And don't waste your time sitting on the street eating donated pizza and babbling.
What if you're unemployed, with no job prospects? That's not a hypothetical question: The core of the protests in, say, Egypt, were young people with education but no job and no hope of getting a job. So, if you quite seriously have nothing better to do, why not get involved in political protests?
I'm not saying intelligent voting isn't worth doing. But part of the process is to use the soapbox to make arguments about how other folks should vote too. And if We The People aren't making the pitch, then the only people who will be making the pitch are those who can afford TV ads or can gain access to newsrooms. That makes it easy for a very small number of people to mostly silence some of the candidates (e.g. Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, John Huntsman, Ron Paul) basically guaranteeing that they lose.
treat them differently based on the content of the protest (this is easiest to show if they treat protestors for and against some position differently).
This is why I've thought that an interesting exercise would be to put on a suit and tie and stand around Wall St holding signs like "Lower the Capital Gains Tax" and "Immunity for Bankers", just to see how the police would react to that.
First off, unlike the Occupy Wall St folks, there's a good chance I could get to Wall St without being stopped or cordoned off. Second, I doubt I'd be cornered and sprayed with pepper spray.
How can they ask for something like this after doing everything in their power to ensure something like this can't be created?
This all makes perfect sense when you consider what the NSA's desired state of affairs is: * The NSA, and only the NSA, are technically capable of spying on everybody and anybody at the drop of a hat. * Nobody can spy on US government officials, and especially nobody can spy on the NSA.
It's worth pointing out that both of these activities are very much within the stated mission of the NSA.
Yes, the rush to college occurred after WWII with the GI Bill, and many returning soldiers took full advantage of that, because even in 1945 the job prospects were better for college graduates.
But the job prospects for returning soldiers was anything but dismal: Unemployment was below 4% through much of the late 1940's and 1950's, the federal government had implemented a specific policy of using government spending to ensure full employment, and real wages were going up dramatically for almost all sectors of the economy (the one exception being farming, which was suffering from overproduction). Cost of living was low enough, and wages were good enough, that a family could be supported in a fairly middle-class lifestyle (including owning a home) on somewhere around 1.25 average full-time incomes.
For instance, if you go to a smaller school that only really does undergrad, those first 2-3 years are a big part of what the school does. The profs who work at places like that do so in large part because they want to teach, and they genuinely care about the freshmen students because that's how they're going to pick up people majoring in their subject. In my alma mater, for instance, the English courses geared towards first-year students were not "English 101", they were something like "The Heroic Epic Tradition" so the professor could teach both of his favorite Old and Middle English epics and some Heinlein.
If you're at a big research university, then you're may get professors who care far more about their research than they do about teaching. That's perfectly fine if your goal is to get involved in some big research projects. But if you want professors who care primarily about teaching, you need to seek out schools that care primarily about teaching and rate their professors on how well they do at teaching.
Making code secure is expensive. When these systems were designed, they were not going to be connected to any outside system, and thus were not designed securely because in order to do anything really bad you'd need to physically access the machine, which meant getting past security guards, cameras, etc without anybody noticing. Nobody could justify the expense of doing things right the first time.
Then somebody with no technical background comes along and says "Why can't we manage this system from our office desktops?"
I should point out that any salary figures vary wildly by location due to cost of living differences. $60K is a different sort of salary in Louisville than it is in Chicago.
And I'm not suggesting that $42K is necessarily a fair wage right out of college, just that it's not a fair wage in most areas for, say, somebody with 10 years of experience. What employers are doing now, though, is low-balling their offers for people with 10 years of experience, because they can get the prices they want.
It may be better in terms of long term performance, but consider this approach to making money if you're on the board of a company: 1. Hire a perceived "rock star" CEO. 2. Stock goes up on the announcement. 3. Sell some of your stock right after the announcement (nothing suspicious about that, just collecting a gain) 4. If "rock star" CEO doesn't work out (as seen in some of the quarterly reports, so you aren't insider trading illegally) buy up some company stock as the price gets lower. 5. Fire bad CEO, stock goes up on the announcement. 6. Form CEO search committee, go to step 1.
This will eventually run the company into the ground, but a director could make a lot of gains on the way down. And they can continue to hold their seat on the board by timing things so that board elections happen between steps 4-6.
