Actually, I did find a job (reread my post). But I know a lot of people who can't find work or are seriously underemployed (working at Peet's, etc). As such, I take issue with the inference that all unemployed people are just taking a few weeks off to lounge by the pool, esp. given that the people he sited wouldn't be included in the unemployment rate, anyhow.
I, for one, did not spend January-May 2002 bumming around Europe.
My girlfriend was not dropping a kid from June 2001 to April 2002.
My friend who does telecom sales has not been jerking off since October 2001, although his wife did do some sales (specifically, her car) to pay the mortgage.
And let me assure you that my boss from my second job hasn't "found himself" since December of last year.
So might I humbly suggest you keep your fucking mouth shut when you don't have the first clue you're talking about. People who lose their jobs tend to spend their time glued to their computer searching the listings, hitting job fairs or calling old contacts. It's not like losing your $15/hour job there in college where you can just call your parents and have them send you money.
I'm a skilled tech worker, but I only have 3 years of full-time professional experience. Right now, this makes me almost unemployable -- the HR bunnies just toss my resume into the bin when they see when I graduated. I was very lucky to get recommended by a friend to the job I have now. So don't talk to me about you mad computer skillz and how you can get a job at will because you're such a legendary hacker. And don't you fucking presume to tell me that it's not really bad out there, because I damn well know different.
"I'm an American, I should have priority" doesn't work
That's bullshit.
The government has one purpose, and that's to serve the people it represents. If it allows companies to hire foreign workers at the expense of American citizens, that's a problem. The US government should be helping to protect me, and it's only because tech employers have a better lobbying effort than we tech workers that they don't.
Despite all your one-world economy fantasies (which business-types have been having since the 1800s), it won't work out the way you envision for long. In the long run, US engineers will organize in one way or another, and this will all come to an end -- you can't take people's livelihoods away and expect then just to sit and take it.
Being 19, you should worry more about getting out from Mommy and Daddy's house and driving their car than what they put in their car that you use. If it is your property, then rip the thing out.
That's not fair. Assuming he's going to college, he shouldn't be criticized too harshly for having his folks help him out with auto or housing or whatever -- it's fuggin' expensive, esp. if you end up doing a work-study sort of thing.
True, but the flip side of that is that most kids won't be able to afford a safe car on their own and will end up with an old Pinto or something.
The best solution is probably the one my parents used: figure out how much I make an hour, then subsidize a decent-but-not-insane used car to a price where it represented a *lot* of work. I got a used Buick LaSabre for $1000, which was about 150 hours of grunt work at a local pharmacy for me, and my parents covered the rest.
Step 1: Unscrew cover to expose circuit board. Step 2: Pop hood. Step 3: Retrieve jumper cables from trunk (you are in the Midwest, right?) Step 4: Connect jumper cables to battery. Step 5: Apply cables to circuit board. Step 6: Return items to original position. Step 7: Feign ignorance.
No teenager (or new driver in general) is as good a driver as they think they are.
That said, having a little electronic mommy watching you is a terrible idea -- you never get any sense of responsibility about what you're doing when you're not the one in charge.
Personally, were I 16 again, I'd get laid more^H^H^H^H... I mean, were I 16 again, this thing would be in for a short circuit -- a little extra current applied to the board is just what the doctor ordered.
"I dunno, mom. Maybe the whole line of these things are defective?"
The problem is that these things take no account for actual traffic conditions.
In the real world, nobody ever drives the speed limit under good driving conditions. Realistic freeway speeds are at least 80 in nondeveloped areas, and cars going under that speed are actually at increased risk.
Besides, nothing like this will ever stop the experimentation kids do in cars. In my younger days, I did donuts in the empty church parking lot, caught air on the Spooner St. bridge, drove my car over a lawn or two, etc. No excessive speed involved (you'd jump Spooner doing 35).
IMO, your best bet is to buy your kid a fairly modern, safe car without too much extra juice (try a Toyota with side-curtain airbags with traction control and ABS, or a Volvo if it's in your means) -- buying kids old cars is actually more dangerous due to the lack of modern safety gear. Those parents buying their kids Z3's... well, that's just natural selection at work.
