I agree, you have some point - especially that the 50/50 split is not guaranteed to be the equilibrium point. And, I have to concede there could be some selection in favor of more women in these fields (you don;'t specify what you are thinking of). I seriously doubt that that factor should have been enough to skew the results this badly, though in absence of further evidence one way or the other, I can only say, I don't buy it, but you will have to decide for yourself.
Check out this NSF report for some interesting data: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf04311/
SOMETHING is going on - and I would be willing to bet most of it is NOT due to biology. The percentage of women in basically all science and technical fields has increased since 1966. Engineering is a great example; in 1966 less than 1% of engineering bachelor's were awarded to women; in 2001 it was over 20% and growing. Biology didn't change that much in 25 years.... Now, obviously it is possible there are biological factors which could affect, but I daresay it looks like it will turn out to be much more even than a lot of people seem to think. (BTW, I am also sure they said the same thing about biology once - and today there are MORE women studying biology at the undergrad level than men. Though the numbers were better in 1966 fror biology than they were for engineering in 2001, admittedly.)
Maybe you ARE right, but historically the trend has been to argue women just don't WANT to work in certain fields - only to find out that is wrong. Thus my skepticism.
Now, rant aside, it is interesting that in 1966 33% of math and CS bachelor's went to women. Today that number is actually lower... What that means, I don't know, but given that in all other science fields the number of women went up, I doubt it is their technical ability. (BTW, math is, if I recall correctly from other studies, relatively even, so most of the gap comes from CS.)
Indeed, as most Ameeican libraries (at least in any moderately large town/city) are like that as well, I think that is his point: Gorman is not representative of librarians as a whole.
You would probably be correct in diagnosing the NPR as somewhat left-leaning. And assuming your reserach is correct (the obvious limitations of the methdology aside), they seem to display that perspective in style as well as substance.
Interestingy, though, that bias need not automatically lower the quality of the news. For that matter, it may raise it...
I say this because the grand-parent had an interesting point - which is that many sources believed to be liberal by those sufficiently conservative enough are actually fairly moderate (at worst) AND that that can have an impact on the quality of the stories. (Which suggests that regardless of whether liberal media exists, the group of what is considered liberal media is smaller than believed by most conservatives.)
The NY Times and the Washington post are a great example. Considered to be flaming liberal publications by many conservatives, both published stories claiming good evidence for WMD in Iraq. The effects of such articles (and who benefited therefrom) and their inaccuracy are clear in retrospect. But still today conservatives refer to the Washington Post and NY Times as liberal, despite the fact that they took what was perceived as the conservative side in this rather significant issue.
While one issue may not be enough to absolve either paper as a liberal publication, it hardly goes a long way toward supporting the case. And frankly, I think it suggests they are, unsurprisingly, in the middle. The fact that conservatives accuse them of liberal bias and that liberals accuse them of conservative bias (largely over the Iraq issue) probably goes a long way toward suggesting they ARE right in the middle. (As well as pointing out the limitations of considering someone biased just because they disagree with your position, which is not always the case, but can be, frequently.)
In most states I have heard about, if you buy something from a nother state you are liable for sales tax - in the state in which you live.
Indiana collects sales tax for items you bought out of state with their state income tax forms. You fill out the income tax, and if you own them any sales tax for out of state purchases, you put that on there too.
Opt-out is not an entirely bad thing. For one thing, it makes it much easier to protect small-time authors like all of the people on slashdot (it protects everyone who posts something substantial enough to warrant protection, but it also protects things more useful like blogs they might have, etc.).
Anyway, I like not having to send in a copyright registration form everytime I write three paragraphs on my blog. (Well, okay, I am pretty much a communist, so I guess that doesn't really help me a whole lot, since I would generally be willing to give it away anyway, but not everybody is a communist.)
The downside is that there might be some important thing that is written never even intending that it be copyrighted, and no one can use it since the author neglected to release it. Sometimes this causes problems (er, I think - I can't think of any examples right now), but a lot of this probably has to do with the ridiculous lengths of copyrights.
