In what? Choosing a fake name? Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless.
Actually, one of the things that some Indian call center workers have been starting to revolt against is choosing American-sounding fake names for themselves. The workers of the opinion "My name is Rakesh, and I shouldn't be ashamed of that fact. Plus, they'll know I'm from India the moment I open my mouth, why try to hide it?" And management has occasionally gone along with that.
Tech support, outsourced or not, done on the cheap, will get shoddy results. Tech support will get done on the cheap (or not at all) because very few people buy tech products based on the quality of its tech support. They might say they do, but if a business purchaser has the choice between a $10,000 product with great tech support and a $9,000 product with shoddy tech support, they'll end up choosing the $9,000 product almost every time. Even if the guy responsible for the purchase decision thinks the tech support is worth it, convincing his boss to spend $1000 for tech support they may or may not need is difficult at best.
The basic story that you're after but didn't quite say: The US is right now a society that does not value the ability to separate fact from fiction.
There are a lot of reasons for this, and you touch on some of them, but that's the fundamental issue. Some of the reasons you don't get into: * Even among the nerdy intellectual types, most people are not taught how to dissect an argument and see if it holds water. And I include a lot of academics in this, mostly concentrated in the humanities and social sciences.
* A lot of the psychology research that has been well-funded in the last 50 years has been focused on how to convince people of 'facts' that are flat wrong. For instance, "You can save by buying a Chevrolet!" is not remotely true if your current car is running fine or if you can get where you need to go by bicycle. It's always been possible to buy expert opinion to convince people of complete lies, but it's never before been this well-researched.
* Television, the primary form of mass communication for most of the last 60-70 years, is not a medium that is conducive to lengthy explanation. If an academic gets on TV and tells the world that the population of marmots is dropping dramatically and that all sorts of dire things will happen when they do, while a representative of the industry that is killing the marmots states "no, nothing bad will happen", without the time to go into what evidence the academic or the industry is basing their conclusions on (which neither can do in the 2-5 minutes at most they'll have) all the viewer sees is "there's controversy on whether killing the marmots is bad" and "Ooh, look, marmots are so cute!"
* If you're a person in authority who can't separate fact from fiction, you're going to prefer subordinates who also can't separate fact from fiction, because those subordinates won't be able to expose your lying. In organizations where the people in the top of the hierarchy are those sort of idiots, your best chance of advancement is to behave like that sort of idiot, whether you are or not.
Err, yes, they are. For instance, David Brooks, who's definitely on the Republican side of the aisle, wrote this just yesterday:
If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.
And they will be right.
The Democrats have proposed several compromises that are most of what the Republicans wanted plus closing some tax loopholes. The Republicans, Eric Cantor in particular, walked out, and added to their list of demands. Safe to say they aren't interested in dealing.
At least Congress did one thing right with it, and put sunset provisions into it so it comes up to be exposed to light and oxygen periodically.
And since then the leadership (from both major parties) has repeatedly shut down any attempt by Congressmen who are concerned about the more draconian provisions of it to actually debate any of it on the floor. Like the original PATRIOT ACT, the renewals have occurred quickly, with only a minority of legislators giving it any kind of real thought.
Sunset provisions are more often than not a way of making a bill seem less risky or stupid than it really is. For instance, the Bush tax cuts were portrayed as much cheaper than they turned out to be, in large part because according to the accounting at the time they would have expired last year.
Yeah, the inspectors hired by the US and EU need to get in on that bribery action too!
In all seriousness, the 2 main reasons the US and EU don't do this are (A) most of their politicians are probably on the take from the same businesses, and (B) the WTO and other international trade organizations would ensure retaliation by imposing massive duties on exports.
For instance, most of the really draconian stuff in the PATRIOT Act was stuff that the FBI and other TLAs had been trying to get passed for decades. They just knew how to ensure a good crisis never went to waste, so when Congress went to them and said "give us something cool-sounding to pass", they just took all those bad ideas off the shelf and said "here you go, now let's come up with a name that will force almost everyone in Congress to go along with it."
