So why, asks a longtime developer, is there a stigma attached to not having a four-year degree, when 'blue collar' coders might be better trained?
Is there? And are they? I think it depends on what you need a developer for and how your development team works. If your developers are merely coders, who are given a set of specifications and told "make it so!", then you just need somebody who can write code. If you expect more of your people, and want them to go from being just coders to taking on greater responsibility, then it may be a good idea to have somebody with a broader education. Being able to write C code doesn't make you good at guessing the effect a new feature will have on your users; a degree in psychology or sociology might, perhaps.
The other, and perhaps the biggest, benefit you get from an academical education is the training in handling complex issues in a methodical way, as well as potentially a wider outlook on the world, which is something a lot of businesses could benefit from IMO.
Road pricing is horseshit because if having to drive on a congested road isn't sufficient deterrent to stop you doing it, then taxation isn't going to achieve it
Except that congestion charging in London has been a resounding success. I remember well how it was to drive down Oxford Street before; you could watch your children grow up in the time it took. So that is one place it has worked.
Being able to track the movements of vehicles has many merits, which tend to be forgotten by those who hide behind the freedom- and privacy slogans. And it is not only "the government" being able to spy on your every movement, as if they would want to. Personally I would find it very handy if I could go online to check where my car was if it got stolen. Other potential benefits are:
- being able to put a damper on those people who consistently drive 120 mph on the motorway - giving drivers an incentive for using alternative modes of transport by charging road tax and insurance by the mile - crimefighting would be helped a lot if the whereabouts of cars, mobiles and computers were always known
Could it be abused by "an authoritarian regime"? Probably, but then so can everything else. The trick is to avoid having that kind of government; if the population could be bothered to keep themselves informed and take part in the political debate, they have it in their power to do just that.
The U.N. exists to exert and expand U.N. control, wherever possible
It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic, the way certain Slashdotters seem to think, if "think" is indeed the right term.
First UN: they don't exist to promote democracy, freedom or any other such ideologically charged ideals - UN is there to promote communication between governments, primarily; everything else secondary to that. When things like emergency aid occur, they are happy consequences of the cooperation that springs from the effort to communicate in an orderly manner. It is also a voluntary organisation - nations choose to participate, they are not forced to do so, and UN doesn't make laws or enforce anything, which is one of the reasons, I suspect, why we so often see that countries make promises and later ignore them.
It is of course nonsense to say that UN "exists to exert power"; that is just one of those sweeping statements that show that you don't know and don't want to know what you are talking about - you just want to spit your gall out on anything or anybody who isn't there to defend themselves. If you want to do something constructive, go and find out where that comes from instead of inventing scapegoats.
1. Install Linux at all machines 2. Install VMware 3. Install whichever OS in a virtual machine. 4. Make a backup copy of it in a safe place 5. Let people use the virtual machine, but don't let them use the base OS 6. Make sure that all essential data - documents, whatever - are always on a networked disk
- when they screw up, simply copy from backup. Not perfect, but it is amazing how much hassle it has saved me.
How many points do I score for guessing that the majority of this howling chorus have never even watched as much as 1 second of CCTV's programs? This is just some idiots that - once again - want to whip up some anti-Chinese sentiment, to prevent bad things from happening in case people start thinking on their own. I mean, that is how the people of America have been conned for decades, and why your education system is constantly under threat from "religious" groups; that is why Americans automatically think that "free market" must be good - despite all the Enrons and the current recession, which were the direct results of deregulation.
Wake up and think your own thoughts, for God's sake; it won't turn you into a Communist overnight. Just don't be a sheep (or a cow - why do you think they called GWB a cowboy?)
Well, I'd object to their purchasing the sun as well!!
I'm not so much against it as completely flabbergasted. What does a database vendor want with a newspaper? And especially one as arguably despicable at The Sun: http://www.thesun.co.uk?
Yeah, I know it sounds daft, and it is perhaps a rather naive scheme, but what I do is keep them on my mobile. That's mostly for PIN numbers, though; I store them as false telephone numbers. I don't use the socalled "secure" style of passwords, I write them too many times every day for that to work; I need something that is reasonably easy to type.