The much bigger issue is the lengths of copyrights. Fix that and I think for the most part opt-out would be hard to sell as a problem.
(I know this is old, but having just seen this I really felt the need to respond.)
What I am saying is that if an employer is going to use your labor full time (whatever our society deems is full time - one could argue 40 hours is too little, for example), they should be paying you enough to pay rent and buy food. That's the whole idea of employment. It is our very modern system that says that labor is a commodity to be bought at what ever the going rate is; I don't think you would find that attitude prior to the 19th century.
As per you next point... I am not saying a 16 year old should be able to survive on their own. But you know as well as I do that many older men and women are being paid minimum wage or close to it, and that is not enough. It is not an written law of the universe that people should be paid enough by their employer to be able to afford (1) housing (2) food (3) clothing, but I don't care. I am saying that our supposedly advanced society can espouse those as minimum requirements, as it did for so many years prior. To employ people knowing that they can't afford these things is, one can construct the argument various ways, wrong. You may disagree with the arguments, but that doesn't automatically make them wrong, either.
And as for your calculation... I did, after all, cite numbers on this, which says that others who study this for a living disagree with you. Yes, I can come up with calculations that ALMOST work, but it becomes very clear that there is just about no margin of error. And your calculations are very stripped down. You forgot crucial things like doctor's visits, for example. And I am not sure I agree owning a car is a luxury; maybe in Denver, but not in rural Colorado, I bet. So, it all depends.
"you earned it" - this goes to the whole heart of the argument. What I deserve is to get paid for a day's work. If I am valuable enough to my employer to be employed full time, I should be able to eat off of that. If I provide extra value, and he choses to pay me more, fine. But he shouldn't be able to deprive me of a day's wage. (And by the way, the hardest working people in this country are the ones making minimum wage or less - ask the poor suckers making $2 an hour working fields. So, I don't buy the whole "they will want to work harder bit.")
You make a good argument, but I think ultimately it falls a little short. Our thinking on this issue is so clouded by late 20th century corporate capitalism, which is, I dare say, a cruddy model. Sure, we could leave things the way they are, or go back to when they were worse, but, why? Don't we live in a society that claims it is better than that?
(And by the way - I like your thing about living on our own. You are mostly correct there. The problem is we do have to supply people's needs in the here and now, and in our society it is unfortunately all to common to need to live alone. Most families won't put up with having their kids live with them until they are 35.)
Well, and in some industries it doesn't matter if it is made in the US. The garment industry is especially notorious for having sweat shops even in the US (and I do mean now, not thirty years ago).
I used to buy that line, but now I am not so sure - here's why.
As has already been pointed out, minimum wage is NOT usually enough to survive on. For where I live in 2002 the required hourly wage for a single adult for self sufficiency was evidently $7.37 (http://www.bloomington.in.us/~scan/SelfSuff.pdf [pdf]) and was over $12 for one adult with an infant.
(And where did your brother come up with a $9 an hour job working fast food? I am fairly certain most in that industry aren't making that much.)
So, while the prospect of giving up some jobs is bad, so is paying people less than it costs to live.
Note that the companies will still have to fill a certain number of jobs though or go out of business. But since CEO salaries are typically several orders of magnitude higher than the average worker salary, I can suggest a few places they can find that cash. Even with several orders of magnitude more workers than the one CEO... Well, it works out ALMOST perfectly.
Don't get me wrong; less jobs are bad. But, like I said, if the people working can't eat, how are they better off for working? Maybe they are maybe they aren't I don't know. Anyways, though, my inclination is to say we are better off with a higher minimum wage. I think companies will find a way to pay it. (It would help to have an incentive to decrease profit margins and excesses, I suppose, though the mechanism whereby that would be accomplished I can't imagine at the moment.)
