The last time I checked, the US government still pays people NOT to grow food because we have more than we need. When farm subsidies disappear, then I'll start worrying about urban sprawl affecting crop production.
The problem of world hunger cannot simply be solved by producing more food. You have to get that food to whoever needs it, before it spoils, and in a way that is cost effective. That's a much more difficult problem than just growing more corn.
I'm a Java developer with no artistic talent whatsoever. I tried to draw something once....the result caused dizziness, blindness, and violent nausea in all who saw it. It was eventually banned by the FDA and shot into space. Whenever I'm forced to make choices about color, font, and layout in web pages I inevitably choose a combination that looks like an elephant came along and crapped on a computer screen.
What sources are out there for people like me? Technical people who need a little help making artistic choices. I'm not expecting a website to turn me into Rembrant or anything, but just a few simple rules and some examples that demonstrate those rules would go a long way.
Some estimates indicate that 15K US households (probably about 75K people, or.001%) own 5% of the Earth's property.
There will always be rich people, my friend. It's a fundemental feature of human social structure. Someone has to decide what times the train run (Rich People) and someone has to run them (Poor People).
500 years ago, there were maybe a couple dozen people who owned a good 80% of the earth's property...they're called Monarchs. The real difference between then and now is not that the rich people have slightly less, it's that we've invented a whole new class of people: The Middle Class.
And the middle class is hurt the most by high income taxes (at any level). I don't know if you've noticed it or not, but rich people already have money. More accurately, they already have assets (stock, real estate, bonds, annunities, etc...). People who think that high income taxes put the tax burden on the rich are fooling themselves. If you really wanted to put the tax burden on the rich, you'd have a wealth tax, but putting the tax burden on the rich isn't what the income tax is all about.
The purpose of a progressive income tax is to prevent the middle class from becoming rich. Since middle class people are almost entirely dependent on thier income, taxing it ensures that they will never have enough disposable cash to start a business, invest in a new private business, or do anything else that might lead to financial independence. This is why a progressive income tax is a key plank in the communist manifesto. It's designed to crush the ability of the middle class to raise enough capital to become financially independent.
I will probably get modded down as a troll here but no one who supports tax cuts really understand that service cuts must follow.
Oh my god! I didn't realize that! I thought that the federal government is a magical money creator that can solve all of my problems!
If you care about Hubble then vote for someone who will raise your taxes. One or the other.
Did you ever stop to think that the reason so many Americans want tax cuts is because they think the government is spending too damn much of our money? And it is our money. Make no mistake about it, a tax cut is not a generous donation from the government back to the people, it's a re-assertion of the rights of the American taxpayer to decide how thier money is spent.
Service cuts should follow. The federal government provides way too many services that would be more efficently done at the state and local level (or not at all). A senator in Washington is always going to be more out of touch with the problems of my local city than the people who live here. Why should I send him my money to solve my problems when he only sends back 80 cents on the dollar?
Running a deficit is one of the few ways you can get legislators to agree to desperately needed service cuts. It gives politicans a good explanation as to why you have to cut the budget for some political group's pet project ("Look, we just don't have the money").
I want service cuts (even in NASA). I want to federal government to do less because what it does now it does pretty poorly. And if I have to pay a little interest on the debt in the meantime, that's fine with me.
Java 2 Micro Edition (or J2ME) is supported on a ton of devices and comes on pretty much any new mobile phone you can buy today.
Most of the wireless providers also have developer programs and will help distribute your J2ME game as well as handling billing and some customer support (for a small %).
I made a blackjack MIDlet for J2ME, and it was pretty easy to use. There's a ton of documentation and free tools out there and I never ran into a problem that I couldn't find the answer to. Of course, it's Java, so if you don't like Java you won't like J2ME, but I liked it.
demanding the mind athletes be treated with the same respect as physical athletes.
Mind athletes?? The last time I checked, an Athlete is someone who required good physical attributes in order to be sucessful. The term "Mind Athlete" makes no sense whatsoever.
Lets call these people what they are...gamers. Being a gamer is nothing to be ashamed of, and I would love to see more professional gaming, and more pro gamers. This goes for both the electronic and "pencil and paper" variety.
But come on people, is Gary Kasparov a "Mind Athelete"? Maybe gatorade can come out with a new marketing campaign:
"When you're trying to decide between bishop to R3 or a queen gambit, your body depletes essential minerals and nutrients..."
If strong typing is really important, I can create my own strongly-typed collection.
