Oh, what the hell, since everyone else is dogpiling you about semantics, I'll go ahead and join in...
Disc typically refers to optical media (CDs, DVDs, Laserdiscs, etc). Disk typically refers to magnetic media (hard disks, floppy disks, etc.). I don't really know the history or logic behind this, but since the first phrase on your homepage is "don't be ignorant", I thought you'd like to know.
:-) (Obligatory smiley to let you know I'm not flaming, or at least being just passive-aggressive).
They turn you into a trendwhoring hipster who may spontaneously break into dance in a public area, which results in a severe beating by some guy who thinks you're an idiot.
/The iPod is not a music accessory, it's a fashion accessory.
Yet I have to fork over my tax money so the police can protect it?
You fork over tax money so that the 'police' can protect it, and whatever copyrights you may hold. You say you don't produce copyrighted material, so why should you pay? Because that's how society works. I'm sure someone, somewhere is paying taxes for something that they don't use, but you do.
And of course copyright holders have the right to get a cut out of my backup media...
Look, I don't support the RIAA, MPAA, or any organization like them. I agree that they've abused their powers to contort copyright law into a gigantic mess that seems to only line their pockets. However, I do support the individual copyright holders out there who just wanted their work to be recognized, attributed to them, and distributed according to their rules. I don't shed a tear for the latest pop-tastic boy/girl band, or the underwhelmingly mediocre rock band who owe their whole careers to the strongarm tactics of the RIAA, but I still think that their... output, for lack of a better word, should be protected under copyright as well. I won't buy their music, but I won't pirate it, either.
I don't know why I'm even bothering to reply to this; you seem outwardly hostile as though by stating my *personal* view on the matter, I'm trying to collapse society and promote ignorance.
My "efforts to disinform the public"?! Whenever I state a personal opinion, I make damned sure to label it as such, which is why that statement begins with "I still believe..." You need to chill out. Frankly, I don't give two shits about changing what anyone on this board personally believes, I just enjoy the exchange of views sometimes, although posts like yours make me wonder why I still come here to do that.
I'm not saying, "lets change the laws to reflect my belief"; I wholly understand that there are different laws to deal with copyright infringement and with theft, simply because they are TWO DIFFERENT ACTS. BUT, even on a purely semantic level, you could say that you are taking the RIGHT to COPY from the copyright holder and assigning it to yourself, to copy it as you see fit. You can argue ad infinitum that nothing is being taken, so it's not theft, and fine, maybe you don't see it that way. My point isn't to legally treat copyright infringement as theft, but to explain why I see them as closely related.
If the terms of the sale explicitly prohibit resale, then yes, you are guilty of copyright infringement. Otherwise, no, you can do anything implicit in the terms of sale, and it will be the copyright holder's fault for not properly protecting his/her work. My whole argument in this thread is that you should respect the terms of the rights-owner, or simply not utilize their content, plain and simple. I'm not saying I agree with their terms all the time, but I don't say "fuck you" and take what I want to anyway.
This is an inaccurate sentiment. It's not the middlemen who are at fault for not "waking up", it is the artists/content creators. If I can't figure out how to utilize digital publishing for distribution and/or profit, while retaining my rights to my work, well, it's unfortunate, but it's my own shortcoming.
I have no argument against this. But still, the content creators are not without choice. Release your stuff under Creative Commons, or a F/OSS license, or whatever applicable license, or make up your own terms. US copyright laws only apply to works that have chosen to use US Copyright protection. As an end-user, make a choice to use only those content providers whose terms you agree with. To paraphrase what bigmammoth said in a reply further down, we don't have to play by their rules or cheat, we can just create our own game.
I can appreciate your attempts at passive subversion, but I would highly recommend against using that particular phrase, or anything threatening to the president. It doesn't matter if it's said in jest, if you are heard making a threat to the president, you will be guilty of a felony.
On an unrelated note, I wonder if this is exclusive to the president, or White House officials, or what?
This is one of those gray areas where I think it's hard to draw a line. What about the language they used? They merely arranged a bunch of preconceived words to create their book, right? I know it seems like an absurd argument, but where can you draw the line? The old memory techniques they cite would not have been possible if someone hadn't defined the concept of memory before them, so where does it stop?
Same with programming, music, or anything else. You are merely rearranging predefined elements to create something new as a whole. So while the memory techniques they discuss aren't original, the arrangment is, and I guess it should be subject to their copyright.
