The US is a representative republic. If they didn't like it they should have voted for someone else who wouldn't have supported a moon launch.
Given that logic, you voted to go war in Iraq. Fine, YOU pay for it - I don't want any part of it.
Anyone who was watching social security in the 60s would have realized that it was a house of cards that could not possibly stand.
Nonsense. The Social Security fund surplus was tapped for decades and diverted to the general fund. That money paid for your education, the roads you drive on, and the tax cuts on your income. Give it back, slacker.
They made a promise to themselves that I (who was not even born yet!) would pay for their retirement, so they didn't need to save for it. They had a choice about it: vote to end the system then. They didn't, so I blame them.
Again, I suggest you get some tutoring in history. Nobody except Congress was ever offered a choice (and they opted for their own retirement program). If people had been offered a choice, they would have voted down any program that took money out of their paychecks, the same way the income tax would have been repealed if brought to a vote.
They made a promise to themselves that I (who was not even born yet!) would pay for their retirement, so they didn't need to save for it.
Wrong. The government said, "We are going to take a chunk out of your paycheck every week and put it in a retirement account for you, because we know what's best, and you don't have any choice."
They had a choice about it: vote to end the system then. They didn't, so I blame them.
They had no choice. There is a war in Iraq, and I blame you for it and the huge drain on the economy. I certainly didn't ask for another war - I've been there before.
If you are healthy, and didn't save for retirement, then get off your butt and work.
My retirement account is doing just fine - thanks for your concern. I've also involuntarily paid over 8% of my income into Social Security/FICA for over 30 years. If you want to get rid of the programs, okay, give me my money back (plus interest) or shut up.
I don't mind helping the disabled, and bodies do fail as you get older (though if you work they don't fail as fast as when you do nothing). The vast majority of retired people could support themselves (this is different from supporting themselves as well as when they were in their prime), yet they don't.
You don't have a clue as to what's happening for most folks on SS. I suggest you do a little volunteer time with something like Meals-on-wheels or a local "soup kitchen" or one of the home repair assistance programs. Many of these people are old, frail, and/or sick, and if they could work, they would. SS doesn't pay enough to live on, it pays enough to die on, and you will likely get your wish this winter as natural gas prices reach new highs and many die. Right now, that well-worn Slahdot term "insensitive clod" comes to mind.
We could probably do it the the way it's actually done, by asking people who aren't working if they're looking for jobs. If they say they are, then hey, they're unemployed.
The official number the government provides completely ignores the *underemployed*, which is exactly what the government wishes to do. People who have taken a subsistence-level job while continuing to look for work are counted as fully employed even if working part-time for minimum wage. The unemployment numbers you see quoted on the news also ignore anyone who has run out of benefits even if they are still looking for work. That is hardly a true representation of the number of people who are trying to find work.
Well, Carly certainly trimmed the fat profit margins by buying Compaq and getting into the no-margin commodity PC business. HP is in disarray. They have ticked off a lot of formerly loyal business users. They apparently have no control over their inventory any longer. I've been told three times in two weeks that a part has shipped, and it still hasn't. Even at the supervisor level, there isn't anyone who can call up the warehouse and ask what the heck is going on. After the third time and a flamed supervisor, my "ticket" got "escalated". Woohoo, I'm a happy HP customer now. Not.
Those are the same people that voted to send all the money to the moon.
Nobody voted to send money to the moon, start wars, or even to start Social Security. Nobody voted to have money withheld from their paychecks. They were executive decisions backed by the legislature.
They made their grave, now let them lie in it.
You need to study some history. They did not create the problems. Now the government wants to back out of a promise with the support of some short-sighted, selfish people.
I don't really believe something this extreme, but it is important to make the point.
If you don't believe, then why say it? Your only point seems to be that you want to renege on promises made to people who already paid into the system through no choice of their own. They didn't have the option of using that money for a retirement account. It was taken from them.
Unless FEMA gets involved, in which case I predict our space program will be limited to airing repeats of the Thunderbirds for decades to come.
