That's precisely what NY Senator Chuck Schumer asked. America is becoming a nation of high-paid lawyers & doctors & ballplayers, serviced by low-paid walmart workers & sanitary workers & handymen. What about the middle class, constantly squeezed out of existence by these Benedict Arnold CEOs ? Gosh, I sound like John Kerry & I don't even like that guy that much.
Hemos - Ultimately, free trade works out well
John Maynard Keynes - In the long run, we are all dead.
1. Why do economists get off so easy ? What is "ultimately" ? What happens in the short term ??
2. My friends and colleagues have been laid off due to outsourcing to India. People writing code are becoming handymen, plumbers, delivering pizza. Nothing against those "careers", but they didn't spend 4 years of school getting CS degrees to end up delivering pizza now, did they ?
3. The same New York Times ( 30 little turles - Feb 29 edition link here) has a long op-ed by Friedman where he argues thus - Be glad that Indians are writing code & not becoming suicide bombers like the Arabs.
Friedman contends that America is secure because Indians are writing code & not blowing themselves up! How ridiculous is that ?!
Say your boss wants to make a deal with you. He says get to work at 7am, you say 9am. He says "Lets talk about it". Now, you can't really say "No", can you ? Think about it. If you did, you'll sound unreasonable & stubborn. People may suspect you have something fishy going on, that absolutely prevents you from even talking about it. So you are forced to say "Ok, lets talk".
Standard management tactic.
IBM has a $96 share price with 166 billion market cap. When they say "Lets talk about it", someone worth only 5 bucks a share and two quarters of operating losses is forced to say "ok".
Not at all. 1. State needs money for bicycles - we call them "taxes". 2. Bicycle is an idea means just that. Its an idea, just like every single formula in Mathematica is just an idea. Yet, do you know the net worth of Stephen Wolfram ? 3. I get the impression you are running away fast from Marx towards the free market candyman. Look, Marx is respected as an economist just as much as Adam Smith is. Its just that Smith has turned out the victor in the real world. Marx was the victor for a while in the last century under Lenin, until Stalin the despot totally hijacked Marxism, just like Andrew Fastow of Enron hijacked capitalism.
Doesn't mean Free Market right, Marxism wrong. First law of Philosophy - "Every idea has its time" . The time is not right/ripe for Professor Eben Moglen's idea. One fine day we will get there, and I look forward to it myself. But that day is not today.
The good Professor is simply reiterating what Marx said about 150 years ago.
eg. Lets say bicycle is an idea. The state outlaws private ownership of bicycles, because ideas belong to the masses, they are not one man's private property. So nobody can own a bicycle. But the state places free bicycles at the corner of every street and every avenue. So you walk to a corner, pick up a bicycle & pedal to wherever you want & leave it at the other corner. No tolls, no insurance, no gasoline, no ownership, no maintainence, no hassle.
Malthus read this and told Marx he was an ostrich.
That's the problem right there. You can't pretend man is an ostrich, so lets be benign & do away with the notion of private property & share & take just what we need & so on. This socialist utopia is ideal, but unfortunately we don't live there. Capitalism says man is not benign - man is malign. He will want ownership. In that sense of the principle, you can own intangible ideas just as much as you own actual tangible objects - no difference. That's just the reality we live in. Deal with it.
I see you are what is known in economics circles as an "Optimist":)
Fairness is a loaded term. You speak about "fair compensation". FYI, there is no such thing. Who is to say that the 60K a programmer makes is "fair" wages ? Maybe the programmer is a single 22 year old kid with no liabilities - he probably needs only 40K. Maybe the programmer is a 55 year old man with arthritis & a large family with 5 kids & plenty to pay for mortgage & health insurance - he obviously needs lot more than 60K.
This is why Marx said - "To each according to his need". Read the Communist Manifesto - the word "Fair" appears in it a million times. Read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" - there is no fair in it.
Under capitalism, market determines the wages. There's nothing fair about it. But that's the way it is. This is why Britney Spears will ALWAYS outsell Wagner or Mozart or whoever.
Again, you are wandering in the Marx garden of utopia. You say - "In a fair market, blah blah...". There are no fair markets, only free markets. Big difference. Marx said, if man could co-operate instead of compete, then we would have all kinds of products, a great variety, instead of just mindless imitations of the same product each trying to undercut & outsell the other. Malthus read this, rolled his eyeballs & said - yeah and if man was ostrich, then we wouldn't have the notion of private property & we'd all live in peace & harmony & so on...
In a fair market, average American programmers would have secure jobs just as much as the Indian programmers. Do they ?
Rules must be internalized - they always are. When's the last time the EFF composed a song, or signed up an artist ? The only rules that'll get accepted in any industry are ones that emerge from within that industry - not from outside. Now if a bunch of EFF folks join RIAA as management, and then propose these rules, that's different...
