Why does everyone on Slashdot think that they know better than the people who spend their free time studying this stuff?
I don't think I know better than someone who studies this stuff. I just think the people who study this stuff have very little to go on, and make up a lot of untested (and perhaps untestable) theories.
It's interesting they're doing some more excavations (though I'm not sure why it wasn't done before). I'm not really certain how it's going to give evidence to this theory one way or another.
Surgeons have experimented with flint scalpels made by modern flint knappers and found them as sharp as surgical steel, easy to sterilize and better at holding their edge.
And also very brittle.
I'm not sure it's such a great idea to have your scalpel break off into pieces while you're operating on a patient. Especially if that scalpel isn't sterile (like in say the neolithic period).
I wish my mod points hadn't just expired, because you just summed it up perfectly.
Really? For the purposes of this article, why?
It seems perfectly reasonable to me to take a set of data and try to model how likely a particular outcome is. That's a very valid question to ask that a statistical model can answer. The model may be flawed, need improvement, or whatever, but that doesn't mean the question isn't one that can't be answered by science. If you invest in it, I guarantee a large return, because complex systems that rely heavily on myriad human variables are of course determined entirely by statistics.
This is simply an invalid analogy. The article isn't saying it can predict the future (or even the past!) based on a statistical model. All it's saying is "just how likely was it for DiMagio to get his streak, given past performance".
Unless you are dealing with quantum effects, you are not dealing with something truly random.
From wikipedia on "electronic (thermal) noise": In any electronic circuit, there exist random variations in current or voltage caused by the random movement of the electrons carrying the current as they are jolted around by thermal energy.
Is that quantum mechanical enough for you?
As for network latency between packets, while it may not be random on a quantum-mechanical level, it's still unpredictable unless you can get on the same lan segment as the target computer. The keyboard timings are taken on a small enough time scale that they're quite unpredictable, and not related to the typist.
That'll be a surprise to the multiple true random number generators build into most operating systems. There's many sources of random data in a computer. Timing between keystrokes, timing of mouse movements, network latency between packets, and of course hardware random number generators that use thermal noise as its source.
So to put it mildly, computers can, and DO generate truly random numbers that are completely unpredictable and free from bias.
(Oh, BTW, to do a Monte-Carlo simulation (which the referenced article is) you actually don't need true random numbers, you only need a pseudo-random source that's free from bias. Those pseudo-random sources do exist, and aren't that even that difficult to code.)
The thing I find strange is the idea of The record book.
As if there's some big "official" book that's published as "The Record Book Of Baseball", and MLB officials all sit around arguing about asterisks. I'm no baseball fan, but I never thought there was "The" record book. Isn't there just a series of "A" record books?
I've never been a big sports fan, but what drives me crazy, especially about a game like this where you win or lose, is how people get all hung up about this record or that record. What does it matter? The players play the game, the people watch the game, they get caught up the in the competition, the game is over. Then people go home and start whipping out their pencil and calculator. That just seems kind of odd to me. The records just seem so created and artificial.
You can attack the individual examples all you like, feel free. They're simply examples used to illustrate a point. Bloggers are never going to have the resources of newspaper journalists. If you think they do, I don't think you have much idea how journalism is conducted.
If the point was to keep people from distributing copies of Reader, why not just simply add a clause that you can only re-distribute it for your own, personal use or for the internal use of your organization?
You're implying the lawyers are thinking about marketing, or the marketing people are thinking about legal implications, or hell the marketing people even KNOWING that internal re-distribution is important for many organizations (sysadmin knowledge). To understand this problem you'd really need a basic understanding of all three parts of the problem.
How many people actually have all those skills, and more to the point, how many people in a company are actually DOING this kind of thing? I'd bet there's not a lot of cross-fertilization happening, especially at a large company like Adobe. When you divide up a product into parts and few people are looking at the whole this kind of thing is bound to happen.