It's not quite non-existent. It's not hard to find residents of Chicago or Philadelphia who were part of political machines that regularly placed fraudulent votes. For instance, a common tactic was (maybe still is) to use dead people's names and addresses.
However, efforts to restrict voting (at least in the US) have far more to do with disenfranchising poor people and black people than they do with any actual risk of fraud. For instance, photo ID requirements, a mere annoyance for middle-class white folks with a driver's license, are an insurmountable burden for members of the underclass that survive on public housing and food assistance. One tell-tale sign here is that the focus is on somebody who shows up to the polls and tries to cast a fraudulent vote, rather than the much easier ways of committing election fraud on a significant scale like manipulating the persons or machines responsible for counting the votes or effectively ballot-stuffing. If you were, say, a secretary of state with ties to a party's political campaign trying to commit election fraud, which would be easier - making a vulnerable voting machine and changing a number in Microsoft Access, or organizing hundreds of thousands of people to go to the polls and fraudulently casting votes?
I don't know about GP, but, I tend to ignore most of what they say too. Which doesn't matter, because if you just stick to the scientists affiliated with universities and governments, who's salaries don't depend on coming up with a particular answer, you still get the same basic agreement that the globe is warming and that the best explanation for why that's happening is that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are causing a greenhouse effect.
The big draw of Facebook in its early years was "It's not MySpace". What makes anybody think that the story of G+ is going to be any different than the story of MySpace and Facebook?
Sorry, that argument didn't fly then, and it won't fly now.
That argument sometimes did in fact fly: "I was just following orders" wasn't fine, but "I would have been killed if I didn't do it" most definitely made a difference. Coercion is most definitely a legal defense, and for good reason, and "do this or you'll be fired" is recognized as a form of coercion (albeit nowhere near as extreme as "do this or I'll shoot you".
I have some serious questions about what sort of person would sign up for that kind of work.
A hungry person, a person about to be evicted, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these folks are saints, I'm saying that they're mostly ordinary people who made decisions not much different from the decisions you might well have made had you been in a similar position. It's all well and good to say "I would never do that job" if you're well-fed and comfortable. It's another thing entirely to take that same stand when you're broke and the bills are piling up. I'm just doubting that anyone would take a job that involves working long hours on their feet, receiving abuse all day long, in serious danger if there were a real terrorist attack, for minimum wage and no benefits, just for the fun of grabbing some stranger's crotch.
Or in other words, most of these folks would be McDonald's cooks before they'd be TSA agents, but would be TSA agents before they'd be hookers and crack dealers.
That's the same point I've often made with telemarketers: You have to understand that these folks are doing their jobs not because they want to, but because the alternative is much worse - unemployment, starvation, homelessness, etc.
That also means that TSA employees who are acting like jackasses are almost definitely doing so with not only the sanction but encouragement of those higher up the chain. Just today, in the case of the elderly woman required to show that her diaper wasn't a bomb, the TSA crew got the full support of the organization. Which means - treat the employees as people who are just trying to do their job. Save your complaining and vilification for the upper management who's setting the policies designed to mess with passengers.
Also, if you really want to protest these kinds of behaviors, the only real solution is to not fly. Stop rewarding this behavior with your hard-earned cash.
I can say what I want, but the parent has control over what their children can hear.
The fact of the matter is that the parent has no control either, but it's not the end of the world that they don't.
For instance, somebody could go up to a baby on the street and shout profanity at them. The parent can't actually stop that from happening. They can be royally pissed off at the guy who did that, but the kid heard the word. Similarly, the kid is going to learn about sex, violence, drugs, and rock and roll far sooner than the parent would ever want to admit, probably not from their parents but from their older friends and acquaintances.
Basically, every kid in human history has learned about that stuff, and many of them learned it by going behind their parents' back. The biggest mistakes most parents make are assuming their kids are innocent, and assuming their kids are stupid.
