> I picked up some modeling clay and started sculpting. Easy enough to pack when you head back
home -- sqish it all down back into a lump. >
> I brought a laptop of my own, to toy around with software.
...and as long as you don't store that lump in the corner of your laptop's spare drive bay, you should be fine. *ba-da-bump*
> There are a few differences between an antimatter galaxy and a matter galaxy like our own. For instance, in an antimatter galaxy, the element Antimony is called "Mony". They use it as a means of facilitating the exchange of goods and services.
So you're saying Billy Idol, to say nothing of Tommy James and the Shondells, were just a bunch of greedy aliens from this other galaxy?
Oh, right. Roswell 1947, shortly before the popularity of rock 'n' roll... and the rise of RIAA to world dominance. It all makes sense now.
> That's the kicker. I know a LOT of sites that do this. A couple of financial services sites I frequent have Registered Reps that seem to think a MIDI that runs in the background lends "ambiance" or some such to their site. They INSIST on it.
Financial services sites do this kind of crap too?!? Geez. Fucking lame. If you're at liberty to name them, please do, so I know where not to do business.
"If I want your fucking website to make noise, I'll rub my finger on the fucking screen."
> I've been reading between the lines with the recent health care benefits for seniors. The message I've been seeing is "We can't afford to pay for all you old people to survive. Why don't you just die? You're not being productive anymore anyway."
Got news for ya, bub. When "government pensions" were introduced, the age was set to 65 because Bismarck knew that very few people would live long enough to collect. The average life expectancy was 45 years.
If you read through the weasel words at the bottom of the page, even the operators of the largest variation of this pyramid scam on the face of this earth admit as much.
> Now I'm not sure that Aibo will develop into anything more useful than it already has. But I'm
not sure it won't. (It could easily be crossed with a fire alarm, e.g.)
Not really. The AIBO is too low to the ground to serve as a fire alarm.
Solution - Gecko tape!:)
AIGeckO crawls around on the ceiling, and when it finds a fire, drops to the floor, wakes you up, and you crawl behind its flashing lights to escape!
> From what I understand (and study), Buddhism is the same way. Wasn't it the Buddha that said: > > "Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true."
More bluntly, "If you meet the Buddha on the road to Enlightenment, kill him.."
(That is, if you meet anyone whom you start believing is the authority on your particular brand of religion, stop following that person, because you've been suckered.)
> It's an interesting comparison, because meditation is closely related to hypnotism
Which reminds me - if the goal is to achieve a certain detachment, a geek-friendly form of meditation might very well be video games, particularly rapid-fire "zone-out" types of games.
You 80s gamers who remember (and hopefully own) a Tempest or Robotron machine - know exactly what I'm talking about.
>Read any of Jon Kabat-Zinn's books; Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Note to self: If faced with Full Catastrophe Living, and given the choice between Yoga/Meditation and alternative mental/physical conditioning systems such as those offered by the United States Marine Corps... I'm puttin' my money on the Marines.
> There are also a variety of gun emplacements and bunkers that you can wander around on. You
can also get inside them, but they're mostly barricaded and I have no idea how safe or unsafe they are.
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is what makes for a great Geek Tour of North America. We like to explore. (For some good exercise and some dynamite views along the way, hike up to the top of the hill where the radars for the Nike site were originally located.)
> Having previously worked in many service related jobs I know that people (especially older adults) will not allow this to occur. >[...] >With this being said, I love automated services such as "Pay-at-the-Pump" and especially self-checkout at the grocery stores. It's not that I'm some hermit who likes no human contact, but who wants to make idle chit-chat with some register jockey?
Seniors don't make idle chit-chat with register jockeys because they're old/lonely. They do it because, when they were our age, it was part of doing business. One would know the name of one's grocer, butcher, etc., and have a working relationship with 'em. "Howdy, Granddad-of-Tackhead, got a fresh side of beef in yesterday, here's your four filet mignon - one for you, the missus, and the two kids, cut 2" thick the way you like it. The one on the top's actualy 2 1/4" thick, heh-heh!", "Thanks, Frank-the-Grocer, that new sausage spice blend you made up last week was great too. I'll take a dozen links."
Our generation sees things differently. The register jockey is fundamentally no different than a robot - and that's how he sees his job too. Process your purchase, get you out the door ASAP. "Ungh. Welgumtoburgomatic, canitakyerorderplz?" "DoubleBurgosaurus, sideofrize", "Yawantfrizewidat?" "Yeah, wun sideofrize". "OK, herezyachange", "Thx".