All of this sort of points to the fact that the Second Amendment as in need of modification (well, I KNOW there are some of you who probably will argue that position, but...). Then again, we moderns/post-moderns are so good at living with contradiction, no one cares. But that last glowing ember of logic within me compels me to suggest that we should really try to fix the Constitution so that it actually fits modern standards. That will never happen of course (well, until people get fed up with more mundane weapons); thus we will continue to be deprived of our Constitutional but bizarre right to bear nuclear arms.)
Well, more like 2700.. but seriously, that IS the equivalent of a 10 page paper in double spaced paper in 12 point courier (bad flashback to college). Could be worse, I suppose.
It is quite possible IT outsourcing will hurt a lot right now (though as per this article, some have made an argument it won't, so who knows), but from a long term perspective, it seems to be a good thing.
Stick with me here, this requires thinking at an international level here, which I know we Americans hate doing.;) But seriously, the positive impact this has had on India for one, is a great thing. If the effect spreads some more even better. When the general population of the world is better off, that improves (1) stability, (2) gives us less things to worry about, (3) increases the pace of technological progress (cf. Japan in earlier decades), und so weiter. Bascially, while some people in one industry in one country lose for now, we all gain in the end.
Anyway, my job isn't on the line (I do work in technology though, but academic jobs don't get outsourced very often:) ), so I can be cavalier about it. But it is just my suspicion that ultimately outsourcing is a good thing, at least in large part.
> I just don't think following the letter of the law makes you any better a parent or person.
Perhaps it is not that following the law makes you a better person but that NOT following the law makes you a WORSE person. The kind of ethic that the specific violation we are talking about teaches - it is alright to take something and avoid paying for it - is exactly the kind of ethic that led to these crises. It is the same mentality that led to those evil megacorporations who think it is alright to take from the poor of the world. Maybe it is not as bad - yet - but who knows what those kids will grow up to believe. Maybe they will think that the world owes them whatever they can take. May we not suffer that fate.
So, no, the corporations and government abusing the poor is not right. Its despicable. And the rich wasting money... Well, I think it is misguided, though I want to be careful... Hard telling how much money I waste I don't realize. But at any rate, I think the other poster is correct that we aren't really improving the world by teaching kids that taking things is alright when they are a little expensive. (And again, I am not going to pretend I am perfect, but it is a point we should probably consider.)
Well, as a recent graudate of an American institution of higher learning, it's not as if this is a foreign idea. Indiana University has a deal with Coca Cola where they distribute Coke products exclusively. Ticks me off.
Eh, I guess I see what you are saying now. Just because us i-e speaking types with it does not make it hard. Okay, i will give you that as reasonable. I probably should have stated the problem better though, since the difficulty of Estonian itself was not really the issue.
I don't recall if I was aware of that theory or not. I do know that Latvian and Lithuanian are considered to be the two most conservative languages of the european half of indo-european languages, just to throw some more trivia in.
However, I must say that that still does not change anything I said since 1) Languages are not genetic; just because my ancestors knew it doesn't help me if I learned only an indo-european language and 2) Phonetics is only a small part of the language, it is the grammar I believe that is the largest part of the problem (and is usually what trips people up). [I am not sure the part about computational linguistics, so maybe there is something to that, but I cannot comment, except to say that we are not talking about the simplicity of the language, but rather the ability of people, conditioned to speak indo-european languages, to learn it, which are not the same thing.]
[P.S. Speaking as an American, I have no intention of pursuing my Finno-Ugric roots since that is meaningless in a culture where we are all mongrels. (And, by the way a decent portion of those Indo-European speakers in my country are not of European origin, so that would be truly silly for them.)]
Given that Estonian is considered to be one of the hardest languages in the world (or anyways Europe; Estonian, like Finnish, is a finno-ugric language, not indo-european) to learn, it is not surprising Russians have trouble passing language exams for citizenship tests.
What I meant to say before bumping the enter key on an incomplete post was...