Aargh, I hate it when people try to get "smart" about serious subjects, and this one smells a lot like one of those. The explanations and arguments sound superficially OK, but they are deceptive, in that they don't spell out their starting conditions. Take the one about protectionism - it starts from the conclusion: "protectionism is bad, and now we are going to prove it". So they roll out the argument that on average America would be better off without protectionist tariffs - which of course leaves out a lot of details; but apart from that, it is like saying that if 99 people have nothing and 1 person has 1 million, then they are all well off, on average. Yeah, right. On the other hand, if you were to ask one of them, you would still have a 99% chance of hearing that they had nothing.
Same thing with Heisenberg - it is stated as solid fact that "there is nothing to be found...", which is again smugly claimed nonsense. All we know is that we do not at present have a method of measuring things more precisely than what is described by Heisenberg's inequality; the fundamental problem is the wave-particle nature of the things we measure with: electrons, photons etc. The wave-length sets a lower limit for how precisely we can know the position of any target, and since shorter wave-length mean higher momentum, if we try to get more precise, we hit the target harder, and therefore can't determine its momentum as precisely. That is all we know. The rest of it is just quasi-religious hokum.
I think you should turn this the other way round - you are in charge of keeping the whole thing flying, and what is important is what YOU need to keep a tab on in order to do a good job. I don't know what kind of problems you tend to encounter on your site, but for many it would probably be something about how much your resources are being utilized. Like, how fast are disks filling up? You need to be able to be proactive - ie. to tell your managers that you need more diskspace before the disk is too full.
What I am still working on is data collection - simply putting things into a relational database. I try to collect everything that might be interesting - user logs, running processes, network traffic counts, etc. I find that managers don't really want to be bothered when things are fine; they just want to know when they have to take action. So I would suggest that you focus on giving them data that allow them to predict what money they will have to spend on upgrades and repairs.
It's new because the prosecutors are actually being reasonable about it.
But the really worrying thing in this is that it took 11 months; in which time two innocent people may well have experienced massive damage to their lives from the suspicion they were subjected to.
You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.
An important point to make, though, is that the purpose of all this should be to get healthier. You can be slim and fat at the same time - it is not uncommon to see people that look skinny, but when they sit down, their thighs seem to spread out over the chair, because there are no muscles in there. What people should concentrate on is getting fit and feeling good about themselves; you can be overweight and still fitter than most. If you are able to run for 20 minutes without having to stop, you are fit, no matter what the scales say.
... unwelcome aliens will take full advantage of the U.S. taxpayers.
Oh? And? All countries with a proper healthcare for all share this problem; the alternative being that you just let people die or something similar.
... lots of loopholes... no mention of... doctors and hospitals are going out of business... this nightmare...
As far as I can see, you have let it all go to your head. I'm sure there is a lot of everybody's pet grievances that haven't been addressed; but this is at least a start. Isn't it better to get started than simply keep arguing over and over and over? I mean, that is the way most people work in the real world - you start on something and solve problems along the way. This stance of adamantly refusing to do anything at all until it is "perfect" for some unspecified value of "perfect" is nothing less than wilfully obstructive - if people genuinely want a better healthcare system, cooperate and make the best of any compromises, because you from the start that compromises will have to be made.
And I don't buy the one about doctors and hospitals going out of business either; extending healthacre to more people will necessarily mean that more people will be able to get treatment - which means more customers for doctors and hospitals. How can that put them out of business?
People - and expecially in the US - I'm sorry to say, tend to judge others exclusively from their own background, without trying to understand what the actual differences are. Thus, "it must be bad to live in China" - because you can't earn as much money as in America and you don't have the same sort of freedom as in America and so on. However, if you talk to people, as I have, you find that they don't see it that way.
My own background is that I am married to a Chinese - ten years, now - and have family there, both in Beijing and in the countryside. They are not fabulously rich, but they don't complain; most of the older generation have lived to see their country going from a war-torn hell-hole to a modern society, and even the poorest have seen clear improvement. Nobody is saying that the work is done, but they are happy with things so far, and they are convinced it will get better.
