I pay Comcast for bandwidth so I can access various content over the internet. Netflix pays Level 3 for bandwidth so they can provide content to people like me. Now Comcast says they should be receiving payment for allowing the data with which I have elected to use my bandwidth?
Comcast should be paying Netflix for providing the content that brings customers to purchase Comcast's services; they should also be paying Level 3 for dutifully delivering that data down the big pipes until it reaches Comcast's smaller pipes and eventually finds its way into my home.
Netflix, (or Slashdot or any other content on the web) are like the fruit on the tree; Level 3 are like the people who deliver the fruit to the stores; Comcast is the store; and I am the store's customer. And Comcast thinks this arrangement entitles them to a share of the wholesale fruit profits? When the presence of that fruit in Comcast's store is the only reason I go to that store? I pay Comcast for the fruit. They don't need the delivery companies to pay them as well - the very idea is absurd.
>Life's too flipping short.
...and shorter still if you crash and burn. Burnout is a real phenomenon with some rather nasty side effects (like chronic neuropathic pain, for instance). Given the choice of wealth or happiness, choose happiness.
Best wishes on your possible career move.
"No matter how many shitty movies the Wachowski brothers crank out, they will always be the creators of Bound."
"For that alone, my hat comes off whenever they walk by."
Apple's tradition of donating Macs to liberal arts programs all over the US goes some way towards accounting for the supposed greater 'expression' skills... at my university, Macs were used almost exclusively for graphic design and in the humanities department, while in the engineering program we had *nix mainframes and PCs with linux and NT. The Mac users could express themselves all they wanted, but when it came to using the computer for anything outside of it's 'Microsoft Bob'-like interface, they'd call one of us unexpressive PC guys over to help them.
When I was first looking at computers, I asked a friend who was familiar with both Macs and PCs which he'd recommend. He told me that the Mac was so simple that "any idiot can use it".
I figured if "any idiot" was Apple's target audience, I'd go for the PC.
When the sixth round of layoffs came around and they told me they were adding the orphaned workload to mine (as they had in each of the previous five rounds), I'd just worked 9 months without a Saturday or Sunday off, so I volunteered to help them keep budget costs low buy subtracting my paycheck as well. No 'mightily' about it... it was a very solemn occasion, not something lightly taken when more than half of the engineers and programmers I went to uni with are unemployed, but I really don't think I'd be alive right now if I'd tried to keep up that workload. Everyone thought volunteering for a layoff in this climate was crazy, but when it finally happened everyone congratulated me... I'm like that jump-to-conclusions guy in "Office Space", who got hit by the truck: "You know, I was like you once..."
After I was gone my manager said that I was cursed with actually being able to do my job; the company has some guys that have been there from the beginning, and they usually don't listen to you much until you've been around a decade or so, and when the older engineers heard me say that it was impossible, they thought it was the usual mushy-head newbie whine... sadly, I only gained the respect of these guys upon my leaving the company, when they took a deeper look at what was going on. Of course, my manager was supposed to buffer and translate these interactions from the start to make sure everyone was on the same page, but he was the one lying to everyone about how the project was coming along just fine, and most of my reports never got higher than his desk. (To give him his due, he was caught in different strata of the same bullshit... but then again it was his job to mediate between engineering and marketing and upper management, and he was telling three different stories, so fuck him, actually. They laid him off a couple of months after I left.)
So contrary to rant #1, it wasn't that I didn't learn the engineering... the thing I didn't learn was what I was supposed to do when marketing presold a product that was *provably physically impossible* in the first month, yet management, not wanting to admit to their bosses that they'd hosed it up, asked me to 'see what I could do'... I did some damn fine engineering, made just enough progress to prove that the original zero-engineering-input design was in fact impossible, then designed the best solution that didn't violate any laws of physics. Markagement declared it 'done', i.e. told the customer that the original design was working fine, and told me that there were $N millions riding on the successful completion of the original design, which, as I had said, (and finally managed to prove to markagement in the last few weeks of work, with big color Powerpoint slides so they'd understand me), was impossible.
Final analysis: my engineering design work was rated on the level of people that had been there years more than me. My ability to deal with politics and marketing and various other real-world stuff is lacking where it exists at all. I don't have a problem with that... it took going through that job to figure out that the things I enjoy about engineering really only make up about 10% of the job. So: build an evil laboratory in the basement, work on my own engineering projects, volunteer time with FIRST and the local science museum, and ponder what comes next.
It won't be a cubicle, I know that for sure.