The difference is that this is a separate transaction. The bookstore has already purchased the book from the publisher, who published the rights from the author. If they choose to let you read the whole book and leave without paying, that's their decision and perhaps a failure of their business model. If you download a copy, no one in the chain has received compensation, and no one enabled you to do that.
Look, I've said this before, too, but I think it bears repeating: you do not have a right to commercial entertainment. It is a service/product whose terms are defined by the publisher/producer. If you do not agree to these terms, then don't utilize the product. This is one concept that I think translates directly from the physical world to digital.
1. Your first point is fair enough, I suppose. Although I simply meant that the value of what they're selling is in the content, not the access medium.
2a. Oh no, you've attacked my level of discourse! You've ignored the rest of the post (which is at least fairly coherent) and picked on the one whimsical statement of opinion I made. Awesome.
2b. There are many legal venues for sampling an album or a movie to see whether it's to your liking before purchase. Perhaps you use pira-- er, copyright infringement-- as a meter by which to guage your interest in a product before purchasing it, but a substantial portion of 'pirates' simply horde as much content as they can, sift through it as their convenience, keep what they want, and enjoy it without any desire to recompense the producer.
3. My contrived analogy had nothing to do with Gibson's theories. As the paragraph below it clarified (a little), it's to show that we can't always define something in the digital world as we do in the physical world. To say you duplicated content and didn't physically steal anything is like saying you rearranged bits, and didn't physically destroy anything. Both are true, but neither quite fit the physical world definitions, either.
4. I wasn't making a legal case. I still believe that it is theft; the producer creates content to entertain you at a set cost, and you acquire the entertainment without paying the cost. Theft of services, piracy, copyright infringement, whatever you want to call it. The concept is pretty much the same.
This argument drives me nuts. They're not selling you the paper on which the book was printed. They are selling you the entertainment/knowledge/whatever you derive from the content of the book. The lost sales argument aside, this is the problem I have with any music/movie pirates who justify it the way you did. "Well, I wouldn't buy that shit anyway, and I just made a copy, I didn't physically deprive them of anything." Well, 1) How pathetic must you be to waste your time downloading shit you don't value? Either that or you're lying, and enjoy getting something for free. And 2) If you delete a bunch of vital information on a company's server, would you use the defense that "I didn't physically destroy anything, I just realigned some bits on a hard drive"?
Of course not, because the typical/. demographic understands that you can't apply laws and governance of the physical world to the virtual, technology world. So perhaps it is not THEFT in the traditional sense, but it is THEFT in the "I'm taking something that I'm not authorized to take" sense.
I post similar comments everytime I see this issue raised, and most people must think I'm a shill or something. I'm not; I personally believe in free (speech and beer) information, and public disbursement of my creative efforts. As a multi-medium content creator, however, I recognize that not everyone believes the same things I do, and it's more important to respect that than to push my own beliefs.
Most people don't seem to pick up the subtleties of the film, and usually either remark on the how people are forced to turn to physical violence to feel alive in our modern, soulless society, or how the movie advocates anarchy and living free.
This is my #3 favorite movie of all time, but for a while, I focused on the anarchy aspect of it. Eventually I realized that if you really pay attention, there's a whole other layer. All the propaganda that Tyler spouts about liberating people, allowing them to live their own lives, escaping from the air-conditioned nightmare... it's all contradicted throughout the rest of the movie.
The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The whole "his name is Robert Paulson" chanting-thing. "Why was Tyler Durden building an army? In Tyler we trusted". The recurring theme of blind faith in Tyler's master plan seems to imply that it's really a changing of the shepard, rather than freeing the flock. One "mentally-ill" man discontent with his life starts a cult and resculpts the world to his liking.
I think it's a brilliant movie, masterfully done. I lean towards Tyler's personal philosophy anyway, so perhaps I'm a bit biased, but that's my interpretation of the whole movie.
In my opinion, the only ones who are exempt from this description are the ones standing outside capitol hill protesting, or otherwise actively trying to right the wrongs of their elected officials. So no, shaking your head and saying, "I don't agree with this administration" does not admonish you of guilt.
Of course, that makes me a guilty, drooling moron as well, but I don't try to misrepresent myself otherwise.
That was a very coherent post with many good points.
However you mistyped "continuum" so, in standard Slashdot form, I will call you a fuckwad and claim your whole argument is bullshit.
