Not as much as you might think. He makes more than half what Letterman does now ($8 mil/yr vs Dave's ~$15mil) and it's unlikely CBS will pay him as much as they paid Dave, at least not to begin with.
Since Dave (and Leno for that matter) took pay cuts a few years back due to declining audiences across the board, Jon Stewart has been the highest-paid talk show host on the air.
You could usually see it coming at my last job, when a Dvorak user would step up to - for instance - a communal computer used for presentations, and attempted to log into something. They always had to type their password twice, the second time after wincing in realization of what they'd done the first time...
I should add - I'm glad those features are there, I think they're cool, and I sometimes wish I could use them. If I had only one computer to use for the rest of eternity, it'd be so customized I'd only need eyeblinks to do everything.
But those features are only good insofar as they don't take away from stability. And when my Linux desktop encounters an error, it's pretty much always Compiz these days... this has been true across the last two revs of Ubuntu, v11-v13 and across two separate hardware platforms Dell-Lenovo, and reinstalls every few months. Never had problems with Ubuntu v8-v10...
If you can't have a consistent experience across even one day, why get too reliant on customizations and shortcuts?
Back in the day, I had to switch between Data General (terminals), MacOS, and Amiga keyboards and UIs on a daily basis between work and home. These days, of course, everything has changed - now I bounce from Linux to Android to OSX, and more than occasionally Windows too. It's just never paid off to build a super-custom setup when you can't stick with it.
I use Linux for my main desktop at home partly because it is so quick and easy to reinstall - just keep your data on a backed-up server and you can virtually forget about maintenance or troubleshooting. Get used to the default setup and just reinstall whenever you run into something you can't work around - 15 minutes to get back to a familiar desktop is quicker than any full restore-from-backup I'm aware of. (I actually like Linux internals but every time I learn something, I end up forgetting it before I need it a second time; it gets frustrating...)
I'm aware I'm giving up a fair amount of potential productivity and convenience. I don't care any more. I'm just happy when I remember not to try and touch the monitor on my wife's iMac.
I got friends and colleagues who, for example, use Dvorak. More power to 'em. They're younger and more stubborn than I, and most of the time they have one laptop they use both at home and at work. As a wise man once remarked, I'm older now, I got to move my car on street-sweeping day, I can't be doing just anything I want any more...
Would it not do more for the community they claim to be supporting if they were to cap their membership at 50% (allowing their current proportion to rebalance by attrition or as the rest of the network continues to grow) thus preventing anyone ELSE from doing it as well?
> what's the point of a self-driving car if you can't relax or do something else while 'driving?'"
It's early days yet, give it time.
There was no point in cars AT ALL when they first were introduced: they were slower than horses, you needed to bring a mechanic along with you 'cos they broke down every mile. Some cities you had to employ a guy to walk ahead of the car with flags to warn people. Utterly without practical use, they were.
They got better, laws adapted. You have to start somewhere though!
Been rewatching "Max Headroom" (one of my all-time faves) lately and have been so impressed with how much they foresaw. Sure, today's cameras are a lot smaller and several details about society and industry were a bit off-base, but the idea that information is more valuable than money, the rise of corporate power while governments decline in relevance, and a lot of other things they got spot on.
That said, the live telemetry from "satcams" is something which has been missing. Google made a big leap forward with Maps and Streetview, I just wanted it to all connect together in realtime like at Theora's console... nice to know we're still making progress!
I've obscured the name of the company so as to avoid a messy copyright battle, but this is the photo selected for the "Security Threats" chapter of my networking class: http://goo.gl/R67PWF
Takeaway message: be wary of inter-dimensional black guys in dungarees...
You don't need to reach for SF to get a great project management lesson, just look at the Apollo program.
A triumph of the human spirit, of technology, of ingenuity, sure - but mainly, an overwhelming triumph of project management. Who says the government can't handle any big jobs, eh? (well, anyone who's been watching for the last 40 years maybe...)
I have to wonder, did you leave the U.S. because you had no friends?