Different time, different culture.
My Grandmother still won't hang up on telemarketers, because she was brought up to believe that hanging up on someone - even someone who she knows is trying to defraud her - is impolite.
> Yoga and meditation are not inherently New Age and certainly aren't clap-trap. That doesn't mean that New Agers don't mess up the field something fierce.
*applause*. A lot of the "don't knock it till you've tried it" posters sure sound like evangelists to me.
> This isn't what typically happens though. It gets applied just like any other buzz word compliant band-aid program that makes them feel like they're respecting their employees while actually treating them with disdain and just as much like mere productivity machines as they ever did.
Does a HR drone have the Buddha nature?:-)
> That being said you are absolutely correct. Giving people the opportunity to take a relax and stretch without harassing them about their "productivity" would certainly be one thing they could do to treat employees with respect.
>
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
My SMTP server, my rules for filtering out spam. My mind, my rules for filtering out distractions.
Giving 'em the opportunity is a great idea. Them New Age Crystal-Huggers can go hug a crystal or whatever it is they do.
And materialists like me can frag our friends over the company LAN for 15 minutes and come back just as refreshed. (Or better yet, just walk to the water cooler to stretch my legs, reducing our long-term risk of DVT / deep-vein thrombosis.)
I believe that enforced meditation isn't just disrespectful to your employees, it's potentially legally risky.
As soon as HR makes it an enforced thing, and you're not just pissing off us fundamentalist materialists who think it's hokey claptrap, you're also putting yourself at legal risk from fundamentalist Christians or non-fundamentalist Muslims, either of whom will be happy to sue your ass into the Age of Pisces for bringing in a competing brand of religion - even if no Buddhism per se is taught, that's not how the fundie sees it. ("What? My preacher/imam told me that funky relax-o-breathing stuff has the Buddhist brand name on it! PAGANS! APOSTATES! STONE THEM!".:)
(Side note - props to the Jews. Y'all appear to be smart enough to know the difference between trying to relax and trying to convert someone. Insert stereotypical "...must be 'cuz Jews are smart enough to be lawyers - win/win for 'em!" joke here. *ducks and runs*)
> And if you're looking for an example of applied technology, head a few hours north to the
red-light district. Its the only place in the U.S. where you can pay for a blowjob with a debit
card.
Bah. If you're looking for a real example of applied technology around Vegas, make a reservation with the Department of Energy and see the
Nevada Test Site. Land of a thousand nuclear craters.
And it's only one hour north of Vegas.:-)
Also, since you can only get there by DoE's bus tour, it's great for backpackers, so long as they make your reservation well in advance, especially if you're not a US Citizen.
> One of my most favorite places is the Golden Gate Bridge. Cross the bridge and head to the Sausilto side, then take a uturn right away, and you'll be heading back towards the bridge, but take the first right turn that goes up. And just keep going up, and up, and up and the top has one of the most spectacular views I've seen!
The top also has some hidden views that are quite spectacular in their own right.
If the geek in question is at all interested in military history, the Marin headlands were used for gunnery emplacements from the Spanish-American War through WW2, through to a restored Nike missile base from the Cold War.
Best times are the First Sunday of the month - the guides are usually veterans who served at Nike sites, and they know the tech. They're also extremely proud of what they did, and upon detecting a fellow geek, take delight in showing the nuts 'n' bolts (Analog computers! Big gears and cams to do differential equations in real time! Vaccuum tubes the size of your arm!) of the systems they worked on.
See an Enigma machine, a chunk of ENIAC, the PDP-1 on which SpaceWar was invented, multiple Cray supercomputers, and an Apple I, all in one day.
Unlike most "museums", which are geared to a young or general audience (you know what I'm talking about, big displays that talk about how binary means "made of ones and zeroes" and such), this is a museum built by, and for, geeks. The tour guides actually know what they're talking about, having worked on half the stuff in the collection.
A glance at their Lecture list should give you an idea of the caliber of the museum and its collection.
Last time I was there, the cost of admission was "whatever you wanted to donate". So even if you're traveling on a budget, You Have No Excuse For Not Seeing This Before You Die.
> Solution: >
1.Wipe the pad clean. > 2.Wait a few hours. > 3.Blow chalk on it and brush gently. > 4.Note which 3 digits have chalk stuck to them. > 5.Try the six possible combinations. > 6.Bingo! You're an executive.