Your problem is better known in economics as "The Labor Theory of Value". Karl Marx was a huge proponent of the same. Predictably, Adam Smith & other capitalists totally disagree with it.
You ask "Why should a quick tinkle on a xylophone be better rewarded than months of work on an orchestral masterpiece? " Why ? Because that's the way the world is. If you spend 8 hours a day building a highly creative straw statue in your backyard while I spend same 8 hours mindlessly slogging in a corporate IT outfit, guess who gets paid at the end of the month ? Your creative impulses are fine, but nobody wants your straw statue:( My labor has value because the market wants the end product. Your labor has value only to yourself. Deal with it.
Not quite.
In the US, tv scans every second line so 60hz is only 30 fps.
Specifically, NTSC = 30 fps
PAL = 25 fps = much closer to 24 fps, which is one reason most indies shot using a camcorder opt for a PAL camcorder than an NTSC one. The Canon XL1 PAL version, the Sony PD150 PAL, the Panasonic VX100 PAL outsell their NTSC versions for the same reason.
Don't you know, the entire IT industry in the You Yes of Yay is following the best open source policy = Open the source to Indian programmers, Close the source to American programmers. As you can see, it is very successful, very profitable, very popular open source policy. Why don't you follow the same ?
Sorry, simply had to get that off my chest.
YALOOP ( Yet Another Laid Off due to Outsouring Programmer )
A few years ago when I did my Masters in CS, we had to take a bunch of courses in Advanced Algorithms - math oriented stuff like Primality Testing, Numerical Methods for equation solving, interpolation, range-kutta, pseudorandomness & the like.
Java wasn't widely available at that time, but all the browsers supported Javascript quite well. The Professor was a math guy, a computer neophyte who preferred that we turn in solutions ( pseudocode) using pen & paper. He didn't care too much about programming them in a real language.
I wrote all my assignments in Javascript - he got his pseudocode, and he could click "Execute" & actually run it in a browser. He was quite impressed & I got an A on that.
My own beef with JS is, big-number support isn'
t robust. I tried testing primality for 12 digit numbers & the browser would just freeze up. However, JS actually holds up well for number crunching in the 8-10 digit range.
Why the hell do you need a job ?
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Score : -5 : Long misguided rant from leftist bastard --- I would phrase it thusly - you needn't have a job in the first place.
I come from a third world country where everybody has to have a job, else they'll soon die because they'll have no money, so no food, no shelter, no nothing.
My idea of a first world country like the USA was - a. plenty of money to go around b. very little need to work or to have a job. c. simply pursue your natural inclination d. an intelligent society
I'm not advocating Disneyland, or some decadent Roman society where everyone's screwing around. I mean, people living life like Aristotle advocated - "pursuit of reason" - pursue poetry, fine arts, sculpture, literature, philosophy, physics, astronomy,...
Instead, this 1st world country is actually a hundred times worse than my 3rd world country. Atleast in a socialist nation, your jobs were sort-of guaranteed, you had lots of vacations & holidays, & you weren't stressed out. Here in the hire-n-fire crucible of the USA, GDP is the only thing sacrosanct, everybody works works works, NOT out of his choice but because people are burdened by sheer debt & bills & mortgages & a culture of overconsumption, President Bush proudly declares "we are the hardest working nation in the planet" ( how exactly is that a good thing ? ), the most welllknown intellectual of the nation on whom literally everything hinges is an ugly old bespactacled economist named Alan Greenspan, and people have such black-n-white partitions of life, like you do. ie. Life = Lots of Work + Escape to Family on weekends/2-week Vacations
What about a variety, like in a socialist country. eg. Life = Some Work + Some Family + Some Arts + Some Sciences + Some hobbies + Some... every single day ?
Back in my country, you could have a conversation with the "average guy" that ranged all over the map - from philosophy to astronomy to films to music ( I mean deep music theory, tones & notes & so forth not junk Britney-Spears pop) to literature - Average guys took active part in theatre, sports, book clubs, sciences, solved puzzles,...it was a poor country but there was so little stress and so much happiness to go around. People had time on their hands, they pursued a variety of things.
Here you have terribly hardworking populace, so much opulence, much more stress, 15 foreclosures per 1000 households,...need I go on? Why the fuck do you need to work so hard ? Screw the GDP, just take it easy & get a life. I mean, really, go to your local library, find a new hobby & actually practice it, not just dabble & escape to football on the weekends. Lobby the government to support a more diverse lifestyle, where, like Thoreau advocated, you can "live life deliberately", not just plain exist like you now do.
I told all this to a colleague of mine, a staunch first world American citizen, & he plays the Beatles record for me - "Get back Jojo! Get back to where you once belong!" ---
So you learn Linux x86 Assembly. Then what ? Are there jobs in Linux x86 Assembly ? If yes, where ? Out here in the US, or someplace in India ?