Sure you can. You can also write the Java bytecode by hand, in hexadecimal, using only your pinky fingers to type.
The point of generics is to reduce (significantly) the amount of time it takes to create strongly typed collections. In addition, it makes those collections more reusable. For example, if I make a strongly typed Iterator, either I have to make an Iterator that doesn't inherit from the java.util.Iterator interface (meaning that it won't be compatable with classes that already use that interface), or I have to create a subclass that has two sets of methods (one strongly and one weakly typed) for every operation. Neither of those options are ideal. Generics provide a 3rd option that is much more elegant and safe.
Taxes are budgeted. You don't tax people and then figure out how you're going to spend the money...you raise taxes to fulfil a specific need. So unless the EU 2004 operating budget included a line item for penalties paid from suing Microsoft, they were not expecting to get this money.
Which is why it's so important to figure out where it's going. Where it should go is into the pockets of individuals and corporations that were damaged by Microsoft's behavior. Where it will probably go is into some politican's pet pork barrel project.
What the article is saying, is that adding primitives to a collection is slower than adding objects (due to boxing - automatic or otherwise).
Yes, but the title of this article is "Generics in C#, Java, and C++". My question is, what the hell does autoboxing in Java have to do with generics? With generics, only objects can be put into collections. Without generics, only objects can be put into collections. Nothing's changed!
Of course, I think the real point of this article is to use the topic of Generics as an excuse to empahsise the fact that Java collections can't hold primitive types. Considering the other objective advice that's come out of Mircosoft, I can't say I'm suprised.
What I want to know is, if they do get fined $3.2 billion, who gets it? I suppose the lawyers will get thier cut before anyone else, but what are they going to do with the $2 or $3 million left after that?
Specifically that Java's genericised collections will have to box all primitive types as full objects, whereas C# does not. This is a big performance plus for C#.
The Java collections operate this way right now (in JDK 1.4) and AFAIK have operated this way since the beginning. You can't add a primitive type to a collection, genericised or not, it has to be a first class Object. In terms of performance, whether or not the conversion is done explicitly or automatically shouldn't matter. If anything, the automatic conversion with autoboxing should be faster because it can be optimized "under the covers" in the compiler or the JVM.
I don't see how this performance issue is related to generics in C# vs Java.
That's one thing this is NOT about: free trade. Free trade is when an unemployed American computer scientist can go to India to get a job. Guess what? It's impossible for Americans to get work visas in India.
Guess what? Life's not fair. And Free Trade isn't fair either. No, you can't go over to India to get your job back. Somehow I doubt that you would if you could, but it doesn't matter anyway because you can't. Because that not what free trade is about, and that's why free trade is a good thing.
People are different. Countries are different. Cultures are different. It's foolish to expect them to all operate in the same way. Americans, as a society, have decided that we want a particular standard of living, a particular level of workplace safety, and lots of other things that make us very different that the people who live over in India. And so, because of the choices we've made here, and the choices they've made there, they can do a job for 1/10th the cost of us.
And that's what you get when you allow people to choose: Inequality. When people are free to make choices about how they want to live thier lives, different people will inevitably make different choices, and create differences that create some advantages and some disadvantages.
Trying to create a system (especially an economic system) in which people are equal will always lead to a system in which people are not free. And I'll take a free system over an equal system any day.
I see resumes all the time where you can tell that the writer either does not speak English very well, or suffered a serious head injury at some point. Every time I read one of these resumes, I'm reminded of Lewis Black's bit about the cop in Miami who asked him "How you money make?"
"Good Communication Skills" may be a cliche thing to put on a resume, but if you can't communicate well, in the native tounge of whatever company you want to work for, you are going to be at a major disadvantage. Especially, developers, who tend to think they can just sit in thier cube all day and not talk to anyone, need to wake up. Any job that does not require you to communicate with anyone else at your company can easily be outsourced to another country. Think about it.
Resumes (unlike slashdot posts) should be poured over again and again to make sure everything is perfect. If you don't know what "perfect" is, you need to find out. If you can't do that, why should anyone hire you?
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
To me, it looks like what happened here is that the Dems didn't configure thier system correctly, and accidently gave the Rebublicans access to thier confidential files.
Of course, the right thing to do would have been for the Republicans to let them know that thier system was wide open, but then again, we all know what happens when you try to do the right thing and inform admins of thier security problems.
