Except for the targetting systems, there isn't much in the military drones which couldn't be done by an amateur hobbyist with enough funds. The technology still appears to be fairly simple, probably in part due to its origins.
If I had not already commended and I had mod points, you'd be getting some (mod points). You distilled the idea quite well: it comes down to a religious system of belief which begets power to the elite. Making less of what we have doesn't fix things; making further progress in efficiency, on the other hand, can only help.
Of course people have noticed this. Many intelligent people with a broad base of knowledge have. The problem is that this article, as well as the so-called research it is based on, was written by myopic ideologues who have an agenda. Facts do not coincide with the agenda (which, they suspect, will undoubtedly grant them prestige and power when it becomes fruitful), and are therefore rejected.
I hate academia at large. It is painfully myopic: it's the useless thinking which results in this kind of study, as well as the short-sighted economic and political theories which result in the complete clusterfuck we're in now. It's got no basis in reality simply because the people who are in academia are complete detached from "reality", cloistered up in their sectarian communities, digesting ideas from others throughout the world in similar isolation. It's as bad as the self-feeding mindset of religion: devoid of outside input, self-selectively isolated, and stagnant (though they do not know it). They're like an unclean petri dish: they're getting results, but they're not results based on a factual basis but a subset understanding thereof.
Nobody has ever suggested that 100% of the Mayan population died.
Sure they have, multiple times. Haven't you been paying attention? The Mayans, and many other historical cultures like them, have been utterly killed off. The answer is obvious: whitey did it. Whitey needs to stop living in excess so he doesn't kill off more more of the hard working industrious people of wherever, and make amends for his evil ways. Reverting to a pre-hunter society where we graze off the land like cows is a recommended Good First Step, typically.
I live in the Dakotas, and the situation is much the same: nothing but scrubbrush and grass. We humans (evil white men) destroyed the native fauna when we brought destructive eastern weeds with our grain crop seeds, which pushed out the weaker native grasses. We've also planted trillions of trees, which help keep the winds low and the soils from eroding. Shrubs are now common and have (wherever the land is not completely flat) allowed for all kinds of shrubs and trees to take root.
Further south in Nebraska, where there is nothing but sand (except along a 20-odd mile swath by the Missouri), the situation is the same. Why is there only sand throughout most of the state? Some blame glaciers from millennia ago, which scraped the topsoil southward. The land still produces some shrubbery, but there's not much organic matter aside from what man has put there over the past 100 years through ranching and very mindful land management.
Yet things seemed to get to fairly fruitful states (eg. Mesopotamia) prior to man's intervention, quite randomly, without much intervention.
What makes you think that the Mesopotamia, "all over Africa" (specifically, the Sahara) became desolate due to Man's intervention/destruction? There's no corroborative evidence whatsoever, and quite the contrary in South and Central America. (Hell, the United States is more fertile and densely grown than it was 100, 200 years ago...)
Bio-fuels are outside of peak il theory, but are not a solution to it. The amount of vegetable matter that you need to produce the massive amounts of oil that humans use, would take up all the worlds arable land,leaving us nowhere to produce food for the every expanding population.
The use of most "biofuels" is, in and of itself, likely a contributor to the existing state of Peak Oil.
Most corn grown in the US today is put towards biofuels. If they were not growing that corn, they would not be consuming astoundingly copious amounts of petroleum to plant it (#2 diesel), fertilize it (petroleum-based nitrogen), herbicide it, harvest it (#1/#2 diesel depending on when it's harvested), dry it (#1 diesel), and then convert it to ethanol or another "biofuel" (50% energy loss), we wouldn't have nearly as much consumption of petroleum. (There is still debate whether so-called biofuels are even net-benfit, with up to 30% loss in energy being likely, resulting in the burning of the straight plant oils as diesel likely being more efficient.)
Yet, I've yet to see a laptop battery survive fully functional for more than a year and a half, or 3-5 years if frequently cycled. That's going to be one hell of a fueling cost once you consider the cost of the regular electricity to recharge daily.
