Well to start with the physics of racing are a bit simply because they involve large objects with relatively predictable parameters, in addition, most gaming "physics" is designed to be impressive. People like seeing heads explode and bodies fly 20 feet backward, reality would seem boring.
What they are is generally is people who are paid badly and whose only required qualification is the ability to lift a certain weight. Which translates to "muscular 18-25 year old males with no education". Think of any 18-25 year old males you know or to what you were like back then if you were. Personally I was a dickhead, and your average UPS employee is probably worse.
I knew a guy who used to work in one of those places and he said that they used to have competitions as to who could break more fragile packages. They're bored, they're stupid, and they're not looking for a lot of career advancement.
The fact that customs decided to be a dick isn't really the USPS's fault, since despite both being government departments they have nothing to do with one another.
I worked with a guy when I was young who was an ex UPS employee, he told similar stories.
The reality is that the guys working in the shipping center are generally young, unskilled, and paid crap. Even if they actually got fired for screwing around(which they generally don't), they'd just be replaced with another batch of idiots.
The thing about the free market is not that it doesn't work, or isn't a really good idea, it does and it is. The issue is that the free market, at least as envisioned by its most ardent supporters doesn't exist.
What the free market is is an optimizing algorithm. You take a certain set of constraints(technological limits, government regulations, consumer sentiment, etc) and the free market will find the optimum solution which matches that set of constraints. It actually works really well.
The issue we have is that we have too many people who believe that the free market will automatically find the optimum overall solution. This is a load of hogwash. The theoretical free market which will solve all our problems is a lot like when you take physics classes and talk about throwing a baseball in a vacuum, it's all sort of true, but how often would you actually do that. The barriers to entry in any non trivial industry will never be zero, trade will never be 100% fair or free, consumers will never react 100% rationally, and people will never be guaranteed to put the good of everyone over their own personal gain.
If we stop believing that the free market will find us the perfect solution we can start to create a much better and fairer world. We've all seen that the government determining what everything is worth and what everyone gets paid doesn't work, and can never work, but we've also seen that letting the market do whatever it wants doesn't work either, the government may not regulate the market, but the people running it certainly do and they regulate it to increase their own personal profits.
That's the simple fact so many people seem to be missing. The US is still the backbone of the world economy, it might be rather rotten and full of holes, but it's still the backbone and one of the miraculous things about financial markets is that if enough people believe in something thin air can become solid.
Until and unless the US is replaced in this role, any country who could possibly call in the US's debts would destroy their economy by doing so. Despite the complete and total failure of any US politician to actually do their job instead of being a radical partisan ass, the US government and its debts will continue for quite some time yet. Not forever of course, and we'll need to get some politicians who aren't owned by big business, have some sort of guts, and are willing to go for a goal that is more visionary than "Keep my seat and get the other guy out", which may never happen, but it's not going to happen in the next decade.
And all the government funded science in the world doesn't give you one piece of music that touches your soul, one piece of art which moves you, or one story you'll never forget.
Government funding certainly has its place, it allows for the creation of ideas which won't be profitable for decades if ever. The internet would not exist if it had been left to private enterprise. That doesn't mean that science is everything that copyright is designed to promote, or that we'd be better off without it.
The difference here is that enticing someone to move for a job which doesn't exist is fraud in Minnesota. The damage to his career is just why punitive damages are so high.
As does the motivation for the genuinely wrong plaintiff, and for that matter their lawyer.
Not saying we don't need some form of Tort reform, but what lawyer is going to take a case on contingency, wherein their best possible outcome is the fees they would have charged anyway, and what plaintiff is going to bring a lawsuit where their best possible outcome is provable damages and months in court and their worst possible outcome is bankruptcy.
Companies can afford to piss money away on lawyers, normal people cannot.
Seagate committed fraud based on their local jurisdiction. There never was a job, the fact that they paid him a salary for a few months is beside the point.