Actually no. But, you say that "evolution is at the base merely a means for a common (breeding) genepool to maintain itself through time". I'm not quite sure I understand this statement. With every evolutionary step forward (mutation or adaptation), isn't the common genepool becoming less and less common, until it ultimately dissolves into one or many other distinct genepools? Also, that statement seems to claim that there is something intrinsically shaping the direction of evolution, or at least an intrinsic goal towards which every organism strives (the goal of maintaining its genepool, or proliferating, or whatever you consider evolution); some succeed, some fail.
But really, how would you define that goal? Without trying to further polarize the issue, it seems like it's really a choice between complete and utter randomness, or some form of "intelligent intervention". To say that every living organism ultimately strives towards one goal is to say that there is at least one universal truth, which implies a boundary, and thus absolute chaos cannot exist. Conversely, to say that every moment in 'time' is random, and that no event occurs with the goal of a future event (procreation, etc.), suggests that evolution, as humans have defined it, is only an arbitrary pattern carved out of chaos. So perhaps evolution falls more into place with intelligent design than with chaos...
This is me just shooting from the hip. Please feel free to refute any pseudo-philosophical premise that I've constructed, or just to simply call me a fuckwad.
They wouldn't even give that away. The main appeal of Windows isn't really the OS itself, but it's application base is so huge. If Microsoft made the Win32 runtimes available, you could just build another OS that is compatible with their binaries. Which is actually what ReactOS is trying to do. So I sincerely doubt that Microsoft will ever release the source to their legacy products.
I think it's kind of funny that the SDI program wanted satellite-based lasers to defend against terrestrial threats, and now they want terrestrial-based lasers to defend against satellitical (I think I just precedented a word...) threats.
Yeah, I agree. Competence is competence no matter what country you're in. But you take that risk whether you use a U.S. consulting firm, an Indian outsourcing farm, or hire someone in-house to complete the project. At least with the outsourcing farm, you're saving some money.
Well, that's what marketing is for. It's not an implant, it's a "security augmentation". The next generation of children, along with immunizations, will be required to undergo a minor, non-invasive procedure to help prevent against abductions and other unpleasantries. Tyranny and oppression are most effective under the guise of convenience.
By 2012, every Florida-legal vehicle will be required to have an RFID-type chip in them. Government officials say it's to help monitor traffic, and will not be used for speeding citations, but the smart money is on the fact that within two or three years, they will be using this for law enforcement as well.
Granted, a chip in your vehicle and a chip in your muscle tissue are very different things. But every such anecdote makes it easier and easier to believe that people will not put up much resistance to this kind of stuff. I do, however, and will continue to until my trip to the Re-Education Center. (Yes, I know 1984 references are quaint, but damn if they're not getting more and more pertinent.)
Disclaimer: the above information was relayed to me by a civil engineer who is currently designing and implementing "traffic monitoring" along most major Central Florida highways. If you like, I can try to find another source, or failing that, admit that I may be talking out of my anus.
I definitely don't support outsourcing, but I think it's a little misunderstood, too.
Based on what I've heard from several people working in large companies, outsourcing isn't always just about the money. They've said that, all costs considered, it really doesn't save that much money. But the work ethic in certain countries is far better than what they've experienced here. Deadlines are met, micro-management isn't required, and the workers are willing to put in that proverbial 110% if needed. Now, they concede that in the long-run, it's probably not sustainable, and will cause problems when the project is handed off, but for projects that just need to get done now, it's the way to go. So perhaps it's not just price, but the price/performance ratio that keeps companies from hiring domestic...
I'm 20, and have been doing high-level IT consulting for a few years now. I dropped out of college while pursuing my CS degree (for personal reasons). I'd be lying to say that the reason I stick to IT rather than finish my degree is because of outsourcing, but the media and public at least make it seem like the market is evaporating. I think there will always be demand for CS majors domestically, but you better make damned sure you're not like all the paper MCSE's, and that you really know/are passionate about what you're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, what the hell, since everyone else is dogpiling you about semantics, I'll go ahead and join in...
Disc typically refers to optical media (CDs, DVDs, Laserdiscs, etc). Disk typically refers to magnetic media (hard disks, floppy disks, etc.). I don't really know the history or logic behind this, but since the first phrase on your homepage is "don't be ignorant", I thought you'd like to know.