An ICE vehicle is 'bricked' (in most cases) if the engine dies. Just because it's a manufacturer replaceable part or you can get them elsewhere does not mean it doesn't "brick" the vehicle. A computer is bricked by the board, CPU, RAM, or PSU going dead. That doesn't mean it can't be fixed. You're thinking of a 'total writeoff'. From wikipedia: "In the strictest sense of the term, bricking must imply that software error has rendered the device completely unrecoverable without some hardware replacement."
Just going off the cheap and easily acquirable CR123 li-ion batteries: they're about $1 - $1.35 each at wholesale prices, depending on the cell (more for the ones which are 'individually controlled'). There are 8,000 similar cells, so it's arguably going to have a material cost of at least $8,000 to replace it. That's a small part of the cost on these extravagant vehicles, but that's not chump change, either.
Need I remind people on slashdot that the average lifespan for a lithium cell is in the ballpark of 3-6 years? Needless to say, you won't be seeing too many 'classic' Teslas in 10-20 years.
They overlook another 'failure mode' for the battery, and they're being disingenuous by not mentioning the physical lifespan of their cell technology. They're looking at 3-5 years max before the vehicle range, battery output, and charge capacity greatly diminishes. Then they'll get the 'cutoff' on their battery from the electronics, and yes, it will be bricked until a new battery can be installed. (Hopefully they've got the cells fully isolated from each other so they can't back-charge each other and things like that, as well.)
To be sure. It's just (typically) not "new" vehicles which have such large problems, it's the ones that approach or surpass the decade or 100k mark.
There are very few designs which actually 'last' these days. There are too many plastic parts or designed-to-fail/replace parts, and the smallest of accidents can often 'total' the vehicle.
To list a few off the top of my head vehicles which are known for having significant problems (from recent vehicle research for used vehicle purchase):
* 90s Subarus (you name it, it'll fall apart or break before you hit 100k... but the engine will still work) * Pontiac Aztek (absolute crap all around) * Any Toyota truck in the past decade (body/frame/safety) * Early Ford Focus models (all) and the Ford Escape (same frame/design) * Ford Taurus -1995 (and earlier, not sure when it started) * Plymouth Voyager/Dodge Caravan pre-1995 (redesign year - previously completely plagued with electrical and overheating issues) * Certain years of at least one major model from every single manufacturer in each of the past 10 years, particularly the ones which use synthetic oil exclusively and are manufactured to exceedingly tight tolerances (they'll blow up quickly with low oil pressure). Honda and Toyota are plagued by this, but I've heard of quite a few Audis having sludge/engine failure problems as well.
I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I've heard of and seen first hand. I have to laugh when people tout their new vehicles as 'reliable' these days, because they are almost all reliable (to a fault) for the first 5+ years and/or 100k+ miles. A "reliable" vehicle is one that lasts a decade, has over 100k on it, and doesn't consume parts (moreso than normal maintenance - belts, filters, and other regular consumables). Replacing struts and cabin parts (eg. door latches, handles, window controls, etc.) with any sort of regularity? "Having" to replace distributor, solenoid, wiring harness, plugs much before 100k? Not a terribly reliable vehicle.
Yeah, right. Anyone want to take a wager that they shot down their own drone? Shit like that is sorta the 'terrorist' MO. They've done it before. Why else would they launch their craft if the event was shut down and they no longer had a reason to do so?
On the other hand, wanton destruction of other's property is really not the MO of the hunters and shooters in general. When you've got to fight for the right to use public lands and get blamed for other's abuse of them, or having to deal with special regulations on privately owned land to shoot, you're careful about things like this.
If you've ever posted something (anything) which could be found with a search engine (ie, it was indexed, which it most certainly was), it's probably available as part of a very large dataset which is indexed and searchable, and the company is able to generate
Those reports are sold to other companies, which then combine them with other information (or do so themselves) - like financial information.