I moved to Australia 7 years ago and I still have friends back in America. Although I can get a lot more things here now than I used to, I still occasionally have a friend help forward things to me. There's no reason to go with a service, just Paypal them the postage.
Maybe you can send them things they might enjoy too - my friend's wife developed a taste for Tim Tams (cookies) and so we have a regular exchange going, as my Aussie wife misses the "graham crackers" she could get in the U.S. which are unheard-of here...
FWIW I can confirm, having experienced hospitalization in the U.S. - with top-tier Blue Cross coverage - and later in Australia as well - the ordinary everyday Medicare system - there is no real difference in the quality of care.
The equipment, the people, and the access are all very good in both countries - assuming you have insurance in the U.S., and I'm comparing major cities to major cities here of course.
What's dramatically different is the cost, and the level of paperwork. In America we were snowed under for years with insurance company statements and bills from a dozen providers - we ended up just sorting them by color and then weighing them... and we had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket after Blue Cross was finished.
In Australia, you pay maybe $80 for a doctor visit, and get some of it back from the government Prescriptions average $10-$20. If you go to the ER and get admitted to a room, you have to pay $6 a day if you want the TV to work. And I think you sign like one form on your way out. You never hear from them again.
Whoops - I misread the post - they're not asking for your private KEY, just private data... ah well, most of the suggested sentence structure still holds.
If you don't have the social skills to phrase a polite question, Slashdot is perhaps not the ideal place to go looking for advice...
Technical issues with giving anyone your private key aside (I can't think of any reason to give it out to someone no matter how much you trust them) just explaining things clearly should work for any reasonable person:
"I have no problem with you having my personal key, but I am concerned about the integrity of the data while in transit. I would appreciate it if you can supply me with a public key for your organization, then I will be able to encode my key so that only you can decode it. This will ensure that our mutual privacy won't be at risk due to using an insecure communication system such as Email. Thanks very much!" etc
I wrote about the CSER last year at http://www.thisiswhyweredoomed.com/2012/12/europeans-will-doom-us-all.html - if you take this and combine it with the news that the EU is building the world's most powerful laser, you'll wonder why the movie version of Skynet even bothered with a time machine in the first place...
I have a 6-yr-old and a 3-yr-old. So far the smaller one is happy enough with a few kid-friendly games on mom's iPhone (very sparingly, a few times a week at most) but I'm finding the 6-yr-old very engaged with online casual puzzle games. He's not quite ready for escape-the-room-type stuff, but there are quite a few kid-friendly puzzlers out there - check JayIsGames.com, you can search by tags and I use "kidfriendly" and "puzzle" (and "flash" because I'm not downloading anything, even if I did have Windows around)
While others may disagree, I'm happy to let the local schools teach the basic 3 R's; later on I'll supplement the history and geography and science. Right now I'm more interested in making sure he has analytical skills, including skeptical thinking and inductive reasoning. He's not the math/science geek I was at his age. So I'm trying to make sure he learns as much as possible about puzzles and different ways of solving them. "Rubble Trouble" is a current favorite, but that's only after we've gone through most of the Bonte stable (especially "Factory Balls"! he solved virtually all of them, not bad for (at the time) a 5-year-old)
As for the 3-yr-old, he loves Angry Birds first and foremost, but is just as happy tossing the birds to the left as to the right. He's developing differently and takes things at his own speed, so we're kind of feeling our way forward. (by contrast with the older boy, who's basically a carbon copy of my wife's personality) If he ends up more like me there'll be no keeping him away from the more analytical, strategy-type games - violence-based or otherwise - and he'll be wanting to modify the games as soon as he's finished with 'em... I'll certainly be showing him puzzles of every shape and size until we find a genre he likes.
Kids can only be steered so far. But there's enough out there that you can find something that you and the child can agree on for almost any combination of "you" and "the child"!
Just when I think I live in a remote corner of the world, something like this shows up - this guy came within a few hundred meters of picking up my SSID...