:-) (Obligatory smiley to let you know I'm not flaming, or at least being just passive-aggressive).
Yeah, but that was then. In this post-9/11 world, terr'rists are always looking to abduct your children.
No, I'm not trying to start a flamewar, just a stupid comment
Actually, your equation was right, but you didn't keep your decimal values consistent.
So it should be about 92% uptime total.
btw how are ipods a health issue?
They turn you into a trendwhoring hipster who may spontaneously break into dance in a public area, which results in a severe beating by some guy who thinks you're an idiot.
/The iPod is not a music accessory, it's a fashion accessory.
Yet I have to fork over my tax money so the police can protect it?
You fork over tax money so that the 'police' can protect it, and whatever copyrights you may hold. You say you don't produce copyrighted material, so why should you pay? Because that's how society works. I'm sure someone, somewhere is paying taxes for something that they don't use, but you do.
And of course copyright holders have the right to get a cut out of my backup media...
Look, I don't support the RIAA, MPAA, or any organization like them. I agree that they've abused their powers to contort copyright law into a gigantic mess that seems to only line their pockets. However, I do support the individual copyright holders out there who just wanted their work to be recognized, attributed to them, and distributed according to their rules. I don't shed a tear for the latest pop-tastic boy/girl band, or the underwhelmingly mediocre rock band who owe their whole careers to the strongarm tactics of the RIAA, but I still think that their... output, for lack of a better word, should be protected under copyright as well. I won't buy their music, but I won't pirate it, either.
I don't know why I'm even bothering to reply to this; you seem outwardly hostile as though by stating my *personal* view on the matter, I'm trying to collapse society and promote ignorance.
My "efforts to disinform the public"?! Whenever I state a personal opinion, I make damned sure to label it as such, which is why that statement begins with "I still believe..." You need to chill out. Frankly, I don't give two shits about changing what anyone on this board personally believes, I just enjoy the exchange of views sometimes, although posts like yours make me wonder why I still come here to do that.
I'm not saying, "lets change the laws to reflect my belief"; I wholly understand that there are different laws to deal with copyright infringement and with theft, simply because they are TWO DIFFERENT ACTS. BUT, even on a purely semantic level, you could say that you are taking the RIGHT to COPY from the copyright holder and assigning it to yourself, to copy it as you see fit. You can argue ad infinitum that nothing is being taken, so it's not theft, and fine, maybe you don't see it that way. My point isn't to legally treat copyright infringement as theft, but to explain why I see them as closely related.
It's also unfortunate that I can't close my tags, or remember to paste quote snippets in my posts. Sorry.
If the terms of the sale explicitly prohibit resale, then yes, you are guilty of copyright infringement. Otherwise, no, you can do anything implicit in the terms of sale, and it will be the copyright holder's fault for not properly protecting his/her work. My whole argument in this thread is that you should respect the terms of the rights-owner, or simply not utilize their content, plain and simple. I'm not saying I agree with their terms all the time, but I don't say "fuck you" and take what I want to anyway.
This is an inaccurate sentiment. It's not the middlemen who are at fault for not "waking up", it is the artists/content creators. If I can't figure out how to utilize digital publishing for distribution and/or profit, while retaining my rights to my work, well, it's unfortunate, but it's my own shortcoming.
I have no argument against this. But still, the content creators are not without choice. Release your stuff under Creative Commons, or a F/OSS license, or whatever applicable license, or make up your own terms. US copyright laws only apply to works that have chosen to use US Copyright protection. As an end-user, make a choice to use only those content providers whose terms you agree with. To paraphrase what bigmammoth said in a reply further down, we don't have to play by their rules or cheat, we can just create our own game.
I can appreciate your attempts at passive subversion, but I would highly recommend against using that particular phrase, or anything threatening to the president. It doesn't matter if it's said in jest, if you are heard making a threat to the president, you will be guilty of a felony.
On an unrelated note, I wonder if this is exclusive to the president, or White House officials, or what?
This is one of those gray areas where I think it's hard to draw a line. What about the language they used? They merely arranged a bunch of preconceived words to create their book, right? I know it seems like an absurd argument, but where can you draw the line? The old memory techniques they cite would not have been possible if someone hadn't defined the concept of memory before them, so where does it stop?
Same with programming, music, or anything else. You are merely rearranging predefined elements to create something new as a whole. So while the memory techniques they discuss aren't original, the arrangment is, and I guess it should be subject to their copyright.