Remember the basic Dilbert Equation: Money = Work / Knowledge (Because Power = Work / Time, Time = Money, Knowledge = Power, and the algebra is pretty easy after that)
So it's no surprise that the most competent CEO is the one paid the least to go away.
Yes, it is. And that's exactly how employers use recessions and the threat of H1B imports to try to drive down the going rate for techies. Now, if tech workers had some sort of union or professional association that made it impossible for employers to find people at $42K, that would help counter this effect, but as it stands chances are fairly good that the employer will eventually stumble upon somebody who's good enough and desperate enough to take the job.
When I meant "early", I was thinking of the period from about 1000 CE (Leif Erikson) through about 1550 CE. Typically what would happen in that period was that monarchs would sponsor expeditions, the explorers would try to map out the place and also frequently "seed" the new territories with livestock for future settlement. By the time they were establishing Pennsylvania and Maryland, they had some clue what the area might look like, and some reason to think that the new settlement would survive.
In other words, the highest-risk investments involved government, when they became lower risk, the private investors moved in. This is a pretty common pattern.
For starters, in addition to cracking down on criminals, government also has the power to finance investments that otherwise wouldn't be made. For instance, every single one of the early trans-Atlantic trips was the result of a government-financed venture, because for a private financier the risk would be high and the rewards unclear at best. They also have the power to fend off other governments militarily, if it comes to that. That gives them quite a bit to do with the money they'd save by having fewer criminals in the world.
As far as who would want a nation of law-abiding citizens, and what's in it for people, I'll just say that the only folks who would really want a nation of criminals (and creating criminals if they aren't already there) would be those who take pleasure in locking people up and/or inflicting pain on people, in other words, sadists. The rest would be perfectly happy to keep people under enough control that they aren't hurting anybody.
It makes sense on a bunch of levels: For starters, each cow / hog / bird is more important to a smaller farmer than a big one, because each one represents a higher percentage of the total business. Also, the farmer (who, as you pointed out, is the owner and is on the scene working) has the time and attention to really devote to getting his farm in the best possible shape. Lastly, the smaller operations generally are much better about ensuring the proper amount of land for each animal, and preventing overgrazing, because most of them are looking to have a farm worth something when it's time to retire. The large corporate operations don't care about any of that, and the results show.
And I've only did a bit of farm work, but there was a very clear difference between the good farms and the not-good ones.
Congress's attitude towards NASA alternates between using it as pork spending, and seeing it as a horrendous waste of money. The major points of the space program from Congress's point of view was never to promote science or human exploration of space - it was to learn how to launch spy satellites, and prove to the world how much smarter the US was than those dirty Commies. Since the real motivations are gone, you're left with an agency that has a lot of smart engineers with a wildly fluctuating budget and no clear goal to work towards.
And because NASA projects last way longer than, say, a presidential term, there's no sign they're going to get a clear mission anytime soon.
He: * has top-notch understanding of what it takes to build a PC * has a prior relationship to HP * co-founded a highly successful technology company * is not a complete power-hungry jerk * knows better than anyone else how to identify "Steve Jobs types"
Of course, there's one problem: He has way too much sense to take the job.
Based on most committees, the clear alternative is to go to the captain and order him to get busy rearranging the deck chairs.
(Interestingly, on the actual Titanic, Edward Smith and his officers did what was probably the right thing with their boss: did their best to keep him busy with useless stuff, and on one occasion told him off so they could get back to work)
You're assuming that Lowell doesn't realize he's wrong. Much more likely, he's completely full of it, and saying what he thinks will benefit his company to say because that's what's best for him and his shareholders.
It would give Verizon the go-ahead to gobble up Sprint in, say, a hostile takeover, leaving only AT&T and Verizon on the playing field. A 2-company oligopoly can price gouge more easily than a 4-company oligopoly.