Base lesson: No good ever came of spying on your kids and making it clear you don't have any trust for them.
I think the key word is "if". Maybe a move like this makes sense to the same sort of people who looked at the HP/Compaq thing and said "Yeah, that seems like a great idea! I'm sure this will go differently than all the other HP mergers ever, turn both companies around and put us right back on top!".
Personally, I never trust my money to companies which are so obviously run by pointy-hairs. So, I stay away from HP, I stayed away from a lot of.coms -- the managers don't have to be a Gates or an Ellison, just so long as they're not a Belluzo or a Fiorina.
I couldn't agree more on Fiorina. She's following the path of a typical bad CEO: making deals that don't make a lot of sense, merging with a declining computer maker, etc -- all towards the end of "doing something" to justify her options and salary and at the expense of the little people and the HP corporate culture.
Living in the Bay Area, I find the main trouble I see is that any attack on Fiorina's ideas or methods is immediately interpreted in some quarters as an attack against women in important roles (like CEO). Granted, some people do make things a gender issue ("that stupid bitch", etc), but it's frustrating to be grouped in with them when you try to make reasonable points. It's gotten to the point where I group her with politics and religion as things to avoid in friendly conversation.
No matter, though; I've sold my HP stock and I don't work there, so maybe my company will see a rise in business while HP starts to toss theirs. Still, it's always sad to see a company sunk by its PHBs.
PS: I think renaming the Compaq Center the "HP Pavillion" is probably the tackiest thing I've every heard. Fortunately, for the locals who care it'll always be the Shark Tank.
I consider myself appreciated every day that the servers don't go down.
Really? Personally, I find myself far more appreciated every time the servers *do* go down in flames due to a massive (vendor, contractor or intern-caused) issue that nobody else has a clue about. I can feel the appreciatation radiating off my boss when I tell him that I've used my years of experience and contacts in this-or-that organization to save not only the data of the developers, but also his private image collection.
Weirdly, these problems seem to crop up just before quarterly reviews. That's when I really feel appreciated.
I use Red Hat personally (I know, boo, hiss), but I have used Mandrake and I believe it will eventually be far and away the best desktop distro.
It's true that the install is somewhat bloated, but then again it seems like most desktop OS's are -- they tack on a lot of functionality that you might need just in case, sometime down the road, you do need it. IMO, this isn't such a problem with incredibly large desktop hard drives being so inexpensive.
Besides that, though, Mandrake has always seemed to have the end user in mind -- they were the first with a nifty GUI update feature, they were the first to introduce some of the simple programs to update config files (what can I say, vi scares some people), etc. Hopefully, in the longer run, this sort of emphesis will pay off on the desktop.
Remember: Just because Linux sucks on the desktop right now doesn't mean that it always will. Linux is an evolutionary product, and as such should eventually adapt to fill all niches (although not necessarily in the same form).
While I applaud this change by the UK government, I think it might be a little early to engage the orchestra for the dance on Bill G's grave.
Personally, as much as I enjoy seeing the very successful beaten by scrappy newcomes, I don't really want to see MS or any other vendors go away -- I want to see them compete against OSS. I want to see them forced to compete on the merits of their product, not just on who has the state locked in with proprietary file formats. I want to see strong competition because that is the mother of innovation. Competition, then, accelerates the advancement of the state of the art.
Amen to that. I've been successful in convincing my managers to go with an OSS (often the only ones adhering to open standards 100%) solution several times using this arguement.
The big advantage of this is that you don't need to get technical to explain it and there's no reasonable-sounding counterarguement the sales droids from whatever vendor can use to counter you. It's simple: "Boss, if we start using their product, we'll be locked in. After we've put enough work into it they'll hold our own data hostage and will be free to charge us whatever they want. Now, with this product, we can move to another package at any time because they use an approved, published standard."
My hope is that once enough businesses realize the sense of this arguement, commercial software will be forced to adhere to standards to compete. And after all, healthy competition is really what OSS is all about, isn't it?
Gore's contract with the university stipulated that her presentation could not be recorded.