So - sorry if something frozzled you in the first post (I'm assuming an identity-continuous Anonymous Coward here), but now that the whole autobiography is in print perhaps you can see where I was (and am) coming from. My experience with three different companies in 6 years, conveniently divided into small, medium, and large, showed me that the best environment for me (as someone who wants to design circuits and write code) is somewhere smaller than 'small company'. Contract work in the evil laboratory in the basement sounds about right, perhaps working with one or two like-minded people and one or two other-minded people so
>And you musta been *real* high up the ranks to still be in a cubicle!
Wow... you really live in a fantasy world. At Tektronix, an Engineer VII with 30 years of experience and 100 patents to their name works in a cubicle. 95% of the engineers and computer programmers in the country work in cubicles. Or did you think Dilbert was the only one?
Don't worry, though, you'll find out all of this shit when you finally get out of school, my Anonymous little pissant Coward friend.
Possibly... or perhaps I was the top of my class, educated myself so well that college turned out to be little more than rote recitation, secured a good position in a competitive field and then did my job so well that my managers dumped the unclaimed workload from the first 5 rounds of layoffs onto me... which I managed to maintain for a couple of years, quickly rising through the engineering heirarchy, before getting totally burnt out on the whole deal and calling it quits. And I still get contract offers from my previous employers, which I politely turn down, because I figured out that cubicle-dwelling was too soul-numbing for me and I'd rather be unemployed than work on meaningless projects.
Seriously, Coward, I thought *I* was the bitter one.
No, but the remainder of your undergraduate education will benefit if you continue to hope that this is true.
Every year in my EE and CS programs I figured that 'next year' would be the year I'd really learn something useful, but that day never arrived. Nonetheless I managed to graduate, get a high-paying job, and get laid off 20 months ago after 3 years of 15 hour days. Now I think about taking classes at the community college, welding maybe, but I just can't get up the energy to do it.
You see, you are wrong in assuming that calculus is the only thing you've learned so far. You've also learned The Secret a year earlier than most people.
You know those tests they do on rats, where they put them in a maze, and if they do the wrong thing they get an electric shock, but if they do the right thing they get the cheese?
The Secret is this:
You are the rat.
The electric shock is *always* on.
***There Is No Cheese***.
You cut right through the fanboy cult rabidity that is often displayed by linux afficionados. The bottom line is that if you make it easier for the sheep to use, and more importantly you have an easy way to show them, on their hardware, how it works, they will use it. Dazzle them with the blinkenlights *first*, then work on the ideology. 'Free' as in anything confuses people sometimes, but empowerment vs sucking on the MS teat is pretty appealing. In the process, you might even make some of them stop being sheep.
ummm... they posted similar numbers *last* year, and damned if everything doesn't still suck.
People can tweak the numbers any way they want, the fact remains that a hell of a lot of educated and trained Americans are out of work, out of unemployment, and out of hope. I know this, because I meet with them for lunch every Thursday.
Those predictions have been wrong for 3 years in a row, and as for this coming year, I think it's Groundhog Day again:
"Tomorrow? What makes you think there's gonna be a tomorrow? There wasn't one today."
I use Windows exclusively now, and MyDoom isn't touching me at all.
Because *ANY* system that is set up well will be better than any system that is not set up well, regardless of OS.
How many thousands of linux users don't have the time or obsessiveness to figure out every tiny fucking detail of tweaking their linux box to ensure security? I've set up linux and windows boxen, and truthfully the quickest route to a secure system I've found is this:
* set up your hardware with a good firewall/router * install XP * spend 5 minutes removing every removable part of Outlook and IE * install Mozilla (and/or Opera) and Eudora
I've had no virii, no blue screen, no threats whatsoever since XP came out. So it's both funny and sad to hear so many linux users gloat over MyDoom etc... because anyone with an ounce of sense can secure a windows box, and people who don't have enough sense to perform that simple task will *never* be able to handle a linux box.
Why is it that linux users, who as a group claim to be all about personal choice, get their panties in a bunch whenever somebody makes the choice to use something other than linux? It shows your true colors, and it's not flattering.
Computers are tools. Every user should look at the job they need to do and choose the tool best suited to that job. Period. Whining that your wrench makes a perfectly good hammer doesn't help at all.
It works for Scott Adams, who has been drawing cartoons based on my life (and the lives of many of you I'm sure) for years. Once he got the ball rolling he just had to farm his email account for more ideas...