This just fits so nicely into the "Obama is trying to take our land and our money and our lives and give them all to the crackheads in the cities, under the direction of George Soros and the Illuminati" mythology. Of course it's complete hogwash (*drum sting*) but you can be assured that Senator Blunt has about as much relationship with the truth as the guy who spends all his time smoking blunts.
I most definitely enjoyed my Gen Eds, for 2 major reasons: 1. Being able to write and read critically and understand economics and how people think just seemed like stuff worth knowing and getting good at. 2. All the hot babes were in those classes, not my CS courses.
It's actually not panicky investors, but investors who can very easily move their cash to greener pastures.
Imagine a world with 2 investment possibilities: Company A is growing at a steady 5% and is likely to continue that easily over the next 5 years. Company B is growing at a very unstable 15%, and is likely to blow up in about 6 months. Our rational investor will want to invest in company B for the next 5 months, then go back and move their money into company A. If the investor moves his cash, it's quite possible company A won't be around when company B blows up. But if the investor doesn't move his cash, then company A will still collapse because all the other rational investors came to the same conclusion about the correct strategy. That means moving the capital from B to A is a completely rational, yet destructive, decision.
The management at both companies knows this. So the management at company A will try to look like company B to investors. Meanwhile, the management at company B will try to cash in on the investor activity, make a bundle, and quit before moving on to found another unstable company C.
Business guys want short-term profit at all costs. Technical guys want long-term technical excellence which is better in the long run but not as profitable in the short run. Because the business guys have the dough, they win in a for-profit business.
That (in a nutshell) is why for-profit business cannot be the driver of excellence in software.
That's because "Liberal" and "Conservative" are basically meaningless.
Consider, for instance, the recent issue of the US war in Afghanistan. The 'liberals' Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid support it, along with the 'conservative' John McCain, John Boehner, and Mitt Romney. Opposed to the war are 'liberal' Dennis Kucinich and 'conservative' Ron Paul. Or another example: the Sierra Club really liked self-described conservative Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) back when he was in office, because he would frequently vote in their favor if they showed him a picture of a cute animal who would be harmed if he didn't. So you can't describe a political leader as 'liberal' or 'conservative' and give much insight into how they're going to behave once in office.
The far more useful measurement of a politician's actual behavior in office is to find out their campaign funding. Generally speaking, if a group that supports a policy you want doesn't appear on the politician's top 100 contributors list, the politician in question won't represent that policy.
As somebody who writes Python professionally, I'm a bit biased, but can say with some assurance that the whitespace thing is not a major problem in the Real World. It's certainly no more of a problem than any other technique for designating a code block.
Compare these:
' Basic If a == b Then
do_something() EndIf
/* C and relatives */ if (a==b) {
do_something() }
; LISP and friends (if (== a b)
(do_something))
# Python if a==b:
do_something()
Are you seriously suggesting that the last one is more confusing than the others? If your blocks are large enough that they can't easily fit on a screenful, you have other problems not related to your language of choice.
There are things to go after Python for, but whitespace is definitely not one of them. My take on its strength as a teaching language is that it can do really simple beginner stuff and really advanced stuff with graphics and sound (with the right libraries installed).
It means that ideas and knowledge that are any good and useful have a tendency to spread incredibly cheaply from one brain to the next. It takes real effort and legal controls for it to be otherwise. And to shut down the spreading of information entirely - forget it.
For example, in the 1950's there was a very well-funded and politically powerful effort to completely eliminate the idea of Communism from the American population. What happened? Well, a mere 20 years later, you had all sorts of hippies forming communes and talking about the value of sharing goods and services freely with each other.
Or In Soviet Russia, there was a very well-funded and politically powerful effort to completely eliminate any ideas that weren't part of the Communist Party orthodoxy. What happened? Well, the ideas spread anyways via samizdat and private conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
In what? Choosing a fake name? Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless.
Actually, one of the things that some Indian call center workers have been starting to revolt against is choosing American-sounding fake names for themselves. The workers of the opinion "My name is Rakesh, and I shouldn't be ashamed of that fact. Plus, they'll know I'm from India the moment I open my mouth, why try to hide it?" And management has occasionally gone along with that.