The people working for the newspapers aren't all that different from the people writing blogs.
I don't think most journalists like to admit this, but I think you're actually right.
The BIG difference between the newspaper writers and the bloggers is funding and resources. How many bloggers are there embedded in Iraq for instance? How many have the resources, capital, lawyers, and clout to investigate Watergate, or The Pentagon Papers? I don't recall hearing about any bloggers able to get into the white house press room (but hey, traditional journalists haven't exactly been all that great when they ARE there).
Journalists like to downplay the bloggers as cub-reporters, and bloggers like to imagine they're bringing the REAL information to the people, unfiltered, unedited, blah, blah blah. Both opinions are an exaggeration.
My point is that the bloggers aren't going to ever replace professional journalists. There's some stories that just can't be done by a guy doing a little research after work and on weekends.
Or, is this a case where Adobe tried to sneak one past the public and got busted
Adobe, like any entity, doesn't act as one. They might like to think they all made some big great decision about The Best Approach, but that kind of thing, if it happens, takes place over a period of time.
The most likely scenario is some group at Adobe said "we need a free product to compete with other free products, otherwise we risk being irrelevant!" The marketing people decided what features it needed, the software guys worked on their end, the lawyers did what they do and tried to protect Adobe from liability. Finally the product was released. The lawyers didn't think about marketing, the marketing people didn't think about the legal side of things, and so you got this really dumb EULA that gave all the rights to Adobe, and none to anyone else. It's an effect that often happens at large companies do to compartmentalization, and not enough people looking across the aisles.
the reality is that Photoshop has the acceptance of professionals everywhere, and that kind of inertia will be hard to overcome even if GIMP ultimately exceeds
Market change of established products rarely, if ever start from the top down. It's invariably from the bottom up. There's a constant crop of people doing photo editing that don't necessarily have the $$ to buy Photoshop (and will think the online product sucks ass). Those people might just start using a free product like Gimp. Later on they get real jobs as graphic designers, and are already familiar with Gimp, so why switch?
The bottom-up toppling of Established Products happens over and over. The latest one I learned about was Centronics (which apparently was a real company, not just a printer interface) that was THE company that made printers for Mainframe and Mini computers. They were quite expensive to match the price of the Mainframe and Mini.
The microcomputers came along in the late 70s/early 80s, and of course people were going to want printers for them, but not the multi thousand dollar Centronics. Commodore actually approached centronics with an idea to use the 6502 chip to make a much lower cost printer, affordable for someone buying a microcomputer. They were going to help them develop the product, etc. Centronics essentially said "no", so Commodore went to the Japanese company Epson with the same deal. Epson made the print head, and commodore developed the controller interface. That was the first cheap dot-matrix printer. Guess which company still makes printers, and which one most people have never heard of, or think it's just some strange old interface name?
but it suggests that organizations with computer labs and such are supposed to negotiate a volume license with Adobe.
I doubt it. It sounds like Adobe just wants to maintain distribution rights. Essentially to squash anyone keeping copies to distribute. (And maybe get deals with any OEMs that want to have reader pre-installed on their computers). How many people in a computer lab, or small business read through the license of "free" software that's as common and trusted as Adobe Reader? (And would expect this strange, "you have to download it each time for each computer" implication?) Not many. I bet if you contacted the sales people they wouldn't even have a way to sell you a site license for reader.
I think the most likely scenario is just what you described, boilerplate re-use. The marketing people don't talk to the lawyers, and would never even think about multiple downloads.
who's to say they won't change it back again at some point in the future?
Anything is possible. But what's more important is what's likely.
Adobe has really little to gain by changing it back to current incarnation of the license. They're in the business of producing and selling software, not tricking people into given them rights to sell stock photography. They won't change it back because it'd be a pretty obviously dumb business move by Adobe. This really highlights all the problems with using someone else's equipment to host and processes personal data files.