Think about it: how many things from 10 years ago can you find just on the public internet (via Google)? Hell, you can track the 'accuracy' of my job history to see when and with what my resume, etc. on my site was updated through archive.org - going back over a decade, and all they do is archive. I'm sure this isn't exceptional. With the screen name of a prolific internet user in hand and a little time in front of a search engine, chances are you can track down a known person's entire online history manually, too - even without going to Facebook or the like.
As for the OT: my wife recently saw an ad for "singles in your area" for some random site. She was kind of shocked to see a picture of me as part of the collage advertising the 'singles'. It was a picture someone (ahem me) had put up on hotornot.com years ago (close to a decade ago, before I'd met her). Anything and everything you ever post on the internet in a datatype'd field? Someone has packaged it, sorted it, studied it, created reports on it, and sold it - guaranteed.
Short of the GSM modem/voice calling functionality, you can get 200%+ of the embedded computer for less than $200 USD. I can get a used/refurb
Hell, I can get a new/refurb HTC Sensation for about $250-300 USD on Ebay (not quite as 'open' yet but twice as spec'd and much more functional), or a (used) HTC HD2 for around $100 - still more device, and markedly more capable in terms of what it can do and what's available for it in terms of free software.
I know comparing a used/refurb device to a new one isn't exactly fair, but c'mon. It's 7x+ more expensive for just the board and it's got nothing to make it appealing over, oh, say, a Pandaboard or Beagleboard, which are both under $200.
Then you've got sites like HP's, which is absolutely useless to find information (either through their navigation system or search). In contrast, 'general' searches on Google (or Bing, for that matter) usually find what I want immediately.
I guess this means me. I fit the demographic. I was born in the early 1980s.
There is something 'missing' in the digital remasters of films, though arguably it's of a non-quantifiable aesthetic. Arguably, it's something of nostalgia, and I'd grant someone who argues it that way.
I remember, as a child, watching The Lone Ranger. Not the black and white, but the movie made in the 1980s (or early 90s). It'd come off television and had the start and finish of the ad segmens; my grandfather had recorded it for us, carefully stopping/recording at the appropriate parts - but we still had parts of he "We now return you to USA's Friday Night Movie".
My brother and I also had an VHS 'copy' of the original Batman serials from television in the late 1940s ( I think). The cars were big, there was no color, and the "Batmobile" was no different than any of the other cars. (Much better than the 1950s Batman, IMO.) The same goes for the b&w Superman, which we recorded off of reruns off TV, at some point. The Batman serials, we'd somehowmanaged to record about 20 seconds over the middle - some Micromachines commercial, right in the middle of a fight scene.
Flashing forward, I saw most of my favorite movies first on VHS: Die Hard, The Saint, Braveheart, Terminator, Commando. A favorite VHS had character, of sorts. You could tell it was well watched when the colors had started to fade and there was static or muddled audio. There was no jumping around randomly for favorite scenes. Many of them had been recorded off the TV by one person or another and passed around amongst friends. It wasn't until over a decade later that saw the full, non-edited-for-TV version of Commando (awesome!).
And then there was rainy days, snow days, or really-bad-storm days. You'd sit at home with the generator on (if you had one) and maybe watch movies while someone made food. You'd sort through a dozen different movies to find one that didn't suck, and you'd look for something to like or something to make fun of: it'd end up becoming a favorite for one reason or another.
That said: most of these people need to get a life.:) While I will grant you that the 1980s was the last great decade of America (for some time to come, at least), if you get too wrapped up in 1980s VHS films, you've got something wrong with you. I believe the term is "reality avoidance".
Surely you jest. There is no incentive for them to join in a union with Americans.
If you're in IT and unemployed, it's probably because they're doing the work over there cheaper - or over here doing it, living in a crowded self-selected cultural ghetto to make ends meet. What is there for them to gain by saying "sure, we'll standardize on wage"? They're competing on price now. Unless you're a complete idiot, you're more competent than they are without even the slightest bit of effort (DeVry graduate? you're more awesome than most of them).