Tried it. No chalk remaining on any of the four pads.
> YMMV, depending on whether you have execs of the sweaty oily finger variety, or the scaly lizard species.
Incidentally, what's the polite way of telling your boss he's got chalk on his nose, especially on a day when he seems to be real pissed off about something, but he won't say what's buggin' him?
He's got a press conference in 20 minutes, and I don't know how to bring this up.
"Mr. Valenti, you have chalk on your nose" seems too direct, don't you think?
> You are clearly, while a staunch conservative, both intelligent and honest. I am curious about whether you see any limits on a rewards an organisation should be allowed to receive as a result of their superior manipulation of the system. I see a parallel with the physical strength of an individual. It is appropriate that an unusually big and powerful man should be signed as an NFL player and receive financial rewards accordingly. It is his good fortune. I draw limits, however, on how he should be permitted to use his size and strength. If he covets goods of mine, he should not be able to use his greater strength to dispossess me.
I'm not the original poster, but I'll <AOL>Me Too</AOL> the original poster's post.
To answer your question, I'd say no - within the bounds of the system. In the case of the NFL player - the "system" is "American Football" - if he's playing within the bounds of that system, he can't "dispossess you", even if he can singlehandedly beat the Oakland Raiders into a bloody pulp on his way down the field.
(To make it clear - if you're an ISP, "the system" is how to route IPv4 or IPv6 packets on wires. If you're a telco, "the system" is the wires you own. If you're a cableco, "the system" is the wires you own. If you're Hollywood, "the system" is the movies you made and the free market into which you sell them. If you're Dell, "the system" is selling boxen. Until Hollywood buys every PC manufacturer and every software company, they have no right to tell me what sort of hardware I can buy. What Hollywood is doing is using Congress to do by legal fiat what they could never accomplish in a free market. Enforcing copyrights good - Hollywood owns copyright, so it's inside the system. Enforcing DRM/Palladium under threat of making general-purpose PCs illegal - bad. Outside the system.)
> I should also mention that we agree totally that copyright should not be regarded as property. However, I am out of sympathy with your justification. Why is it that the US Constitution, written long before Davy Crockett was even born, is seen as an infallible oracle for the running of society half a century after Albert Einstein's death?
I'll chip in two bits here: "Because until amended, it's the law." Law, in this context == "the rules of the system that govern the actions of the USA".
Someone wants 75-year copyrights? Fine by me - but they should have to get Congress to pass an amendment and the states to ratify an amendment first. IMO, the CTEA and DMCA are examples of coloring outside the lines - much like our hypothetical uber-NFL-dude.
> In the same way, I see appropriate rewards for successful companies. But, I think society has a duty to ensure that these rewards are kept in proportion.
But who's "society"? You mean, the duly-elected representatives in Congress? See above (Constitution), and backwards (the whole point is that our representatives in Congress prefer - not entirely irrationally - to snort a line of lobbyist-supplied coke laid down between Britney's spears than to listen to RMS singing "Share the Software";)
> And while you're at it, stop being so condescending to people who are obviously worried about their livelyhood.
My intent wasn't to come off as condescending - hell, I'm in the same boat, as my job can also be replaced by someone from India.
When the automobile came out, blacksmiths went out of business. But many people who could only make horseshoes discovered that "working steel" was still a useful skill in its own right.
When steel mills shut down because production got offshored, many people who could only "make steel" found that "operating industrial process control machinery" was a pretty useful skill.
Now that slinging code is being offshored, many people who can "code to a spec" are out of work. I believe many of us will discover that "writing specs that guys in India can code to" is a skill that'll be in demand for quite some time.
Yes, there are limits to what one can adapt to - there aren't many ex-steelworkers writing code, and there aren't gonna be many ex-RDBMS guys who make the jump to bioinformatics or nanotech or whatever the Next Big Thing's gonna be.
But there are lots of ex-steelworkers whose 401(k)s and pensions did pretty damn good during the dot-com boom years, the recent bear market notwithstanding. (In a sense, I have a lot more sympathy for the steelworker who relied on his company to manage his "pension fund" than I do the 401(k) guy - nobody held a gun to the head of the 401(k) guy and told him to buy Internet stocks - but the poor guy invested in a "pension" had no such choice in where it got invested. IMO the mismanagement of pension assets by large pension funds is something well-worth investigating.)
But I think my original point - that you can profit from the Next Big Thing, even if you're not working in it - still stands.