I have been to Xinjiang and Tibet; as far as I can tell, these are not oppressed people with no rights; but there are people who won't accept a place in Chinese society, no matter what - those are the socalled "dissidents". They are about as opressed as the "muslim dissidents" in UK; and just like in UK, the vast majority of the ethnic minorities are not part of that, they just want to make a good life for themselves, so they integrate into society.
The Chinese are building a modern society in their own way; they are immensely proud of the fact that what they are is of their own making. As an American, you should be well placed to know how much that means.
I own an apartment in Beijing, I speak the language, I am married to a Chinese. Which all goes to show that I have done my homework; I have experience. Do you?
I can see the potential in cloud computing, although it isn't as huge as some would have us believe, and virtualisation is very useful technology for many purposes - I can see that going a long way, though it has many limitations too. But the tablet PC? I honestly can't see what I would use one for; it seems to combine the worst features of a notebook PC - general clunkiness, short battery life, easily breakable - with the disadvantages of pen and paper. Both are very valuable technologies on their own, but combining them is a bit like combining a pneumatic hammer with a nose-hair trimmer. It's not going to give you the best of both worlds, I suspect.
America is "supporting [India and China's] welfare"? There are so many inaccuracies I could point out to you, but I fear it would be wasted on you. Just to puncture a few:
1. America is not supporting anybody's welfare; American companies are simply maximising their profits by seeking out lower costs. So the richest Americans are earning even more, and on average America gets richer; shame that it doesn't trickle down to you guys, but hey, you believe in capitalism, so why complain?
2. Historically, the West has milked those very same countries for all they were worth; you live your life in comparative comfort because of that fact. So if wealth is now flowing out of the West and into India and China, that is only a small pay-back, as far as I can see. "But I didn't keep slaves", you might say - which is true, of course, but you live on stolen riches, so what is the difference?
We all need, us in the western nations, to have a major change of heart; we can't keep insisting that we live in the sixties or whatever, where the was always blue and we would all get richer all the time. It's just a stupid dream.
Asimov created an interesting concept, and he didn't fully explore it - so why shouldn't others write stories in the same universe? I see lots of stories around about orcs and elves, clearly based on Tolkien's universe; most are crap, but some aren't, and I think it is a good thing if people are inspired by an author.
What I find distasteful is that somebody is supposed to sort of write in the same style as the original author; it just doesn't work, and apart from that, I don't really think Asimov was a greatwriter from a literary point of view. His style seems stiff and awkward to me, where to me, good literature should be a joy read even after decades or centuries.
It is a load of shameless and deceptive nonsense; and does make it better that it is wrapped up in florid language, if you will excuse the pun, hur, hur. "Create a new species"? Even highly educated plant breeders haven't been able to do that, but a car manufacturer manages to do it with a gesture and a lorry-load of hype?
For a plant species to work well as carbon-capturer, it ought to grow fast (thus producing large quantities of biomass) and it should break down slowly, so the CO2 isn't released quickly again. Gardenias and sages don't really fit the bill - grasses might, some trees might and green algae, perhaps. But I understand, of course - surrounding the offices with a few hectares of slimy ponds isn't as pretty.
The real mystery is - how on Earth did this make it as far as being mentioned here?
Anonymous? Like a sniper, you mean? If you hide youself behind anonymity, you are no better than the bloke at the back of a crowd who jeers - or throws a stone, for that matter. People like you always talk about "freedom" and "rights", but what they mean is simply that they want to shirk their responsibility, like the free-loaders on society they are; true freedom comes with responsibility and obligations.
It is always possible - certainly in UK - to express your opinion without fear of prosecution and to be in loyal opposition. This was most recently demonstrated by the BBC inviting the clown Nick Griffin to participate in Question Time.
where did you find a company where bosses actually know good workers from bad workers?