No, it really highlights the fact that many software companies don't really understand the legal implications of hosting someones data. They likely just called up the lawyers and said "make sure we don't get burned somehow by hosting this content". The lawyers pulled out some boilerplate language and changed it around a little bit, not thinking that the guy submitting content might actually want to retain some of his rights (end users have right? Who'd have thought that!).
Not every company is trying to screw you over at every single moment. They tend to pick and choose those times carefully;).
I thought you can't get security updates for win2000 any more?
No. Security updates for Win2k are available through 7/13/2010. You may be thinking of "Mainstream support" where Microsoft will fix bugs. That ended on 6/30/2005, and includes things like the daylight-saving change. If so that's a BAD upgrade path.
It's not very good. But even XP will only get you Mainstream support until 4/14/2009 (unless Microsoft extends support). Vista isn't really a good choice either of course.
Because of Vista, none of the upgrade paths are all that attractive right now. Maybe they chose 2000 because the requirements are a bit lower, and licenses via ebay are dirt cheap? Anyone still on Windows 98 in 2008, and hiring an 11 year old as the network admin is obviously very cash strapped
Why do so many people think employing children is illegal? Do you all think the television and movie studios should be in jail for employing Gary Coleman? (That annoying red-haired kid who played his adoptive brother I'd say a resounding YES, but for different reasons of course). They merely treat it as any other unpaid student-held post, like Yearbook Editor or Class Secretary
You might want to check your local employment laws. I wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal to not pay someone for actual work (like done by a network administrator) rather than something purely educational like Yearbook editor, or Class Secretary).
That's true. The biggest downside of working on a OSS project though, especially over the summer, is it doesn't bring in the small pieces of green paper that let most of us do things we consider necessary, like eating.
I remember being a College student, and paying for the majority of it myself. Money was important.
I think the US is hardly in a good ethical place to start putting pressure on Switzerland.
Nice segway into an attack on the Bush administration. Unfortunately it's totally irrelevant as to whether it's hunky-dory for Switzerland to help tax evaders (which is the actual topic we're discussing).
That's not even really scapegoating, it's just a dodge to change the topic to something you'd rather discuss. You really need to work on more effective, and less obvious dodges.
Since you asked about a JOB rather than "how do I learn programming", I'll skip the usual dumb "join an open source project!" response.
Personally I think an actual job is a better route, because it'll put you in contact with more people who use the software, rather than implementing some feature request someone made possibly on another continent. Plus, you actually get PAID (which is important to anyone in College without rich parents). Actual job experience looks a LOT better to most employers than working on a random, often unheard of open-source project. Not to say open source stuff isn't good experience, I'm just not certain how many employers value it.
As to how, this may be obvious to you, but many Colleges and Universities have programs to connect students with companies. Those can be quite beneficial, and you usually get paid pretty decently compared to most student jobs. Have you not looked at the various job boards, talked to your instructors, etc?
I'd also recommend just looking internal to your University. Many departments have come to use the student programmers as a cheap workforce. Scientists often need someone to do some programming for them, though they may want you to program in something quite outdated, like FORTRAN. Departments have programming needs as well. I think one summer I had three different programming gigs.
That if you give kids responsibility early on, they'll step up.
It does? I think it shows there's some kids out their that are ready and interested in this responsibility. My last crop of interns at work were college juniors, and couldn't be trusted to make copies, much less administer anything.
Sounds like you hired a bunch of idiots. I used to be a college junior working in a computer lab 10+ years ago. We were all extremely competent and very well able to administrate the network, the PCs, the servers, and even develop some software to help us administrate the system and provide functions to the users. We got a pretty big leash from the Head Guy (who generally knew less than us about the systems), and we used it well to learn all the systems.
It's got nothing to do with age, and everything to do with the individuals.