I don't think FEMA (the agency) is the problem. Until very recently, for quite some time FEMA has been there when needed. The problem is the super-bureaucracy that is Homeland Security that swallowed FEMA and the political lap-dog hacks that were appointed to head FEMA in this grand and glorious new scheme. Guess what? Adding another layer of bureaucracy doesn't make things work better.
Making new laws and creating new bureaus to demonstrate that the government is *doing something* is a waste of time, effort, and taxpayer money. I personally know of one town that purchased a patrol vehicle with HS money under the assumption that it could also be used in regular duty. Wrong. It hasn't been used in over a year - it just sits in a garage while the town pays for maintenance and insurance because it can only be used in the event of a terrorist attack (in a rural area). That is so stupid - what a waste of taxpayer money. DHS needs to be deep-sixed, pronto.
If we cut 25% of the funding for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, we would have DOUBLE the current "discretionary" spending
So which 25% of the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients do you think should die in order to achieve this savings? The people receiving it were promised it because they had involuntary payments taken from their income over a lifetime's work. Sure, there are a few fat cats getting Social Security (the law doesn't even allow them to opt out), but the vast majority are barely making it month to month. And the games that Congress is playing with the drug companies isn't funny at all. Is it Soylent Green time?
Being a good engineer means even if a company does outsource development, finding more work is easy, even during a down market.
There are plenty of good engineers out of work. Age discrinination is rampant in the industry - some companies have even been stupid enough to admit it.
Good means good at selling yourself, as well as good at your job.
Good salesmen are good at selling. Good engineers are good at engineering. To each his own.
And yes, plumbing is a pretty good option, and it does kids a disservice to suggest otherwise. 40 hours a week, eighty grand a year, no possibility of outsourcing, and you get to work with your hands.
I never suggested it wasn't a decent job. That doesn't help the people who spent years and thousands of dollars getting an education and building a career in engineering or CS. Nor is there enough room in the plumbing trade to absorb significant numbers of new workers.
There is a real difference between being a coder and a worker in a steel mill. In a steel mill, you are completely dependant on the mill owner continuing to decide to keep the mill operational. Mills are expensive pieces of capital equipment.
Your analysis is shallow. The company itself is the major expense. Equipment and facilities are usually a one-time expense and deductible while in the country. Moving established manufacturing businesses offshore has no benefit other than a possible long-term saving from cheaper labor.
However, all that has nothing to do with your scaremongering claim. Let's stay on topic. It has happened before, and the warnings were not scaremongering. It is happening again. To paraphrase Huxley, the fact that we do not learn from history is its most important lesson - one we never actually learn. It's somewhat ironic that you got modded up for proving Huxley right.
People who aren't all that good at their job, and conciously or subconciously know it are panicked about the possibility their job may be outsourced. Unfortunately these days, half the people who claim to be software engineers fall into that camp.
It is not just programmers but also EEs that have high unemployment and are seeing their jobs offshored. It is hardly a panic; it is the acknowledgement of the current situation.
And if you can't be in the top half of people doing a job that is so easily mobile, you ought to pick a trade career that is less likely to be outsourced.
Being in the top half has nothing to do with it when the CEO decides s/he needs a news flash to boost those stock options into profitable territory, and some offshoring will fit the bill. Given your approach, it looks like plumbing and sanitation engineering are the new, hot, job growth prospects for the US.
I suspect that/.'s active posting population is skewed fairly young... college students and people just starting out who haven't established themselves in their career and are more concerned and vocal about it.
You're half right, but the demographic doesn't indicate who is posting. It is the older workers that are being displaced in favor of less expensive younger workers and foreign workers.
Time for another round of "oh no, all our jobs are going to [insert country here]". Oh gebus. Spare me How many years of offshoring scaremongering do I have to put up with? I remember it from the 80s.
Yes, like you, I remember all the scaremongering about the textile, garment, steel, and electronics industries. Heh, what a joke. Oh wait . . . that all really happened.
The best of all is - the way he put it, it looks like while MS exports jobs, Google hires this PhD guy Lee to open a fucking kindergarten or something.