And it's just about exactly one year after the "Craig from Windsor" notes began showing up all around where I work, and went viral online.
I never see this mentioned, but I wonder, what's the shelf life of the charge on these things? Once topped off, how long can you leave it until it drains itself? It can't be indefinite, from my memory of physics.
I know NiMH cells drain fairly fast (compared to non-reusable batts) - I think the half life is in the range of a few months. If ultracaps are comparable, that's probably good enough, but if it's hours or days, there may be some adjustment issues...
The people who've said networking is the way to go are, of course, right. All my best jobs have come that way; what few I've gotten from the classifieds (online or otherwise) have been crummy.
But either way, I've learned that it's best to try for jobs with smaller companies. Anyplace big enough to have an HR department will, often as not, screen out your resume if it lacks some credential they specify (college degree at a minimum, usually), whereas a smaller outfit will have a human reading them and might actually give your application enough attention to see that you have something to offer.
Once you get an interview, your degree or lack thereof no longer is important. Just like it won't matter if you actually get the job. What the degree does for you is keep your resume from being tossed out the door during the first round of culling.
You are making the assumption that nothing will happen in the future to make currently acceptable, moral, lawful behavior illegal.
If the law changes in such a way as to be tyrannical
...then you're screwed anyway! If the law is changed to cover past offenses retroactively, all bets are off. It's not like former slave owners went to jail as soon as the Civil War ended; that's not how democratic government is supposed to work. In my mind, if that sort of principle is abandoned, then principles like evidence and fair trials are out the window too, so why even worry about details?
I think it helps to separate the abstract value of privacy from daily practice. I don't worry much; my life is an open book (perhaps a dull book, but not secret), and I strive to minimize the list of things which I would hesitate to reveal, even with a stranger. Probably my biggest concession to privacy is clearing browser cookies after playing an online game at work... (oops, better post this anonymously)
HOWEVER, I also strongly believe that the right to some kinds of privacy is fundamentally important, and needs to be fought for with dedication and vigilance. It's just that lots of people think of "privacy" in very broad terms, and consequently worry a lot more than they probably ought to.
In nutshell terms - Defending the right to privacy? Good. Worrying about the reality of privacy? Probably something wrong with your priorities.
I dunno about anyone else, but the love of computers that got me into this field didn't last more than a year or two into my now-20-year-career... it's gotten to the point where I hardly turn on my computer(s) at home unless I have to do something - for someone else! When you only ever see computers failing (I'm in I.T. and programming) it's hard to remember what they're like when they work properly.
In fact I sometimes border on envying those less familiar with the technical innards of our new silicon overlords. When you run across some home user who never backs up and hasn't had a problem for years, do you want to slap them over the head - or beat yourSELF up a little, and wish you lived in their world?
rant, about how I/we were just one more liberties-reduction away from moving to Canada, Europe, Antarctica, etc. But we generally just grumble for a while and then get used to the new "normal".
Is this any different? Are there any of us for whom this really *is* the straw that breaks the camel's back?
I reached the point of "disgust" long ago, but it took the birth of my son to actually force me to go through the enormous rigamarole involved with moving to another country. (fortunately, I'd had the foresight to marry an Australian, so we ended up somewhere nice...)
It takes enormous time, lots of money and sustained effort to actually get a residency visa, arrange for shipping your crap overseas, and then re-establish your life - job, home, car, etc. I don't see any single example of political malware triggering that sort of thing for most people. No matter how dumb you think your politicians are, they're smart enough to introduce the concentration camps slowly, while distracting you with shiny things, car crashes and sex scandals.
I miss my home and hope to return someday; I also want my son to have full advantage of his dual citizenship and be comfortable in both cultures as he grows up. But I don't want to trust the educational, medical and political system of the U.S. for his crucial formative years. So I now live in a country where booze prices are 4x higher and there's nothing resembling NewEgg...
> It simply isn't in anyone's best interests to cooperate with this kind of project; that's why it's doomed from the start.