Right. So, what did Gore's contract with Mr. Westmore say? Or did he agree to some invisible EULA when he walked through the door of a publically-funded US academic institution to hear a speech by a prominent US political figure?
Remember: Just because the people in charge tell you that you don't have any rights doesn't mean that you don't.
"We live in a world where we communicate worldwide and we travel worldwide," Farber said. "If I violate some Australian law and then land in Sydney, do they throw me in jail?"
It's worth repeating that the originator of this technique was the United States with the Skarlov(sp?) case. The US, in effect, used legal pretense to abduct a visiting foreign national for breaking our laws while living and and a citizen of another country.
If another country, say Iran, had imprisoned a US citizen for speaking his mind while living in the US, the Marine Corps battle flag would be flying over the rubble of Teheran by now. But, of course, might makes right, so that will just have to remain one of life's little injustices.
As, then, will this concept of having your travel restricted by exercising your (US) rights.
Unless I'm not understanding the article, an Italian citizen living in Italy was forced by Italian police to shut down his web site, which happened to be hosted in the United States.
So... What's the big deal again?
Sure, it offends me that the Italian government discourages free discourse, but that's a matter for the government and the citizens of Italy to work out. Just because the site was hosted in the US does not extend legal protection to the person running the site. This would be as if I, say, obtained a copy of the Solaris source and kept it on a server in Iran, and the US forced me to delete it in order to avoid jail time. Regardless of if you think the laws involved are intelligent, I am still subject to the laws of my country.
If the Italian government had somehow forced the US hosting company to remove the speech in question, then we'd have a serious problem to discuss here. However, that now being the case, I don't see what the issue is.
Want something real to worry about? Try this: an American U student is charged with theft for taping a speech by Tipper Gore. They say he "stole" her intellectual property. I suppose from now on we'll need expressed written permission from Major League Baseball to describe what our political leaders are saying...
Maybe my understanding of the DMCA is a bit off, but couldn't MS insinuate that, since an OSS media player that decodes Media Player could be used to circumvent someone's copyright protection (regardless of who), the reverse engineering was in violation of the DMCA?
Of course, this is *assuming* that they did as you suggest and had isolated virgin programmers, which I hope they did for their sake (that said, I've seen companies do this on a couple of occassions for whatever legal reason).
A chocolate shake is the only possible companion for a basket of cheese sticks.
Chocolate shakes are good, but nothing tops a good cup 'o Denny's java. It's good with everything, from the original Grand Slam breakfast to Denny's late-night favorites like the always-good Moons Over My Hammy.
I consider this in-depth Dennys knowledge proof that I went to high school. Diplomas can be faked, but knowing the contents of the Southern Slam is something that must be learned through hard experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I did find a job (reread my post). But I know a lot of people who can't find work or are seriously underemployed (working at Peet's, etc). As such, I take issue with the inference that all unemployed people are just taking a few weeks off to lounge by the pool, esp. given that the people he sited wouldn't be included in the unemployment rate, anyhow.
My girlfriend was not dropping a kid from June 2001 to April 2002.
My friend who does telecom sales has not been jerking off since October 2001, although his wife did do some sales (specifically, her car) to pay the mortgage.
And let me assure you that my boss from my second job hasn't "found himself" since December of last year.
So might I humbly suggest you keep your fucking mouth shut when you don't have the first clue you're talking about. People who lose their jobs tend to spend their time glued to their computer searching the listings, hitting job fairs or calling old contacts. It's not like losing your $15/hour job there in college where you can just call your parents and have them send you money.
I'm a skilled tech worker, but I only have 3 years of full-time professional experience. Right now, this makes me almost unemployable -- the HR bunnies just toss my resume into the bin when they see when I graduated. I was very lucky to get recommended by a friend to the job I have now. So don't talk to me about you mad computer skillz and how you can get a job at will because you're such a legendary hacker. And don't you fucking presume to tell me that it's not really bad out there, because I damn well know different.
That's bullshit.
The government has one purpose, and that's to serve the people it represents. If it allows companies to hire foreign workers at the expense of American citizens, that's a problem. The US government should be helping to protect me, and it's only because tech employers have a better lobbying effort than we tech workers that they don't.