Wow. You must have been on the college debating team. Start with a blazing ad hominem attack, don't read anything, and finish up with a blistering misinterpretation. There probably was an idiot involved in the argument.
I think he was right: you are astroturfing. Does Bill pay overtime for Slashdotting on holidays?
And don't get me started on publicly traded corporations. The very idea that a board of directors is legally obligated to make decisions in favor of the bottom line number, and that shareholders can sue them if they don't seems incredibly obsurd to me.
In the US, anyone or any group can sue anyone or any company for anything, whether it be frivolous or not. Company officers have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company. Period. The assumption that this means the bottom line is (mostly) a fiction brought on by a few shareholder lawsuits about mismanagement. The "bottom line" has no time frame. This quarter, next quarter, this year, next year, in five years . . . ? The "bottom line" is different for every shareholder. The claim that companies are required to do anything in the pursuit of profit is just weasel-speak fiction by some corporate executives trying to justify their nefarious actions. (See Kenneth Lay, et al.)
Yes I'm sure. Ballmer got mad that he lost another employee just like a baskball coach gets angry when he loses a good player to higher bidding team.
What "baskball" team coach would that be? Professional teams are businesses, and most managers of businesses behave in a professional manner. People come and go - it's a part of business, and most managers don't go postal about it. Throwing chairs is like a child having a tantrum - not something a business leader should be doing.
Anyone that thinks otherwise is just being a melodramatic group-thinker who continues to salute the slash-quo (everything microsoft does is evil no matter what and everything any other company that competes against microsoft does is perfectly ok). Grow up.
Microsoft has been convicted of monopolistic abuses despite the best efforts of its legion of lawyers. It is a company that has routinely bent and broken the law, and companies, like fish, rot from the head down. Until Microsoft gets leadership that thinks and acts professionally, it will remain a corporate thug. Stop astrotufing.
The point is that VB.NET is incompatible with VB 6 (or whatever the latest version was). If the code is to be changed or maintained using the new VS, it will have to be ported. There are a lot of companies that aren't very happy about that. Personally, I think it serves 'em right for using the product.
Nah VB developers are MS buttboys. They will bend over anytime MS wants them to.
Maybe, but the companies that pay those MS buttboys may not be too happy about retraining them or paying for the time to port all that legacy VB crap out there.
An AC calling someone on posting AC... I'd call that ironic, but someone would inevitably beat me upside the head for using the word wrong.
Someone not using the word "ironic" because some half-baked, uninformed Slashdot wannabe grammarian might object -- that's ironic. Just don't misspell it, or I'll be all over your case.:)
As far as I'm concerned, that's what I've been doing all along.
Endgame. And that's the problem. Tomas, is that you? This seems familiar.
That "unfettered (hence superior)" bit is your interpretation, not what I said.
You failed to explain how your claim of a non-bigoted view did not perforce make your view superior. The conclusion stands.
Again you should read what I write, not what you think that I write. Yes, I do have "problems" with religious beliefs because I percieve them as unrational. But other than that, all I wrote about Americans is that their country is "bible haunted", NOT that I have problems with Americans such, let alone ALL Americans. The latter generalisation and specialisation is, once more, entirely yours.
Incorrect. If you want to make distinctions like that, you should use separate sentences or phrases. I have been paid for writing articles for several decades, and I know how to parse a sentence (and I wouldn't try to publish this one;).
Besides, you're the one who wants to stay "on the goatse topic" so much that you want to twist my words for it, but now you're the one who shifts a completely different topic (albeit one that I hinted at, but that so far was not discussed any further).
Go back to my first reply. The topic has always been about your supposedly superior viewpoint about an abnormally enlarged anus (and as I write this, I'm wondering how my humorous poke at a stuffed shirt led to this).
Yes, but if you do the insertion, you can't claim that I did it.
If your claim allows that insertion, you can't claim I'm twisting your words, and you should provide proof for your claim.
Discussions topics tend to shift or expand. My argument was on topic, as far as I was and am concerned, it's only your interpretation of it that didn't make the sense it was supposed to make.