Personally, I live in America, part of the Western world where we have working municipal sewage and running water to almost every home. I don't want to bring Indian culture and living standards here; that means I'd like to keep the wages above welfare rates, thanks.
The reality is simply this: finding good people in the tech sector is very hard.
Is it hard, or are you looking for the wrong thing? Finding people based on resumes in information technology is, I've found, hit or miss: sometimes, you've found the perfect candidate but his resume gets discarded out of hand; often, a good resume yields a completely worthless candidate. The failure here is not that there aren't enough of the right kind of technical people, it's that you're looking in the wrong place.
In my experience, the 'best hires' for positions have been people found through word of mouth and human connections. The 'best fits' I've found have been word-of-mouth referrals (though higher ups usually frown on such candidates actually getting picked for fears of cronyism). Of course, I'm sure HR would typically have a problem with this, as it runs around their infallible process, and hiring people you know instead of going through the full process probably breaks the law in a number of states as well, so there's not much you can do about this.
You see many candidates who claim to have the skills, but when you test the candidate they frequently disappoint.
But does that test even matter? I would argue that it may not. Hear me out here. I have interviewed a number of people recently, one of which had a very impressive resume. He was pre-interviewed by a favored 'rockstar' developer who the owner regards highly. (I question the veracity of this individual's actual ability and chalk his esteemed status up to being fluent in Synergy.)
I interviewed this individual once in person and got a feel for him. He grated on me, but that may be due to the fact that he was likely being pigeonholed for my replacement, not as my auxiliary or subordinate. I, admittedly, have multiple reasons I wanted to trip him up on the interview: first, I wanted him to be a useful person, not a lout who can tell a good tale about what he has supposedly done.
He impressed me at the initial interview, as he was able to talk about what he'd done in broad terms. He dug in and mentioned specifics on some topics, but he did have a way of taking a while to say it. He was well spoken. But then I realized he didn't fully answer in some cases, providing vague answers. So I asked for a follow-up interview.
Here were the questions I asked him on the follow-up interview (on the phone). I should note, these questions were for a "senior sysadmin" type role - someone who claimed in-depth LAMP and broad Linux experience, as well as broad experience in implementing different network topographies in highly sensitive environments.
* Using iptables, in which chain would you preferentially use to drop a specific TCP port? * What is catalina? (re: Tomcat, which he claimed to be a God with) * Which specific tool or tools would you use to properly back up mysql databases? ('file level copy' was his answer) * Do you have any cups or samba familiarity? (If so) what have you done? (nothing aside from what his mac did for him) * When is RAID5 better than RAID6? * Where is the correct place to install 3rd party, or non-system packages? * Describe the linux boot process, from POST to "login:"? (not a clue, muttered something about the boot sector and then immediately jumped to "applications start") * What is the general criteria used by the kernel's OOM killer? * Using a crossover ethernet cable between two gigE connected servers, what is the real, or practical realizable throughput of rsync and/or transfer over NFS? (didn't even have a clue where to start, blustered for a while about switches, even after I clarified/restated that no switches were involved) * What is your approach to web infrastructure backup while not breaking the running web applications? (a misdirection, which he answered poorly) * What is your familiarity with desktop linux? (none - went on for about 5 minutes about how Linux wasn't ready for the desktop and how Macs were best for
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Except for the targetting systems, there isn't much in the military drones which couldn't be done by an amateur hobbyist with enough funds. The technology still appears to be fairly simple, probably in part due to its origins.
If I had not already commended and I had mod points, you'd be getting some (mod points). You distilled the idea quite well: it comes down to a religious system of belief which begets power to the elite. Making less of what we have doesn't fix things; making further progress in efficiency, on the other hand, can only help.