Or are you suggesting people learn x86 Assembly for kicks ? That's cool too, but you know, its a bad economy...have you looked at the recent unemployment numbers...people live with rising debt, record number of bankruptcies, the country struggles with 500 billion deficit....not exactly a bright time for polishing my x86 skills...what do you think ?
Outsourcing is purely a currency play. $1 USD equals about 45 Rupees, so your $10,000 translates to 450,000 rupees or "4.5 lakhs" as they call it out there. That's a big deal to an Indian where 25% of the population ie. 250,000,000 people, live on less than a $1 a day.
So you're gaming the system - the currency markets- by taking American cash & buying Indian laborers at these "cheap" rates. This isn't free trade at all.
What would free trade look like? Say the American could go live in India. Say he could have a nice 2-bdrm house, subsidized education in a socialist economy where a PhD level education costs you less than $100 ( I'm not kidding - am an Indian myself and have benefitted from this ). Books that cost $20 here are less than a dollar out there. Notion of copyright is just on paper - everything gets pirated, duplicated, with no real legal hassle. Say the American could have cheap health care. No notion of monthly health insurance - just walk into any hospital when you're ill, & one of the numerous MDs - not nurses, but an MD would personally look at you. Say the American... you get the idea - ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL == Free Trade. Otherwise, you are simply gaming the system.
The shareholders don't want them taking risks with their money.
If you want to make money, and that's your only goal, my goodness - there's hundred million foolproof ways to do it eg. run a hedge fund, invest in practical & innovative technology, work in real estate, sell fast food burgers, be a middleman - run a brokerage & take a cut for every transaction, umpteen schemes to pry your fellow human of his wealth.
Making a film to make money is such an elaborate enterprise, like trying to reach your nose with the hand behind your back. People are capricious, tastes change, what works today doesn't work tomorrow, people fancy something for a while & then move on to something else - given all these tiresome variables, artforms like film,book,theatre must be funded by society not to increase shareholder stake but to simply promote culture. After all, art is simply a celebration of humanity. Why do we celebrate the 4th of July ? Does it increase shareholder value ?
Gosh man, business isn't the only end, you got to live your life too, and that's what art is all about.
While I agree with you from a theoretical standpoint, I'm sure you are aware why things like this get overlooked in day-to-day corporate IT programming tasks. eg. Manager says, write a UI that accepts username & account, and then spits out user transactions . During design phase, you invariably make the code hack-able so its easy to test. ie. I could put in "*" for account and it would spit out transactions of ALL users, regardless of the username. This is a useful backdoor, especially in development time when your UI has to interact with somebody else's data repository in some compplicated fashion. Ofcourse, its a given that the input validation logic must be modified and backdoor must be taken out when the UI is actually deployed. But corporate practices being what they are, someone else takes ownership of the code at that stage, and either doesn't understand the "star-feature" ( *) , or thinks its cool to have this in case of emergency debugging, so leaves it there. Soon, this stupid program that should have been running standalone on someone's box, gets a facelift and is shoved on the internet. Some cracker comes along and puts in a star for account & gets all the transactions, & pretty soon, register.co.uk gets wind of this and reports it on front page. by then, original programmer has moved on to some other task, requiring a new back-door:)
As a person of Indian origin who consumes the 10% of those 1000 Bollywood films that eventually do make it to the US market, and as someone who is acutely aware of Bollywood happenings on an almost day-to-day basis ( I must say the average Indian would easily fall into this category ), I think this is the right move.
Bollywood on P2P - way to go!
But why ? 1. The average expat Indian watches Bollywood purely out of nostalgia. There is a sense of loss in leaving one's home country & settling abroad, and Bollywood manages to help one cope with that loss rather effectively. P2P would cater to that segment quite nicely.
2. Despite this comment, Bollywood does large churn out pulp. Devdas & Lagaan are no different. At its core, Bollywood themes are hackneyed and trite - hero gets heroine, a couple of songs & dances, few mild conflicts ( mother-in-law versus bride, dad versus son, man versus the corrupt system, hero vs villian, etc ). So when you have a thousand of these made, year after year after year, you do have to wonder what happens to quality. Even as a fan of Bollywood, I'm not ashamed to claim that maybe 1, atmost 2 films per year, would make it to my DVD library. The rest are just fluff - to be consumed & discarded, like a can of pop. 2 out of 1000 films is 0.2%. That being the case, it seems almost criminal to waste the amount of resources needed to bring pulp onto the large screen on your local multiplex, and cause major traffic jams in local Indian hubs like Jersey City ( NJ ), Iselin ( NJ ), Flushing ( NY ) etc, where Indian communities hog the narrow arteries with their Toyotas blaring Bollywood songs as they head towards the latest Friday release, inconveniencing the local populace, not to mention the untold damage to cells in the cranium and the basal ganglia that get permanently damaged watching crap of this magnitude week after week on the large screen in surround sound. Its much better these Indians stay home and download these "Bollywood blockbusters" as they are known, on the DSL lines using P2P networks and watch themn on 15" laptops - saves gasoline for the commute, electicity needed to work the multiplex, and annoyance to local communities, plus hopefully a few brain cells.