The difference is that this is a separate transaction. The bookstore has already purchased the book from the publisher, who published the rights from the author. If they choose to let you read the whole book and leave without paying, that's their decision and perhaps a failure of their business model. If you download a copy, no one in the chain has received compensation, and no one enabled you to do that.
Look, I've said this before, too, but I think it bears repeating: you do not have a right to commercial entertainment. It is a service/product whose terms are defined by the publisher/producer. If you do not agree to these terms, then don't utilize the product. This is one concept that I think translates directly from the physical world to digital.
1. Your first point is fair enough, I suppose. Although I simply meant that the value of what they're selling is in the content, not the access medium.
2a. Oh no, you've attacked my level of discourse! You've ignored the rest of the post (which is at least fairly coherent) and picked on the one whimsical statement of opinion I made. Awesome.
2b. There are many legal venues for sampling an album or a movie to see whether it's to your liking before purchase. Perhaps you use pira-- er, copyright infringement-- as a meter by which to guage your interest in a product before purchasing it, but a substantial portion of 'pirates' simply horde as much content as they can, sift through it as their convenience, keep what they want, and enjoy it without any desire to recompense the producer.
3. My contrived analogy had nothing to do with Gibson's theories. As the paragraph below it clarified (a little), it's to show that we can't always define something in the digital world as we do in the physical world. To say you duplicated content and didn't physically steal anything is like saying you rearranged bits, and didn't physically destroy anything. Both are true, but neither quite fit the physical world definitions, either.
4. I wasn't making a legal case. I still believe that it is theft; the producer creates content to entertain you at a set cost, and you acquire the entertainment without paying the cost. Theft of services, piracy, copyright infringement, whatever you want to call it. The concept is pretty much the same.
This argument drives me nuts. They're not selling you the paper on which the book was printed. They are selling you the entertainment/knowledge/whatever you derive from the content of the book. The lost sales argument aside, this is the problem I have with any music/movie pirates who justify it the way you did. "Well, I wouldn't buy that shit anyway, and I just made a copy, I didn't physically deprive them of anything." Well, 1) How pathetic must you be to waste your time downloading shit you don't value? Either that or you're lying, and enjoy getting something for free. And 2) If you delete a bunch of vital information on a company's server, would you use the defense that "I didn't physically destroy anything, I just realigned some bits on a hard drive"?
Of course not, because the typical /. demographic understands that you can't apply laws and governance of the physical world to the virtual, technology world. So perhaps it is not THEFT in the traditional sense, but it is THEFT in the "I'm taking something that I'm not authorized to take" sense.
I post similar comments everytime I see this issue raised, and most people must think I'm a shill or something. I'm not; I personally believe in free (speech and beer) information, and public disbursement of my creative efforts. As a multi-medium content creator, however, I recognize that not everyone believes the same things I do, and it's more important to respect that than to push my own beliefs.
Most people don't seem to pick up the subtleties of the film, and usually either remark on the how people are forced to turn to physical violence to feel alive in our modern, soulless society, or how the movie advocates anarchy and living free.
This is my #3 favorite movie of all time, but for a while, I focused on the anarchy aspect of it. Eventually I realized that if you really pay attention, there's a whole other layer. All the propaganda that Tyler spouts about liberating people, allowing them to live their own lives, escaping from the air-conditioned nightmare... it's all contradicted throughout the rest of the movie.
The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The whole "his name is Robert Paulson" chanting-thing. "Why was Tyler Durden building an army? In Tyler we trusted". The recurring theme of blind faith in Tyler's master plan seems to imply that it's really a changing of the shepard, rather than freeing the flock. One "mentally-ill" man discontent with his life starts a cult and resculpts the world to his liking.
I think it's a brilliant movie, masterfully done. I lean towards Tyler's personal philosophy anyway, so perhaps I'm a bit biased, but that's my interpretation of the whole movie.
In my opinion, the only ones who are exempt from this description are the ones standing outside capitol hill protesting, or otherwise actively trying to right the wrongs of their elected officials. So no, shaking your head and saying, "I don't agree with this administration" does not admonish you of guilt.
Of course, that makes me a guilty, drooling moron as well, but I don't try to misrepresent myself otherwise.
That was a very coherent post with many good points.
However you mistyped "continuum" so, in standard Slashdot form, I will call you a fuckwad and claim your whole argument is bullshit.