Because they need to rewrite large sections of the code, since their secrets are out in the open, and the black hats don't even need to bother reverse-engineering protocols when they have the source code. It would probably be A Bad Thing to release the game minus online bits now, and release the rest later. And if Steam code was released, their security is hosed...
It's not a direct comparison, but remember when Quake I was released, with the supposedly unbreakable infrastructure encrypting the entire Id line on the CD? On the day of the release the crack was available before the stores even opened on the west coast of the US... most people had the crack before they had the CD.
Valve has brought us good games in the past, I don't see a problem in giving them a few months to try to recover from this. This is the sort of thing some companies don't *ever* recover from.
True, it has nothing to do with deregulation. It *might*, on the other hand, have something to do with the way we use twenty times as much electricity per capita as any other developed country on the planet. We've redefined what were previously known as 'luxuries', which we now consider 'needs'.
Every empire, right before it crumbles, goes through a phase where resources are squandered thoughtlessly, where excess becomes the norm. This country has become so pathetic that if the McDonalds and 7-11s all closed, half the population would die. Personally I think this outage is great... I say bring more on... I'll get the marshmallows and watch the motherfucking country burn.
this sounds like the worst remake of 'Total Recall' we're likely to see. I guess Arnold is too busy playing politico to play the lead, and Hollywood is too busy thinking up happy endings for American films to think up new story lines.
On the other hand, this one is written by Philip K Dick, who hasn't led us astray yet (I don't think he had any role in choosing Little Tommy Cruise for the lead in Minority Report).
Yes, there is: drop the fear. This new cult of fear is absurd. I know it's easy to get into that rut (in fact in the US it's practically your duty as a citizen), but seriously, the conceit that leads people to assume that *they*, of all people, will be targeted is ridiculous... and the fear that this engenders is counterproductive.
The article says that 750 THOUSAND people (or more) per year suffer from identity theft. So, in the 10 years that encompass my time in college and my career, an estimated 7.5 MILLION people have suffered from identity theft. The population of the US in that time has averaged around 290 million. So (math majors please don't get your panties in a bunch, these are just loose calculations and are not meant to represent actual statistics) 7.5 out of every 290 people (2.6%), or 1 in 38 people, have had this problem in the last ten years.
So why is it that NOBODY I know has had this happen to them? Of the thousands of people I have met in school, in my engineering job, traveling, online friendships, MMORPGs, teaching, socializing, meeting the new neighbors, out of all of these people, no one has had this happen to them. I've never even heard of anyone who had it happen to them.
It is possible that I live in a Rosencrantz-and-Guildensternian probability bubble wherein this event occurs more infrequently than elsewhere, but it's more possible that this is just another one of those fear virii that self-propagate through our culture.
This issue gives me a raging soft-on. It's a cousin of the Y2K fearbug, and about as relevant to my life and the lives of everyone I know as that non-event was. Drop the fear and move on, people, there's nothing to see here...
"The software giant issued a patch Wednesday morning to plug a critical security hole that could allow an attacker to take control of computers running any version of Windows except for Windows ME."
Hell, even legitimate users of Windows ME can't take control of their computers...
Of course innovation died, but that's just the price we had to pay for all of this conformity and mediocrity that Netscape and Microsoft have worked so hard to bring us.
Nowadays it would be a phenomenal innovation if they would just make standards compliant browsers.
American workers are also more stressed, shorter lived, more irate, more likely to commit suicide, more likely to murder someone else, less fulfilled, and more likely to trade their humanity for The Company than their German and British counterparts.
Ummm... I thought of this too, so I looked up the document on our corporate website that detailed exactly what you could be fired for.
It turns out that at my company, coming in and sitting at your desk and not doing your job means you have implicitly quit, and they don't need to fire you... you quit honoring your contract with them when you decided not to do the work they assigned you.
Similarly for coming in late, leaving early, taking 4 hour lunch breaks... none of the 'passive' techniques are defined as a firable offense, they are defined as you announcing that you have quit.
I read that document about a hundred times, trying to see what I could do to get fired. It turns out there is *NOTHING* I could do to get fired that I couldn't also be arrested for.
When tech companies have a structure like this:
management
legal
marketing ...
engineers
it should come as no surprise that you don't have any options... the 'management' and 'marketing' departments make sure that your job is impossible, and the 'legal' department makes sure that if you leave, you do it on their terms.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay Comcast for bandwidth so I can access various content over the internet. Netflix pays Level 3 for bandwidth so they can provide content to people like me. Now Comcast says they should be receiving payment for allowing the data with which I have elected to use my bandwidth?