Tech support, outsourced or not, done on the cheap, will get shoddy results. Tech support will get done on the cheap (or not at all) because very few people buy tech products based on the quality of its tech support. They might say they do, but if a business purchaser has the choice between a $10,000 product with great tech support and a $9,000 product with shoddy tech support, they'll end up choosing the $9,000 product almost every time. Even if the guy responsible for the purchase decision thinks the tech support is worth it, convincing his boss to spend $1000 for tech support they may or may not need is difficult at best.
...but I left with the wrong woman.
That wasn't a woman.
The basic story that you're after but didn't quite say: The US is right now a society that does not value the ability to separate fact from fiction.
There are a lot of reasons for this, and you touch on some of them, but that's the fundamental issue. Some of the reasons you don't get into:
* Even among the nerdy intellectual types, most people are not taught how to dissect an argument and see if it holds water. And I include a lot of academics in this, mostly concentrated in the humanities and social sciences.
* A lot of the psychology research that has been well-funded in the last 50 years has been focused on how to convince people of 'facts' that are flat wrong. For instance, "You can save by buying a Chevrolet!" is not remotely true if your current car is running fine or if you can get where you need to go by bicycle. It's always been possible to buy expert opinion to convince people of complete lies, but it's never before been this well-researched.
* Television, the primary form of mass communication for most of the last 60-70 years, is not a medium that is conducive to lengthy explanation. If an academic gets on TV and tells the world that the population of marmots is dropping dramatically and that all sorts of dire things will happen when they do, while a representative of the industry that is killing the marmots states "no, nothing bad will happen", without the time to go into what evidence the academic or the industry is basing their conclusions on (which neither can do in the 2-5 minutes at most they'll have) all the viewer sees is "there's controversy on whether killing the marmots is bad" and "Ooh, look, marmots are so cute!"
* If you're a person in authority who can't separate fact from fiction, you're going to prefer subordinates who also can't separate fact from fiction, because those subordinates won't be able to expose your lying. In organizations where the people in the top of the hierarchy are those sort of idiots, your best chance of advancement is to behave like that sort of idiot, whether you are or not.
Err, yes, they are. For instance, David Brooks, who's definitely on the Republican side of the aisle, wrote this just yesterday:
If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.
And they will be right.
The Democrats have proposed several compromises that are most of what the Republicans wanted plus closing some tax loopholes. The Republicans, Eric Cantor in particular, walked out, and added to their list of demands. Safe to say they aren't interested in dealing.
At least Congress did one thing right with it, and put sunset provisions into it so it comes up to be exposed to light and oxygen periodically.
And since then the leadership (from both major parties) has repeatedly shut down any attempt by Congressmen who are concerned about the more draconian provisions of it to actually debate any of it on the floor. Like the original PATRIOT ACT, the renewals have occurred quickly, with only a minority of legislators giving it any kind of real thought.
Sunset provisions are more often than not a way of making a bill seem less risky or stupid than it really is. For instance, the Bush tax cuts were portrayed as much cheaper than they turned out to be, in large part because according to the accounting at the time they would have expired last year.
* Powerpoint sucks
[next slide]
* Powerpoint sucks
* No, really, it sucks.
[next slide]
* General complaints
- Powerpoint
and so on.
Yeah, the inspectors hired by the US and EU need to get in on that bribery action too!
In all seriousness, the 2 main reasons the US and EU don't do this are (A) most of their politicians are probably on the take from the same businesses, and (B) the WTO and other international trade organizations would ensure retaliation by imposing massive duties on exports.
For instance, most of the really draconian stuff in the PATRIOT Act was stuff that the FBI and other TLAs had been trying to get passed for decades. They just knew how to ensure a good crisis never went to waste, so when Congress went to them and said "give us something cool-sounding to pass", they just took all those bad ideas off the shelf and said "here you go, now let's come up with a name that will force almost everyone in Congress to go along with it."