Once enough of these jobs are located in India, the wages companies will have to offer Indian workers will rise.
Until that happens, those of us in the Western world can invest in companies that are relocating or doing outsourcing work. As these companies become more profitable, their shareholders can win too.
What's that you say? Shareholders? Who are they to profit? Oh, those horrible corporations making scads of money, setting up a new aristocracy of shareholders as the companies they own become more profitable? Oh, the horror! How dare they! How exclusionary, how elitist! Damn those corporations with their Congress-bought laws that prevent Joe Sixpack from joining the New Elite by, umm... opening up a brokerage account, hey, that was easy, but I'm sure the Evil Business Conspirators exclude undesirable rabble from, umm... buying shares with the, umm... click of a mouse. Umm, but it's all a part of the violence inherent in the system! Yeah! Help, help, I'm bein' repressed!
Slashdot Mirror
>
> I brought a laptop of my own, to toy around with software.
So you're saying Billy Idol, to say nothing of Tommy James and the Shondells, were just a bunch of greedy aliens from this other galaxy?
Oh, right. Roswell 1947, shortly before the popularity of rock 'n' roll... and the rise of RIAA to world dominance. It all makes sense now.
They're MICE. It takes serious gene spicing to turn 'em into woodland bunnies, happy or not.
Financial services sites do this kind of crap too?!? Geez. Fucking lame. If you're at liberty to name them, please do, so I know where not to do business.
"If I want your fucking website to make noise, I'll rub my finger on the fucking screen."
Got news for ya, bub. When "government pensions" were introduced, the age was set to 65 because Bismarck knew that very few people would live long enough to collect. The average life expectancy was 45 years.
If you read through the weasel words at the bottom of the page, even the operators of the largest variation of this pyramid scam on the face of this earth admit as much.
Not really. The AIBO is too low to the ground to serve as a fire alarm.
Solution - Gecko tape! :)
AIGeckO crawls around on the ceiling, and when it finds a fire, drops to the floor, wakes you up, and you crawl behind its flashing lights to escape!
What makes you think robots to talk on /. about it whoa...
>
> "Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true."
More bluntly, "If you meet the Buddha on the road to Enlightenment, kill him.."
(That is, if you meet anyone whom you start believing is the authority on your particular brand of religion, stop following that person, because you've been suckered.)
Which reminds me - if the goal is to achieve a certain detachment, a geek-friendly form of meditation might very well be video games, particularly rapid-fire "zone-out" types of games.
You 80s gamers who remember (and hopefully own) a Tempest or Robotron machine - know exactly what I'm talking about.
Atari is my yoga, baby :)
Note to self: If faced with Full Catastrophe Living, and given the choice between Yoga/Meditation and alternative mental/physical conditioning systems such as those offered by the United States Marine Corps... I'm puttin' my money on the Marines.
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is what makes for a great Geek Tour of North America. We like to explore. (For some good exercise and some dynamite views along the way, hike up to the top of the hill where the radars for the Nike site were originally located.)
>[...]
>With this being said, I love automated services such as "Pay-at-the-Pump" and especially self-checkout at the grocery stores. It's not that I'm some hermit who likes no human contact, but who wants to make idle chit-chat with some register jockey?
Seniors don't make idle chit-chat with register jockeys because they're old/lonely. They do it because, when they were our age, it was part of doing business. One would know the name of one's grocer, butcher, etc., and have a working relationship with 'em. "Howdy, Granddad-of-Tackhead, got a fresh side of beef in yesterday, here's your four filet mignon - one for you, the missus, and the two kids, cut 2" thick the way you like it. The one on the top's actualy 2 1/4" thick, heh-heh!", "Thanks, Frank-the-Grocer, that new sausage spice blend you made up last week was great too. I'll take a dozen links."
Our generation sees things differently. The register jockey is fundamentally no different than a robot - and that's how he sees his job too. Process your purchase, get you out the door ASAP. "Ungh. Welgumtoburgomatic, canitakyerorderplz?" "DoubleBurgosaurus, sideofrize", "Yawantfrizewidat?" "Yeah, wun sideofrize". "OK, herezyachange", "Thx".
Different time, different culture.
My Grandmother still won't hang up on telemarketers, because she was brought up to believe that hanging up on someone - even someone who she knows is trying to defraud her - is impolite.
*applause*. A lot of the "don't knock it till you've tried it" posters sure sound like evangelists to me.