Hmm, I'm not quite sure how it came about. I think I can disclose without risk that the company I work for is called Informatica - as it is now, I have almost nothing but praise for them, their work culture and ethics. It wasn't like that in the beginning, some 8 years ago, when I joined; it was all "our department against theirs". I think much of it is down to communication from both sides. I don't claim to have made the company change, but I think a large part of the change I perceive is down to a change in my perspective on things and my way of communicating. Before I - and everybody else - would say things like "those idiot managers", "useless salespeople", "clueless bureaucrats in IT" etc; I remember distinctly that I decided to stop and instead talk about pulling in the same direction; instead of calling others idiots, I now say that my department make so and so valuable contribution, when I criticise I try to say things like "I know you are already overloaded with work, but perhaps...". What I can see is that it is rather infective; nobody wants to be at war, and I suspect that people in the other departments have been feeling the same way that we did.
Perhaps this kind of misery is more common in American companies, simply because American culture puts much more emphasis on individual performance and less on group performance.
I wish I could say a magical word that would somehow make everything better, I really do. Still, I have always found that reality is your friend; and there is some truth in the saying, that when you are at low as you can come, every step will bring you upwards. The thing to remember is that you have to actually take a step - any step, really.
It would be great if I could take some time off to 'find myself' but the steady paycheque I need to keep food in the fridge for the family kinda puts a damper on that idea.
Think of it as a long-term project. There are many hobbies that could have the potential to become a new career if one is committed. For me it is growing orchids - it isn't too challenging and very interesting (well, to me at least). Superficially it could look as if a few, big producers have cornered the market and are the only ones that sell anything; but this is because you think of it in terms of producing a million plants at a time and selling through a supermarket chain. There are other ways and other markets. So, perhaps this is something I will do one day; and in the meantime I simply enjoy it.
Wouldn't it be nice one day, when the kids are grown, to sell the house and move far away from it all, to live a simple, undemanding life? There are many lovely places in the world: Outer Hebrides, Yunnan, The Alps, and possibly a few more:-)
Slashdot Mirror
So why, asks a longtime developer, is there a stigma attached to not having a four-year degree, when 'blue collar' coders might be better trained?
Is there? And are they? I think it depends on what you need a developer for and how your development team works. If your developers are merely coders, who are given a set of specifications and told "make it so!", then you just need somebody who can write code. If you expect more of your people, and want them to go from being just coders to taking on greater responsibility, then it may be a good idea to have somebody with a broader education. Being able to write C code doesn't make you good at guessing the effect a new feature will have on your users; a degree in psychology or sociology might, perhaps.
The other, and perhaps the biggest, benefit you get from an academical education is the training in handling complex issues in a methodical way, as well as potentially a wider outlook on the world, which is something a lot of businesses could benefit from IMO.
Road pricing is horseshit because if having to drive on a congested road isn't sufficient deterrent to stop you doing it, then taxation isn't going to achieve it
Except that congestion charging in London has been a resounding success. I remember well how it was to drive down Oxford Street before; you could watch your children grow up in the time it took. So that is one place it has worked.
Being able to track the movements of vehicles has many merits, which tend to be forgotten by those who hide behind the freedom- and privacy slogans. And it is not only "the government" being able to spy on your every movement, as if they would want to. Personally I would find it very handy if I could go online to check where my car was if it got stolen. Other potential benefits are:
- being able to put a damper on those people who consistently drive 120 mph on the motorway
- giving drivers an incentive for using alternative modes of transport by charging road tax and insurance by the mile
- crimefighting would be helped a lot if the whereabouts of cars, mobiles and computers were always known
Could it be abused by "an authoritarian regime"? Probably, but then so can everything else. The trick is to avoid having that kind of government; if the population could be bothered to keep themselves informed and take part in the political debate, they have it in their power to do just that.
The U.N. exists to exert and expand U.N. control, wherever possible
It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic, the way certain Slashdotters seem to think, if "think" is indeed the right term.
First UN: they don't exist to promote democracy, freedom or any other such ideologically charged ideals - UN is there to promote communication between governments, primarily; everything else secondary to that. When things like emergency aid occur, they are happy consequences of the cooperation that springs from the effort to communicate in an orderly manner. It is also a voluntary organisation - nations choose to participate, they are not forced to do so, and UN doesn't make laws or enforce anything, which is one of the reasons, I suspect, why we so often see that countries make promises and later ignore them.