It's not necessarily as simple as that - could be it's just not COOL to document, duuude!
The group where I work (a small IT services company) is mostly younger guys who like a 'hectic' atmosphere, lots of fast action and explosions, or at least busy troubleshooting schedules. Getting them to sit down and record their time spent on various projects is enough of a hurdle; getting anyone to document "office processes" is more like asking for volunteers to make a handwritten backup of each bit on a hard drive.
No one's job is threatened - it's a growing company - and everyone's smart enough to realize that things really would work better if we all were on the same page more often. It's just not fun. Even when I point out it's easier than their actual work, while being just as appreciated by the boss - it's not gonna happen.
Never mind the fact that sometimes "documenting processes" is more a matter of creating them from scratch than describing what's currently done... in a nutshell, if it was easy it wouldn't be an issue worth discussing.
(I never thought of using a "wiki" before, so I'm already a step ahead just from reading the synopsis of this story!)
> Or are you just assuming this because some of your friends are libertarians?
Agreed - I know more than my share of libertarians but none of them are techies by any stretch of the term (most of them aren't even especially sane). I've met a number of apolitical techies, but otherwise, in my limited experience, they fall into one of the two usual categories.
Then again, it's fair to say that Microsoft can be seen as something of a political entity in the tech world, and there are those who happily live within its warm embrace and others who reject everything associated with the Beast of Redmond, with vigor and dedication. Offhand I don't find it hard to see parallels between the mindsets of the "get Microsoft off our backs" camp (well-represented amongst Slashdot readership) and the political movement that rejects bloated, intrusive, overbearing government...
So yeah, if you're sick of Microsoft then maybe you're a techno-Lib?
How can you expect the USA to maintain our lead in computer science when the schools are woefully inadequate to the task of teaching our kids?
Last time I checked inside a school they were being taught Logo on an Apple ][!! I mean, that's just pathetic. We need to call Washington and tell President Reagan to modernize our educational system NOW! When my baby son enters school in 2012 I want him working on the very latest 64-bit processors and learning a language with words in it, by jove!
Slashdot Mirror
Snow Crash? I think you mean "Freedom, Inc"...
> His bank account will see a significant step up
Not as much as you might think. He makes more than half what Letterman does now ($8 mil/yr vs Dave's ~$15mil) and it's unlikely CBS will pay him as much as they paid Dave, at least not to begin with.
Since Dave (and Leno for that matter) took pay cuts a few years back due to declining audiences across the board, Jon Stewart has been the highest-paid talk show host on the air.
You could usually see it coming at my last job, when a Dvorak user would step up to - for instance - a communal computer used for presentations, and attempted to log into something. They always had to type their password twice, the second time after wincing in realization of what they'd done the first time...
I should add - I'm glad those features are there, I think they're cool, and I sometimes wish I could use them. If I had only one computer to use for the rest of eternity, it'd be so customized I'd only need eyeblinks to do everything.
But those features are only good insofar as they don't take away from stability. And when my Linux desktop encounters an error, it's pretty much always Compiz these days... this has been true across the last two revs of Ubuntu, v11-v13 and across two separate hardware platforms Dell-Lenovo, and reinstalls every few months. Never had problems with Ubuntu v8-v10...
If you can't have a consistent experience across even one day, why get too reliant on customizations and shortcuts?
Back in the day, I had to switch between Data General (terminals), MacOS, and Amiga keyboards and UIs on a daily basis between work and home. These days, of course, everything has changed - now I bounce from Linux to Android to OSX, and more than occasionally Windows too. It's just never paid off to build a super-custom setup when you can't stick with it.
I use Linux for my main desktop at home partly because it is so quick and easy to reinstall - just keep your data on a backed-up server and you can virtually forget about maintenance or troubleshooting. Get used to the default setup and just reinstall whenever you run into something you can't work around - 15 minutes to get back to a familiar desktop is quicker than any full restore-from-backup I'm aware of. (I actually like Linux internals but every time I learn something, I end up forgetting it before I need it a second time; it gets frustrating...)