Wow, those are great weasel words that could cover almost anything ever said, and I could make some money with that. Would you release the copyright so I can sell that to a US politician?
But as you say: "normally people use arguments relevant to the discussion to...", which is NOT what you are doing when saying exactly that. Usually when people switch to using such ad hominem attacks, it means that they're out of real arguments that hold water.
The topic has only wandered as far afield as you have driven it, while I have tried to contain it. The nearest I have come to an ad hominem attack is the "stuffed shirt" term in this post. An attack on what you are saying is not an ad hominem attack. And I don't worry about my arguments holding water, as long as my bladder does. As long as my arguments aren't airy or vacuous, I'm both content and continent.
While originally interesting, this has become a really questionable use of my bandwidth. Unless you have something new and/or piquant to offer, I won't be responding.
You should read what I write, not what you think that I write.
Perhaps you should write what you mean to say instead of what you write.
At no point did I take the position that my POV is superior in any way.
But then again, I have not been raised in "bible haunted" America and compared to the average religious bigot - be (s)he Muslim, Christian, Jew, or whatever - I have a very much more objective view of many other things as well...
Unless you are claiming that said that you were a non-average religious bigot, you are claiming to have a "much more objective" and unfettered (hence superior) view than Americans and people with religious beliefs, which makes them bigots. That is what it says. If you don't agree that a less objective view or a bigoted view is inferior to your claimed view, then all I can suggest is a good English thesaurus and dictionary.
As Francis Picabia said: "Unser Kopf ist rund, damit das Denken die Richtung wechslen kann."
As the warden in Cool Hand Luke (that great American philosophical piece;) said, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."
While the discussion started with that guy's anus, by the time I wrote about cultures in which an enlarged <whatever> is or was considered a sign of beauty, power, social status, sexual desirability, or whatnot, we were talking more in general.
Do tell. I classified the act of rectal expansion with the exacting scientific term "weird" as would be the expansion of other orifices. You countered with your anthropological claim of cultures revering <whatever> such changes. Note that the <whatever> allows the insertion (I can't help the puns, I'm sorry) of any term, including "anuses". Normally, people use arguments relevant to the discussion to back their claims. If your argument was no longer relevant to the immediate discussion, it might have made more sense to point that out at the time. Personally, now I think you're just blowing smoke . . . no, I won't finish it.
As the French saying goes: "Je persiste et signe."
As the American saying goes, "If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, it is most likely a duck." Keeping with that wildlife theme, you can try to weasel your way out of what you said, but don't accuse me of twisting the words you posted for the whole world to see. And as Americans like to say, EOT. See ya.
I don't agree, but if I did that would make two of us.:-)
Well, to be serious for a moment, I consider any discussion of goatse to be an open-ended joke (sorry, I couldn't help it), and I've treated it as such. Your claims of a superior, unbiased POV, and suggestions of the need for education about the anthropological basis for sphincter stretching seem serious to me. Perhaps I missed the punch line, or it was all just a troll?
Note that I never referred to the existence of "a culture that venerates large anuses". That's just you twisting my words - and also carefully dropping the part that doesn't suit you regarding individual people, not cultures, doing certain things - in a failed attempt to be humorous.
There are and have always been a lot of people practicing all sorts of what's called "Permanent Body Modification" stuff. Also,
there are and have been are lot of cultures in which an enlarged <whatever> is or was considered a sign of beauty, power, social status, sexual desirability, or whatnot.
If the words seem familiar, it's because you wrote them. The discussion is about a guy purposely stretching his nether knot. So where is this culture in which this "enlarged [anus] is or was considered a sign of beauty, [etc.]"? If there isn't one, then why try to claim the behavior is normal? There was no attempt at humor in that question. Your humor detector really is defective, and as much fun as this hasn't been, that's pretty obviously the problem.
So, I'll let you get back to introspection until the next highly intrusive Slashdot examination of large anuses and small minds.;)
Slashdot Mirror
The US is a representative republic. If they didn't like it they should have voted for someone else who wouldn't have supported a moon launch.