It is of course nonsense to say that UN "exists to exert power"; that is just one of those sweeping statements that show that you don't know and don't want to know what you are talking about - you just want to spit your gall out on anything or anybody who isn't there to defend themselves. If you want to do something constructive, go and find out where that comes from instead of inventing scapegoats.
My solution is crude and simple:
1. Install Linux at all machines
2. Install VMware
3. Install whichever OS in a virtual machine.
4. Make a backup copy of it in a safe place
5. Let people use the virtual machine, but don't let them use the base OS
6. Make sure that all essential data - documents, whatever - are always on a networked disk
- when they screw up, simply copy from backup. Not perfect, but it is amazing how much hassle it has saved me.
How many points do I score for guessing that the majority of this howling chorus have never even watched as much as 1 second of CCTV's programs? This is just some idiots that - once again - want to whip up some anti-Chinese sentiment, to prevent bad things from happening in case people start thinking on their own. I mean, that is how the people of America have been conned for decades, and why your education system is constantly under threat from "religious" groups; that is why Americans automatically think that "free market" must be good - despite all the Enrons and the current recession, which were the direct results of deregulation.
Wake up and think your own thoughts, for God's sake; it won't turn you into a Communist overnight. Just don't be a sheep (or a cow - why do you think they called GWB a cowboy?)
Well, I'd object to their purchasing the sun as well!!
I'm not so much against it as completely flabbergasted. What does a database vendor want with a newspaper? And especially one as arguably despicable at The Sun: http://www.thesun.co.uk?
It's that hard to say Huffington Post?
You need to cheer up a bit, man. People invent nicknames for things all the time, sometimes to express a certain view on things.
Yeah, I know it sounds daft, and it is perhaps a rather naive scheme, but what I do is keep them on my mobile. That's mostly for PIN numbers, though; I store them as false telephone numbers. I don't use the socalled "secure" style of passwords, I write them too many times every day for that to work; I need something that is reasonably easy to type.
Aargh, I hate it when people try to get "smart" about serious subjects, and this one smells a lot like one of those. The explanations and arguments sound superficially OK, but they are deceptive, in that they don't spell out their starting conditions. Take the one about protectionism - it starts from the conclusion: "protectionism is bad, and now we are going to prove it". So they roll out the argument that on average America would be better off without protectionist tariffs - which of course leaves out a lot of details; but apart from that, it is like saying that if 99 people have nothing and 1 person has 1 million, then they are all well off, on average. Yeah, right. On the other hand, if you were to ask one of them, you would still have a 99% chance of hearing that they had nothing.
Same thing with Heisenberg - it is stated as solid fact that "there is nothing to be found ...", which is again smugly claimed nonsense. All we know is that we do not at present have a method of measuring things more precisely than what is described by Heisenberg's inequality; the fundamental problem is the wave-particle nature of the things we measure with: electrons, photons etc. The wave-length sets a lower limit for how precisely we can know the position of any target, and since shorter wave-length mean higher momentum, if we try to get more precise, we hit the target harder, and therefore can't determine its momentum as precisely. That is all we know. The rest of it is just quasi-religious hokum.
Well, one thing they could learn from open source is that it can be rewarding to forgo profits altogether. Now that WOULD be a revolution.
I think you should turn this the other way round - you are in charge of keeping the whole thing flying, and what is important is what YOU need to keep a tab on in order to do a good job. I don't know what kind of problems you tend to encounter on your site, but for many it would probably be something about how much your resources are being utilized. Like, how fast are disks filling up? You need to be able to be proactive - ie. to tell your managers that you need more diskspace before the disk is too full.
What I am still working on is data collection - simply putting things into a relational database. I try to collect everything that might be interesting - user logs, running processes, network traffic counts, etc. I find that managers don't really want to be bothered when things are fine; they just want to know when they have to take action. So I would suggest that you focus on giving them data that allow them to predict what money they will have to spend on upgrades and repairs.
It's new because the prosecutors are actually being reasonable about it.
But the really worrying thing in this is that it took 11 months; in which time two innocent people may well have experienced massive damage to their lives from the suspicion they were subjected to.
You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.