Voter fraud is a non-existent problem.
It's not quite non-existent. It's not hard to find residents of Chicago or Philadelphia who were part of political machines that regularly placed fraudulent votes. For instance, a common tactic was (maybe still is) to use dead people's names and addresses.
However, efforts to restrict voting (at least in the US) have far more to do with disenfranchising poor people and black people than they do with any actual risk of fraud. For instance, photo ID requirements, a mere annoyance for middle-class white folks with a driver's license, are an insurmountable burden for members of the underclass that survive on public housing and food assistance. One tell-tale sign here is that the focus is on somebody who shows up to the polls and tries to cast a fraudulent vote, rather than the much easier ways of committing election fraud on a significant scale like manipulating the persons or machines responsible for counting the votes or effectively ballot-stuffing. If you were, say, a secretary of state with ties to a party's political campaign trying to commit election fraud, which would be easier - making a vulnerable voting machine and changing a number in Microsoft Access, or organizing hundreds of thousands of people to go to the polls and fraudulently casting votes?
I don't know about GP, but, I tend to ignore most of what they say too. Which doesn't matter, because if you just stick to the scientists affiliated with universities and governments, who's salaries don't depend on coming up with a particular answer, you still get the same basic agreement that the globe is warming and that the best explanation for why that's happening is that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are causing a greenhouse effect.
The big draw of Facebook in its early years was "It's not MySpace". What makes anybody think that the story of G+ is going to be any different than the story of MySpace and Facebook?
I don't want to go on the cart. I feel happy! I feel happy!
Sorry, that argument didn't fly then, and it won't fly now.
That argument sometimes did in fact fly: "I was just following orders" wasn't fine, but "I would have been killed if I didn't do it" most definitely made a difference. Coercion is most definitely a legal defense, and for good reason, and "do this or you'll be fired" is recognized as a form of coercion (albeit nowhere near as extreme as "do this or I'll shoot you".
I have some serious questions about what sort of person would sign up for that kind of work.
A hungry person, a person about to be evicted, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these folks are saints, I'm saying that they're mostly ordinary people who made decisions not much different from the decisions you might well have made had you been in a similar position. It's all well and good to say "I would never do that job" if you're well-fed and comfortable. It's another thing entirely to take that same stand when you're broke and the bills are piling up. I'm just doubting that anyone would take a job that involves working long hours on their feet, receiving abuse all day long, in serious danger if there were a real terrorist attack, for minimum wage and no benefits, just for the fun of grabbing some stranger's crotch.
Or in other words, most of these folks would be McDonald's cooks before they'd be TSA agents, but would be TSA agents before they'd be hookers and crack dealers.
That's the same point I've often made with telemarketers: You have to understand that these folks are doing their jobs not because they want to, but because the alternative is much worse - unemployment, starvation, homelessness, etc.
That also means that TSA employees who are acting like jackasses are almost definitely doing so with not only the sanction but encouragement of those higher up the chain. Just today, in the case of the elderly woman required to show that her diaper wasn't a bomb, the TSA crew got the full support of the organization. Which means - treat the employees as people who are just trying to do their job. Save your complaining and vilification for the upper management who's setting the policies designed to mess with passengers.
Also, if you really want to protest these kinds of behaviors, the only real solution is to not fly. Stop rewarding this behavior with your hard-earned cash.
I can say what I want, but the parent has control over what their children can hear.
The fact of the matter is that the parent has no control either, but it's not the end of the world that they don't.
For instance, somebody could go up to a baby on the street and shout profanity at them. The parent can't actually stop that from happening. They can be royally pissed off at the guy who did that, but the kid heard the word. Similarly, the kid is going to learn about sex, violence, drugs, and rock and roll far sooner than the parent would ever want to admit, probably not from their parents but from their older friends and acquaintances.
Basically, every kid in human history has learned about that stuff, and many of them learned it by going behind their parents' back. The biggest mistakes most parents make are assuming their kids are innocent, and assuming their kids are stupid.