Actually no. But, you say that "evolution is at the base merely a means for a common (breeding) genepool to maintain itself through time". I'm not quite sure I understand this statement. With every evolutionary step forward (mutation or adaptation), isn't the common genepool becoming less and less common, until it ultimately dissolves into one or many other distinct genepools? Also, that statement seems to claim that there is something intrinsically shaping the direction of evolution, or at least an intrinsic goal towards which every organism strives (the goal of maintaining its genepool, or proliferating, or whatever you consider evolution); some succeed, some fail.
But really, how would you define that goal? Without trying to further polarize the issue, it seems like it's really a choice between complete and utter randomness, or some form of "intelligent intervention". To say that every living organism ultimately strives towards one goal is to say that there is at least one universal truth, which implies a boundary, and thus absolute chaos cannot exist. Conversely, to say that every moment in 'time' is random, and that no event occurs with the goal of a future event (procreation, etc.), suggests that evolution, as humans have defined it, is only an arbitrary pattern carved out of chaos. So perhaps evolution falls more into place with intelligent design than with chaos...
This is me just shooting from the hip. Please feel free to refute any pseudo-philosophical premise that I've constructed, or just to simply call me a fuckwad.
Do you mind if I .sig that? I couldn't stop chuckling when I read it.
They wouldn't even give that away. The main appeal of Windows isn't really the OS itself, but it's application base is so huge. If Microsoft made the Win32 runtimes available, you could just build another OS that is compatible with their binaries. Which is actually what ReactOS is trying to do. So I sincerely doubt that Microsoft will ever release the source to their legacy products.
The poster clearly says he/she took it up to 3200+ speeds, meaning whatever frequency equivalent there is for that model.
I think it's kind of funny that the SDI program wanted satellite-based lasers to defend against terrestrial threats, and now they want terrestrial-based lasers to defend against satellitical (I think I just precedented a word...) threats.
I know people say this all the time, but this may honestly be my favorite post on Slashdot ever.
I'm not sure if it's because this one statement is so acerbically accurate, or if it's the mental image of people jumping up their own butts.
Yeah, I agree. Competence is competence no matter what country you're in. But you take that risk whether you use a U.S. consulting firm, an Indian outsourcing farm, or hire someone in-house to complete the project. At least with the outsourcing farm, you're saving some money.
Well, that's what marketing is for. It's not an implant, it's a "security augmentation". The next generation of children, along with immunizations, will be required to undergo a minor, non-invasive procedure to help prevent against abductions and other unpleasantries. Tyranny and oppression are most effective under the guise of convenience.
By 2012, every Florida-legal vehicle will be required to have an RFID-type chip in them. Government officials say it's to help monitor traffic, and will not be used for speeding citations, but the smart money is on the fact that within two or three years, they will be using this for law enforcement as well.
Granted, a chip in your vehicle and a chip in your muscle tissue are very different things. But every such anecdote makes it easier and easier to believe that people will not put up much resistance to this kind of stuff. I do, however, and will continue to until my trip to the Re-Education Center. (Yes, I know 1984 references are quaint, but damn if they're not getting more and more pertinent.)
Disclaimer: the above information was relayed to me by a civil engineer who is currently designing and implementing "traffic monitoring" along most major Central Florida highways. If you like, I can try to find another source, or failing that, admit that I may be talking out of my anus.
either my joke detector isn't working, or yours isn't... :)
I definitely don't support outsourcing, but I think it's a little misunderstood, too.
Based on what I've heard from several people working in large companies, outsourcing isn't always just about the money. They've said that, all costs considered, it really doesn't save that much money. But the work ethic in certain countries is far better than what they've experienced here. Deadlines are met, micro-management isn't required, and the workers are willing to put in that proverbial 110% if needed. Now, they concede that in the long-run, it's probably not sustainable, and will cause problems when the project is handed off, but for projects that just need to get done now, it's the way to go. So perhaps it's not just price, but the price/performance ratio that keeps companies from hiring domestic...
I'm 20, and have been doing high-level IT consulting for a few years now. I dropped out of college while pursuing my CS degree (for personal reasons). I'd be lying to say that the reason I stick to IT rather than finish my degree is because of outsourcing, but the media and public at least make it seem like the market is evaporating. I think there will always be demand for CS majors domestically, but you better make damned sure you're not like all the paper MCSE's, and that you really know/are passionate about what you're doing.