Despite all your one-world economy fantasies (which business-types have been having since the 1800s), it won't work out the way you envision for long. In the long run, US engineers will organize in one way or another, and this will all come to an end -- you can't take people's livelihoods away and expect then just to sit and take it.
Personally, I don't want to see any of you in person. Attaching human faces would only make it harder to flame your stupid opinions. =)
That's not fair. Assuming he's going to college, he shouldn't be criticized too harshly for having his folks help him out with auto or housing or whatever -- it's fuggin' expensive, esp. if you end up doing a work-study sort of thing.
The best solution is probably the one my parents used: figure out how much I make an hour, then subsidize a decent-but-not-insane used car to a price where it represented a *lot* of work. I got a used Buick LaSabre for $1000, which was about 150 hours of grunt work at a local pharmacy for me, and my parents covered the rest.
Step 1: Unscrew cover to expose circuit board.
Step 2: Pop hood.
Step 3: Retrieve jumper cables from trunk (you are in the Midwest, right?)
Step 4: Connect jumper cables to battery.
Step 5: Apply cables to circuit board.
Step 6: Return items to original position.
Step 7: Feign ignorance.
Easy 'nuff.
That said, having a little electronic mommy watching you is a terrible idea -- you never get any sense of responsibility about what you're doing when you're not the one in charge.
Personally, were I 16 again, I'd get laid more^H^H^H^H... I mean, were I 16 again, this thing would be in for a short circuit -- a little extra current applied to the board is just what the doctor ordered.
"I dunno, mom. Maybe the whole line of these things are defective?"
In the real world, nobody ever drives the speed limit under good driving conditions. Realistic freeway speeds are at least 80 in nondeveloped areas, and cars going under that speed are actually at increased risk.
Besides, nothing like this will ever stop the experimentation kids do in cars. In my younger days, I did donuts in the empty church parking lot, caught air on the Spooner St. bridge, drove my car over a lawn or two, etc. No excessive speed involved (you'd jump Spooner doing 35).
IMO, your best bet is to buy your kid a fairly modern, safe car without too much extra juice (try a Toyota with side-curtain airbags with traction control and ABS, or a Volvo if it's in your means) -- buying kids old cars is actually more dangerous due to the lack of modern safety gear. Those parents buying their kids Z3's... well, that's just natural selection at work.
Base lesson: No good ever came of spying on your kids and making it clear you don't have any trust for them.
Actually, I heard a NPR host suggest it be renamed the Fiorina Arena, which I was greatly amused by.
I think the key word is "if". Maybe a move like this makes sense to the same sort of people who looked at the HP/Compaq thing and said "Yeah, that seems like a great idea! I'm sure this will go differently than all the other HP mergers ever, turn both companies around and put us right back on top!".
Personally, I never trust my money to companies which are so obviously run by pointy-hairs. So, I stay away from HP, I stayed away from a lot of .coms -- the managers don't have to be a Gates or an Ellison, just so long as they're not a Belluzo or a Fiorina.
Living in the Bay Area, I find the main trouble I see is that any attack on Fiorina's ideas or methods is immediately interpreted in some quarters as an attack against women in important roles (like CEO). Granted, some people do make things a gender issue ("that stupid bitch", etc), but it's frustrating to be grouped in with them when you try to make reasonable points. It's gotten to the point where I group her with politics and religion as things to avoid in friendly conversation.
No matter, though; I've sold my HP stock and I don't work there, so maybe my company will see a rise in business while HP starts to toss theirs. Still, it's always sad to see a company sunk by its PHBs.
PS: I think renaming the Compaq Center the "HP Pavillion" is probably the tackiest thing I've every heard. Fortunately, for the locals who care it'll always be the Shark Tank.
Really? Personally, I find myself far more appreciated every time the servers *do* go down in flames due to a massive (vendor, contractor or intern-caused) issue that nobody else has a clue about. I can feel the appreciatation radiating off my boss when I tell him that I've used my years of experience and contacts in this-or-that organization to save not only the data of the developers, but also his private image collection.