Of course people have noticed this. Many intelligent people with a broad base of knowledge have. The problem is that this article, as well as the so-called research it is based on, was written by myopic ideologues who have an agenda. Facts do not coincide with the agenda (which, they suspect, will undoubtedly grant them prestige and power when it becomes fruitful), and are therefore rejected.
I hate academia at large. It is painfully myopic: it's the useless thinking which results in this kind of study, as well as the short-sighted economic and political theories which result in the complete clusterfuck we're in now. It's got no basis in reality simply because the people who are in academia are complete detached from "reality", cloistered up in their sectarian communities, digesting ideas from others throughout the world in similar isolation. It's as bad as the self-feeding mindset of religion: devoid of outside input, self-selectively isolated, and stagnant (though they do not know it). They're like an unclean petri dish: they're getting results, but they're not results based on a factual basis but a subset understanding thereof.
Nobody has ever suggested that 100% of the Mayan population died.
Sure they have, multiple times. Haven't you been paying attention? The Mayans, and many other historical cultures like them, have been utterly killed off. The answer is obvious: whitey did it. Whitey needs to stop living in excess so he doesn't kill off more more of the hard working industrious people of wherever, and make amends for his evil ways. Reverting to a pre-hunter society where we graze off the land like cows is a recommended Good First Step, typically.
I live in the Dakotas, and the situation is much the same: nothing but scrubbrush and grass. We humans (evil white men) destroyed the native fauna when we brought destructive eastern weeds with our grain crop seeds, which pushed out the weaker native grasses. We've also planted trillions of trees, which help keep the winds low and the soils from eroding. Shrubs are now common and have (wherever the land is not completely flat) allowed for all kinds of shrubs and trees to take root.
Further south in Nebraska, where there is nothing but sand (except along a 20-odd mile swath by the Missouri), the situation is the same. Why is there only sand throughout most of the state? Some blame glaciers from millennia ago, which scraped the topsoil southward. The land still produces some shrubbery, but there's not much organic matter aside from what man has put there over the past 100 years through ranching and very mindful land management.
Yet things seemed to get to fairly fruitful states (eg. Mesopotamia) prior to man's intervention, quite randomly, without much intervention.
What makes you think that the Mesopotamia, "all over Africa" (specifically, the Sahara) became desolate due to Man's intervention/destruction? There's no corroborative evidence whatsoever, and quite the contrary in South and Central America. (Hell, the United States is more fertile and densely grown than it was 100, 200 years ago...)
Bio-fuels are outside of peak il theory, but are not a solution to it. The amount of vegetable matter that you need to produce the massive amounts of oil that humans use, would take up all the worlds arable land,leaving us nowhere to produce food for the every expanding population.
The use of most "biofuels" is, in and of itself, likely a contributor to the existing state of Peak Oil.
Most corn grown in the US today is put towards biofuels. If they were not growing that corn, they would not be consuming astoundingly copious amounts of petroleum to plant it (#2 diesel), fertilize it (petroleum-based nitrogen), herbicide it, harvest it (#1/#2 diesel depending on when it's harvested), dry it (#1 diesel), and then convert it to ethanol or another "biofuel" (50% energy loss), we wouldn't have nearly as much consumption of petroleum. (There is still debate whether so-called biofuels are even net-benfit, with up to 30% loss in energy being likely, resulting in the burning of the straight plant oils as diesel likely being more efficient.)
With variables like that, you must write Java for a living.
Yet, I've yet to see a laptop battery survive fully functional for more than a year and a half, or 3-5 years if frequently cycled. That's going to be one hell of a fueling cost once you consider the cost of the regular electricity to recharge daily.
Yeah, and?
An ICE vehicle is 'bricked' (in most cases) if the engine dies. Just because it's a manufacturer replaceable part or you can get them elsewhere does not mean it doesn't "brick" the vehicle. A computer is bricked by the board, CPU, RAM, or PSU going dead. That doesn't mean it can't be fixed. You're thinking of a 'total writeoff'. From wikipedia: "In the strictest sense of the term, bricking must imply that software error has rendered the device completely unrecoverable without some hardware replacement."