In the summary, it says the field is at 10-15% of where it was 150 years ago, but the article says it has WANED 10-15%, which would actually make it 85-90% of where it was 150 years ago...
I am glad to see MS making some positive changes, as well. In fact, I am very happy about some of the moves, like releasing some code, opening up bug tracking. And, whatever you think of their motives, MS can't help but be changed itself by some of these changes. And as the industry culture changes, MS will have to chaneg more.
What worries me though is that ultimately MS will still have to ultimately remain an enemy of open source as long as it is a software development company. The vast majority of its value right now is in its software, so it has to (1) compete (and apparently to the death in MS's thinking) with any products attempting to do the same thing as one of its own and (2) oppose any effort that would lead to opening up the code for its software, since then you wouldn't need MS anymore (they think). As long as MS is in the software development business, they will have to still be an enemy of open source. If they were to transition in to a more diverse company like IBM or Sun, there would be some hope. So how do we do ourselves and MS a favor and make them realize that software development was so 1990s? (Or do we just watch them die?:) )
Part of Fabian Pascal's point is that SQL is NOT RDBMS - which is most (all?) of what he thinks is wrong with it. I skimmed the article, but I have read some of his stuff in the past, and that is what I recall.
Of course, those of us who have watched Office Space a few too many times may just decide the grunt work is better....:) (I don't mean that sarcastically.)
I don't know why the accurate post is at 1 and the inaccurate post is at +5 Informative, but hey:) And in case you were wondering, indeed we have no WEP but we do have VPN: IU Knowledge Base article on setting up wirless network access. The CS dept. does have WEP for faculty, staff, and grad students though, so perhaps this is where the misunderstanding came from.
I suppose if I was smart enough to use paragraphs it would help at least a little. Oh, well, live and learn, next time use preview first... (I have been using Nucles too long). As for the inanity of the substance rather than form, I have no defense.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, you have some point - especially that the 50/50 split is not guaranteed to be the equilibrium point. And, I have to concede there could be some selection in favor of more women in these fields (you don;'t specify what you are thinking of). I seriously doubt that that factor should have been enough to skew the results this badly, though in absence of further evidence one way or the other, I can only say, I don't buy it, but you will have to decide for yourself.
Check out this NSF report for some interesting data: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf04311/
SOMETHING is going on - and I would be willing to bet most of it is NOT due to biology. The percentage of women in basically all science and technical fields has increased since 1966. Engineering is a great example; in 1966 less than 1% of engineering bachelor's were awarded to women; in 2001 it was over 20% and growing. Biology didn't change that much in 25 years.... Now, obviously it is possible there are biological factors which could affect, but I daresay it looks like it will turn out to be much more even than a lot of people seem to think. (BTW, I am also sure they said the same thing about biology once - and today there are MORE women studying biology at the undergrad level than men. Though the numbers were better in 1966 fror biology than they were for engineering in 2001, admittedly.)
Maybe you ARE right, but historically the trend has been to argue women just don't WANT to work in certain fields - only to find out that is wrong. Thus my skepticism.
Now, rant aside, it is interesting that in 1966 33% of math and CS bachelor's went to women. Today that number is actually lower... What that means, I don't know, but given that in all other science fields the number of women went up, I doubt it is their technical ability. (BTW, math is, if I recall correctly from other studies, relatively even, so most of the gap comes from CS.)
Indeed, as most Ameeican libraries (at least in any moderately large town/city) are like that as well, I think that is his point: Gorman is not representative of librarians as a whole.
You would probably be correct in diagnosing the NPR as somewhat left-leaning. And assuming your reserach is correct (the obvious limitations of the methdology aside), they seem to display that perspective in style as well as substance.
Interestingy, though, that bias need not automatically lower the quality of the news. For that matter, it may raise it...
I say this because the grand-parent had an interesting point - which is that many sources believed to be liberal by those sufficiently conservative enough are actually fairly moderate (at worst) AND that that can have an impact on the quality of the stories. (Which suggests that regardless of whether liberal media exists, the group of what is considered liberal media is smaller than believed by most conservatives.)
