wants a problem to be corrected, suggesting a method (or two) of correction is much more helpful than merely pointing out the problem. If you're going to take the time to put together a website addressing an issue, you might as well add a couple ideas about how to correct it. In support of Glen, I see that he at least tried to contact some of the official military agencies, so that was a potential course for correction.