That's a very odd defintion of "real". My definition of a real administrator would be someone who acts as the adminisrator. Titles be damned. I'd say someone who "select and install a gateway security appliance largely by himself." and "maps out the network to find out what was on it." and "is now the technical support much of the time on everything from printer jams to setting up an external drive to backing up the school's most important server. " is acting as the administrator. like how anyone in the administration figured it would be ok to have a minor sign contracts... An 11-year old isn't legal to work
Who said that? I'm sure his parents signed the contract (assuming they've made this all nice and legal, which I hope they have). As someone already pointed out, it's perfectly legal to have children work. There's just special rules to protect them. Did you think all those child actors were breaking the law?
I really wonder why people make so many assumptions about posts.
Nothing has any meaning without context. My guess is when people provide very short posts, with little to no context and background, the reader is forced to make up a background and context to understand it. Often times the wrong assumptions are made.
If you'd like to avoid this, try to provide some more information about the general point you're trying to argue and how it fits into the discussion.
In short, don't assume everyone knows who you are, where you're coming from, and exactly what you're trying to say. We're all mostly strangers here, so the normal rules of face-face communication with someone you kind of know go out the window.
Heh. That's certainly what the media keeps talking about. The fact is nobody really knows if the US is currently in a recession. You can prognosticate and speculate all you like, but it won't change the fact that nobody knows.
and the EU (but especially Germany, with mind boggling high taxes) are looknig for someone to lay the blame on for their own problems again. Yawn.
Oh please. Switzerland has been allowing people to hide assets from tax authorities for a LONG time. Is that so hard to own up to? The truth is there's some political will created to put pressure on Switzerland to stop their tax-evasion business. I don't know if it'll happen or not, but it's hard to see what's wrong with different countries being pissed off at the Swiss from helping tax evaders hide money from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone on Slashdot think that they know better than the people who spend their free time studying this stuff?
I don't think I know better than someone who studies this stuff. I just think the people who study this stuff have very little to go on, and make up a lot of untested (and perhaps untestable) theories.
It's interesting they're doing some more excavations (though I'm not sure why it wasn't done before). I'm not really certain how it's going to give evidence to this theory one way or another.
Dark-skinned humans would have suffered vitamin C deficits in colder, darker europe
It's actually Vitamin D, (the body can't make vitamin C), but otherwise you're completely correct.
Surgeons have experimented with flint scalpels made by modern flint knappers and found them as sharp as surgical steel, easy to sterilize and better at holding their edge.
And also very brittle.
I'm not sure it's such a great idea to have your scalpel break off into pieces while you're operating on a patient. Especially if that scalpel isn't sterile (like in say the neolithic period).
[x] George.
I wish my mod points hadn't just expired, because you just summed it up perfectly.
Really? For the purposes of this article, why?
It seems perfectly reasonable to me to take a set of data and try to model how likely a particular outcome is. That's a very valid question to ask that a statistical model can answer. The model may be flawed, need improvement, or whatever, but that doesn't mean the question isn't one that can't be answered by science.
If you invest in it, I guarantee a large return, because complex systems that rely heavily on myriad human variables are of course determined entirely by statistics.
This is simply an invalid analogy. The article isn't saying it can predict the future (or even the past!) based on a statistical model. All it's saying is "just how likely was it for DiMagio to get his streak, given past performance".
Unless you are dealing with quantum effects, you are not dealing with something truly random.
From wikipedia on "electronic (thermal) noise":
In any electronic circuit, there exist random variations in current or voltage caused by the random movement of the electrons carrying the current as they are jolted around by thermal energy.
Is that quantum mechanical enough for you?
As for network latency between packets, while it may not be random on a quantum-mechanical level, it's still unpredictable unless you can get on the same lan segment as the target computer. The keyboard timings are taken on a small enough time scale that they're quite unpredictable, and not related to the typist.
Computers do not actually generate random numbers
That'll be a surprise to the multiple true random number generators build into most operating systems. There's many sources of random data in a computer. Timing between keystrokes, timing of mouse movements, network latency between packets, and of course hardware random number generators that use thermal noise as its source.