A few reasons: 1. The support for housing and feeding protesters isn't there. It's a solvable problem, but it's not there yet. 2. The way unemployment insurance works in the US, you lose your benefits if you stop actively looking for work. Most of those who are jobless are eligible for unemployment insurance and using it to make ends meet, and aren't going to jeopardize their only source of income. 3. A significant percentage of people believe that if somebody is unemployed (or employed and poor, for that matter), it's their own fault, and that what they're supposed to do is look for jobs even more, and stop worrying about using all that high-priced education and just take a job pushing a broom or flipping burgers. 4. Those who do protest effectively will tend to get their butts kicked by the police and thrown in jail. Being arrested for assaulting a police officer's knee with your groin will give you a criminal record that makes it harder for you to get a job, even if the case is thrown out.
That's why CentOS exists. It's Red Hat's SRPMs (which they distribute to stay GPL-compliant), without the Red Hat branding, built themselves and give away freely. So if you don't want support but do want something that's basically identical to RHEL, use that. And yes, this can be used on a large scale if needed.
What RHEL really caters to are the CTOs or small business owners who have heard from the trade magazines and their techies that Linux is a great tool, but are too stuck in the Microsoft mindset to think that anything available for $0 and without a formal support contract is good enough to use. So if you're in a MS shop and want to convince management to consider Linux, RHEL is a good stepping stone. And then the next step is "Ok, you've used Linux for a while without a hitch, how about not having to pay for it so we can save the company thousands of dollars in licensing?"
So this is what's actually needed, if you want to really get things going in New York and elsewhere:
1. Wait for Washington to force unemployment benefits to run out, as the Republicans seem intent on doing.
At that point, most rational folks redouble their efforts to go out and find a job, or some way to be of value to their fellow citizens, such that they get paid.
For every available job, there are 5 people looking for work. Under those conditions, 4 of the 5 people redoubling their efforts to go out and find a job are just as screwed as they were before. The alternative, trying to start a business, is unlikely to succeed in any field other than food, housing, or medical care, because the vast majority of consumers with money are spending it on pretty much only those things.
2. Offer free food and shelter to anyone coming to New York to protest at Wall St (or Washington DC to protest at the Mall or the Pentagon).
Who's going to pay for that? Anyone with sufficient funds would be better off using that money to further their own interests, not gather a bunch of smelly malcontents on the off hope of getting some policy changed.
Shelter is relatively easy - residents of New York and DC have couches, guest rooms, garages, and other places with roofs and heat that they aren't really using. Food is tougher to solve, but still doable, and has been solved in similar protests in the past.
The thing I'm really noticing here is that you're assuming that everyone is looking out solely for themselves and maybe their families and close friends. But if you poll Americans, a significant percentage of them will offer to pay higher taxes in order to feed and house total strangers, suggesting there's a bit more compassion for those without comfort than you're willing to express.
3. Wait for the crowd of malcontented, malnourished, homeless unemployed people to show up. Give them signs, demands, chants etc to start off with.
Ah, here's the meat of the matter: Your fantasy that you possess the knowledge necessary to lead the 'malcontented, malnourish, homeless unemployed' people into some glorious new future society. Hey, when I was a kid, I had a hero fantasy or two as well. Then I realized that I really needed to straighten out my self first, improve my position in life, and that other folks need to do the same.
You are mistaken on 5 counts: 1. I'm not a 'kid', I'm an adult near the prime of my working life. 2. I was never crooked (didn't cheat to get where I am, no drug or alcohol problems, no premature pregnancies, etc), and have a position in life that most people would envy - good education, good job, financial security, good friends and family relationships, responsibilities in the wider community, some good hobbies, good health, etc, etc. 3. That I would be able to achieve those things doesn't imply that everyone else can achieve them. Some of my success is due to being born into the right family, some from my hard work and sacrifices, and some from sheer luck. 4. I don't think I can solve the problem on my own, or even close to it. I don't even want to lead the protest, because that's not something I have any particular talent for doing. 5. It's not even my idea - these same sorts of tactics were used by Gandhi, by African-Americans in the 1950's, by anti-Vietnam folks in the 1960's, and by Tunisians and Egyptians just a few months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't waste your time sitting on the street eating donated pizza and babbling.
What if you're unemployed, with no job prospects? That's not a hypothetical question: The core of the protests in, say, Egypt, were young people with education but no job and no hope of getting a job. So, if you quite seriously have nothing better to do, why not get involved in political protests?