Just going off the cheap and easily acquirable CR123 li-ion batteries: they're about $1 - $1.35 each at wholesale prices, depending on the cell (more for the ones which are 'individually controlled'). There are 8,000 similar cells, so it's arguably going to have a material cost of at least $8,000 to replace it. That's a small part of the cost on these extravagant vehicles, but that's not chump change, either.
Need I remind people on slashdot that the average lifespan for a lithium cell is in the ballpark of 3-6 years? Needless to say, you won't be seeing too many 'classic' Teslas in 10-20 years.
They overlook another 'failure mode' for the battery, and they're being disingenuous by not mentioning the physical lifespan of their cell technology. They're looking at 3-5 years max before the vehicle range, battery output, and charge capacity greatly diminishes. Then they'll get the 'cutoff' on their battery from the electronics, and yes, it will be bricked until a new battery can be installed. (Hopefully they've got the cells fully isolated from each other so they can't back-charge each other and things like that, as well.)
To be sure. It's just (typically) not "new" vehicles which have such large problems, it's the ones that approach or surpass the decade or 100k mark.
There are very few designs which actually 'last' these days. There are too many plastic parts or designed-to-fail/replace parts, and the smallest of accidents can often 'total' the vehicle.
To list a few off the top of my head vehicles which are known for having significant problems (from recent vehicle research for used vehicle purchase):
* 90s Subarus (you name it, it'll fall apart or break before you hit 100k... but the engine will still work)
* Pontiac Aztek (absolute crap all around)
* Any Toyota truck in the past decade (body/frame/safety)
* Early Ford Focus models (all) and the Ford Escape (same frame/design)
* Ford Taurus -1995 (and earlier, not sure when it started)
* Plymouth Voyager/Dodge Caravan pre-1995 (redesign year - previously completely plagued with electrical and overheating issues)
* Certain years of at least one major model from every single manufacturer in each of the past 10 years, particularly the ones which use synthetic oil exclusively and are manufactured to exceedingly tight tolerances (they'll blow up quickly with low oil pressure). Honda and Toyota are plagued by this, but I've heard of quite a few Audis having sludge/engine failure problems as well.
I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I've heard of and seen first hand. I have to laugh when people tout their new vehicles as 'reliable' these days, because they are almost all reliable (to a fault) for the first 5+ years and/or 100k+ miles. A "reliable" vehicle is one that lasts a decade, has over 100k on it, and doesn't consume parts (moreso than normal maintenance - belts, filters, and other regular consumables). Replacing struts and cabin parts (eg. door latches, handles, window controls, etc.) with any sort of regularity? "Having" to replace distributor, solenoid, wiring harness, plugs much before 100k? Not a terribly reliable vehicle.
Yeah, right. Anyone want to take a wager that they shot down their own drone? Shit like that is sorta the 'terrorist' MO. They've done it before. Why else would they launch their craft if the event was shut down and they no longer had a reason to do so?
On the other hand, wanton destruction of other's property is really not the MO of the hunters and shooters in general. When you've got to fight for the right to use public lands and get blamed for other's abuse of them, or having to deal with special regulations on privately owned land to shoot, you're careful about things like this.
Maybe. Are you sure?
If they were innocent, then they were probably less sexually inclined than children. IE, they probably thought their bodies were funny.
The focus should be on "why" they want to blow up the plane. Maybe we should stop pissing off people by trying to take over their countries?
We just spent millions of dollars by giving radical Islamists yet another country to control. Why question anything?
May I introduce you to the tiling window manager? Take a gander at awesome, the first and last window manager a competent person should ever need.
Forget "virtual desktops". Forget "windows". They're silly concepts not suited for anyone but a designer.
Wasn't able to track down where the ad was from. Wife mentioned it in passing.
Absolutely.