So to put it mildly, computers can, and DO generate truly random numbers that are completely unpredictable and free from bias.
(Oh, BTW, to do a Monte-Carlo simulation (which the referenced article is) you actually don't need true random numbers, you only need a pseudo-random source that's free from bias. Those pseudo-random sources do exist, and aren't that even that difficult to code.)
The thing I find strange is the idea of
The record book.
As if there's some big "official" book that's published as
"The Record Book Of Baseball", and MLB officials all sit around arguing about asterisks. I'm no baseball fan, but I never thought there was "The" record book. Isn't there just a series of "A" record books?
I've never been a big sports fan, but what drives me crazy, especially about a game like this where you win or lose, is how people get all hung up about this record or that record. What does it matter? The players play the game, the people watch the game, they get caught up the in the competition, the game is over. Then people go home and start whipping out their pencil and calculator. That just seems kind of odd to me. The records just seem so created and artificial.
You can attack the individual examples all you like, feel free. They're simply examples used to illustrate a point. Bloggers are never going to have the resources of newspaper journalists. If you think they do, I don't think you have much idea how journalism is conducted.
If the point was to keep people from distributing copies of Reader, why not just simply add a clause that you can only re-distribute it for your own, personal use or for the internal use of your organization?
You're implying the lawyers are thinking about marketing, or the marketing people are thinking about legal implications, or hell the marketing people even KNOWING that internal re-distribution is important for many organizations (sysadmin knowledge). To understand this problem you'd really need a basic understanding of all three parts of the problem.
How many people actually have all those skills, and more to the point, how many people in a company are actually DOING this kind of thing? I'd bet there's not a lot of cross-fertilization happening, especially at a large company like Adobe. When you divide up a product into parts and few people are looking at the whole this kind of thing is bound to happen.
The people working for the newspapers aren't all that different from the people writing blogs.
I don't think most journalists like to admit this, but I think you're actually right.
The BIG difference between the newspaper writers and the bloggers is funding and resources. How many bloggers are there embedded in Iraq for instance? How many have the resources, capital, lawyers, and clout to investigate Watergate, or The Pentagon Papers? I don't recall hearing about any bloggers able to get into the white house press room (but hey, traditional journalists haven't exactly been all that great when they ARE there).
Journalists like to downplay the bloggers as cub-reporters, and bloggers like to imagine they're bringing the REAL information to the people, unfiltered, unedited, blah, blah blah. Both opinions are an exaggeration.
My point is that the bloggers aren't going to ever replace professional journalists. There's some stories that just can't be done by a guy doing a little research after work and on weekends.
Or, is this a case where Adobe tried to sneak one past the public and got busted
Adobe, like any entity, doesn't act as one. They might like to think they all made some big great decision about The Best Approach, but that kind of thing, if it happens, takes place over a period of time.
The most likely scenario is some group at Adobe said "we need a free product to compete with other free products, otherwise we risk being irrelevant!" The marketing people decided what features it needed, the software guys worked on their end, the lawyers did what they do and tried to protect Adobe from liability. Finally the product was released. The lawyers didn't think about marketing, the marketing people didn't think about the legal side of things, and so you got this really dumb EULA that gave all the rights to Adobe, and none to anyone else. It's an effect that often happens at large companies do to compartmentalization, and not enough people looking across the aisles.
the reality is that Photoshop has the acceptance of professionals everywhere, and that kind of inertia will be hard to overcome even if GIMP ultimately exceeds
Market change of established products rarely, if ever start from the top down. It's invariably from the bottom up. There's a constant crop of people doing photo editing that don't necessarily have the $$ to buy Photoshop (and will think the online product sucks ass). Those people might just start using a free product like Gimp. Later on they get real jobs as graphic designers, and are already familiar with Gimp, so why switch?