I'm not saying intelligent voting isn't worth doing. But part of the process is to use the soapbox to make arguments about how other folks should vote too. And if We The People aren't making the pitch, then the only people who will be making the pitch are those who can afford TV ads or can gain access to newsrooms. That makes it easy for a very small number of people to mostly silence some of the candidates (e.g. Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, John Huntsman, Ron Paul) basically guaranteeing that they lose.
treat them differently based on the content of the protest (this is easiest to show if they treat protestors for and against some position differently).
This is why I've thought that an interesting exercise would be to put on a suit and tie and stand around Wall St holding signs like "Lower the Capital Gains Tax" and "Immunity for Bankers", just to see how the police would react to that.
First off, unlike the Occupy Wall St folks, there's a good chance I could get to Wall St without being stopped or cordoned off. Second, I doubt I'd be cornered and sprayed with pepper spray.
As Dean Martin explained: "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."
How can they ask for something like this after doing everything in their power to ensure something like this can't be created?
This all makes perfect sense when you consider what the NSA's desired state of affairs is:
* The NSA, and only the NSA, are technically capable of spying on everybody and anybody at the drop of a hat.
* Nobody can spy on US government officials, and especially nobody can spy on the NSA.
It's worth pointing out that both of these activities are very much within the stated mission of the NSA.
That's only partially right.
Yes, the rush to college occurred after WWII with the GI Bill, and many returning soldiers took full advantage of that, because even in 1945 the job prospects were better for college graduates.
But the job prospects for returning soldiers was anything but dismal: Unemployment was below 4% through much of the late 1940's and 1950's, the federal government had implemented a specific policy of using government spending to ensure full employment, and real wages were going up dramatically for almost all sectors of the economy (the one exception being farming, which was suffering from overproduction). Cost of living was low enough, and wages were good enough, that a family could be supported in a fairly middle-class lifestyle (including owning a home) on somewhere around 1.25 average full-time incomes.
That's not always correct.
For instance, if you go to a smaller school that only really does undergrad, those first 2-3 years are a big part of what the school does. The profs who work at places like that do so in large part because they want to teach, and they genuinely care about the freshmen students because that's how they're going to pick up people majoring in their subject. In my alma mater, for instance, the English courses geared towards first-year students were not "English 101", they were something like "The Heroic Epic Tradition" so the professor could teach both of his favorite Old and Middle English epics and some Heinlein.
If you're at a big research university, then you're may get professors who care far more about their research than they do about teaching. That's perfectly fine if your goal is to get involved in some big research projects. But if you want professors who care primarily about teaching, you need to seek out schools that care primarily about teaching and rate their professors on how well they do at teaching.
Making code secure is expensive. When these systems were designed, they were not going to be connected to any outside system, and thus were not designed securely because in order to do anything really bad you'd need to physically access the machine, which meant getting past security guards, cameras, etc without anybody noticing. Nobody could justify the expense of doing things right the first time.
Then somebody with no technical background comes along and says "Why can't we manage this system from our office desktops?"
I should point out that any salary figures vary wildly by location due to cost of living differences. $60K is a different sort of salary in Louisville than it is in Chicago.
And I'm not suggesting that $42K is necessarily a fair wage right out of college, just that it's not a fair wage in most areas for, say, somebody with 10 years of experience. What employers are doing now, though, is low-balling their offers for people with 10 years of experience, because they can get the prices they want.
It may be better in terms of long term performance, but consider this approach to making money if you're on the board of a company:
1. Hire a perceived "rock star" CEO.
2. Stock goes up on the announcement.
3. Sell some of your stock right after the announcement (nothing suspicious about that, just collecting a gain)
4. If "rock star" CEO doesn't work out (as seen in some of the quarterly reports, so you aren't insider trading illegally) buy up some company stock as the price gets lower.
5. Fire bad CEO, stock goes up on the announcement.
6. Form CEO search committee, go to step 1.
This will eventually run the company into the ground, but a director could make a lot of gains on the way down. And they can continue to hold their seat on the board by timing things so that board elections happen between steps 4-6.
Remember the basic Dilbert Equation: Money = Work / Knowledge (Because Power = Work / Time, Time = Money, Knowledge = Power, and the algebra is pretty easy after that)
So it's no surprise that the most competent CEO is the one paid the least to go away.