The NY Times and the Washington post are a great example. Considered to be flaming liberal publications by many conservatives, both published stories claiming good evidence for WMD in Iraq. The effects of such articles (and who benefited therefrom) and their inaccuracy are clear in retrospect. But still today conservatives refer to the Washington Post and NY Times as liberal, despite the fact that they took what was perceived as the conservative side in this rather significant issue.
While one issue may not be enough to absolve either paper as a liberal publication, it hardly goes a long way toward supporting the case. And frankly, I think it suggests they are, unsurprisingly, in the middle. The fact that conservatives accuse them of liberal bias and that liberals accuse them of conservative bias (largely over the Iraq issue) probably goes a long way toward suggesting they ARE right in the middle. (As well as pointing out the limitations of considering someone biased just because they disagree with your position, which is not always the case, but can be, frequently.)
Actually that is incorrect.
In most states I have heard about, if you buy something from a nother state you are liable for sales tax - in the state in which you live.
Indiana collects sales tax for items you bought out of state with their state income tax forms. You fill out the income tax, and if you own them any sales tax for out of state purchases, you put that on there too.
Opt-out is not an entirely bad thing. For one thing, it makes it much easier to protect small-time authors like all of the people on slashdot (it protects everyone who posts something substantial enough to warrant protection, but it also protects things more useful like blogs they might have, etc.).
Anyway, I like not having to send in a copyright registration form everytime I write three paragraphs on my blog. (Well, okay, I am pretty much a communist, so I guess that doesn't really help me a whole lot, since I would generally be willing to give it away anyway, but not everybody is a communist.)
The downside is that there might be some important thing that is written never even intending that it be copyrighted, and no one can use it since the author neglected to release it. Sometimes this causes problems (er, I think - I can't think of any examples right now), but a lot of this probably has to do with the ridiculous lengths of copyrights.
The much bigger issue is the lengths of copyrights. Fix that and I think for the most part opt-out would be hard to sell as a problem.
(I know this is old, but having just seen this I really felt the need to respond.)
What I am saying is that if an employer is going to use your labor full time (whatever our society deems is full time - one could argue 40 hours is too little, for example), they should be paying you enough to pay rent and buy food. That's the whole idea of employment. It is our very modern system that says that labor is a commodity to be bought at what ever the going rate is; I don't think you would find that attitude prior to the 19th century.
As per you next point... I am not saying a 16 year old should be able to survive on their own. But you know as well as I do that many older men and women are being paid minimum wage or close to it, and that is not enough. It is not an written law of the universe that people should be paid enough by their employer to be able to afford (1) housing (2) food (3) clothing, but I don't care. I am saying that our supposedly advanced society can espouse those as minimum requirements, as it did for so many years prior. To employ people knowing that they can't afford these things is, one can construct the argument various ways, wrong. You may disagree with the arguments, but that doesn't automatically make them wrong, either.
And as for your calculation... I did, after all, cite numbers on this, which says that others who study this for a living disagree with you. Yes, I can come up with calculations that ALMOST work, but it becomes very clear that there is just about no margin of error. And your calculations are very stripped down. You forgot crucial things like doctor's visits, for example. And I am not sure I agree owning a car is a luxury; maybe in Denver, but not in rural Colorado, I bet. So, it all depends.
"you earned it" - this goes to the whole heart of the argument. What I deserve is to get paid for a day's work. If I am valuable enough to my employer to be employed full time, I should be able to eat off of that. If I provide extra value, and he choses to pay me more, fine. But he shouldn't be able to deprive me of a day's wage. (And by the way, the hardest working people in this country are the ones making minimum wage or less - ask the poor suckers making $2 an hour working fields. So, I don't buy the whole "they will want to work harder bit.")