> This isn't what typically happens though. It gets applied just like any other buzz word compliant band-aid program that makes them feel like they're respecting their employees while actually treating them with disdain and just as much like mere productivity machines as they ever did.
Does a HR drone have the Buddha nature? :-)
> That being said you are absolutely correct. Giving people the opportunity to take a relax and stretch without harassing them about their "productivity" would certainly be one thing they could do to treat employees with respect.
>
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
My SMTP server, my rules for filtering out spam.
My mind, my rules for filtering out distractions.
Giving 'em the opportunity is a great idea. Them New Age Crystal-Huggers can go hug a crystal or whatever it is they do.
And materialists like me can frag our friends over the company LAN for 15 minutes and come back just as refreshed. (Or better yet, just walk to the water cooler to stretch my legs, reducing our long-term risk of DVT / deep-vein thrombosis.)
I believe that enforced meditation isn't just disrespectful to your employees, it's potentially legally risky.
As soon as HR makes it an enforced thing, and you're not just pissing off us fundamentalist materialists who think it's hokey claptrap, you're also putting yourself at legal risk from fundamentalist Christians or non-fundamentalist Muslims, either of whom will be happy to sue your ass into the Age of Pisces for bringing in a competing brand of religion - even if no Buddhism per se is taught, that's not how the fundie sees it. ("What? My preacher/imam told me that funky relax-o-breathing stuff has the Buddhist brand name on it! PAGANS! APOSTATES! STONE THEM!". :)
(Side note - props to the Jews. Y'all appear to be smart enough to know the difference between trying to relax and trying to convert someone. Insert stereotypical "...must be 'cuz Jews are smart enough to be lawyers - win/win for 'em!" joke here. *ducks and runs*)
Bah. If you're looking for a real example of applied technology around Vegas, make a reservation with the Department of Energy and see the Nevada Test Site. Land of a thousand nuclear craters. And it's only one hour north of Vegas. :-)
Also, since you can only get there by DoE's bus tour, it's great for backpackers, so long as they make your reservation well in advance, especially if you're not a US Citizen.
>
> Punch him in the face.
Not direct enough. (But admittedly, lots of fun. Maybe I should try again.)
The top also has some hidden views that are quite spectacular in their own right.
If the geek in question is at all interested in military history, the Marin headlands were used for gunnery emplacements from the Spanish-American War through WW2, through to a restored Nike missile base from the Cold War.
Best times are the First Sunday of the month - the guides are usually veterans who served at Nike sites, and they know the tech. They're also extremely proud of what they did, and upon detecting a fellow geek, take delight in showing the nuts 'n' bolts (Analog computers! Big gears and cams to do differential equations in real time! Vaccuum tubes the size of your arm!) of the systems they worked on.
See an Enigma machine, a chunk of ENIAC, the PDP-1 on which SpaceWar was invented, multiple Cray supercomputers, and an Apple I, all in one day.
Unlike most "museums", which are geared to a young or general audience (you know what I'm talking about, big displays that talk about how binary means "made of ones and zeroes" and such), this is a museum built by, and for, geeks. The tour guides actually know what they're talking about, having worked on half the stuff in the collection.
A glance at their Lecture list should give you an idea of the caliber of the museum and its collection.
Last time I was there, the cost of admission was "whatever you wanted to donate". So even if you're traveling on a budget, You Have No Excuse For Not Seeing This Before You Die.
Q: How much ass can a half-ass mash, on a half-assed hashing pass?
A: With a 20-gig cache and a shell like bash, burn the cached pass into ash.
> 1.Wipe the pad clean.
> 2.Wait a few hours.
> 3.Blow chalk on it and brush gently.
> 4.Note which 3 digits have chalk stuck to them.
> 5.Try the six possible combinations.
> 6.Bingo! You're an executive.
Tried it. No chalk remaining on any of the four pads.
> YMMV, depending on whether you have execs of the sweaty oily finger variety, or the scaly lizard species.
Incidentally, what's the polite way of telling your boss he's got chalk on his nose, especially on a day when he seems to be real pissed off about something, but he won't say what's buggin' him? He's got a press conference in 20 minutes, and I don't know how to bring this up.
"Mr. Valenti, you have chalk on your nose" seems too direct, don't you think?
I have also seen desktop BIOSes that have default "backdoor" passwords that ignore/override/reset user-supplied ones.
I'm not the original poster, but I'll <AOL>Me Too</AOL> the original poster's post.