Yes, it is. And that's exactly how employers use recessions and the threat of H1B imports to try to drive down the going rate for techies. Now, if tech workers had some sort of union or professional association that made it impossible for employers to find people at $42K, that would help counter this effect, but as it stands chances are fairly good that the employer will eventually stumble upon somebody who's good enough and desperate enough to take the job.
Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported.
link.
When I meant "early", I was thinking of the period from about 1000 CE (Leif Erikson) through about 1550 CE. Typically what would happen in that period was that monarchs would sponsor expeditions, the explorers would try to map out the place and also frequently "seed" the new territories with livestock for future settlement. By the time they were establishing Pennsylvania and Maryland, they had some clue what the area might look like, and some reason to think that the new settlement would survive.
In other words, the highest-risk investments involved government, when they became lower risk, the private investors moved in. This is a pretty common pattern.
Ayn Rand is in fact completely wrong about this.
For starters, in addition to cracking down on criminals, government also has the power to finance investments that otherwise wouldn't be made. For instance, every single one of the early trans-Atlantic trips was the result of a government-financed venture, because for a private financier the risk would be high and the rewards unclear at best. They also have the power to fend off other governments militarily, if it comes to that. That gives them quite a bit to do with the money they'd save by having fewer criminals in the world.
As far as who would want a nation of law-abiding citizens, and what's in it for people, I'll just say that the only folks who would really want a nation of criminals (and creating criminals if they aren't already there) would be those who take pleasure in locking people up and/or inflicting pain on people, in other words, sadists. The rest would be perfectly happy to keep people under enough control that they aren't hurting anybody.
It makes sense on a bunch of levels: For starters, each cow / hog / bird is more important to a smaller farmer than a big one, because each one represents a higher percentage of the total business. Also, the farmer (who, as you pointed out, is the owner and is on the scene working) has the time and attention to really devote to getting his farm in the best possible shape. Lastly, the smaller operations generally are much better about ensuring the proper amount of land for each animal, and preventing overgrazing, because most of them are looking to have a farm worth something when it's time to retire. The large corporate operations don't care about any of that, and the results show.
And I've only did a bit of farm work, but there was a very clear difference between the good farms and the not-good ones.
as long as your OEM isn't a dick
That's a pretty big assumption right there.
And I should point out, this isn't just Dell or HP or Lenovo or something, it's also motherboard manufacturers who can get in on this game.
In a word, NASA's problem is: Congress.
Congress's attitude towards NASA alternates between using it as pork spending, and seeing it as a horrendous waste of money. The major points of the space program from Congress's point of view was never to promote science or human exploration of space - it was to learn how to launch spy satellites, and prove to the world how much smarter the US was than those dirty Commies. Since the real motivations are gone, you're left with an agency that has a lot of smart engineers with a wildly fluctuating budget and no clear goal to work towards.
And because NASA projects last way longer than, say, a presidential term, there's no sign they're going to get a clear mission anytime soon.
Imagine if even 1 person of Border's (former) customer were to file a petition with the bankruptcy court to enter as a creditor.
The court would come back with "Go away - your information might be worth about $10 to you, while these other creditors are owed millions."
Clearly, they need to hire this guy.
He:
* has top-notch understanding of what it takes to build a PC
* has a prior relationship to HP
* co-founded a highly successful technology company
* is not a complete power-hungry jerk
* knows better than anyone else how to identify "Steve Jobs types"
Of course, there's one problem: He has way too much sense to take the job.
Based on most committees, the clear alternative is to go to the captain and order him to get busy rearranging the deck chairs.
(Interestingly, on the actual Titanic, Edward Smith and his officers did what was probably the right thing with their boss: did their best to keep him busy with useless stuff, and on one occasion told him off so they could get back to work)
You're assuming that Lowell doesn't realize he's wrong. Much more likely, he's completely full of it, and saying what he thinks will benefit his company to say because that's what's best for him and his shareholders.
It would give Verizon the go-ahead to gobble up Sprint in, say, a hostile takeover, leaving only AT&T and Verizon on the playing field. A 2-company oligopoly can price gouge more easily than a 4-company oligopoly.
So why isn't this happening?