Comcast should be paying Netflix for providing the content that brings customers to purchase Comcast's services; they should also be paying Level 3 for dutifully delivering that data down the big pipes until it reaches Comcast's smaller pipes and eventually finds its way into my home.
Netflix, (or Slashdot or any other content on the web) are like the fruit on the tree;
Level 3 are like the people who deliver the fruit to the stores;
Comcast is the store;
and I am the store's customer.
And Comcast thinks this arrangement entitles them to a share of the wholesale fruit profits? When the presence of that fruit in Comcast's store is the only reason I go to that store? I pay Comcast for the fruit. They don't need the delivery companies to pay them as well - the very idea is absurd.
>Life's too flipping short.
...and shorter still if you crash and burn. Burnout is a real phenomenon with some rather nasty side effects (like chronic neuropathic pain, for instance). Given the choice of wealth or happiness, choose happiness.
Best wishes on your possible career move.
"No matter how many shitty movies the Wachowski brothers crank out, they will always be the creators of Bound."
"For that alone, my hat comes off whenever they walk by."
I think you misspelled 'pants'.
You can beat someone to death with a Subway sandwich, if you are determined enough. Should we stop eating sandwiches so everyone will be safer?
Check out Wilco to see how it is done. Check out Fiona Apple to see how it is done to you.
All of this is pre-OSX, of course:
Apple's tradition of donating Macs to liberal arts programs all over the US goes some way towards accounting for the supposed greater 'expression' skills... at my university, Macs were used almost exclusively for graphic design and in the humanities department, while in the engineering program we had *nix mainframes and PCs with linux and NT. The Mac users could express themselves all they wanted, but when it came to using the computer for anything outside of it's 'Microsoft Bob'-like interface, they'd call one of us unexpressive PC guys over to help them.
When I was first looking at computers, I asked a friend who was familiar with both Macs and PCs which he'd recommend. He told me that the Mac was so simple that "any idiot can use it".
I figured if "any idiot" was Apple's target audience, I'd go for the PC.
When the sixth round of layoffs came around and they told me they were adding the orphaned workload to mine (as they had in each of the previous five rounds), I'd just worked 9 months without a Saturday or Sunday off, so I volunteered to help them keep budget costs low buy subtracting my paycheck as well. No 'mightily' about it... it was a very solemn occasion, not something lightly taken when more than half of the engineers and programmers I went to uni with are unemployed, but I really don't think I'd be alive right now if I'd tried to keep up that workload. Everyone thought volunteering for a layoff in this climate was crazy, but when it finally happened everyone congratulated me... I'm like that jump-to-conclusions guy in "Office Space", who got hit by the truck: "You know, I was like you once..."
After I was gone my manager said that I was cursed with actually being able to do my job; the company has some guys that have been there from the beginning, and they usually don't listen to you much until you've been around a decade or so, and when the older engineers heard me say that it was impossible, they thought it was the usual mushy-head newbie whine... sadly, I only gained the respect of these guys upon my leaving the company, when they took a deeper look at what was going on. Of course, my manager was supposed to buffer and translate these interactions from the start to make sure everyone was on the same page, but he was the one lying to everyone about how the project was coming along just fine, and most of my reports never got higher than his desk. (To give him his due, he was caught in different strata of the same bullshit... but then again it was his job to mediate between engineering and marketing and upper management, and he was telling three different stories, so fuck him, actually. They laid him off a couple of months after I left.)
So contrary to rant #1, it wasn't that I didn't learn the engineering... the thing I didn't learn was what I was supposed to do when marketing presold a product that was *provably physically impossible* in the first month, yet management, not wanting to admit to their bosses that they'd hosed it up, asked me to 'see what I could do'... I did some damn fine engineering, made just enough progress to prove that the original zero-engineering-input design was in fact impossible, then designed the best solution that didn't violate any laws of physics. Markagement declared it 'done', i.e. told the customer that the original design was working fine, and told me that there were $N millions riding on the successful completion of the original design, which, as I had said, (and finally managed to prove to markagement in the last few weeks of work, with big color Powerpoint slides so they'd understand me), was impossible.
Final analysis: my engineering design work was rated on the level of people that had been there years more than me. My ability to deal with politics and marketing and various other real-world stuff is lacking where it exists at all. I don't have a problem with that... it took going through that job to figure out that the things I enjoy about engineering really only make up about 10% of the job. So: build an evil laboratory in the basement, work on my own engineering projects, volunteer time with FIRST and the local science museum, and ponder what comes next.