A lot of this probably comes down to the details of the contract, but I think mostly the issue is that the job never actually existed. It's one thing to terminate someone, or to eliminate a position after the fact, but this is a pretty clear cut breach of contract. If sign a contract with you to mow my lawn weekly for $X a week and then I decide to terminate the agreement because I don't like the way you're cutting it or I can't afford to have someone do that job anymore or I've sold my house, then I would fall back on the terms of the contract. If however you rock up to the address I specified and there's no lawn to mow or it's not actually my property you're probably talking about fraud.
Depends on what you're looking for. A 2 year tech degree teaches you what to do whereas a 4 year one teaches you why you're doing it. That's not to say that people with a 2 year degree can't learn why or that people with a 4 year degree are always capable of learning what, but that's the general difference.
Obviously doing a proper interview is the only real way to determine what someone is actually capable of, but if you're going to go off education alone, someone with a recent 2 year degree will hit the ground running fairly quickly but may not pick up changes in technology very quickly whereas someone with a recent 4 year degree but little experience will probably take a little while to get started but should, at least in theory be able to pick up technology changes a little quicker.
A 2 year degree from more than 5 years ago however is worth absolutely nothing and may as well be ignored.
Of course the flip side of that is that if those forks were made close to home, they might be more expensive, but on the other hand someone close to home would actually be being paid to make the damned forks.
Cheap offshore labor is a short term thing, eventually you depress the local economy and boost the offshore economy to the point where it isn't cheaper anymore and all you've really accomplished is to transfer some of the local standard of living elsewhere.
I didn't say they don't want to fight the fight by proxy. I don't really know what they want to do anymore, but they won't have bought the patents themselves if that is their intention because they'll lose.
There's no deal to block, Microsoft bought some IP, which doesn't require any approval, and Attachmate is buying Novell which has nothing to do with Microsoft.
If Microsoft bought the Unix patents and tried to actually do anything with them, they they'd either lose and have worthless patents or win and have the government invalidate their patents to prevent a 100% monopoly. There's no upside for them in that game. Microsoft may have been rooting for SCO, but that's a war they need fought by proxy, they can't fight that themselves.
Well to start with, again that's an engineering position, not just a general college education. Engineering is one of those sectors where people without a degree can't even play let alone compete, and it's a relatively harsh degree program so the number of graduates is fairly low.
The problem with the skilled worker visas is that the people who have them have no rights. It's not so much about competing with people from India, it's about competing with people whose working conditions are essentially a well paid slavery.
If you are in the US on a skilled worker visa the only way you get to stay is if your current employer keeps sponsoring you or you can find a new employer to sponsor you. Sponsoring someone is a fair amount of paperwork, and so even in a really good economy finding a new job on an H1-B isn't exactly easy.
The long and the short of it is that if you're living in the US on one of these kind of visas and you want to stay there, you'll do exactly what your boss says pretty much no matter what because your alternative is to go home. This means that aside from the fact that these workers have salaries and conditions which are substantially lower than their counterparts who are citizens, they also have that complete lack of options which no US citizen can compete with.
An employer will always no that no matter how much you might grovel, no matter how low a salary you might accept, that you have a choice, whereas the H1-B guy doesn't.
The salaries are real, but they're for computer engineering not computer science, at least if the engineering coop program is anything like the one at my university.
75k isn't by any means an outrageous salary for a qualified engineer, but it's not all that much higher than friends of mine got with degrees from public state schools a few years back.
I admit however that I'd forgotten about Cornell in my original statements.
My point was primarily that the Ivy league is seriously overrated, especially the sort of premiere Ivy league schools which everyone associates as being Ivy league schools(Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, etc). The big two Harvard and Yale in particular are astoundingly poor for certain kinds of degrees. Their admission criteria also reflect this.
I may have overstated my case somewhat, but my point still stands. If you want to get a top notch Engineering or Computer Science degree, there are a number of schools which are substantially better than most of the Ivy League schools including some public schools.
Yes you're right, Cornell has a good department(I confess I'd forgotten Cornell was even considered an Ivy school), and Princeton appears to be reasonable. However if you look at this list, you'll see that 10 public universities outrank Harvard and Columbia, and three outrank Princeton.
Given how high the tuition for places like Harvard are, and how extreme the admission criteria. They just don't seem to be worth it for this kind of degree. I got my CS undergrad at UW-Madison, and my tuition for all 4 years was less than a single year at Harvard, and it was a hell of a lot easier to get into.
