If tech companies weren't shit at training they would be somewhat more fungible, though not perfectly so. Engineering companies are somewhat better at this: if a company is looking for chemical engineers and can't find someone with experience in exactly the process they're hiring for, they'll hire a chemical engineer with experience in a different process and get them up to speed. Tech companies seem incapable of doing that, and instead they have a big list of really specific background they want, "must have 7 years of experience in J2EE and 3 years experience using Joe Bob's Serialization Framework", then complain they can't find anyone so it must be a "programmer shortage".
At which point they bring a foreign worker over and train them in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework.
I've written about this at length in the past. My own wife came over on an H1A as a nurse. The reason that they got her had nothing to do with a "shortage of nurses". Instead, it had to do with a "shortage of nurses that would work for the shit wages that the nursing homes wanted to pay". Big difference - and frankly that's the same thing I see in the tech industry.
If the Department of Labor simply forced these companies to follow the law and compensate the foreign workers on par with American workers it would somewhat alleviate the problem. But they don't, and the law's a joke.
The other issue is that these workers are essentially indentured servants until they get a green card and the power disparity also plays heavily into this. Looking at my wife's situation again I know of nurses who pissed off the wrong people in their job and ended up on a plane back home. If you hate your job you don't have the ability to simply get another. I'd like to say that everybody acts like an adult and that doesn't matter but the reality is that it matters a lot. When you don't really have the option to quit there's little pressure on management to make sure you like your job.
In the nursing industry it's even worse because of regulation. I don't mean the regulation makes it worse - hiring foreigners is a great way to get around regulation and not worry about your employees turning you in. After all, if your understaffed shit hole gets shut down by the state you get a plane ride back home.
In my wife's generation this was even worse because they had to come up with US$5000 to pay the staffing agency to bring them over. That's about a year and a half of wages for your typical middle class Filipino - it would be analogous to an American coming up with $75,000. Not easy. And if you lose your job in America you'll spend 10 years working in the Philippines to pay that off.
I'm a Verizon shill? LOL!!! I think there should be laws against what Verizon is doing, and when I say "laws" I mean "government takes your stuff" type laws. Read my last line. I'm serious.
city-owned roads are much the same as they were 50 years ago, same for sewer pipes
What shithole do you live in where they haven't upgraded any roads in 50 years?
LOL! I live in Franklin, TN. They upgrade roads regularly.
In case you're actually as stupid as you sound the point is that the *technology* is largely the same as it was 50 years ago - limestone and asphalt cement.
Is your networking technology the same as it was 50 years ago?
It's impossible to compare slowly changing technologies such as road construction and sewer construction with computer and networking technologies.
We have a do-not-call list and the requisite legal structure to make it work well. What we don't have is a government agency to enforce it, so it's a joke at this point. Worse yet is that the scammers are brazen enough at this point that they're apparently using the do-not-call list as a calling list.
I actually called the FTC once to inquire about the status of their investigation into one company that was doing this a few years ago - one which I was able to mostly track down. The response from the lady there was "yeah, we're trying to track them down, too, so if you find out who they are please get back in touch with us and let us know". Argh.
As others have pointed out it's trivial to find out who they are, particularly for the government. Just give them the card information that they so desperately want and find out who got the money. Dirt simple.
Trying to get government to run networks would work well up front, but in 5 years it would be outdated and there would be no money to upgrade it.
What is the difference between that and what we have now? It isn't like Comcast is working around the clock to beef up their last-mile connections.
Around here they are. I've been with Comcast for 13 or so years and my speed has increased dramatically during that time. AT&T is also adding fiber as is one of their smaller competitors. Sorry about your situation.
That long cycle worked fine for the telephone lines that serve your house. They served us well for a long time.
Yes, and the amount of data pushed over those lines didn't change for 100 years. During the last 15 years a home internet connection has went from 28.8Kbps to 50Mbps - about a 2000 times increase. Governments cannot move at that speed.
Capitalism works just fine. What I described above is known around here as "crony capitalism", and it's a whole nother ballgame. And it's a problem of government, not business. Having honest people in government puts an end to cronyism and allows actual capitalists to do their thing. That's better for the economy, too.
In case you're honestly asking: city-owned roads are much the same as they were 50 years ago, same for sewer pipes. We can do things like that in a publicly owned manner due to the long cycles, and even then it's often not optimal. Note, too, that most roads that you travel on were not built by a government but were built by a developer and simply maintained by the government.