If you've ever posted something (anything) which could be found with a search engine (ie, it was indexed, which it most certainly was), it's probably available as part of a very large dataset which is indexed and searchable, and the company is able to generate
Those reports are sold to other companies, which then combine them with other information (or do so themselves) - like financial information.
Think about it: how many things from 10 years ago can you find just on the public internet (via Google)? Hell, you can track the 'accuracy' of my job history to see when and with what my resume, etc. on my site was updated through archive.org - going back over a decade, and all they do is archive. I'm sure this isn't exceptional. With the screen name of a prolific internet user in hand and a little time in front of a search engine, chances are you can track down a known person's entire online history manually, too - even without going to Facebook or the like.
As for the OT: my wife recently saw an ad for "singles in your area" for some random site. She was kind of shocked to see a picture of me as part of the collage advertising the 'singles'. It was a picture someone (ahem me) had put up on hotornot.com years ago (close to a decade ago, before I'd met her). Anything and everything you ever post on the internet in a datatype'd field? Someone has packaged it, sorted it, studied it, created reports on it, and sold it - guaranteed.
For about $100, you can get a used HD2 and put Debian or Ubuntu on it, if you wanted...
Short of the GSM modem/voice calling functionality, you can get 200%+ of the embedded computer for less than $200 USD. I can get a used/refurb
Hell, I can get a new/refurb HTC Sensation for about $250-300 USD on Ebay (not quite as 'open' yet but twice as spec'd and much more functional), or a (used) HTC HD2 for around $100 - still more device, and markedly more capable in terms of what it can do and what's available for it in terms of free software.
I know comparing a used/refurb device to a new one isn't exactly fair, but c'mon. It's 7x+ more expensive for just the board and it's got nothing to make it appealing over, oh, say, a Pandaboard or Beagleboard, which are both under $200.
That, as well as this, is anecdotal: my wife has gotten several recommendations about plumbers from friends through facebook.
Then you've got sites like HP's, which is absolutely useless to find information (either through their navigation system or search). In contrast, 'general' searches on Google (or Bing, for that matter) usually find what I want immediately.
You say that until you've got to be at the office until 3am waiting for a backup to restore for DR.
I guess this means me. I fit the demographic. I was born in the early 1980s.
There is something 'missing' in the digital remasters of films, though arguably it's of a non-quantifiable aesthetic. Arguably, it's something of nostalgia, and I'd grant someone who argues it that way.
I remember, as a child, watching The Lone Ranger. Not the black and white, but the movie made in the 1980s (or early 90s). It'd come off television and had the start and finish of the ad segmens; my grandfather had recorded it for us, carefully stopping/recording at the appropriate parts - but we still had parts of he "We now return you to USA's Friday Night Movie".
My brother and I also had an VHS 'copy' of the original Batman serials from television in the late 1940s ( I think). The cars were big, there was no color, and the "Batmobile" was no different than any of the other cars. (Much better than the 1950s Batman, IMO.) The same goes for the b&w Superman, which we recorded off of reruns off TV, at some point. The Batman serials, we'd somehowmanaged to record about 20 seconds over the middle - some Micromachines commercial, right in the middle of a fight scene.
Flashing forward, I saw most of my favorite movies first on VHS: Die Hard, The Saint, Braveheart, Terminator, Commando. A favorite VHS had character, of sorts. You could tell it was well watched when the colors had started to fade and there was static or muddled audio. There was no jumping around randomly for favorite scenes. Many of them had been recorded off the TV by one person or another and passed around amongst friends. It wasn't until over a decade later that saw the full, non-edited-for-TV version of Commando (awesome!).
And then there was rainy days, snow days, or really-bad-storm days. You'd sit at home with the generator on (if you had one) and maybe watch movies while someone made food. You'd sort through a dozen different movies to find one that didn't suck, and you'd look for something to like or something to make fun of: it'd end up becoming a favorite for one reason or another.