If you're going to jump through hoops to get into an extremely prestigious private school you'd do better with CMU, MIT, or Stanford.
I'm not an expert on the natural sciences, but I stand by the fact that going to an Ivy for CS is pissing your money away. If you're looking for an expensive private school there are better ones, and there are plenty of top tier public universities which won't require you to give up every single second of your life during high school to get in.
The Ivy League is great for some things, but at that kind of money and time invested just to get in, I just really don't see them being a contender for comp sci degrees.
Ivy League schools are not technical schools. I can't think of a single one of them which has a computer science or engineering program worth mentioning. Hell I don't think they even have much in the way of a general science program. We all presume that the Ivy league is awesome, but if you're not going for some sort of liberal arts degree you're pissing your money away.
Injunctions don't work like that. They don't let you just keep doing the thing they believe to be illegal because they haven't proven it's illegal yet. They get a court order telling you to stop pending the results of the case before the court. This isn't actually unreasonable, pointless perhaps, and if you're of the "information wants to be free" crowd you might object to it on a philosophical bent, but really this isn't any different than what they do in the physical world.
Well, given how amazingly easy fingerprint scanners are to fool(at least the ones mere mortals have access to), it couldn't really be a whole lot worse than fingerprints for a locked system.
That said, despite the obsession with using biometrics to provide some sort of security magic bullet, they're really substantially less secure than pretty much every other security mechanism we have. They seem to be astoundingly easy to fake, and it's not like you can just go and get another one every couple of months to keep it secure. Even if they could map your entire DNA and somehow guarantee the sample was actually from the person providing it, there'd still issues cell mutation, twins etc.
The reality is that despite the fantasies of science fiction writers, biometrics are pretty much crap, having a guy behind bullet proof glass is much more effective, and frankly, cheaper.
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I'm not saying that the 6 month layover wasn't stupid, I'm just saying that it's customs being stupid not the USPS.
Well to start with the physics of racing are a bit simply because they involve large objects with relatively predictable parameters, in addition, most gaming "physics" is designed to be impressive. People like seeing heads explode and bodies fly 20 feet backward, reality would seem boring.
Not exactly.
What they are is generally is people who are paid badly and whose only required qualification is the ability to lift a certain weight. Which translates to "muscular 18-25 year old males with no education". Think of any 18-25 year old males you know or to what you were like back then if you were. Personally I was a dickhead, and your average UPS employee is probably worse.
I knew a guy who used to work in one of those places and he said that they used to have competitions as to who could break more fragile packages. They're bored, they're stupid, and they're not looking for a lot of career advancement.
The fact that customs decided to be a dick isn't really the USPS's fault, since despite both being government departments they have nothing to do with one another.
I worked with a guy when I was young who was an ex UPS employee, he told similar stories.
The reality is that the guys working in the shipping center are generally young, unskilled, and paid crap. Even if they actually got fired for screwing around(which they generally don't), they'd just be replaced with another batch of idiots.
The thing about the free market is not that it doesn't work, or isn't a really good idea, it does and it is. The issue is that the free market, at least as envisioned by its most ardent supporters doesn't exist.
What the free market is is an optimizing algorithm. You take a certain set of constraints(technological limits, government regulations, consumer sentiment, etc) and the free market will find the optimum solution which matches that set of constraints. It actually works really well.
The issue we have is that we have too many people who believe that the free market will automatically find the optimum overall solution. This is a load of hogwash. The theoretical free market which will solve all our problems is a lot like when you take physics classes and talk about throwing a baseball in a vacuum, it's all sort of true, but how often would you actually do that. The barriers to entry in any non trivial industry will never be zero, trade will never be 100% fair or free, consumers will never react 100% rationally, and people will never be guaranteed to put the good of everyone over their own personal gain.
If we stop believing that the free market will find us the perfect solution we can start to create a much better and fairer world. We've all seen that the government determining what everything is worth and what everyone gets paid doesn't work, and can never work, but we've also seen that letting the market do whatever it wants doesn't work either, the government may not regulate the market, but the people running it certainly do and they regulate it to increase their own personal profits.