3. Piracy is rampant among Indian film consumers - any video store in an Indian hub will sell you the latest Bollywood offering, pirated version, for $2. The industry loses a big chunk of change. Maybe P2P would pump some money back into the industry.
4. Mafia - Perhaps no industry is more tightly controlled by the underworld than Bollywood. Dons operating out of Dubai ( UAE ), South Africa, and Staten Island even, control the operation of the industry and screening of its films. P2P can subvert this whole criminal enterprise - finally technology beats the bad guys.
But, lets see if this actually takes off - efforts to reform Bollywood are few and far between, and get shut down rather suddenly - P2P may face the same fate.
"Her premise isn't that being liberal is treasonous, it's that liberals almost always side with America's enemies. Which is pretty self evident to any rational person."
Dude, you are, like, so wrong. Who declared France to be America's enemy ? She did. Then she turns around & says all liberals are traitors 'cause they like France. You expect us to keep track of which country is Coulter's pal and which one's the enemy at any point in time ? Liberals like to mostly get along - Coulter likes to mostly drive a wedge. Such a divisive bitch.
I'm not a citizen ( I can't vote ), and yet I do find some of these books quite fascinating. I managed to read big chunks of all of them. The worst is undoubtedly Coulter.
Coulter's a real bitch. I wonder how anybody can stand her. She says stuff like - "you must have the IQ of a microwave if you think there is another way of thinking besides liberal & rightwing."
She totally knocks centrists. Mainstream USA is not as polarized as she makes it out to be. A lot of liberals & rightwing folks do find consensus on several issues - but they simply don't exist in Coulter's hate-filled world.
Time to face up to the facts. If you are still working in IT, in the USA, its just a matter of time ( few months, maybe a year, maybe two ) before you are terminated from your job.
There are people who tell you stuff like - if you are a really good programmer, you have nothing to worry. Balls! You could be a kernel hacker and you will be replaced. Lemme give you actual stats - every 365 days, 250,000 programmers are minted in Bangalore - and that's just one city. There's atleast 5 cities in India where the quantity & quality is comparable.
Now, even if you think you are creme de la creme, you are uber hacker dude, you are the top 0.001% of the IT population, you can still be replaced by one of
0.001 * 250,000 = 250 Indian prgrammers.
Plug in your percentage worth and do you own math, but the fact is this - I personally know of Indian programmers who code device drivers and hack assembly for a living at a fraction of the price they pay here in the US of A. We're not talking about "pick up VB in 14 day" type losers - there's a whole different breed out there and they WILL assimilate you - just a matter of time.
You basically have 2 options -
a. if you don't care about IT, you just want a job & a paycheck - then just switch careers. Pick a job that can't be outsourced - sales manager in local walmart, or a paralegal or a train driver or a...
b. if you MUST do IT for a living and nothing else - well, you can move to India and work as an expat. India has a whole bunch of foreigners working there on expat visas.
economics is a noncompassionate science.
My brain's hard drive spins on its axis, anti clock wise. Penetrating poetry pokes my peripheral vision like a fully charged capacitor on a hot summer day My eyes glaze over Glazier's prose His profound instructions verbose in machine language, almost optimized for O(1) execution on a fast Althon crippled by the superslow multitasking windows OS, Yet, continue to register their keys, in my hashtable of memories.
I wouldn't exactly call 100 grand a bounty...if you live in NYC, its the minimum you'd need to pay rent & support a wife and two kids.
On another tack, I see this as a trend, perhaps an offshoot of angel-investors+freelancing, where rich individuals ( the angel-investors ) pony up cash to get stuff done by the rest of us(freelancers), mostly for themselves, but sometimes society benefits too.
eg. Superman Christopher Reeves is single-handedly funding ( http://www.christopherreeve.org/ ) spinal cord research in this country.
George Soros pours tons of cash into his pet projects in Eastern Europe.
The results can be decidedly mixed - Reeves decides not to pursue research in basic medicine, - he just wants people to work on problems pertaining to his specific spinal cord injury.
I hope mozilla doesn't end up having a button on its toolbar for each investor who coughed up $5K ( where I come from, if you pay 5K for a temple project, you get a stone in the temple with your name on it. )
Slashdot Mirror
what exactly is left?