I'm aware I'm giving up a fair amount of potential productivity and convenience. I don't care any more. I'm just happy when I remember not to try and touch the monitor on my wife's iMac.
I got friends and colleagues who, for example, use Dvorak. More power to 'em. They're younger and more stubborn than I, and most of the time they have one laptop they use both at home and at work. As a wise man once remarked, I'm older now, I got to move my car on street-sweeping day, I can't be doing just anything I want any more...
Would it not do more for the community they claim to be supporting if they were to cap their membership at 50% (allowing their current proportion to rebalance by attrition or as the rest of the network continues to grow) thus preventing anyone ELSE from doing it as well?
> what's the point of a self-driving car if you can't relax or do something else while 'driving?'"
It's early days yet, give it time.
There was no point in cars AT ALL when they first were introduced: they were slower than horses, you needed to bring a mechanic along with you 'cos they broke down every mile. Some cities you had to employ a guy to walk ahead of the car with flags to warn people. Utterly without practical use, they were.
They got better, laws adapted. You have to start somewhere though!
Been rewatching "Max Headroom" (one of my all-time faves) lately and have been so impressed with how much they foresaw. Sure, today's cameras are a lot smaller and several details about society and industry were a bit off-base, but the idea that information is more valuable than money, the rise of corporate power while governments decline in relevance, and a lot of other things they got spot on.
That said, the live telemetry from "satcams" is something which has been missing. Google made a big leap forward with Maps and Streetview, I just wanted it to all connect together in realtime like at Theora's console... nice to know we're still making progress!
I've obscured the name of the company so as to avoid a messy copyright battle, but this is the photo selected for the "Security Threats" chapter of my networking class: http://goo.gl/R67PWF
Takeaway message: be wary of inter-dimensional black guys in dungarees...
You don't need to reach for SF to get a great project management lesson, just look at the Apollo program.
A triumph of the human spirit, of technology, of ingenuity, sure - but mainly, an overwhelming triumph of project management. Who says the government can't handle any big jobs, eh? (well, anyone who's been watching for the last 40 years maybe...)
I have to wonder, did you leave the U.S. because you had no friends?
I moved to Australia 7 years ago and I still have friends back in America. Although I can get a lot more things here now than I used to, I still occasionally have a friend help forward things to me. There's no reason to go with a service, just Paypal them the postage.
Maybe you can send them things they might enjoy too - my friend's wife developed a taste for Tim Tams (cookies) and so we have a regular exchange going, as my Aussie wife misses the "graham crackers" she could get in the U.S. which are unheard-of here...
FWIW I can confirm, having experienced hospitalization in the U.S. - with top-tier Blue Cross coverage - and later in Australia as well - the ordinary everyday Medicare system - there is no real difference in the quality of care.
The equipment, the people, and the access are all very good in both countries - assuming you have insurance in the U.S., and I'm comparing major cities to major cities here of course.
What's dramatically different is the cost, and the level of paperwork. In America we were snowed under for years with insurance company statements and bills from a dozen providers - we ended up just sorting them by color and then weighing them... and we had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket after Blue Cross was finished.
In Australia, you pay maybe $80 for a doctor visit, and get some of it back from the government Prescriptions average $10-$20. If you go to the ER and get admitted to a room, you have to pay $6 a day if you want the TV to work. And I think you sign like one form on your way out. You never hear from them again.
Whoops - I misread the post - they're not asking for your private KEY, just private data... ah well, most of the suggested sentence structure still holds.
If you don't have the social skills to phrase a polite question, Slashdot is perhaps not the ideal place to go looking for advice...