The US won't default because it can't.
That's the simple fact so many people seem to be missing. The US is still the backbone of the world economy, it might be rather rotten and full of holes, but it's still the backbone and one of the miraculous things about financial markets is that if enough people believe in something thin air can become solid.
Until and unless the US is replaced in this role, any country who could possibly call in the US's debts would destroy their economy by doing so. Despite the complete and total failure of any US politician to actually do their job instead of being a radical partisan ass, the US government and its debts will continue for quite some time yet. Not forever of course, and we'll need to get some politicians who aren't owned by big business, have some sort of guts, and are willing to go for a goal that is more visionary than "Keep my seat and get the other guy out", which may never happen, but it's not going to happen in the next decade.
And all the government funded science in the world doesn't give you one piece of music that touches your soul, one piece of art which moves you, or one story you'll never forget.
Government funding certainly has its place, it allows for the creation of ideas which won't be profitable for decades if ever. The internet would not exist if it had been left to private enterprise. That doesn't mean that science is everything that copyright is designed to promote, or that we'd be better off without it.
The difference here is that enticing someone to move for a job which doesn't exist is fraud in Minnesota. The damage to his career is just why punitive damages are so high.
As does the motivation for the genuinely wrong plaintiff, and for that matter their lawyer.
Not saying we don't need some form of Tort reform, but what lawyer is going to take a case on contingency, wherein their best possible outcome is the fees they would have charged anyway, and what plaintiff is going to bring a lawsuit where their best possible outcome is provable damages and months in court and their worst possible outcome is bankruptcy.
Companies can afford to piss money away on lawyers, normal people cannot.
Seagate committed fraud based on their local jurisdiction. There never was a job, the fact that they paid him a salary for a few months is beside the point.
A lot of this probably comes down to the details of the contract, but I think mostly the issue is that the job never actually existed. It's one thing to terminate someone, or to eliminate a position after the fact, but this is a pretty clear cut breach of contract. If sign a contract with you to mow my lawn weekly for $X a week and then I decide to terminate the agreement because I don't like the way you're cutting it or I can't afford to have someone do that job anymore or I've sold my house, then I would fall back on the terms of the contract. If however you rock up to the address I specified and there's no lawn to mow or it's not actually my property you're probably talking about fraud.
I saw a request for 5 years .NET experience in Q2 2003 when I first graduated. About the only people who might have met that wrote the damned thing.
Depends on what you're looking for. A 2 year tech degree teaches you what to do whereas a 4 year one teaches you why you're doing it. That's not to say that people with a 2 year degree can't learn why or that people with a 4 year degree are always capable of learning what, but that's the general difference.
Obviously doing a proper interview is the only real way to determine what someone is actually capable of, but if you're going to go off education alone, someone with a recent 2 year degree will hit the ground running fairly quickly but may not pick up changes in technology very quickly whereas someone with a recent 4 year degree but little experience will probably take a little while to get started but should, at least in theory be able to pick up technology changes a little quicker.
A 2 year degree from more than 5 years ago however is worth absolutely nothing and may as well be ignored.
Of course the flip side of that is that if those forks were made close to home, they might be more expensive, but on the other hand someone close to home would actually be being paid to make the damned forks.
Cheap offshore labor is a short term thing, eventually you depress the local economy and boost the offshore economy to the point where it isn't cheaper anymore and all you've really accomplished is to transfer some of the local standard of living elsewhere.
I didn't say they don't want to fight the fight by proxy. I don't really know what they want to do anymore, but they won't have bought the patents themselves if that is their intention because they'll lose.
There's no deal to block, Microsoft bought some IP, which doesn't require any approval, and Attachmate is buying Novell which has nothing to do with Microsoft.
Anyone who can't work that one out is daft.
If Microsoft bought the Unix patents and tried to actually do anything with them, they they'd either lose and have worthless patents or win and have the government invalidate their patents to prevent a 100% monopoly. There's no upside for them in that game. Microsoft may have been rooting for SCO, but that's a war they need fought by proxy, they can't fight that themselves.