Just like Milton in "Office Space" you were probably given shittier and shittier tasks in the worst possible work environment. The goal of this practice is to:
a) Make you quit b) Make it hard for you to do your job well, so they have grounds to fire you if you don't quit. c) Limit your involvement in core business tasks, so when you quit, nobody will notice or care.
De-Hiring is a very common practice among managers who don't have the balls/authority/legal staff to actually fire somebody. It looks like it's claimed another victim. All the more reason why, if you don't like your job....look for another! It's easier to move from a bad job to a better one than it is to find a job when you've just been fired (or De-Hired).
While this may be true for your run of the mill games, Massively Multiplayer games that require a subscription fee are a different animal. I have a hard time justifying to myself why I should pay $50 for a game that I have to pay $12.99 a month to use.
Thankfully, a number of companies have realized this. For example, you can download the demo for "Earth and Beyond" from EA, and play the full game for free for 14 days. Then, if you like it, you can buy a new CD key for $14.99 that will upgrade your demo to the full version (and cover your first month's subscription). No, you don't get a box, or a manual, or a physical CD, but you also don't get to pay $50 for a game that you don't really own in the first place.
As if there were ever doubt any longer that America were a police state...
You don't really have any concept of what a police state is, do you?
These people had a warrant. Issued by a (mostly) impartial judge. They were investigating an actual crime of serious magnitude commited against a company that I, for one, am very grateful for making.
In a real police state (Nazi Germany, Stalist Russia, etc...), the FBI would not have rung your doorbell at 6:30am. They would not have had a warrant, and they most certianly would not have been civilized while they hauled only some your stuff out the door. They would have kicked down your door at 3am, killed your family, and set your house on fire. All because you belived in the wrong religion, or were the member of the wrong political party.
FBI raids are not pretty, but like it or not, this is how a fair and just legal system works. When you have to balance the rights of victims and the rights of the accused, nobody comes out happy. I don't know if this guy is guilty or innocent, but he should keep his mouth shut, call a lawyer, and take advantage of every other right that he has. And he can do that because he doesn't live in a police state, he lives in a free country. That's why he's laughing about this whole thing instead of next in line to get his hand chopped off at the local prison.
I have two 21" Sony Trinitron monitors that are at least 10 years old. They're set up in a dual screen configuration, and I will never, ever, get rid of them. I've gotten too used to having all this desktop space that I'm not sure I can go back to something smaller, and it's going to be a long time before you can get good quality 21" LCD's at a price cheap enough for my employer to want to buy them for me.
The SAGE/SANS/BigAdmin survey done for 2002 says that 15.3% of thier respondants were unemployed for at least a week during the year (I don't have a link offhand, but Google might). They won't post the 2003 survey until March, but I would be suprised if 2003 was worse than 2002.
I've gotten calls from two recuiters looking for people in the last week. I think I got a grand total of 0 calls in 2002, and maybe a couple in 2003. I think people are realizing that not everything can be moved offshore and that programmers with domain/business experience are actually worth what you pay them here in the states. Dell, for example, is moving some of thier IT facilities back to the US after outsourcing it to India.
I hate to jinx it, but I think the worst is over. It may not be 1999 again anytime soon, but the storm clouds are clearing.
"The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S." was said by Scott Kirwin, founder of the Information Technology Professionals Association of America. And I think he was trying to be sarcastic.
That right there is exactly the problem. American public schools are broke. The federal government could give them more money; but they value tanks more highly than literacy, and don't want to deprive the wealthy of even a single ounce of caviar by taxing them.
Why exactly is it the Federal Government's job to fund local institutions like public schools? Does the federal government pay the salary of your local police and fire departments? Of course not...why should they? Do you really want your local cops under the control of John Ashcroft?!
Not every school is America is broke. Many have problems that are more policy oriented than fiscal. It's the job of local governments to decide how much they want to tax thier constituents in order to support public schools. Shifting the burden to the federal government is just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
There is not one magical funding fix that can be applied to every school in the U.S. in order to make things better. Real solutions have to be implemented on a case by case basis, which means they have to be done locally. Just saying "Make the Feds pay for it!" isn't going to solve anything.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I checked, the US government still pays people NOT to grow food because we have more than we need. When farm subsidies disappear, then I'll start worrying about urban sprawl affecting crop production.
The problem of world hunger cannot simply be solved by producing more food. You have to get that food to whoever needs it, before it spoils, and in a way that is cost effective. That's a much more difficult problem than just growing more corn.