The bottom-up toppling of Established Products happens over and over. The latest one I learned about was Centronics (which apparently was a real company, not just a printer interface) that was THE company that made printers for Mainframe and Mini computers. They were quite expensive to match the price of the Mainframe and Mini.
The microcomputers came along in the late 70s/early 80s, and of course people were going to want printers for them, but not the multi thousand dollar Centronics. Commodore actually approached centronics with an idea to use the 6502 chip to make a much lower cost printer, affordable for someone buying a microcomputer. They were going to help them develop the product, etc. Centronics essentially said "no", so Commodore went to the Japanese company Epson with the same deal. Epson made the print head, and commodore developed the controller interface. That was the first cheap dot-matrix printer. Guess which company still makes printers, and which one most people have never heard of, or think it's just some strange old interface name?
but it suggests that organizations with computer labs and such are supposed to negotiate a volume license with Adobe.
I doubt it. It sounds like Adobe just wants to maintain distribution rights. Essentially to squash anyone keeping copies to distribute. (And maybe get deals with any OEMs that want to have reader pre-installed on their computers). How many people in a computer lab, or small business read through the license of "free" software that's as common and trusted as Adobe Reader? (And would expect this strange, "you have to download it each time for each computer" implication?) Not many. I bet if you contacted the sales people they wouldn't even have a way to sell you a site license for reader.
I think the most likely scenario is just what you described, boilerplate re-use. The marketing people don't talk to the lawyers, and would never even think about multiple downloads.
who's to say they won't change it back again at some point in the future?
Anything is possible. But what's more important is what's likely.
Adobe has really little to gain by changing it back to current incarnation of the license. They're in the business of producing and selling software, not tricking people into given them rights to sell stock photography. They won't change it back because it'd be a pretty obviously dumb business move by Adobe.
This really highlights all the problems with using someone else's equipment to host and processes personal data files.
No, it really highlights the fact that many software companies don't really understand the legal implications of hosting someones data. They likely just called up the lawyers and said "make sure we don't get burned somehow by hosting this content". The lawyers pulled out some boilerplate language and changed it around a little bit, not thinking that the guy submitting content might actually want to retain some of his rights (end users have right? Who'd have thought that!).
Not every company is trying to screw you over at every single moment. They tend to pick and choose those times carefully
I thought you can't get security updates for win2000 any more?
No. Security updates for Win2k are available through 7/13/2010. You may be thinking of "Mainstream support" where Microsoft will fix bugs. That ended on 6/30/2005, and includes things like the daylight-saving change.
If so that's a BAD upgrade path.
It's not very good. But even XP will only get you Mainstream support until 4/14/2009 (unless Microsoft extends support). Vista isn't really a good choice either of course.
Because of Vista, none of the upgrade paths are all that attractive right now. Maybe they chose 2000 because the requirements are a bit lower, and licenses via ebay are dirt cheap? Anyone still on Windows 98 in 2008, and hiring an 11 year old as the network admin is obviously very cash strapped
Of course it's legal - if they don't pay him!
Why do so many people think employing children is illegal? Do you all think the television and movie studios should be in jail for employing Gary Coleman? (That annoying red-haired kid who played his adoptive brother I'd say a resounding YES, but for different reasons of course).
They merely treat it as any other unpaid student-held post, like Yearbook Editor or Class Secretary
You might want to check your local employment laws. I wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal to not pay someone for actual work (like done by a network administrator) rather than something purely educational like Yearbook editor, or Class Secretary).
That's true. The biggest downside of working on a OSS project though, especially over the summer, is it doesn't bring in the small pieces of green paper that let most of us do things we consider necessary, like eating.
I remember being a College student, and paying for the majority of it myself. Money was important.
No, sounds like he hired a bunch of people, and then had them make copies.
That's possible too, I hadn't thought of that.
So which is it "duffbeer703"? Did you hire idiots, or turn perfectly competent people disfunctional by treating them like idiots?