Trying to get government to run networks would work well up front, but in 5 years it would be outdated and there would be no money to upgrade it. It would end up being a ghettoized mess.
The other issue is that it works fairly well right now, it's just stupidity like this that we have to overcome. And it should be easy to overcome this using law, public pressure, or both.
But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices.
However, if you believe in capitalism this creates a space for an aggressive innovator to come in with new reduced-energy practices/processes, and pass those savings onto consumers, causing the existing players to either likewise update their practices/processes to compete, or have them diminish/die. Such changes don't happen overnight however -- it could take many years for the selective pressure to bear.
Yaz
And here's what the problem is: it's cheaper for the capitalist to simply buy some sort of "exemption" from the government through "campaign donations" or outright bribery. This gives the company a leg up on their competition, then, and the tax simply becomes a barrier to entry into a market that existing players don't have to deal with.
I'll assume that there were industries that donated heavily to whoever had the previous majority in the parliament and were exempted from the carbon tax. Am I correct?
Or how about the other side that we see in America where politically connected "green energy" scams rake in millions?
What's really needed (short of scrapping the whole thing) is to change the law so that DMCA takedowns must be of the form "I declare under penalty of perjury that I am the owner of this copyrighted material, and it is being used here in violation of my copyright." And start putting some of these bastards in jail for perjury if they keep this crap up.
That's how the DMCA is already written. The problem is the lack of enforcement, not the law.
What is sworn under penalty of perjury is that you are, or are authorised to act for, the copyright owner of the allegedly infringed work....
Correct. And since they're not authorized by the copyright owner of the allegedly infringed work the statute should kick in.
There's no way out. Someone perjured themselves and it's high time they get to see the inside of a jail cell. This crap stops tomorrow with one single example. Right now, there's literally no downside to filing thousands of frivolous claims. The worst that happens is... nothing. The whole point of the DMCA is that you can take stuff down but you have to put your own ass on the line in order to do so.
There's tons of precedent for this, by the way. If I call the police and say "so and so robbed my house today" and then, when they come and investigate and find no evidence that my house was robbed I say "oh, well, not really" - I'm going to jail in that case. That's filing a false report and it's a crime.
We do this for a reason. The DMCA was written like that for a reason. What we see right now is the direct result of lack of enforcement.
Is it me or is the mere fact that they automated the takedown notices speaking volumes of how frivolous the whole matter has become? Take them all down and let God sort them out, or how is that supposed to be?
Am I the only one who thinks it's about time for some (serious) fines for frivolous takedown notices? It's not like they don't cost the media providers anything.
They're already supposed to be sworn under penalty of perjury, which beats the hell out of a "fine". The mechanism is already there, it's just that nobody seems to be interested in enforcing it.
Whoever sent the takedown notice should be looking at jail time according to the law.
The problem with your analogy is that Obama also sucker punched somebody and yet the people who refuse to associate with you - supposedly because you sucker punched somebody - see no problem with continuing their association with him. It's the double standard.
The whole "winshape" part of the "controversy" came after Cathy's comments. It was his comments that set it off, and his comments were no different than those expressed by Obama and Clinton (both) over the years. The difference is that he's an evil "conservative" and they're "Democrats".
Chick-fil-A were attacked because they were openly bigoted.
Were there any documented cases of Chic-Fil-A refusing to serve someone because they were gay? Refusing to hire someone because they were gay? Attacking someone because they were gay?
LK
Since the guy you're actually asking seems to be uninterested in answering, I'll answer for you.
The answers are "no", "no", and "no".
What happened was that the president of Chik-Fil-A, Dan Cathy, expressed an opinion on same-sex marriage that was exactly what Barack Obama had expressed just a couple of years earlier and that HIllary Clinton had also expressed. Oddly, only one of these three people were harassed for their opinion.
Oddly, it happens to be the one of the three with the least power to effect any change in regard to the subject matter at hand. But, he doesn't claim to be a "Democrat", which is an allegiance which absolves one from all responsibility and repercussions from their opinions.
Obama seems to be the first mainstream US presidential candidate in a long time to "talk the talk" to the kind of people who read Slashdot. The others have been spouting ignorant crap or simply ignoring the topics that most Slashdotters care about. Therefore Obama is the first president that we can be disappointed in -- the others were known bad before they became presidents.