That said: most of these people need to get a life. :) While I will grant you that the 1980s was the last great decade of America (for some time to come, at least), if you get too wrapped up in 1980s VHS films, you've got something wrong with you. I believe the term is "reality avoidance".
A union with the Indians?
Surely you jest. There is no incentive for them to join in a union with Americans.
If you're in IT and unemployed, it's probably because they're doing the work over there cheaper - or over here doing it, living in a crowded self-selected cultural ghetto to make ends meet. What is there for them to gain by saying "sure, we'll standardize on wage"? They're competing on price now. Unless you're a complete idiot, you're more competent than they are without even the slightest bit of effort (DeVry graduate? you're more awesome than most of them).
Personally, I live in America, part of the Western world where we have working municipal sewage and running water to almost every home. I don't want to bring Indian culture and living standards here; that means I'd like to keep the wages above welfare rates, thanks.
The reality is simply this: finding good people in the tech sector is very hard.
Is it hard, or are you looking for the wrong thing? Finding people based on resumes in information technology is, I've found, hit or miss: sometimes, you've found the perfect candidate but his resume gets discarded out of hand; often, a good resume yields a completely worthless candidate. The failure here is not that there aren't enough of the right kind of technical people, it's that you're looking in the wrong place.
In my experience, the 'best hires' for positions have been people found through word of mouth and human connections. The 'best fits' I've found have been word-of-mouth referrals (though higher ups usually frown on such candidates actually getting picked for fears of cronyism). Of course, I'm sure HR would typically have a problem with this, as it runs around their infallible process, and hiring people you know instead of going through the full process probably breaks the law in a number of states as well, so there's not much you can do about this.
You see many candidates who claim to have the skills, but when you test the candidate they frequently disappoint.
But does that test even matter? I would argue that it may not. Hear me out here. I have interviewed a number of people recently, one of which had a very impressive resume. He was pre-interviewed by a favored 'rockstar' developer who the owner regards highly. (I question the veracity of this individual's actual ability and chalk his esteemed status up to being fluent in Synergy.)
I interviewed this individual once in person and got a feel for him. He grated on me, but that may be due to the fact that he was likely being pigeonholed for my replacement, not as my auxiliary or subordinate. I, admittedly, have multiple reasons I wanted to trip him up on the interview: first, I wanted him to be a useful person, not a lout who can tell a good tale about what he has supposedly done.
He impressed me at the initial interview, as he was able to talk about what he'd done in broad terms. He dug in and mentioned specifics on some topics, but he did have a way of taking a while to say it. He was well spoken. But then I realized he didn't fully answer in some cases, providing vague answers. So I asked for a follow-up interview.
Here were the questions I asked him on the follow-up interview (on the phone). I should note, these questions were for a "senior sysadmin" type role - someone who claimed in-depth LAMP and broad Linux experience, as well as broad experience in implementing different network topographies in highly sensitive environments.
* Using iptables, in which chain would you preferentially use to drop a specific TCP port?
* What is catalina? (re: Tomcat, which he claimed to be a God with)
* Which specific tool or tools would you use to properly back up mysql databases? ('file level copy' was his answer)
* Do you have any cups or samba familiarity? (If so) what have you done? (nothing aside from what his mac did for him)
* When is RAID5 better than RAID6?
* Where is the correct place to install 3rd party, or non-system packages?
* Describe the linux boot process, from POST to "login:"? (not a clue, muttered something about the boot sector and then immediately jumped to "applications start")
* What is the general criteria used by the kernel's OOM killer?
* Using a crossover ethernet cable between two gigE connected servers, what is the real, or practical realizable throughput of rsync and/or transfer over NFS? (didn't even have a clue where to start, blustered for a while about switches, even after I clarified/restated that no switches were involved)
* What is your approach to web infrastructure backup while not breaking the running web applications? (a misdirection, which he answered poorly)
* What is your familiarity with desktop linux? (none - went on for about 5 minutes about how Linux wasn't ready for the desktop and how Macs were best for