I had never heard of this feat. I asked around (friends and coworkers) and nobody else I've talked to has heard of them either.
That's because in Soviet Russia, moon rovers learn about YOU!
Sorry...couldn't resist.
Maybe The Non-Designer's Design Book
Wow, this book looks perfect! Thanks. The author even lays out the four basic principles of good design:
Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity
That should fit right in with my design skills.
P.S. I'm not even kidding....
I'm a Java developer with no artistic talent whatsoever. I tried to draw something once....the result caused dizziness, blindness, and violent nausea in all who saw it. It was eventually banned by the FDA and shot into space. Whenever I'm forced to make choices about color, font, and layout in web pages I inevitably choose a combination that looks like an elephant came along and crapped on a computer screen.
What sources are out there for people like me? Technical people who need a little help making artistic choices. I'm not expecting a website to turn me into Rembrant or anything, but just a few simple rules and some examples that demonstrate those rules would go a long way.
Some estimates indicate that 15K US households (probably about 75K people, or .001%) own 5% of the Earth's property.
There will always be rich people, my friend. It's a fundemental feature of human social structure. Someone has to decide what times the train run (Rich People) and someone has to run them (Poor People).
500 years ago, there were maybe a couple dozen people who owned a good 80% of the earth's property...they're called Monarchs. The real difference between then and now is not that the rich people have slightly less, it's that we've invented a whole new class of people: The Middle Class.
And the middle class is hurt the most by high income taxes (at any level). I don't know if you've noticed it or not, but rich people already have money. More accurately, they already have assets (stock, real estate, bonds, annunities, etc...). People who think that high income taxes put the tax burden on the rich are fooling themselves. If you really wanted to put the tax burden on the rich, you'd have a wealth tax, but putting the tax burden on the rich isn't what the income tax is all about.
The purpose of a progressive income tax is to prevent the middle class from becoming rich. Since middle class people are almost entirely dependent on thier income, taxing it ensures that they will never have enough disposable cash to start a business, invest in a new private business, or do anything else that might lead to financial independence. This is why a progressive income tax is a key plank in the communist manifesto. It's designed to crush the ability of the middle class to raise enough capital to become financially independent.
I will probably get modded down as a troll here but no one who supports tax cuts really understand that service cuts must follow.
Oh my god! I didn't realize that! I thought that the federal government is a magical money creator that can solve all of my problems!
If you care about Hubble then vote for someone who will raise your taxes. One or the other.
Did you ever stop to think that the reason so many Americans want tax cuts is because they think the government is spending too damn much of our money? And it is our money. Make no mistake about it, a tax cut is not a generous donation from the government back to the people, it's a re-assertion of the rights of the American taxpayer to decide how thier money is spent.
Service cuts should follow. The federal government provides way too many services that would be more efficently done at the state and local level (or not at all). A senator in Washington is always going to be more out of touch with the problems of my local city than the people who live here. Why should I send him my money to solve my problems when he only sends back 80 cents on the dollar?
Running a deficit is one of the few ways you can get legislators to agree to desperately needed service cuts. It gives politicans a good explanation as to why you have to cut the budget for some political group's pet project ("Look, we just don't have the money").
I want service cuts (even in NASA). I want to federal government to do less because what it does now it does pretty poorly. And if I have to pay a little interest on the debt in the meantime, that's fine with me.
Java 2 Micro Edition (or J2ME) is supported on a ton of devices and comes on pretty much any new mobile phone you can buy today.
Most of the wireless providers also have developer programs and will help distribute your J2ME game as well as handling billing and some customer support (for a small %).
I made a blackjack MIDlet for J2ME, and it was pretty easy to use. There's a ton of documentation and free tools out there and I never ran into a problem that I couldn't find the answer to. Of course, it's Java, so if you don't like Java you won't like J2ME, but I liked it.
demanding the mind athletes be treated with the same respect as physical athletes.
Mind athletes?? The last time I checked, an Athlete is someone who required good physical attributes in order to be sucessful. The term "Mind Athlete" makes no sense whatsoever.
Lets call these people what they are...gamers. Being a gamer is nothing to be ashamed of, and I would love to see more professional gaming, and more pro gamers. This goes for both the electronic and "pencil and paper" variety.
But come on people, is Gary Kasparov a "Mind Athelete"? Maybe gatorade can come out with a new marketing campaign:
"When you're trying to decide between bishop to R3 or a queen gambit, your body depletes essential minerals and nutrients..."