That's precisely what NY Senator Chuck Schumer asked. America is becoming a nation of high-paid lawyers & doctors & ballplayers, serviced by low-paid walmart workers & sanitary workers & handymen. What about the middle class, constantly squeezed out of existence by these Benedict Arnold CEOs ? Gosh, I sound like John Kerry & I don't even like that guy that much.
Hemos - Ultimately, free trade works out well
John Maynard Keynes - In the long run, we are all dead.
1. Why do economists get off so easy ? What is "ultimately" ? What happens in the short term ??
2. My friends and colleagues have been laid off due to outsourcing to India. People writing code are becoming handymen, plumbers, delivering pizza. Nothing against those "careers", but they didn't spend 4 years of school getting CS degrees to end up delivering pizza now, did they ?
3. The same New York Times ( 30 little turles - Feb 29 edition link here) has a long op-ed by Friedman where he argues thus - Be glad that Indians are writing code & not becoming suicide bombers like the Arabs. Friedman contends that America is secure because Indians are writing code & not blowing themselves up! How ridiculous is that ?!
Say your boss wants to make a deal with you. He says get to work at 7am, you say 9am. He says "Lets talk about it".
Now, you can't really say "No", can you ?
Think about it.
If you did, you'll sound unreasonable & stubborn. People may suspect you have something fishy going on, that absolutely prevents you from even talking about it.
So you are forced to say "Ok, lets talk".
Standard management tactic.
IBM has a $96 share price with 166 billion market cap. When they say "Lets talk about it", someone worth only 5 bucks a share and two quarters of operating losses is forced to say "ok".
Not at all.
1. State needs money for bicycles - we call them "taxes".
2. Bicycle is an idea means just that. Its an idea, just like every single formula in Mathematica is just an idea. Yet, do you know the net worth of Stephen Wolfram ?
3. I get the impression you are running away fast from Marx towards the free market candyman. Look, Marx is respected as an economist just as much as Adam Smith is. Its just that Smith has turned out the victor in the real world. Marx was the victor for a while in the last century under Lenin, until Stalin the despot totally hijacked Marxism, just like Andrew Fastow of Enron hijacked capitalism.
Doesn't mean Free Market right, Marxism wrong.
First law of Philosophy - "Every idea has its time" . The time is not right/ripe for Professor Eben Moglen's idea. One fine day we will get there, and I look forward to it myself. But that day is not today.
The good Professor is simply reiterating what Marx said about 150 years ago.
eg. Lets say bicycle is an idea. The state outlaws private ownership of bicycles, because ideas belong to the masses, they are not one man's private property. So nobody can own a bicycle.
But the state places free bicycles at the corner of every street and every avenue.
So you walk to a corner, pick up a bicycle & pedal to wherever you want & leave it at the other corner. No tolls, no insurance, no gasoline, no ownership, no maintainence, no hassle.
Malthus read this and told Marx he was an ostrich.
That's the problem right there. You can't pretend man is an ostrich, so lets be benign & do away with the notion of private property & share & take just what we need & so on. This socialist utopia is ideal, but unfortunately we don't live there.
Capitalism says man is not benign - man is malign. He will want ownership. In that sense of the principle, you can own intangible ideas just as much as you own actual tangible objects - no difference. That's just the reality we live in.
Deal with it.
I see you are what is known in economics circles as an "Optimist" :)
Fairness is a loaded term. You speak about "fair compensation". FYI, there is no such thing. Who is to say that the 60K a programmer makes is "fair" wages ? Maybe the programmer is a single 22 year old kid with no liabilities - he probably needs only 40K. Maybe the programmer is a 55 year old man with arthritis & a large family with 5 kids & plenty to pay for mortgage & health insurance - he obviously needs lot more than 60K.
This is why Marx said - "To each according to his need". Read the Communist Manifesto - the word "Fair" appears in it a million times. Read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" - there is no fair in it.
Under capitalism, market determines the wages. There's nothing fair about it. But that's the way it is. This is why Britney Spears will ALWAYS outsell Wagner or Mozart or whoever.
Again, you are wandering in the Marx garden of utopia. You say - "In a fair market, blah blah...". There are no fair markets, only free markets. Big difference.
Marx said, if man could co-operate instead of compete, then we would have all kinds of products, a great variety, instead of just mindless imitations of the same product each trying to undercut & outsell the other.
Malthus read this, rolled his eyeballs & said - yeah and if man was ostrich, then we wouldn't have the notion of private property & we'd all live in peace & harmony & so on...
In a fair market, average American programmers would have secure jobs just as much as the Indian programmers. Do they ?
Rules must be internalized - they always are. When's the last time the EFF composed a song, or signed up an artist ? The only rules that'll get accepted in any industry are ones that emerge from within that industry - not from outside. Now if a bunch of EFF folks join RIAA as management, and then propose these rules, that's different...
Your problem is better known in economics as "The Labor Theory of Value". Karl Marx was a huge proponent of the same. Predictably, Adam Smith & other capitalists totally disagree with it.