An important point to make, though, is that the purpose of all this should be to get healthier. You can be slim and fat at the same time - it is not uncommon to see people that look skinny, but when they sit down, their thighs seem to spread out over the chair, because there are no muscles in there. What people should concentrate on is getting fit and feeling good about themselves; you can be overweight and still fitter than most. If you are able to run for 20 minutes without having to stop, you are fit, no matter what the scales say.
No need to get all emotional, I think.
... unwelcome aliens will take full advantage of the U.S. taxpayers.
Oh? And? All countries with a proper healthcare for all share this problem; the alternative being that you just let people die or something similar.
... lots of loopholes ... no mention of ... doctors and hospitals are going out of business ... this nightmare ...
As far as I can see, you have let it all go to your head. I'm sure there is a lot of everybody's pet grievances that haven't been addressed; but this is at least a start. Isn't it better to get started than simply keep arguing over and over and over? I mean, that is the way most people work in the real world - you start on something and solve problems along the way. This stance of adamantly refusing to do anything at all until it is "perfect" for some unspecified value of "perfect" is nothing less than wilfully obstructive - if people genuinely want a better healthcare system, cooperate and make the best of any compromises, because you from the start that compromises will have to be made.
And I don't buy the one about doctors and hospitals going out of business either; extending healthacre to more people will necessarily mean that more people will be able to get treatment - which means more customers for doctors and hospitals. How can that put them out of business?
People - and expecially in the US - I'm sorry to say, tend to judge others exclusively from their own background, without trying to understand what the actual differences are. Thus, "it must be bad to live in China" - because you can't earn as much money as in America and you don't have the same sort of freedom as in America and so on. However, if you talk to people, as I have, you find that they don't see it that way.
My own background is that I am married to a Chinese - ten years, now - and have family there, both in Beijing and in the countryside. They are not fabulously rich, but they don't complain; most of the older generation have lived to see their country going from a war-torn hell-hole to a modern society, and even the poorest have seen clear improvement. Nobody is saying that the work is done, but they are happy with things so far, and they are convinced it will get better.
I have been to Xinjiang and Tibet; as far as I can tell, these are not oppressed people with no rights; but there are people who won't accept a place in Chinese society, no matter what - those are the socalled "dissidents". They are about as opressed as the "muslim dissidents" in UK; and just like in UK, the vast majority of the ethnic minorities are not part of that, they just want to make a good life for themselves, so they integrate into society.
The Chinese are building a modern society in their own way; they are immensely proud of the fact that what they are is of their own making. As an American, you should be well placed to know how much that means.
Yeah clever. Why don't you move to China?
I own an apartment in Beijing, I speak the language, I am married to a Chinese. Which all goes to show that I have done my homework; I have experience. Do you?
China is a nightmare communist dictatorship hell hole.
Yeah, this is like those despicable Christian that eat children and celebrate the execution of an innocent man!
It's funny, though, how Chinese people keep moving back to China - makes you wonder, perhaps it isn't such a nightmarish hellhole after all.
I can see the potential in cloud computing, although it isn't as huge as some would have us believe, and virtualisation is very useful technology for many purposes - I can see that going a long way, though it has many limitations too. But the tablet PC? I honestly can't see what I would use one for; it seems to combine the worst features of a notebook PC - general clunkiness, short battery life, easily breakable - with the disadvantages of pen and paper. Both are very valuable technologies on their own, but combining them is a bit like combining a pneumatic hammer with a nose-hair trimmer. It's not going to give you the best of both worlds, I suspect.
Whoah, slow down a bit or two.
America is "supporting [India and China's] welfare"? There are so many inaccuracies I could point out to you, but I fear it would be wasted on you. Just to puncture a few:
1. America is not supporting anybody's welfare; American companies are simply maximising their profits by seeking out lower costs. So the richest Americans are earning even more, and on average America gets richer; shame that it doesn't trickle down to you guys, but hey, you believe in capitalism, so why complain?
2. Historically, the West has milked those very same countries for all they were worth; you live your life in comparative comfort because of that fact. So if wealth is now flowing out of the West and into India and China, that is only a small pay-back, as far as I can see. "But I didn't keep slaves", you might say - which is true, of course, but you live on stolen riches, so what is the difference?