You make a good argument, but I think ultimately it falls a little short. Our thinking on this issue is so clouded by late 20th century corporate capitalism, which is, I dare say, a cruddy model. Sure, we could leave things the way they are, or go back to when they were worse, but, why? Don't we live in a society that claims it is better than that?
(And by the way - I like your thing about living on our own. You are mostly correct there. The problem is we do have to supply people's needs in the here and now, and in our society it is unfortunately all to common to need to live alone. Most families won't put up with having their kids live with them until they are 35.)
Well, and in some industries it doesn't matter if it is made in the US. The garment industry is especially notorious for having sweat shops even in the US (and I do mean now, not thirty years ago).
I used to buy that line, but now I am not so sure - here's why.
As has already been pointed out, minimum wage is NOT usually enough to survive on. For where I live in 2002 the required hourly wage for a single adult for self sufficiency was evidently $7.37 (http://www.bloomington.in.us/~scan/SelfSuff.pdf [pdf]) and was over $12 for one adult with an infant.
(And where did your brother come up with a $9 an hour job working fast food? I am fairly certain most in that industry aren't making that much.)
So, while the prospect of giving up some jobs is bad, so is paying people less than it costs to live.
Note that the companies will still have to fill a certain number of jobs though or go out of business. But since CEO salaries are typically several orders of magnitude higher than the average worker salary, I can suggest a few places they can find that cash. Even with several orders of magnitude more workers than the one CEO... Well, it works out ALMOST perfectly.
Don't get me wrong; less jobs are bad. But, like I said, if the people working can't eat, how are they better off for working? Maybe they are maybe they aren't I don't know. Anyways, though, my inclination is to say we are better off with a higher minimum wage. I think companies will find a way to pay it. (It would help to have an incentive to decrease profit margins and excesses, I suppose, though the mechanism whereby that would be accomplished I can't imagine at the moment.)
Yes, I want my nuclear weapons!
Oh, wait...
All of this sort of points to the fact that the Second Amendment as in need of modification (well, I KNOW there are some of you who probably will argue that position, but...). Then again, we moderns/post-moderns are so good at living with contradiction, no one cares. But that last glowing ember of logic within me compels me to suggest that we should really try to fix the Constitution so that it actually fits modern standards. That will never happen of course (well, until people get fed up with more mundane weapons); thus we will continue to be deprived of our Constitutional but bizarre right to bear nuclear arms.)
Am I the only one disturbed by the fact that slashdot is now posting articles that appear on vdare.com? What's next?
Well, more like 2700.. but seriously, that IS the equivalent of a 10 page paper in double spaced paper in 12 point courier (bad flashback to college). Could be worse, I suppose.
It is quite possible IT outsourcing will hurt a lot right now (though as per this article, some have made an argument it won't, so who knows), but from a long term perspective, it seems to be a good thing.
;) But seriously, the positive impact this has had on India for one, is a great thing. If the effect spreads some more even better. When the general population of the world is better off, that improves (1) stability, (2) gives us less things to worry about, (3) increases the pace of technological progress (cf. Japan in earlier decades), und so weiter. Bascially, while some people in one industry in one country lose for now, we all gain in the end.
:) ), so I can be cavalier about it. But it is just my suspicion that ultimately outsourcing is a good thing, at least in large part.
Stick with me here, this requires thinking at an international level here, which I know we Americans hate doing.
Anyway, my job isn't on the line (I do work in technology though, but academic jobs don't get outsourced very often
> I just don't think following the letter of the law makes you any better a parent or person.
Perhaps it is not that following the law makes you a better person but that NOT following the law makes you a WORSE person. The kind of ethic that the specific violation we are talking about teaches - it is alright to take something and avoid paying for it - is exactly the kind of ethic that led to these crises. It is the same mentality that led to those evil megacorporations who think it is alright to take from the poor of the world. Maybe it is not as bad - yet - but who knows what those kids will grow up to believe. Maybe they will think that the world owes them whatever they can take. May we not suffer that fate.