:( My labor has value because the market wants the end product. Your labor has value only to yourself. Deal with it.
You ask "Why should a quick tinkle on a xylophone be better rewarded than months of work on an orchestral masterpiece? "
Why ? Because that's the way the world is. If you spend 8 hours a day building a highly creative straw statue in your backyard while I spend same 8 hours mindlessly slogging in a corporate IT outfit, guess who gets paid at the end of the month ? Your creative impulses are fine, but nobody wants your straw statue
Not quite. In the US, tv scans every second line so 60hz is only 30 fps. Specifically, NTSC = 30 fps PAL = 25 fps = much closer to 24 fps, which is one reason most indies shot using a camcorder opt for a PAL camcorder than an NTSC one. The Canon XL1 PAL version, the Sony PD150 PAL, the Panasonic VX100 PAL outsell their NTSC versions for the same reason.
Don't you know, the entire IT industry in the You Yes of Yay is following the best open source policy = Open the source to Indian programmers, Close the source to American programmers.
As you can see, it is very successful, very profitable, very popular open source policy.
Why don't you follow the same ?
Sorry, simply had to get that off my chest.
YALOOP ( Yet Another Laid Off due to Outsouring Programmer )
A few years ago when I did my Masters in CS, we had to take a bunch of courses in Advanced Algorithms - math oriented stuff like Primality Testing, Numerical Methods for equation solving, interpolation, range-kutta, pseudorandomness & the like. Java wasn't widely available at that time, but all the browsers supported Javascript quite well. The Professor was a math guy, a computer neophyte who preferred that we turn in solutions ( pseudocode) using pen & paper. He didn't care too much about programming them in a real language. I wrote all my assignments in Javascript - he got his pseudocode, and he could click "Execute" & actually run it in a browser. He was quite impressed & I got an A on that. My own beef with JS is, big-number support isn' t robust. I tried testing primality for 12 digit numbers & the browser would just freeze up. However, JS actually holds up well for number crunching in the 8-10 digit range.
Score : -5 : Long misguided rant from leftist bastard
...
...
...it was a poor country but there was so little stress and so much happiness to go around. People had time on their hands, they pursued a variety of things.
...need I go on? Why the fuck do you need to work so hard ? Screw the GDP, just take it easy & get a life. I mean, really, go to your local library, find a new hobby & actually practice it, not just dabble & escape to football on the weekends. Lobby the government to support a more diverse lifestyle, where, like Thoreau advocated, you can "live life deliberately", not just plain exist like you now do.
---
I would phrase it thusly - you needn't have a job in the first place.
I come from a third world country where everybody has to have a job, else they'll soon die because they'll have no money, so no food, no shelter, no nothing.
My idea of a first world country like the USA was -
a. plenty of money to go around
b. very little need to work or to have a job.
c. simply pursue your natural inclination
d. an intelligent society
I'm not advocating Disneyland, or some decadent Roman society where everyone's screwing around. I mean, people living life like Aristotle advocated - "pursuit of reason" - pursue poetry, fine arts, sculpture, literature, philosophy, physics, astronomy,
Instead, this 1st world country is actually a hundred times worse than my 3rd world country. Atleast in a socialist nation, your jobs were sort-of guaranteed, you had lots of vacations & holidays, & you weren't stressed out. Here in the hire-n-fire crucible of the USA, GDP is the only thing sacrosanct, everybody works works works, NOT out of his choice but because people are burdened by sheer debt & bills & mortgages & a culture of overconsumption, President Bush proudly declares "we are the hardest working nation in the planet" ( how exactly is that a good thing ? ), the most welllknown intellectual of the nation on whom literally everything hinges is an ugly old bespactacled economist named Alan Greenspan, and people have such black-n-white partitions of life, like you do.
ie. Life = Lots of Work + Escape to Family on weekends/2-week Vacations
What about a variety, like in a socialist country.
eg.
Life = Some Work + Some Family + Some Arts + Some Sciences + Some hobbies + Some
every single day ?
Back in my country, you could have a conversation with the "average guy" that ranged all over the map - from philosophy to astronomy to films to music ( I mean deep music theory, tones & notes & so forth not junk Britney-Spears pop) to literature - Average guys took active part in theatre, sports, book clubs, sciences, solved puzzles,
Here you have terribly hardworking populace, so much opulence, much more stress, 15 foreclosures per 1000 households,
I told all this to a colleague of mine, a staunch first world American citizen, & he plays the Beatles record for me - "Get back Jojo! Get back to where you once belong!"
---
Score:-1, Offtopic.
So you learn Linux x86 Assembly.
Then what ?
Are there jobs in Linux x86 Assembly ? If yes, where ? Out here in the US, or someplace in India ?