We all need, us in the western nations, to have a major change of heart; we can't keep insisting that we live in the sixties or whatever, where the was always blue and we would all get richer all the time. It's just a stupid dream.
Asimov created an interesting concept, and he didn't fully explore it - so why shouldn't others write stories in the same universe? I see lots of stories around about orcs and elves, clearly based on Tolkien's universe; most are crap, but some aren't, and I think it is a good thing if people are inspired by an author.
What I find distasteful is that somebody is supposed to sort of write in the same style as the original author; it just doesn't work, and apart from that, I don't really think Asimov was a greatwriter from a literary point of view. His style seems stiff and awkward to me, where to me, good literature should be a joy read even after decades or centuries.
It is a load of shameless and deceptive nonsense; and does make it better that it is wrapped up in florid language, if you will excuse the pun, hur, hur. "Create a new species"? Even highly educated plant breeders haven't been able to do that, but a car manufacturer manages to do it with a gesture and a lorry-load of hype?
For a plant species to work well as carbon-capturer, it ought to grow fast (thus producing large quantities of biomass) and it should break down slowly, so the CO2 isn't released quickly again. Gardenias and sages don't really fit the bill - grasses might, some trees might and green algae, perhaps. But I understand, of course - surrounding the offices with a few hectares of slimy ponds isn't as pretty.
The real mystery is - how on Earth did this make it as far as being mentioned here?
Anonymous? Like a sniper, you mean? If you hide youself behind anonymity, you are no better than the bloke at the back of a crowd who jeers - or throws a stone, for that matter. People like you always talk about "freedom" and "rights", but what they mean is simply that they want to shirk their responsibility, like the free-loaders on society they are; true freedom comes with responsibility and obligations.
It is always possible - certainly in UK - to express your opinion without fear of prosecution and to be in loyal opposition. This was most recently demonstrated by the BBC inviting the clown Nick Griffin to participate in Question Time.
where did you find a company where bosses actually know good workers from bad workers?
Hmm, I'm not quite sure how it came about. I think I can disclose without risk that the company I work for is called Informatica - as it is now, I have almost nothing but praise for them, their work culture and ethics. It wasn't like that in the beginning, some 8 years ago, when I joined; it was all "our department against theirs". I think much of it is down to communication from both sides. I don't claim to have made the company change, but I think a large part of the change I perceive is down to a change in my perspective on things and my way of communicating. Before I - and everybody else - would say things like "those idiot managers", "useless salespeople", "clueless bureaucrats in IT" etc; I remember distinctly that I decided to stop and instead talk about pulling in the same direction; instead of calling others idiots, I now say that my department make so and so valuable contribution, when I criticise I try to say things like "I know you are already overloaded with work, but perhaps ...". What I can see is that it is rather infective; nobody wants to be at war, and I suspect that people in the other departments have been feeling the same way that we did.
Perhaps this kind of misery is more common in American companies, simply because American culture puts much more emphasis on individual performance and less on group performance.
I wish I could say a magical word that would somehow make everything better, I really do. Still, I have always found that reality is your friend; and there is some truth in the saying, that when you are at low as you can come, every step will bring you upwards. The thing to remember is that you have to actually take a step - any step, really.
It would be great if I could take some time off to 'find myself' but the steady paycheque I need to keep food in the fridge for the family kinda puts a damper on that idea.
Think of it as a long-term project. There are many hobbies that could have the potential to become a new career if one is committed. For me it is growing orchids - it isn't too challenging and very interesting (well, to me at least). Superficially it could look as if a few, big producers have cornered the market and are the only ones that sell anything; but this is because you think of it in terms of producing a million plants at a time and selling through a supermarket chain. There are other ways and other markets. So, perhaps this is something I will do one day; and in the meantime I simply enjoy it.
Wouldn't it be nice one day, when the kids are grown, to sell the house and move far away from it all, to live a simple, undemanding life? There are many lovely places in the world: Outer Hebrides, Yunnan, The Alps, and possibly a few more :-)