Technical issues with giving anyone your private key aside (I can't think of any reason to give it out to someone no matter how much you trust them) just explaining things clearly should work for any reasonable person:
"I have no problem with you having my personal key, but I am concerned about the integrity of the data while in transit. I would appreciate it if you can supply me with a public key for your organization, then I will be able to encode my key so that only you can decode it. This will ensure that our mutual privacy won't be at risk due to using an insecure communication system such as Email. Thanks very much!" etc
I wrote about the CSER last year at http://www.thisiswhyweredoomed.com/2012/12/europeans-will-doom-us-all.html - if you take this and combine it with the news that the EU is building the world's most powerful laser, you'll wonder why the movie version of Skynet even bothered with a time machine in the first place...
(oh yeah, they already HAVE a Skynet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(satellite)
I have a 6-yr-old and a 3-yr-old. So far the smaller one is happy enough with a few kid-friendly games on mom's iPhone (very sparingly, a few times a week at most) but I'm finding the 6-yr-old very engaged with online casual puzzle games. He's not quite ready for escape-the-room-type stuff, but there are quite a few kid-friendly puzzlers out there - check JayIsGames.com, you can search by tags and I use "kidfriendly" and "puzzle" (and "flash" because I'm not downloading anything, even if I did have Windows around)
While others may disagree, I'm happy to let the local schools teach the basic 3 R's; later on I'll supplement the history and geography and science. Right now I'm more interested in making sure he has analytical skills, including skeptical thinking and inductive reasoning. He's not the math/science geek I was at his age. So I'm trying to make sure he learns as much as possible about puzzles and different ways of solving them. "Rubble Trouble" is a current favorite, but that's only after we've gone through most of the Bonte stable (especially "Factory Balls"! he solved virtually all of them, not bad for (at the time) a 5-year-old)
As for the 3-yr-old, he loves Angry Birds first and foremost, but is just as happy tossing the birds to the left as to the right. He's developing differently and takes things at his own speed, so we're kind of feeling our way forward. (by contrast with the older boy, who's basically a carbon copy of my wife's personality) If he ends up more like me there'll be no keeping him away from the more analytical, strategy-type games - violence-based or otherwise - and he'll be wanting to modify the games as soon as he's finished with 'em... I'll certainly be showing him puzzles of every shape and size until we find a genre he likes.
Kids can only be steered so far. But there's enough out there that you can find something that you and the child can agree on for almost any combination of "you" and "the child"!
Just when I think I live in a remote corner of the world, something like this shows up - this guy came within a few hundred meters of picking up my SSID...
And it's just about exactly one year after the "Craig from Windsor" notes began showing up all around where I work, and went viral online.
Wonder what'll happen next March?
I never see this mentioned, but I wonder, what's the shelf life of the charge on these things? Once topped off, how long can you leave it until it drains itself? It can't be indefinite, from my memory of physics.
I know NiMH cells drain fairly fast (compared to non-reusable batts) - I think the half life is in the range of a few months. If ultracaps are comparable, that's probably good enough, but if it's hours or days, there may be some adjustment issues...
The people who've said networking is the way to go are, of course, right. All my best jobs have come that way; what few I've gotten from the classifieds (online or otherwise) have been crummy.
But either way, I've learned that it's best to try for jobs with smaller companies. Anyplace big enough to have an HR department will, often as not, screen out your resume if it lacks some credential they specify (college degree at a minimum, usually), whereas a smaller outfit will have a human reading them and might actually give your application enough attention to see that you have something to offer.
Once you get an interview, your degree or lack thereof no longer is important. Just like it won't matter if you actually get the job. What the degree does for you is keep your resume from being tossed out the door during the first round of culling.
You are making the assumption that nothing will happen in the future to make currently acceptable, moral, lawful behavior illegal.
If the law changes in such a way as to be tyrannical
I think it helps to separate the abstract value of privacy from daily practice. I don't worry much; my life is an open book (perhaps a dull book, but not secret), and I strive to minimize the list of things which I would hesitate to reveal, even with a stranger. Probably my biggest concession to privacy is clearing browser cookies after playing an online game at work... (oops, better post this anonymously)
HOWEVER, I also strongly believe that the right to some kinds of privacy is fundamentally important, and needs to be fought for with dedication and vigilance. It's just that lots of people think of "privacy" in very broad terms, and consequently worry a lot more than they probably ought to.