Or are you suggesting people learn x86 Assembly for kicks ? That's cool too, but you know, its a bad economy...have you looked at the recent unemployment numbers...people live with rising debt, record number of bankruptcies, the country struggles with 500 billion deficit....not exactly a bright time for polishing my x86 skills...what do you think ?
Outsourcing is purely a currency play. $1 USD equals about 45 Rupees, so your $10,000 translates to 450,000 rupees or "4.5 lakhs" as they call it out there. That's a big deal to an Indian where 25% of the population ie. 250,000,000 people, live on less than a $1 a day.
... you get the idea -
So you're gaming the system - the currency markets- by taking American cash & buying Indian laborers at these "cheap" rates. This isn't free trade at all.
What would free trade look like? Say the American could go live in India. Say he could have a nice 2-bdrm house, subsidized education in a socialist economy where a PhD level education costs you less than $100 ( I'm not kidding - am an Indian myself and have benefitted from this ). Books that cost $20 here are less than a dollar out there. Notion of copyright is just on paper - everything gets pirated, duplicated, with no real legal hassle. Say the American could have cheap health care. No notion of monthly health insurance - just walk into any hospital when you're ill, & one of the numerous MDs - not nurses, but an MD would personally look at you. Say the American
ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL == Free Trade.
Otherwise, you are simply gaming the system.
From the article -
We're a multitasking species. We want to do everything in every room," Plautz said. "We should expect our windows to do the same."
Really ? Do we really do everything in every room? Where does Plautz poop, for instance ? In his bedroom ?
If you want to make money, and that's your only goal, my goodness - there's hundred million foolproof ways to do it eg. run a hedge fund, invest in practical & innovative technology, work in real estate, sell fast food burgers, be a middleman - run a brokerage & take a cut for every transaction, umpteen schemes to pry your fellow human of his wealth.
Making a film to make money is such an elaborate enterprise, like trying to reach your nose with the hand behind your back. People are capricious, tastes change, what works today doesn't work tomorrow, people fancy something for a while & then move on to something else - given all these tiresome variables, artforms like film,book,theatre must be funded by society not to increase shareholder stake but to simply promote culture. After all, art is simply a celebration of humanity. Why do we celebrate the 4th of July ? Does it increase shareholder value ? Gosh man, business isn't the only end, you got to live your life too, and that's what art is all about.
While I agree with you from a theoretical standpoint, I'm sure you are aware why things like this get overlooked in day-to-day corporate IT programming tasks. :)
eg. Manager says, write a UI that accepts username & account, and then spits out user transactions . During design phase, you invariably make the code hack-able so its easy to test. ie. I could put in "*" for account and it would spit out transactions of ALL users, regardless of the username. This is a useful backdoor, especially in development time when your UI has to interact with somebody else's data repository in some compplicated fashion.
Ofcourse, its a given that the input validation logic must be modified and backdoor must be taken out when the UI is actually deployed. But corporate practices being what they are, someone else takes ownership of the code at that stage, and either doesn't understand the "star-feature" ( *) , or thinks its cool to have this in case of emergency debugging, so leaves it there. Soon, this stupid program that should have been running standalone on someone's box, gets a facelift and is shoved on the internet. Some cracker comes along and puts in a star for account & gets all the transactions, & pretty soon, register.co.uk gets wind of this and reports it on front page. by then, original programmer has moved on to some other task, requiring a new back-door
As a person of Indian origin who consumes the 10% of those 1000 Bollywood films that eventually do make it to the US market, and as someone who is acutely aware of Bollywood happenings on an almost day-to-day basis ( I must say the average Indian would easily fall into this category ), I think this is the right move.
Bollywood on P2P - way to go!
But why ?
1. The average expat Indian watches Bollywood purely out of nostalgia. There is a sense of loss in leaving one's home country & settling abroad, and Bollywood manages to help one cope with that loss rather effectively. P2P would cater to that segment quite nicely.
2. Despite this comment, Bollywood does large churn out pulp. Devdas & Lagaan are no different. At its core, Bollywood themes are hackneyed and trite - hero gets heroine, a couple of songs & dances, few mild conflicts ( mother-in-law versus bride, dad versus son, man versus the corrupt system, hero vs villian, etc ). So when you have a thousand of these made, year after year after year, you do have to wonder what happens to quality. Even as a fan of Bollywood, I'm not ashamed to claim that maybe 1, atmost 2 films per year, would make it to my DVD library. The rest are just fluff - to be consumed & discarded, like a can of pop. 2 out of 1000 films is 0.2%. That being the case, it seems almost criminal to waste the amount of resources needed to bring pulp onto the large screen on your local multiplex, and cause major traffic jams in local Indian hubs like Jersey City ( NJ ), Iselin ( NJ ), Flushing ( NY ) etc, where Indian communities hog the narrow arteries with their Toyotas blaring Bollywood songs as they head towards the latest Friday release, inconveniencing the local populace, not to mention the untold damage to cells in the cranium and the basal ganglia that get permanently damaged watching crap of this magnitude week after week on the large screen in surround sound. Its much better these Indians stay home and download these "Bollywood blockbusters" as they are known, on the DSL lines using P2P networks and watch themn on 15" laptops - saves gasoline for the commute, electicity needed to work the multiplex, and annoyance to local communities, plus hopefully a few brain cells.