If strong typing is really important, I can create my own strongly-typed collection.
Sure you can. You can also write the Java bytecode by hand, in hexadecimal, using only your pinky fingers to type.
The point of generics is to reduce (significantly) the amount of time it takes to create strongly typed collections. In addition, it makes those collections more reusable. For example, if I make a strongly typed Iterator, either I have to make an Iterator that doesn't inherit from the java.util.Iterator interface (meaning that it won't be compatable with classes that already use that interface), or I have to create a subclass that has two sets of methods (one strongly and one weakly typed) for every operation. Neither of those options are ideal. Generics provide a 3rd option that is much more elegant and safe.
Taxes are budgeted. You don't tax people and then figure out how you're going to spend the money...you raise taxes to fulfil a specific need. So unless the EU 2004 operating budget included a line item for penalties paid from suing Microsoft, they were not expecting to get this money.
Which is why it's so important to figure out where it's going. Where it should go is into the pockets of individuals and corporations that were damaged by Microsoft's behavior. Where it will probably go is into some politican's pet pork barrel project.
What the article is saying, is that adding primitives to a collection is slower than adding objects (due to boxing - automatic or otherwise).
Yes, but the title of this article is "Generics in C#, Java, and C++". My question is, what the hell does autoboxing in Java have to do with generics? With generics, only objects can be put into collections. Without generics, only objects can be put into collections. Nothing's changed!
Of course, I think the real point of this article is to use the topic of Generics as an excuse to empahsise the fact that Java collections can't hold primitive types. Considering the other objective advice that's come out of Mircosoft, I can't say I'm suprised.
What I want to know is, if they do get fined $3.2 billion, who gets it? I suppose the lawyers will get thier cut before anyone else, but what are they going to do with the $2 or $3 million left after that?
Specifically that Java's genericised collections will have to box all primitive types as full objects, whereas C# does not. This is a big performance plus for C#.
The Java collections operate this way right now (in JDK 1.4) and AFAIK have operated this way since the beginning. You can't add a primitive type to a collection, genericised or not, it has to be a first class Object. In terms of performance, whether or not the conversion is done explicitly or automatically shouldn't matter. If anything, the automatic conversion with autoboxing should be faster because it can be optimized "under the covers" in the compiler or the JVM.
I don't see how this performance issue is related to generics in C# vs Java.
That's one thing this is NOT about: free trade. Free trade is when an unemployed American computer scientist can go to India to get a job. Guess what? It's impossible for Americans to get work visas in India.
Guess what? Life's not fair. And Free Trade isn't fair either. No, you can't go over to India to get your job back. Somehow I doubt that you would if you could, but it doesn't matter anyway because you can't. Because that not what free trade is about, and that's why free trade is a good thing.
People are different. Countries are different. Cultures are different. It's foolish to expect them to all operate in the same way. Americans, as a society, have decided that we want a particular standard of living, a particular level of workplace safety, and lots of other things that make us very different that the people who live over in India. And so, because of the choices we've made here, and the choices they've made there, they can do a job for 1/10th the cost of us.
And that's what you get when you allow people to choose: Inequality. When people are free to make choices about how they want to live thier lives, different people will inevitably make different choices, and create differences that create some advantages and some disadvantages.
Trying to create a system (especially an economic system) in which people are equal will always lead to a system in which people are not free. And I'll take a free system over an equal system any day.
I see resumes all the time where you can tell that the writer either does not speak English very well, or suffered a serious head injury at some point. Every time I read one of these resumes, I'm reminded of Lewis Black's bit about the cop in Miami who asked him "How you money make?"
"Good Communication Skills" may be a cliche thing to put on a resume, but if you can't communicate well, in the native tounge of whatever company you want to work for, you are going to be at a major disadvantage. Especially, developers, who tend to think they can just sit in thier cube all day and not talk to anyone, need to wake up. Any job that does not require you to communicate with anyone else at your company can easily be outsourced to another country. Think about it.
Resumes (unlike slashdot posts) should be poured over again and again to make sure everything is perfect. If you don't know what "perfect" is, you need to find out. If you can't do that, why should anyone hire you?
From the article:
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
To me, it looks like what happened here is that the Dems didn't configure thier system correctly, and accidently gave the Rebublicans access to thier confidential files.
Of course, the right thing to do would have been for the Republicans to let them know that thier system was wide open, but then again, we all know what happens when you try to do the right thing and inform admins of thier security problems.