Well to start with, again that's an engineering position, not just a general college education. Engineering is one of those sectors where people without a degree can't even play let alone compete, and it's a relatively harsh degree program so the number of graduates is fairly low.
The problem with the skilled worker visas is that the people who have them have no rights. It's not so much about competing with people from India, it's about competing with people whose working conditions are essentially a well paid slavery.
If you are in the US on a skilled worker visa the only way you get to stay is if your current employer keeps sponsoring you or you can find a new employer to sponsor you. Sponsoring someone is a fair amount of paperwork, and so even in a really good economy finding a new job on an H1-B isn't exactly easy.
The long and the short of it is that if you're living in the US on one of these kind of visas and you want to stay there, you'll do exactly what your boss says pretty much no matter what because your alternative is to go home. This means that aside from the fact that these workers have salaries and conditions which are substantially lower than their counterparts who are citizens, they also have that complete lack of options which no US citizen can compete with.
An employer will always no that no matter how much you might grovel, no matter how low a salary you might accept, that you have a choice, whereas the H1-B guy doesn't.
The salaries are real, but they're for computer engineering not computer science, at least if the engineering coop program is anything like the one at my university.
75k isn't by any means an outrageous salary for a qualified engineer, but it's not all that much higher than friends of mine got with degrees from public state schools a few years back.
I admit however that I'd forgotten about Cornell in my original statements.
My point was primarily that the Ivy league is seriously overrated, especially the sort of premiere Ivy league schools which everyone associates as being Ivy league schools(Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, etc). The big two Harvard and Yale in particular are astoundingly poor for certain kinds of degrees. Their admission criteria also reflect this.
I may have overstated my case somewhat, but my point still stands. If you want to get a top notch Engineering or Computer Science degree, there are a number of schools which are substantially better than most of the Ivy League schools including some public schools.
Yes you're right, Cornell has a good department(I confess I'd forgotten Cornell was even considered an Ivy school), and Princeton appears to be reasonable. However if you look at this list, you'll see that 10 public universities outrank Harvard and Columbia, and three outrank Princeton.
Given how high the tuition for places like Harvard are, and how extreme the admission criteria. They just don't seem to be worth it for this kind of degree. I got my CS undergrad at UW-Madison, and my tuition for all 4 years was less than a single year at Harvard, and it was a hell of a lot easier to get into.
If you're going to jump through hoops to get into an extremely prestigious private school you'd do better with CMU, MIT, or Stanford.
I'm not an expert on the natural sciences, but I stand by the fact that going to an Ivy for CS is pissing your money away. If you're looking for an expensive private school there are better ones, and there are plenty of top tier public universities which won't require you to give up every single second of your life during high school to get in.
The Ivy League is great for some things, but at that kind of money and time invested just to get in, I just really don't see them being a contender for comp sci degrees.
Ivy League schools are not technical schools. I can't think of a single one of them which has a computer science or engineering program worth mentioning. Hell I don't think they even have much in the way of a general science program. We all presume that the Ivy league is awesome, but if you're not going for some sort of liberal arts degree you're pissing your money away.
Injunctions don't work like that. They don't let you just keep doing the thing they believe to be illegal because they haven't proven it's illegal yet. They get a court order telling you to stop pending the results of the case before the court. This isn't actually unreasonable, pointless perhaps, and if you're of the "information wants to be free" crowd you might object to it on a philosophical bent, but really this isn't any different than what they do in the physical world.
The majority of the population does NOT want to see this pass
Citation needed.
Well, given how amazingly easy fingerprint scanners are to fool(at least the ones mere mortals have access to), it couldn't really be a whole lot worse than fingerprints for a locked system.
That said, despite the obsession with using biometrics to provide some sort of security magic bullet, they're really substantially less secure than pretty much every other security mechanism we have. They seem to be astoundingly easy to fake, and it's not like you can just go and get another one every couple of months to keep it secure. Even if they could map your entire DNA and somehow guarantee the sample was actually from the person providing it, there'd still issues cell mutation, twins etc.
The reality is that despite the fantasies of science fiction writers, biometrics are pretty much crap, having a guy behind bullet proof glass is much more effective, and frankly, cheaper.