Given that logic, you voted to go war in Iraq. Fine, YOU pay for it - I don't want any part of it.
Anyone who was watching social security in the 60s would have realized that it was a house of cards that could not possibly stand.
Nonsense. The Social Security fund surplus was tapped for decades and diverted to the general fund. That money paid for your education, the roads you drive on, and the tax cuts on your income. Give it back, slacker.
They made a promise to themselves that I (who was not even born yet!) would pay for their retirement, so they didn't need to save for it. They had a choice about it: vote to end the system then. They didn't, so I blame them.
Again, I suggest you get some tutoring in history. Nobody except Congress was ever offered a choice (and they opted for their own retirement program). If people had been offered a choice, they would have voted down any program that took money out of their paychecks, the same way the income tax would have been repealed if brought to a vote.
They made a promise to themselves that I (who was not even born yet!) would pay for their retirement, so they didn't need to save for it.
Wrong. The government said, "We are going to take a chunk out of your paycheck every week and put it in a retirement account for you, because we know what's best, and you don't have any choice."
They had a choice about it: vote to end the system then. They didn't, so I blame them.
They had no choice. There is a war in Iraq, and I blame you for it and the huge drain on the economy. I certainly didn't ask for another war - I've been there before.
If you are healthy, and didn't save for retirement, then get off your butt and work.
My retirement account is doing just fine - thanks for your concern. I've also involuntarily paid over 8% of my income into Social Security/FICA for over 30 years. If you want to get rid of the programs, okay, give me my money back (plus interest) or shut up.
I don't mind helping the disabled, and bodies do fail as you get older (though if you work they don't fail as fast as when you do nothing). The vast majority of retired people could support themselves (this is different from supporting themselves as well as when they were in their prime), yet they don't.
You don't have a clue as to what's happening for most folks on SS. I suggest you do a little volunteer time with something like Meals-on-wheels or a local "soup kitchen" or one of the home repair assistance programs. Many of these people are old, frail, and/or sick, and if they could work, they would. SS doesn't pay enough to live on, it pays enough to die on, and you will likely get your wish this winter as natural gas prices reach new highs and many die. Right now, that well-worn Slahdot term "insensitive clod" comes to mind.
We could probably do it the the way it's actually done, by asking people who aren't working if they're looking for jobs. If they say they are, then hey, they're unemployed.
The official number the government provides completely ignores the *underemployed*, which is exactly what the government wishes to do. People who have taken a subsistence-level job while continuing to look for work are counted as fully employed even if working part-time for minimum wage. The unemployment numbers you see quoted on the news also ignore anyone who has run out of benefits even if they are still looking for work. That is hardly a true representation of the number of people who are trying to find work.
The 35-hours-a-day-law in France applies only to a limited part of the workforce.
Ye gods, let's hope so. Or are those metric hours?
To "be more productive", one must trim the fat.
Well, Carly certainly trimmed the fat profit margins by buying Compaq and getting into the no-margin commodity PC business. HP is in disarray. They have ticked off a lot of formerly loyal business users. They apparently have no control over their inventory any longer. I've been told three times in two weeks that a part has shipped, and it still hasn't. Even at the supervisor level, there isn't anyone who can call up the warehouse and ask what the heck is going on. After the third time and a flamed supervisor, my "ticket" got "escalated". Woohoo, I'm a happy HP customer now. Not.
Those are the same people that voted to send all the money to the moon.
Nobody voted to send money to the moon, start wars, or even to start Social Security. Nobody voted to have money withheld from their paychecks. They were executive decisions backed by the legislature.
They made their grave, now let them lie in it.
You need to study some history. They did not create the problems. Now the government wants to back out of a promise with the support of some short-sighted, selfish people.
I don't really believe something this extreme, but it is important to make the point.
If you don't believe, then why say it? Your only point seems to be that you want to renege on promises made to people who already paid into the system through no choice of their own. They didn't have the option of using that money for a retirement account. It was taken from them.
Unless FEMA gets involved, in which case I predict our space program will be limited to airing repeats of the Thunderbirds for decades to come.