Either way, it's not a terribly good reflection on yourself.
I think the US is hardly in a good ethical place to start putting pressure on Switzerland.
Nice segway into an attack on the Bush administration. Unfortunately it's totally irrelevant as to whether it's hunky-dory for Switzerland to help tax evaders (which is the actual topic we're discussing).
That's not even really scapegoating, it's just a dodge to change the topic to something you'd rather discuss. You really need to work on more effective, and less obvious dodges.
Since you asked about a JOB rather than "how do I learn programming", I'll skip the usual dumb "join an open source project!" response.
Personally I think an actual job is a better route, because it'll put you in contact with more people who use the software, rather than implementing some feature request someone made possibly on another continent. Plus, you actually get PAID (which is important to anyone in College without rich parents). Actual job experience looks a LOT better to most employers than working on a random, often unheard of open-source project. Not to say open source stuff isn't good experience, I'm just not certain how many employers value it.
As to how, this may be obvious to you, but many Colleges and Universities have programs to connect students with companies. Those can be quite beneficial, and you usually get paid pretty decently compared to most student jobs. Have you not looked at the various job boards, talked to your instructors, etc?
I'd also recommend just looking internal to your University. Many departments have come to use the student programmers as a cheap workforce. Scientists often need someone to do some programming for them, though they may want you to program in something quite outdated, like FORTRAN. Departments have programming needs as well. I think one summer I had three different programming gigs.
That if you give kids responsibility early on, they'll step up.
It does? I think it shows there's some kids out their that are ready and interested in this responsibility.
My last crop of interns at work were college juniors, and couldn't be trusted to make copies, much less administer anything.
Sounds like you hired a bunch of idiots. I used to be a college junior working in a computer lab 10+ years ago. We were all extremely competent and very well able to administrate the network, the PCs, the servers, and even develop some software to help us administrate the system and provide functions to the users. We got a pretty big leash from the Head Guy (who generally knew less than us about the systems), and we used it well to learn all the systems.
It's got nothing to do with age, and everything to do with the individuals.
Obviously he's not really the admin, his mom is
That's a very odd defintion of "real". My definition of a real administrator would be someone who acts as the adminisrator. Titles be damned. I'd say someone who "select and install a gateway security appliance largely by himself." and "maps out the network to find out what was on it." and "is now the technical support much of the time on everything from printer jams to setting up an external drive to backing up the school's most important server. " is acting as the administrator.
like how anyone in the administration figured it would be ok to have a minor sign contracts
An 11-year old isn't legal to work
Who said that? I'm sure his parents signed the contract (assuming they've made this all nice and legal, which I hope they have). As someone already pointed out, it's perfectly legal to have children work. There's just special rules to protect them. Did you think all those child actors were breaking the law?
I really wonder why people make so many assumptions about posts.
Nothing has any meaning without context. My guess is when people provide very short posts, with little to no context and background, the reader is forced to make up a background and context to understand it. Often times the wrong assumptions are made.
If you'd like to avoid this, try to provide some more information about the general point you're trying to argue and how it fits into the discussion.
In short, don't assume everyone knows who you are, where you're coming from, and exactly what you're trying to say. We're all mostly strangers here, so the normal rules of face-face communication with someone you kind of know go out the window.
the US , currently in a recession,
Heh. That's certainly what the media keeps talking about. The fact is nobody really knows if the US is currently in a recession. You can prognosticate and speculate all you like, but it won't change the fact that nobody knows.
and the EU (but especially Germany, with mind boggling high taxes) are looknig for someone to lay the blame on for their own problems again. Yawn.
Oh please. Switzerland has been allowing people to hide assets from tax authorities for a LONG time. Is that so hard to own up to? The truth is there's some political will created to put pressure on Switzerland to stop their tax-evasion business. I don't know if it'll happen or not, but it's hard to see what's wrong with different countries being pissed off at the Swiss from helping tax evaders hide money from them.