Weirdly, these problems seem to crop up just before quarterly reviews. That's when I really feel appreciated.
If I don't get an answer to this one in the next couple of days, I swear to God I'm climbing a clock tower with a high-powered rifle...
It's true that the install is somewhat bloated, but then again it seems like most desktop OS's are -- they tack on a lot of functionality that you might need just in case, sometime down the road, you do need it. IMO, this isn't such a problem with incredibly large desktop hard drives being so inexpensive.
Besides that, though, Mandrake has always seemed to have the end user in mind -- they were the first with a nifty GUI update feature, they were the first to introduce some of the simple programs to update config files (what can I say, vi scares some people), etc. Hopefully, in the longer run, this sort of emphesis will pay off on the desktop.
Remember: Just because Linux sucks on the desktop right now doesn't mean that it always will. Linux is an evolutionary product, and as such should eventually adapt to fill all niches (although not necessarily in the same form).
Personally, as much as I enjoy seeing the very successful beaten by scrappy newcomes, I don't really want to see MS or any other vendors go away -- I want to see them compete against OSS. I want to see them forced to compete on the merits of their product, not just on who has the state locked in with proprietary file formats. I want to see strong competition because that is the mother of innovation. Competition, then, accelerates the advancement of the state of the art.
That's what I want to see.
The big advantage of this is that you don't need to get technical to explain it and there's no reasonable-sounding counterarguement the sales droids from whatever vendor can use to counter you. It's simple: "Boss, if we start using their product, we'll be locked in. After we've put enough work into it they'll hold our own data hostage and will be free to charge us whatever they want. Now, with this product, we can move to another package at any time because they use an approved, published standard."
My hope is that once enough businesses realize the sense of this arguement, commercial software will be forced to adhere to standards to compete. And after all, healthy competition is really what OSS is all about, isn't it?
Right. So, what did Gore's contract with Mr. Westmore say? Or did he agree to some invisible EULA when he walked through the door of a publically-funded US academic institution to hear a speech by a prominent US political figure?
Remember: Just because the people in charge tell you that you don't have any rights doesn't mean that you don't.
It's worth repeating that the originator of this technique was the United States with the Skarlov(sp?) case. The US, in effect, used legal pretense to abduct a visiting foreign national for breaking our laws while living and and a citizen of another country.
If another country, say Iran, had imprisoned a US citizen for speaking his mind while living in the US, the Marine Corps battle flag would be flying over the rubble of Teheran by now. But, of course, might makes right, so that will just have to remain one of life's little injustices.
As, then, will this concept of having your travel restricted by exercising your (US) rights.
So... What's the big deal again?
Sure, it offends me that the Italian government discourages free discourse, but that's a matter for the government and the citizens of Italy to work out. Just because the site was hosted in the US does not extend legal protection to the person running the site. This would be as if I, say, obtained a copy of the Solaris source and kept it on a server in Iran, and the US forced me to delete it in order to avoid jail time. Regardless of if you think the laws involved are intelligent, I am still subject to the laws of my country.
If the Italian government had somehow forced the US hosting company to remove the speech in question, then we'd have a serious problem to discuss here. However, that now being the case, I don't see what the issue is.
Want something real to worry about? Try this: an American U student is charged with theft for taping a speech by Tipper Gore. They say he "stole" her intellectual property. I suppose from now on we'll need expressed written permission from Major League Baseball to describe what our political leaders are saying...
Of course, this is *assuming* that they did as you suggest and had isolated virgin programmers, which I hope they did for their sake (that said, I've seen companies do this on a couple of occassions for whatever legal reason).
That's okay; I have it on good authority that no actual biological entities are in any way responsible for the various items on the Denny's menu.
Oh, wait...
Hey ESR! How are those stock options working out?
Interestingly, he's using them to line his cat's litter box.
Chocolate shakes are good, but nothing tops a good cup 'o Denny's java. It's good with everything, from the original Grand Slam breakfast to Denny's late-night favorites like the always-good Moons Over My Hammy.
I consider this in-depth Dennys knowledge proof that I went to high school. Diplomas can be faked, but knowing the contents of the Southern Slam is something that must be learned through hard experience.