I don't think FEMA (the agency) is the problem. Until very recently, for quite some time FEMA has been there when needed. The problem is the super-bureaucracy that is Homeland Security that swallowed FEMA and the political lap-dog hacks that were appointed to head FEMA in this grand and glorious new scheme. Guess what? Adding another layer of bureaucracy doesn't make things work better.
Making new laws and creating new bureaus to demonstrate that the government is *doing something* is a waste of time, effort, and taxpayer money. I personally know of one town that purchased a patrol vehicle with HS money under the assumption that it could also be used in regular duty. Wrong. It hasn't been used in over a year - it just sits in a garage while the town pays for maintenance and insurance because it can only be used in the event of a terrorist attack (in a rural area). That is so stupid - what a waste of taxpayer money. DHS needs to be deep-sixed, pronto.
If we cut 25% of the funding for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, we would have DOUBLE the current "discretionary" spending
So which 25% of the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients do you think should die in order to achieve this savings? The people receiving it were promised it because they had involuntary payments taken from their income over a lifetime's work. Sure, there are a few fat cats getting Social Security (the law doesn't even allow them to opt out), but the vast majority are barely making it month to month. And the games that Congress is playing with the drug companies isn't funny at all. Is it Soylent Green time?
I love computers, and I love Free software, but I hate this man.
Your hatred is so deep that you post AC, unwilling to put a name behind it. Your opinion is noted and given due weight - 0.
Being a good engineer means even if a company does outsource development, finding more work is easy, even during a down market.
There are plenty of good engineers out of work. Age discrinination is rampant in the industry - some companies have even been stupid enough to admit it.
Good means good at selling yourself, as well as good at your job.
Good salesmen are good at selling. Good engineers are good at engineering. To each his own.
And yes, plumbing is a pretty good option, and it does kids a disservice to suggest otherwise. 40 hours a week, eighty grand a year, no possibility of outsourcing, and you get to work with your hands.
I never suggested it wasn't a decent job. That doesn't help the people who spent years and thousands of dollars getting an education and building a career in engineering or CS. Nor is there enough room in the plumbing trade to absorb significant numbers of new workers.
There is a real difference between being a coder and a worker in a steel mill. In a steel mill, you are completely dependant on the mill owner continuing to decide to keep the mill operational. Mills are expensive pieces of capital equipment.
Your analysis is shallow. The company itself is the major expense. Equipment and facilities are usually a one-time expense and deductible while in the country. Moving established manufacturing businesses offshore has no benefit other than a possible long-term saving from cheaper labor.
However, all that has nothing to do with your scaremongering claim. Let's stay on topic. It has happened before, and the warnings were not scaremongering. It is happening again. To paraphrase Huxley, the fact that we do not learn from history is its most important lesson - one we never actually learn. It's somewhat ironic that you got modded up for proving Huxley right.
People who aren't all that good at their job, and conciously or subconciously know it are panicked about the possibility their job may be outsourced. Unfortunately these days, half the people who claim to be software engineers fall into that camp.
It is not just programmers but also EEs that have high unemployment and are seeing their jobs offshored. It is hardly a panic; it is the acknowledgement of the current situation.
And if you can't be in the top half of people doing a job that is so easily mobile, you ought to pick a trade career that is less likely to be outsourced.
Being in the top half has nothing to do with it when the CEO decides s/he needs a news flash to boost those stock options into profitable territory, and some offshoring will fit the bill. Given your approach, it looks like plumbing and sanitation engineering are the new, hot, job growth prospects for the US.
I suspect that /.'s active posting population is skewed fairly young... college students and people just starting out who haven't established themselves in their career and are more concerned and vocal about it.
You're half right, but the demographic doesn't indicate who is posting. It is the older workers that are being displaced in favor of less expensive younger workers and foreign workers.
Time for another round of "oh no, all our jobs are going to [insert country here]". Oh gebus. Spare me How many years of offshoring scaremongering do I have to put up with? I remember it from the 80s.