In nutshell terms -
Defending the right to privacy? Good. Worrying about the reality of privacy? Probably something wrong with your priorities.
I dunno about anyone else, but the love of computers that got me into this field didn't last more than a year or two into my now-20-year-career... it's gotten to the point where I hardly turn on my computer(s) at home unless I have to do something - for someone else! When you only ever see computers failing (I'm in I.T. and programming) it's hard to remember what they're like when they work properly.
In fact I sometimes border on envying those less familiar with the technical innards of our new silicon overlords. When you run across some home user who never backs up and hasn't had a problem for years, do you want to slap them over the head - or beat yourSELF up a little, and wish you lived in their world?
rant, about how I/we were just one more liberties-reduction away from moving to Canada, Europe, Antarctica, etc. But we generally just grumble for a while and then get used to the new "normal".
Is this any different? Are there any of us for whom this really *is* the straw that breaks the camel's back?
I reached the point of "disgust" long ago, but it took the birth of my son to actually force me to go through the enormous rigamarole involved with moving to another country. (fortunately, I'd had the foresight to marry an Australian, so we ended up somewhere nice...)
It takes enormous time, lots of money and sustained effort to actually get a residency visa, arrange for shipping your crap overseas, and then re-establish your life - job, home, car, etc. I don't see any single example of political malware triggering that sort of thing for most people. No matter how dumb you think your politicians are, they're smart enough to introduce the concentration camps slowly, while distracting you with shiny things, car crashes and sex scandals.
I miss my home and hope to return someday; I also want my son to have full advantage of his dual citizenship and be comfortable in both cultures as he grows up. But I don't want to trust the educational, medical and political system of the U.S. for his crucial formative years. So I now live in a country where booze prices are 4x higher and there's nothing resembling NewEgg...
> It simply isn't in anyone's best interests to cooperate with this kind of project; that's why it's doomed from the start.
It's not necessarily as simple as that - could be it's just not COOL to document, duuude!
The group where I work (a small IT services company) is mostly younger guys who like a 'hectic' atmosphere, lots of fast action and explosions, or at least busy troubleshooting schedules. Getting them to sit down and record their time spent on various projects is enough of a hurdle; getting anyone to document "office processes" is more like asking for volunteers to make a handwritten backup of each bit on a hard drive.
No one's job is threatened - it's a growing company - and everyone's smart enough to realize that things really would work better if we all were on the same page more often. It's just not fun. Even when I point out it's easier than their actual work, while being just as appreciated by the boss - it's not gonna happen.
Never mind the fact that sometimes "documenting processes" is more a matter of creating them from scratch than describing what's currently done... in a nutshell, if it was easy it wouldn't be an issue worth discussing.
(I never thought of using a "wiki" before, so I'm already a step ahead just from reading the synopsis of this story!)
> Or are you just assuming this because some of your friends are libertarians?
Agreed - I know more than my share of libertarians but none of them are techies by any stretch of the term (most of them aren't even especially sane). I've met a number of apolitical techies, but otherwise, in my limited experience, they fall into one of the two usual categories.
Then again, it's fair to say that Microsoft can be seen as something of a political entity in the tech world, and there are those who happily live within its warm embrace and others who reject everything associated with the Beast of Redmond, with vigor and dedication. Offhand I don't find it hard to see parallels between the mindsets of the "get Microsoft off our backs" camp (well-represented amongst Slashdot readership) and the political movement that rejects bloated, intrusive, overbearing government...
So yeah, if you're sick of Microsoft then maybe you're a techno-Lib?
How can you expect the USA to maintain our lead in computer science when the schools are woefully inadequate to the task of teaching our kids?
Last time I checked inside a school they were being taught Logo on an Apple ][!! I mean, that's just pathetic. We need to call Washington and tell President Reagan to modernize our educational system NOW! When my baby son enters school in 2012 I want him working on the very latest 64-bit processors and learning a language with words in it, by jove!