It won't be a cubicle, I know that for sure.
So - sorry if something frozzled you in the first post (I'm assuming an identity-continuous Anonymous Coward here), but now that the whole autobiography is in print perhaps you can see where I was (and am) coming from. My experience with three different companies in 6 years, conveniently divided into small, medium, and large, showed me that the best environment for me (as someone who wants to design circuits and write code) is somewhere smaller than 'small company'. Contract work in the evil laboratory in the basement sounds about right, perhaps working with one or two like-minded people and one or two other-minded people so
>And you musta been *real* high up the ranks to still be in a cubicle!
Wow... you really live in a fantasy world. At Tektronix, an Engineer VII with 30 years of experience and 100 patents to their name works in a cubicle. 95% of the engineers and computer programmers in the country work in cubicles. Or did you think Dilbert was the only one?
Don't worry, though, you'll find out all of this shit when you finally get out of school, my Anonymous little pissant Coward friend.
Possibly... or perhaps I was the top of my class, educated myself so well that college turned out to be little more than rote recitation, secured a good position in a competitive field and then did my job so well that my managers dumped the unclaimed workload from the first 5 rounds of layoffs onto me... which I managed to maintain for a couple of years, quickly rising through the engineering heirarchy, before getting totally burnt out on the whole deal and calling it quits. And I still get contract offers from my previous employers, which I politely turn down, because I figured out that cubicle-dwelling was too soul-numbing for me and I'd rather be unemployed than work on meaningless projects.
Seriously, Coward, I thought *I* was the bitter one.
>Maybe that's what grad school is for?
No, but the remainder of your undergraduate education will benefit if you continue to hope that this is true.
Every year in my EE and CS programs I figured that 'next year' would be the year I'd really learn something useful, but that day never arrived. Nonetheless I managed to graduate, get a high-paying job, and get laid off 20 months ago after 3 years of 15 hour days. Now I think about taking classes at the community college, welding maybe, but I just can't get up the energy to do it.
You see, you are wrong in assuming that calculus is the only thing you've learned so far. You've also learned The Secret a year earlier than most people.
You know those tests they do on rats, where they put them in a maze, and if they do the wrong thing they get an electric shock, but if they do the right thing they get the cheese?
The Secret is this:
You are the rat.
The electric shock is *always* on.
***There Is No Cheese***.
You cut right through the fanboy cult rabidity that is often displayed by linux afficionados. The bottom line is that if you make it easier for the sheep to use, and more importantly you have an easy way to show them, on their hardware, how it works, they will use it. Dazzle them with the blinkenlights *first*, then work on the ideology. 'Free' as in anything confuses people sometimes, but empowerment vs sucking on the MS teat is pretty appealing. In the process, you might even make some of them stop being sheep.
Wooohoooooooo!!!
Sign me up, this sounds like the job for me. Bastard.
People can tweak the numbers any way they want, the fact remains that a hell of a lot of educated and trained Americans are out of work, out of unemployment, and out of hope. I know this, because I meet with them for lunch every Thursday.
Those predictions have been wrong for 3 years in a row, and as for this coming year, I think it's Groundhog Day again:
I use Windows exclusively now, and MyDoom isn't touching me at all.
Because *ANY* system that is set up well will be better than any system that is not set up well, regardless of OS.
How many thousands of linux users don't have the time or obsessiveness to figure out every tiny fucking detail of tweaking their linux box to ensure security? I've set up linux and windows boxen, and truthfully the quickest route to a secure system I've found is this:
* set up your hardware with a good firewall/router
* install XP
* spend 5 minutes removing every removable part of Outlook and IE
* install Mozilla (and/or Opera) and Eudora
I've had no virii, no blue screen, no threats whatsoever since XP came out. So it's both funny and sad to hear so many linux users gloat over MyDoom etc... because anyone with an ounce of sense can secure a windows box, and people who don't have enough sense to perform that simple task will *never* be able to handle a linux box.
Why is it that linux users, who as a group claim to be all about personal choice, get their panties in a bunch whenever somebody makes the choice to use something other than linux? It shows your true colors, and it's not flattering.
Computers are tools. Every user should look at the job they need to do and choose the tool best suited to that job. Period. Whining that your wrench makes a perfectly good hammer doesn't help at all.
It works for Scott Adams, who has been drawing cartoons based on my life (and the lives of many of you I'm sure) for years. Once he got the ball rolling he just had to farm his email account for more ideas...