Yes, like you, I remember all the scaremongering about the textile, garment, steel, and electronics industries. Heh, what a joke. Oh wait . . . that all really happened.
The best of all is - the way he put it, it looks like while MS exports jobs, Google hires this PhD guy Lee to open a fucking kindergarten or something.
Wow. You must have been on the college debating team. Start with a blazing ad hominem attack, don't read anything, and finish up with a blistering misinterpretation. There probably was an idiot involved in the argument.
I think he was right: you are astroturfing. Does Bill pay overtime for Slashdotting on holidays?
And don't get me started on publicly traded corporations. The very idea that a board of directors is legally obligated to make decisions in favor of the bottom line number, and that shareholders can sue them if they don't seems incredibly obsurd to me.
In the US, anyone or any group can sue anyone or any company for anything, whether it be frivolous or not. Company officers have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company. Period. The assumption that this means the bottom line is (mostly) a fiction brought on by a few shareholder lawsuits about mismanagement. The "bottom line" has no time frame. This quarter, next quarter, this year, next year, in five years . . . ? The "bottom line" is different for every shareholder. The claim that companies are required to do anything in the pursuit of profit is just weasel-speak fiction by some corporate executives trying to justify their nefarious actions. (See Kenneth Lay, et al.)
Oops. Left out an "r". Here you go. r
Yes I'm sure. Ballmer got mad that he lost another employee just like a baskball coach gets angry when he loses a good player to higher bidding team.
What "baskball" team coach would that be? Professional teams are businesses, and most managers of businesses behave in a professional manner. People come and go - it's a part of business, and most managers don't go postal about it. Throwing chairs is like a child having a tantrum - not something a business leader should be doing.
Anyone that thinks otherwise is just being a melodramatic group-thinker who continues to salute the slash-quo (everything microsoft does is evil no matter what and everything any other company that competes against microsoft does is perfectly ok). Grow up.
Microsoft has been convicted of monopolistic abuses despite the best efforts of its legion of lawyers. It is a company that has routinely bent and broken the law, and companies, like fish, rot from the head down. Until Microsoft gets leadership that thinks and acts professionally, it will remain a corporate thug. Stop astrotufing.
The point is that VB.NET is incompatible with VB 6 (or whatever the latest version was). If the code is to be changed or maintained using the new VS, it will have to be ported. There are a lot of companies that aren't very happy about that. Personally, I think it serves 'em right for using the product.
Nah VB developers are MS buttboys. They will bend over anytime MS wants them to.
Maybe, but the companies that pay those MS buttboys may not be too happy about retraining them or paying for the time to port all that legacy VB crap out there.
An AC calling someone on posting AC... I'd call that ironic, but someone would inevitably beat me upside the head for using the word wrong.
Someone not using the word "ironic" because some half-baked, uninformed Slashdot wannabe grammarian might object -- that's ironic. Just don't misspell it, or I'll be all over your case. :)
Sounds like there's some bad blood there.
Mr. Sulu didn't care much for Capt. Kirk either. (Search for "Shatner".)
It's fun redesigning the English language.
Well, the folks on Slashdot have certainly been trying that for years.
As far as I'm concerned, that's what I've been doing all along.
Endgame. And that's the problem. Tomas, is that you? This seems familiar.
That "unfettered (hence superior)" bit is your interpretation, not what I said.
You failed to explain how your claim of a non-bigoted view did not perforce make your view superior. The conclusion stands.
Again you should read what I write, not what you think that I write. Yes, I do have "problems" with religious beliefs because I percieve them as unrational. But other than that, all I wrote about Americans is that their country is "bible haunted", NOT that I have problems with Americans such, let alone ALL Americans. The latter generalisation and specialisation is, once more, entirely yours.
Incorrect. If you want to make distinctions like that, you should use separate sentences or phrases. I have been paid for writing articles for several decades, and I know how to parse a sentence (and I wouldn't try to publish this one ;).
Besides, you're the one who wants to stay "on the goatse topic" so much that you want to twist my words for it, but now you're the one who shifts a completely different topic (albeit one that I hinted at, but that so far was not discussed any further).