To answer your question, I'd say no - within the bounds of the system. In the case of the NFL player - the "system" is "American Football" - if he's playing within the bounds of that system, he can't "dispossess you", even if he can singlehandedly beat the Oakland Raiders into a bloody pulp on his way down the field.
(To make it clear - if you're an ISP, "the system" is how to route IPv4 or IPv6 packets on wires. If you're a telco, "the system" is the wires you own. If you're a cableco, "the system" is the wires you own. If you're Hollywood, "the system" is the movies you made and the free market into which you sell them. If you're Dell, "the system" is selling boxen. Until Hollywood buys every PC manufacturer and every software company, they have no right to tell me what sort of hardware I can buy. What Hollywood is doing is using Congress to do by legal fiat what they could never accomplish in a free market. Enforcing copyrights good - Hollywood owns copyright, so it's inside the system. Enforcing DRM/Palladium under threat of making general-purpose PCs illegal - bad. Outside the system.)
> I should also mention that we agree totally that copyright should not be regarded as property. However, I am out of sympathy with your justification. Why is it that the US Constitution, written long before Davy Crockett was even born, is seen as an infallible oracle for the running of society half a century after Albert Einstein's death?
I'll chip in two bits here: "Because until amended, it's the law." Law, in this context == "the rules of the system that govern the actions of the USA".
Someone wants 75-year copyrights? Fine by me - but they should have to get Congress to pass an amendment and the states to ratify an amendment first. IMO, the CTEA and DMCA are examples of coloring outside the lines - much like our hypothetical uber-NFL-dude.
> In the same way, I see appropriate rewards for successful companies. But, I think society has a duty to ensure that these rewards are kept in proportion.
But who's "society"? You mean, the duly-elected representatives in Congress? See above (Constitution), and backwards (the whole point is that our representatives in Congress prefer - not entirely irrationally - to snort a line of lobbyist-supplied coke laid down between Britney's spears than to listen to RMS singing "Share the Software" ;)
> Entertainment.
> Crime. (its going to go up as the outsourcing becomes more common, so you might want to invest early.)
Masco Corporation: NYSE:MAS
AOL/Time-Warner: NYSE:AOL
Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, Corrections Corporation of America: NYSE:WHC and CXW
Call my broker and bring on the New Millennium!
My intent wasn't to come off as condescending - hell, I'm in the same boat, as my job can also be replaced by someone from India.
When the automobile came out, blacksmiths went out of business. But many people who could only make horseshoes discovered that "working steel" was still a useful skill in its own right.
When steel mills shut down because production got offshored, many people who could only "make steel" found that "operating industrial process control machinery" was a pretty useful skill.
Now that slinging code is being offshored, many people who can "code to a spec" are out of work. I believe many of us will discover that "writing specs that guys in India can code to" is a skill that'll be in demand for quite some time.
Yes, there are limits to what one can adapt to - there aren't many ex-steelworkers writing code, and there aren't gonna be many ex-RDBMS guys who make the jump to bioinformatics or nanotech or whatever the Next Big Thing's gonna be.
But there are lots of ex-steelworkers whose 401(k)s and pensions did pretty damn good during the dot-com boom years, the recent bear market notwithstanding. (In a sense, I have a lot more sympathy for the steelworker who relied on his company to manage his "pension fund" than I do the 401(k) guy - nobody held a gun to the head of the 401(k) guy and told him to buy Internet stocks - but the poor guy invested in a "pension" had no such choice in where it got invested. IMO the mismanagement of pension assets by large pension funds is something well-worth investigating.)
But I think my original point - that you can profit from the Next Big Thing, even if you're not working in it - still stands.
Ha ha, only serious :)
Once enough of these jobs are located in India, the wages companies will have to offer Indian workers will rise.
Until that happens, those of us in the Western world can invest in companies that are relocating or doing outsourcing work. As these companies become more profitable, their shareholders can win too.
What's that you say? Shareholders? Who are they to profit? Oh, those horrible corporations making scads of money, setting up a new aristocracy of shareholders as the companies they own become more profitable? Oh, the horror! How dare they! How exclusionary, how elitist! Damn those corporations with their Congress-bought laws that prevent Joe Sixpack from joining the New Elite by, umm... opening up a brokerage account, hey, that was easy, but I'm sure the Evil Business Conspirators exclude undesirable rabble from, umm... buying shares with the, umm... click of a mouse. Umm, but it's all a part of the violence inherent in the system! Yeah! Help, help, I'm bein' repressed!