This just fits so nicely into the "Obama is trying to take our land and our money and our lives and give them all to the crackheads in the cities, under the direction of George Soros and the Illuminati" mythology. Of course it's complete hogwash (*drum sting*) but you can be assured that Senator Blunt has about as much relationship with the truth as the guy who spends all his time smoking blunts.
I most definitely enjoyed my Gen Eds, for 2 major reasons:
1. Being able to write and read critically and understand economics and how people think just seemed like stuff worth knowing and getting good at.
2. All the hot babes were in those classes, not my CS courses.
It's actually not panicky investors, but investors who can very easily move their cash to greener pastures.
Imagine a world with 2 investment possibilities: Company A is growing at a steady 5% and is likely to continue that easily over the next 5 years. Company B is growing at a very unstable 15%, and is likely to blow up in about 6 months. Our rational investor will want to invest in company B for the next 5 months, then go back and move their money into company A. If the investor moves his cash, it's quite possible company A won't be around when company B blows up. But if the investor doesn't move his cash, then company A will still collapse because all the other rational investors came to the same conclusion about the correct strategy. That means moving the capital from B to A is a completely rational, yet destructive, decision.
The management at both companies knows this. So the management at company A will try to look like company B to investors. Meanwhile, the management at company B will try to cash in on the investor activity, make a bundle, and quit before moving on to found another unstable company C.
Business guys want short-term profit at all costs. Technical guys want long-term technical excellence which is better in the long run but not as profitable in the short run. Because the business guys have the dough, they win in a for-profit business.
That (in a nutshell) is why for-profit business cannot be the driver of excellence in software.
That's because "Liberal" and "Conservative" are basically meaningless.
Consider, for instance, the recent issue of the US war in Afghanistan. The 'liberals' Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid support it, along with the 'conservative' John McCain, John Boehner, and Mitt Romney. Opposed to the war are 'liberal' Dennis Kucinich and 'conservative' Ron Paul. Or another example: the Sierra Club really liked self-described conservative Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) back when he was in office, because he would frequently vote in their favor if they showed him a picture of a cute animal who would be harmed if he didn't. So you can't describe a political leader as 'liberal' or 'conservative' and give much insight into how they're going to behave once in office.
The far more useful measurement of a politician's actual behavior in office is to find out their campaign funding. Generally speaking, if a group that supports a policy you want doesn't appear on the politician's top 100 contributors list, the politician in question won't represent that policy.
Not all that much - it was already basically wiped out by the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster.
As somebody who writes Python professionally, I'm a bit biased, but can say with some assurance that the whitespace thing is not a major problem in the Real World. It's certainly no more of a problem than any other technique for designating a code block.
Compare these:
' Basic
If a == b Then
do_something()
EndIf
/* C and relatives */
if (a==b) {
do_something()
}
; LISP and friends
(if (== a b)
(do_something))
# Python
if a==b:
do_something()
Are you seriously suggesting that the last one is more confusing than the others? If your blocks are large enough that they can't easily fit on a screenful, you have other problems not related to your language of choice.
There are things to go after Python for, but whitespace is definitely not one of them. My take on its strength as a teaching language is that it can do really simple beginner stuff and really advanced stuff with graphics and sound (with the right libraries installed).
why does anybody think the netbook is dead?
Because Netcraft confirms it!
It means that ideas and knowledge that are any good and useful have a tendency to spread incredibly cheaply from one brain to the next. It takes real effort and legal controls for it to be otherwise. And to shut down the spreading of information entirely - forget it.
For example, in the 1950's there was a very well-funded and politically powerful effort to completely eliminate the idea of Communism from the American population. What happened? Well, a mere 20 years later, you had all sorts of hippies forming communes and talking about the value of sharing goods and services freely with each other.
Or In Soviet Russia, there was a very well-funded and politically powerful effort to completely eliminate any ideas that weren't part of the Communist Party orthodoxy. What happened? Well, the ideas spread anyways via samizdat and private conversation.
Dunno, it didn't do that much damage to Spock.