A few reasons:
1. The support for housing and feeding protesters isn't there. It's a solvable problem, but it's not there yet.
2. The way unemployment insurance works in the US, you lose your benefits if you stop actively looking for work. Most of those who are jobless are eligible for unemployment insurance and using it to make ends meet, and aren't going to jeopardize their only source of income.
3. A significant percentage of people believe that if somebody is unemployed (or employed and poor, for that matter), it's their own fault, and that what they're supposed to do is look for jobs even more, and stop worrying about using all that high-priced education and just take a job pushing a broom or flipping burgers.
4. Those who do protest effectively will tend to get their butts kicked by the police and thrown in jail. Being arrested for assaulting a police officer's knee with your groin will give you a criminal record that makes it harder for you to get a job, even if the case is thrown out.
That's why CentOS exists. It's Red Hat's SRPMs (which they distribute to stay GPL-compliant), without the Red Hat branding, built themselves and give away freely. So if you don't want support but do want something that's basically identical to RHEL, use that. And yes, this can be used on a large scale if needed.
What RHEL really caters to are the CTOs or small business owners who have heard from the trade magazines and their techies that Linux is a great tool, but are too stuck in the Microsoft mindset to think that anything available for $0 and without a formal support contract is good enough to use. So if you're in a MS shop and want to convince management to consider Linux, RHEL is a good stepping stone. And then the next step is "Ok, you've used Linux for a while without a hitch, how about not having to pay for it so we can save the company thousands of dollars in licensing?"
So this is what's actually needed, if you want to really get things going in New York and elsewhere:
1. Wait for Washington to force unemployment benefits to run out, as the Republicans seem intent on doing.
At that point, most rational folks redouble their efforts to go out and find a job, or some way to be of value to their fellow citizens, such that they get paid.
For every available job, there are 5 people looking for work. Under those conditions, 4 of the 5 people redoubling their efforts to go out and find a job are just as screwed as they were before. The alternative, trying to start a business, is unlikely to succeed in any field other than food, housing, or medical care, because the vast majority of consumers with money are spending it on pretty much only those things.
2. Offer free food and shelter to anyone coming to New York to protest at Wall St (or Washington DC to protest at the Mall or the Pentagon).
Who's going to pay for that? Anyone with sufficient funds would be better off using that money to further their own interests, not gather a bunch of smelly malcontents on the off hope of getting some policy changed.
Shelter is relatively easy - residents of New York and DC have couches, guest rooms, garages, and other places with roofs and heat that they aren't really using. Food is tougher to solve, but still doable, and has been solved in similar protests in the past.
The thing I'm really noticing here is that you're assuming that everyone is looking out solely for themselves and maybe their families and close friends. But if you poll Americans, a significant percentage of them will offer to pay higher taxes in order to feed and house total strangers, suggesting there's a bit more compassion for those without comfort than you're willing to express.
3. Wait for the crowd of malcontented, malnourished, homeless unemployed people to show up. Give them signs, demands, chants etc to start off with.
Ah, here's the meat of the matter: Your fantasy that you possess the knowledge necessary to lead the 'malcontented, malnourish, homeless unemployed' people into some glorious new future society. Hey, when I was a kid, I had a hero fantasy or two as well. Then I realized that I really needed to straighten out my self first, improve my position in life, and that other folks need to do the same.
You are mistaken on 5 counts:
1. I'm not a 'kid', I'm an adult near the prime of my working life.
2. I was never crooked (didn't cheat to get where I am, no drug or alcohol problems, no premature pregnancies, etc), and have a position in life that most people would envy - good education, good job, financial security, good friends and family relationships, responsibilities in the wider community, some good hobbies, good health, etc, etc.
3. That I would be able to achieve those things doesn't imply that everyone else can achieve them. Some of my success is due to being born into the right family, some from my hard work and sacrifices, and some from sheer luck.
4. I don't think I can solve the problem on my own, or even close to it. I don't even want to lead the protest, because that's not something I have any particular talent for doing.
5. It's not even my idea - these same sorts of tactics were used by Gandhi, by African-Americans in the 1950's, by anti-Vietnam folks in the 1960's, and by Tunisians and Egyptians just a few months ago.