Because they need to rewrite large sections of the code, since their secrets are out in the open, and the black hats don't even need to bother reverse-engineering protocols when they have the source code. It would probably be A Bad Thing to release the game minus online bits now, and release the rest later. And if Steam code was released, their security is hosed...
It's not a direct comparison, but remember when Quake I was released, with the supposedly unbreakable infrastructure encrypting the entire Id line on the CD? On the day of the release the crack was available before the stores even opened on the west coast of the US... most people had the crack before they had the CD.
Valve has brought us good games in the past, I don't see a problem in giving them a few months to try to recover from this. This is the sort of thing some companies don't *ever* recover from.
True, it has nothing to do with deregulation. It *might*, on the other hand, have something to do with the way we use twenty times as much electricity per capita as any other developed country on the planet. We've redefined what were previously known as 'luxuries', which we now consider 'needs'.
Every empire, right before it crumbles, goes through a phase where resources are squandered thoughtlessly, where excess becomes the norm. This country has become so pathetic that if the McDonalds and 7-11s all closed, half the population would die. Personally I think this outage is great... I say bring more on... I'll get the marshmallows and watch the motherfucking country burn.
this sounds like the worst remake of 'Total Recall' we're likely to see. I guess Arnold is too busy playing politico to play the lead, and Hollywood is too busy thinking up happy endings for American films to think up new story lines.
On the other hand, this one is written by Philip K Dick, who hasn't led us astray yet (I don't think he had any role in choosing Little Tommy Cruise for the lead in Minority Report).
>Is there anything else I should be doing?
Yes, there is: drop the fear. This new cult of fear is absurd. I know it's easy to get into that rut (in fact in the US it's practically your duty as a citizen), but seriously, the conceit that leads people to assume that *they*, of all people, will be targeted is ridiculous... and the fear that this engenders is counterproductive.
The article says that 750 THOUSAND people (or more) per year suffer from identity theft. So, in the 10 years that encompass my time in college and my career, an estimated 7.5 MILLION people have suffered from identity theft. The population of the US in that time has averaged around 290 million. So (math majors please don't get your panties in a bunch, these are just loose calculations and are not meant to represent actual statistics) 7.5 out of every 290 people (2.6%), or 1 in 38 people, have had this problem in the last ten years.
So why is it that NOBODY I know has had this happen to them? Of the thousands of people I have met in school, in my engineering job, traveling, online friendships, MMORPGs, teaching, socializing, meeting the new neighbors, out of all of these people, no one has had this happen to them. I've never even heard of anyone who had it happen to them.
It is possible that I live in a Rosencrantz-and-Guildensternian probability bubble wherein this event occurs more infrequently than elsewhere, but it's more possible that this is just another one of those fear virii that self-propagate through our culture.
This issue gives me a raging soft-on. It's a cousin of the Y2K fearbug, and about as relevant to my life and the lives of everyone I know as that non-event was. Drop the fear and move on, people, there's nothing to see here...
for a second there I was worried you were going to say the Mac version was the i-Karamba.
"The software giant issued a patch Wednesday morning to plug a critical security hole that could allow an attacker to take control of computers running any version of Windows except for Windows ME."
Hell, even legitimate users of Windows ME can't take control of their computers...
Of course innovation died, but that's just the price we had to pay for all of this conformity and mediocrity that Netscape and Microsoft have worked so hard to bring us.
Nowadays it would be a phenomenal innovation if they would just make standards compliant browsers.
>I wonder where you get your facts.
He gets them from Real Life, that place where alot of shit is going on, which you might sometimes glimpse past the edges of your monitor.
American workers are also more stressed, shorter lived, more irate, more likely to commit suicide, more likely to murder someone else, less fulfilled, and more likely to trade their humanity for The Company than their German and British counterparts.
I wonder if there's a correlation?
It turns out that at my company, coming in and sitting at your desk and not doing your job means you have implicitly quit, and they don't need to fire you... you quit honoring your contract with them when you decided not to do the work they assigned you.
Similarly for coming in late, leaving early, taking 4 hour lunch breaks... none of the 'passive' techniques are defined as a firable offense, they are defined as you announcing that you have quit.
I read that document about a hundred times, trying to see what I could do to get fired. It turns out there is *NOTHING* I could do to get fired that I couldn't also be arrested for.
When tech companies have a structure like this:
it should come as no surprise that you don't have any options... the 'management' and 'marketing' departments make sure that your job is impossible, and the 'legal' department makes sure that if you leave, you do it on their terms.