So, no, the corporations and government abusing the poor is not right. Its despicable. And the rich wasting money... Well, I think it is misguided, though I want to be careful... Hard telling how much money I waste I don't realize. But at any rate, I think the other poster is correct that we aren't really improving the world by teaching kids that taking things is alright when they are a little expensive. (And again, I am not going to pretend I am perfect, but it is a point we should probably consider.)
Well, as a recent graudate of an American institution of higher learning, it's not as if this is a foreign idea. Indiana University has a deal with Coca Cola where they distribute Coke products exclusively. Ticks me off.
> Blame learning or teaching not the language.
Eh, I guess I see what you are saying now. Just because us i-e speaking types with it does not make it hard. Okay, i will give you that as reasonable. I probably should have stated the problem better though, since the difficulty of Estonian itself was not really the issue.
I don't recall if I was aware of that theory or not. I do know that Latvian and Lithuanian are considered to be the two most conservative languages of the european half of indo-european languages, just to throw some more trivia in.
However, I must say that that still does not change anything I said since 1) Languages are not genetic; just because my ancestors knew it doesn't help me if I learned only an indo-european language and 2) Phonetics is only a small part of the language, it is the grammar I believe that is the largest part of the problem (and is usually what trips people up). [I am not sure the part about computational linguistics, so maybe there is something to that, but I cannot comment, except to say that we are not talking about the simplicity of the language, but rather the ability of people, conditioned to speak indo-european languages, to learn it, which are not the same thing.]
[P.S. Speaking as an American, I have no intention of pursuing my Finno-Ugric roots since that is meaningless in a culture where we are all mongrels. (And, by the way a decent portion of those Indo-European speakers in my country are not of European origin, so that would be truly silly for them.)]
Given that Estonian is considered to be one of the hardest languages in the world (or anyways Europe; Estonian, like Finnish, is a finno-ugric language, not indo-european) to learn, it is not surprising Russians have trouble passing language exams for citizenship tests.
Doh, stupid enter key....
What I meant to say before bumping the enter key on an incomplete post was...
In the summary, it says the field is at 10-15% of where it was 150 years ago, but the article says it has WANED 10-15%, which would actually make it 85-90% of where it was 150 years ago...
> with the north pole's magnetic field at about 10-15 percent it's strength of 150 years ago
I am glad to see MS making some positive changes, as well. In fact, I am very happy about some of the moves, like releasing some code, opening up bug tracking. And, whatever you think of their motives, MS can't help but be changed itself by some of these changes. And as the industry culture changes, MS will have to chaneg more.
:) )
What worries me though is that ultimately MS will still have to ultimately remain an enemy of open source as long as it is a software development company. The vast majority of its value right now is in its software, so it has to (1) compete (and apparently to the death in MS's thinking) with any products attempting to do the same thing as one of its own and (2) oppose any effort that would lead to opening up the code for its software, since then you wouldn't need MS anymore (they think). As long as MS is in the software development business, they will have to still be an enemy of open source. If they were to transition in to a more diverse company like IBM or Sun, there would be some hope. So how do we do ourselves and MS a favor and make them realize that software development was so 1990s? (Or do we just watch them die?
Part of Fabian Pascal's point is that SQL is NOT RDBMS - which is most (all?) of what he thinks is wrong with it. I skimmed the article, but I have read some of his stuff in the past, and that is what I recall.
Of course, those of us who have watched Office Space a few too many times may just decide the grunt work is better.... :) (I don't mean that sarcastically.)
I don't know why the accurate post is at 1 and the inaccurate post is at +5 Informative, but hey :) And in case you were wondering, indeed we have no WEP but we do have VPN: IU Knowledge Base article on setting up wirless network access. The CS dept. does have WEP for faculty, staff, and grad students though, so perhaps this is where the misunderstanding came from.
I suppose if I was smart enough to use paragraphs it would help at least a little. Oh, well, live and learn, next time use preview first... (I have been using Nucles too long). As for the inanity of the substance rather than form, I have no defense.