3. Piracy is rampant among Indian film consumers - any video store in an Indian hub will sell you the latest Bollywood offering, pirated version, for $2. The industry loses a big chunk of change. Maybe P2P would pump some money back into the industry.
4. Mafia - Perhaps no industry is more tightly controlled by the underworld than Bollywood. Dons operating out of Dubai ( UAE ), South Africa, and Staten Island even, control the operation of the industry and screening of its films. P2P can subvert this whole criminal enterprise - finally technology beats the bad guys.
But, lets see if this actually takes off - efforts to reform Bollywood are few and far between, and get shut down rather suddenly - P2P may face the same fate.
"Her premise isn't that being liberal is treasonous, it's that liberals almost always side with America's enemies. Which is pretty self evident to any rational person."
Dude, you are, like, so wrong.
Who declared France to be America's enemy ?
She did.
Then she turns around & says all liberals are traitors 'cause they like France. You expect us to keep track of which country is Coulter's pal and which one's the enemy at any point in time ? Liberals like to mostly get along - Coulter likes to mostly drive a wedge. Such a divisive bitch.
I'm not a citizen ( I can't vote ), and yet I do find some of these books quite fascinating. I managed to read big chunks of all of them. The worst is undoubtedly Coulter.
Coulter's a real bitch. I wonder how anybody can stand her. She says stuff like - "you must have the IQ of a microwave if you think there is another way of thinking besides liberal & rightwing."
She totally knocks centrists. Mainstream USA is not as polarized as she makes it out to be. A lot of liberals & rightwing folks do find consensus on several issues - but they simply don't exist in Coulter's hate-filled world.
http://www.toonzanimationindia.com/ Office presumably in Burbank ( CA ), but actual animation studios back in India.
Time to face up to the facts. If you are still working in IT, in the USA, its just a matter of time ( few months, maybe a year, maybe two ) before you are terminated from your job. There are people who tell you stuff like - if you are a really good programmer, you have nothing to worry. Balls! You could be a kernel hacker and you will be replaced. Lemme give you actual stats - every 365 days, 250,000 programmers are minted in Bangalore - and that's just one city. There's atleast 5 cities in India where the quantity & quality is comparable. Now, even if you think you are creme de la creme, you are uber hacker dude, you are the top 0.001% of the IT population, you can still be replaced by one of 0.001 * 250,000 = 250 Indian prgrammers. Plug in your percentage worth and do you own math, but the fact is this - I personally know of Indian programmers who code device drivers and hack assembly for a living at a fraction of the price they pay here in the US of A. We're not talking about "pick up VB in 14 day" type losers - there's a whole different breed out there and they WILL assimilate you - just a matter of time. You basically have 2 options - a. if you don't care about IT, you just want a job & a paycheck - then just switch careers. Pick a job that can't be outsourced - sales manager in local walmart, or a paralegal or a train driver or a ...
b. if you MUST do IT for a living and nothing else - well, you can move to India and work as an expat. India has a whole bunch of foreigners working there on expat visas.
economics is a noncompassionate science.
My brain's hard drive spins on its axis,
anti clock wise.
Penetrating poetry pokes my peripheral vision
like a fully charged capacitor on a hot summer day
My eyes glaze over Glazier's prose
His profound instructions verbose
in machine language, almost
optimized for O(1) execution on a fast Althon
crippled by the superslow multitasking windows OS,
Yet, continue to register their keys,
in my hashtable of memories.
I wouldn't exactly call 100 grand a bounty...if you live in NYC, its the minimum you'd need to pay rent & support a wife and two kids.
On another tack, I see this as a trend, perhaps an offshoot of angel-investors+freelancing, where rich individuals ( the angel-investors ) pony up cash to get stuff done by the rest of us(freelancers), mostly for themselves, but sometimes society benefits too.
eg. Superman Christopher Reeves is single-handedly funding ( http://www.christopherreeve.org/ ) spinal cord research in this country.
George Soros pours tons of cash into his pet projects in Eastern Europe.
The results can be decidedly mixed - Reeves decides not to pursue research in basic medicine, - he just wants people to work on problems pertaining to his specific spinal cord injury.
I hope mozilla doesn't end up having a button on its toolbar for each investor who coughed up $5K ( where I come from, if you pay 5K for a temple project, you get a stone in the temple with your name on it. )