You, my friend, were De-Hired.
Just like Milton in "Office Space" you were probably given shittier and shittier tasks in the worst possible work environment. The goal of this practice is to:
a) Make you quit
b) Make it hard for you to do your job well, so they have grounds to fire you if you don't quit.
c) Limit your involvement in core business tasks, so when you quit, nobody will notice or care.
De-Hiring is a very common practice among managers who don't have the balls/authority/legal staff to actually fire somebody. It looks like it's claimed another victim. All the more reason why, if you don't like your job....look for another! It's easier to move from a bad job to a better one than it is to find a job when you've just been fired (or De-Hired).
While this may be true for your run of the mill games, Massively Multiplayer games that require a subscription fee are a different animal. I have a hard time justifying to myself why I should pay $50 for a game that I have to pay $12.99 a month to use.
Thankfully, a number of companies have realized this. For example, you can download the demo for "Earth and Beyond" from EA, and play the full game for free for 14 days. Then, if you like it, you can buy a new CD key for $14.99 that will upgrade your demo to the full version (and cover your first month's subscription). No, you don't get a box, or a manual, or a physical CD, but you also don't get to pay $50 for a game that you don't really own in the first place.
As if there were ever doubt any longer that America were a police state ...
You don't really have any concept of what a police state is, do you?
These people had a warrant. Issued by a (mostly) impartial judge. They were investigating an actual crime of serious magnitude commited against a company that I, for one, am very grateful for making.
In a real police state (Nazi Germany, Stalist Russia, etc...), the FBI would not have rung your doorbell at 6:30am. They would not have had a warrant, and they most certianly would not have been civilized while they hauled only some your stuff out the door. They would have kicked down your door at 3am, killed your family, and set your house on fire. All because you belived in the wrong religion, or were the member of the wrong political party.
FBI raids are not pretty, but like it or not, this is how a fair and just legal system works. When you have to balance the rights of victims and the rights of the accused, nobody comes out happy. I don't know if this guy is guilty or innocent, but he should keep his mouth shut, call a lawyer, and take advantage of every other right that he has. And he can do that because he doesn't live in a police state, he lives in a free country. That's why he's laughing about this whole thing instead of next in line to get his hand chopped off at the local prison.
I have two 21" Sony Trinitron monitors that are at least 10 years old. They're set up in a dual screen configuration, and I will never, ever, get rid of them. I've gotten too used to having all this desktop space that I'm not sure I can go back to something smaller, and it's going to be a long time before you can get good quality 21" LCD's at a price cheap enough for my employer to want to buy them for me.
The SAGE/SANS/BigAdmin survey done for 2002 says that 15.3% of thier respondants were unemployed for at least a week during the year (I don't have a link offhand, but Google might). They won't post the 2003 survey until March, but I would be suprised if 2003 was worse than 2002.
I've gotten calls from two recuiters looking for people in the last week. I think I got a grand total of 0 calls in 2002, and maybe a couple in 2003. I think people are realizing that not everything can be moved offshore and that programmers with domain/business experience are actually worth what you pay them here in the states. Dell, for example, is moving some of thier IT facilities back to the US after outsourcing it to India.
I hate to jinx it, but I think the worst is over. It may not be 1999 again anytime soon, but the storm clouds are clearing.
And God sayeth unto the people:
"You know, I have one simple request - and that is, to have monks with frikkin' laser beams attached to their heads!"
Amen.
You've mis-quoted Carly...
"The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S." was said by Scott Kirwin, founder of the Information Technology Professionals Association of America. And I think he was trying to be sarcastic.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic canine...ah fuck it. This isn't fun anymore.
That right there is exactly the problem. American public schools are broke. The federal government could give them more money; but they value tanks more highly than literacy, and don't want to deprive the wealthy of even a single ounce of caviar by taxing them.
Why exactly is it the Federal Government's job to fund local institutions like public schools? Does the federal government pay the salary of your local police and fire departments? Of course not...why should they? Do you really want your local cops under the control of John Ashcroft?!
Not every school is America is broke. Many have problems that are more policy oriented than fiscal. It's the job of local governments to decide how much they want to tax thier constituents in order to support public schools. Shifting the burden to the federal government is just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
There is not one magical funding fix that can be applied to every school in the U.S. in order to make things better. Real solutions have to be implemented on a case by case basis, which means they have to be done locally. Just saying "Make the Feds pay for it!" isn't going to solve anything.