Go back to my first reply. The topic has always been about your supposedly superior viewpoint about an abnormally enlarged anus (and as I write this, I'm wondering how my humorous poke at a stuffed shirt led to this).
Yes, but if you do the insertion, you can't claim that I did it.
If your claim allows that insertion, you can't claim I'm twisting your words, and you should provide proof for your claim.
Discussions topics tend to shift or expand. My argument was on topic, as far as I was and am concerned, it's only your interpretation of it that didn't make the sense it was supposed to make.
Wow, those are great weasel words that could cover almost anything ever said, and I could make some money with that. Would you release the copyright so I can sell that to a US politician?
But as you say: "normally people use arguments relevant to the discussion to ...", which is NOT what you are doing when saying exactly that. Usually when people switch to using such ad hominem attacks, it means that they're out of real arguments that hold water.
The topic has only wandered as far afield as you have driven it, while I have tried to contain it. The nearest I have come to an ad hominem attack is the "stuffed shirt" term in this post. An attack on what you are saying is not an ad hominem attack. And I don't worry about my arguments holding water, as long as my bladder does. As long as my arguments aren't airy or vacuous, I'm both content and continent.
While originally interesting, this has become a really questionable use of my bandwidth. Unless you have something new and/or piquant to offer, I won't be responding.
You should read what I write, not what you think that I write.
Perhaps you should write what you mean to say instead of what you write.
At no point did I take the position that my POV is superior in any way.
Unless you are claiming that said that you were a non-average religious bigot, you are claiming to have a "much more objective" and unfettered (hence superior) view than Americans and people with religious beliefs, which makes them bigots. That is what it says. If you don't agree that a less objective view or a bigoted view is inferior to your claimed view, then all I can suggest is a good English thesaurus and dictionary.As Francis Picabia said: "Unser Kopf ist rund, damit das Denken die Richtung wechslen kann."
As the warden in Cool Hand Luke (that great American philosophical piece ;) said, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."
While the discussion started with that guy's anus, by the time I wrote about cultures in which an enlarged <whatever> is or was considered a sign of beauty, power, social status, sexual desirability, or whatnot, we were talking more in general.
Do tell. I classified the act of rectal expansion with the exacting scientific term "weird" as would be the expansion of other orifices. You countered with your anthropological claim of cultures revering <whatever> such changes. Note that the <whatever> allows the insertion (I can't help the puns, I'm sorry) of any term, including "anuses". Normally, people use arguments relevant to the discussion to back their claims. If your argument was no longer relevant to the immediate discussion, it might have made more sense to point that out at the time. Personally, now I think you're just blowing smoke . . . no, I won't finish it.
As the French saying goes: "Je persiste et signe."
As the American saying goes, "If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, it is most likely a duck." Keeping with that wildlife theme, you can try to weasel your way out of what you said, but don't accuse me of twisting the words you posted for the whole world to see. And as Americans like to say, EOT. See ya.
I don't agree, but if I did that would make two of us. :-)
Well, to be serious for a moment, I consider any discussion of goatse to be an open-ended joke (sorry, I couldn't help it), and I've treated it as such. Your claims of a superior, unbiased POV, and suggestions of the need for education about the anthropological basis for sphincter stretching seem serious to me. Perhaps I missed the punch line, or it was all just a troll?
Note that I never referred to the existence of "a culture that venerates large anuses". That's just you twisting my words - and also carefully dropping the part that doesn't suit you regarding individual people, not cultures, doing certain things - in a failed attempt to be humorous.
If the words seem familiar, it's because you wrote them. The discussion is about a guy purposely stretching his nether knot. So where is this culture in which this "enlarged [anus] is or was considered a sign of beauty, [etc.]"? If there isn't one, then why try to claim the behavior is normal? There was no attempt at humor in that question. Your humor detector really is defective, and as much fun as this hasn't been, that's pretty obviously the problem.So, I'll let you get back to introspection until the next highly intrusive Slashdot examination of large anuses and small minds. ;)