Um, maybe to you. I saw Obama coming a mile away, he's admittedly even more of a let down than I or anyone else could imagine but I knew the vapid talk was just that. I'm glad you admit that he fooled you, most on your side keep claiming that he's actually not an embarrassing failure and that things are way better than when Bush was in office.
Keep preaching this. I have had to explain this over and over again, mainly to wingnuts of both persuasions who like to point out how the Constitution doesn't prohibit their pet laws so they must be okay.
Yeah, but taken by itself "the celtics" has no implications. The "fighting irish", on the other hand, manages to incorporate a negative stereotype in the name. This isn't like "redskins". It would be like the "drunken indians".
It doesn't bother me personally, I'm just pointing out the double standard.
Slashdot Mirror
If tech companies weren't shit at training they would be somewhat more fungible, though not perfectly so. Engineering companies are somewhat better at this: if a company is looking for chemical engineers and can't find someone with experience in exactly the process they're hiring for, they'll hire a chemical engineer with experience in a different process and get them up to speed. Tech companies seem incapable of doing that, and instead they have a big list of really specific background they want, "must have 7 years of experience in J2EE and 3 years experience using Joe Bob's Serialization Framework", then complain they can't find anyone so it must be a "programmer shortage".
At which point they bring a foreign worker over and train them in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework.
I've written about this at length in the past. My own wife came over on an H1A as a nurse. The reason that they got her had nothing to do with a "shortage of nurses". Instead, it had to do with a "shortage of nurses that would work for the shit wages that the nursing homes wanted to pay". Big difference - and frankly that's the same thing I see in the tech industry.
If the Department of Labor simply forced these companies to follow the law and compensate the foreign workers on par with American workers it would somewhat alleviate the problem. But they don't, and the law's a joke.
The other issue is that these workers are essentially indentured servants until they get a green card and the power disparity also plays heavily into this. Looking at my wife's situation again I know of nurses who pissed off the wrong people in their job and ended up on a plane back home. If you hate your job you don't have the ability to simply get another. I'd like to say that everybody acts like an adult and that doesn't matter but the reality is that it matters a lot. When you don't really have the option to quit there's little pressure on management to make sure you like your job.
In the nursing industry it's even worse because of regulation. I don't mean the regulation makes it worse - hiring foreigners is a great way to get around regulation and not worry about your employees turning you in. After all, if your understaffed shit hole gets shut down by the state you get a plane ride back home.
In my wife's generation this was even worse because they had to come up with US$5000 to pay the staffing agency to bring them over. That's about a year and a half of wages for your typical middle class Filipino - it would be analogous to an American coming up with $75,000. Not easy. And if you lose your job in America you'll spend 10 years working in the Philippines to pay that off.
Ugh.
I'm a Verizon shill? LOL!!! I think there should be laws against what Verizon is doing, and when I say "laws" I mean "government takes your stuff" type laws. Read my last line. I'm serious.
city-owned roads are much the same as they were 50 years ago, same for sewer pipes
What shithole do you live in where they haven't upgraded any roads in 50 years?
LOL! I live in Franklin, TN. They upgrade roads regularly.
In case you're actually as stupid as you sound the point is that the *technology* is largely the same as it was 50 years ago - limestone and asphalt cement.
Is your networking technology the same as it was 50 years ago?
It's impossible to compare slowly changing technologies such as road construction and sewer construction with computer and networking technologies.
We have a do-not-call list and the requisite legal structure to make it work well. What we don't have is a government agency to enforce it, so it's a joke at this point. Worse yet is that the scammers are brazen enough at this point that they're apparently using the do-not-call list as a calling list.
I actually called the FTC once to inquire about the status of their investigation into one company that was doing this a few years ago - one which I was able to mostly track down. The response from the lady there was "yeah, we're trying to track them down, too, so if you find out who they are please get back in touch with us and let us know". Argh.
As others have pointed out it's trivial to find out who they are, particularly for the government. Just give them the card information that they so desperately want and find out who got the money. Dirt simple.
That is, if someone cares to do it.
LOL! She's still around, now joined by Bridgette and Carmen. I get called twice a day on my cell phone (which is on the "Do-Not-Call list) from them.
They need to get serious about that as people are apparently still willing to give out their credit card numbers.
Trying to get government to run networks would work well up front, but in 5 years it would be outdated and there would be no money to upgrade it.
What is the difference between that and what we have now? It isn't like Comcast is working around the clock to beef up their last-mile connections.
Around here they are. I've been with Comcast for 13 or so years and my speed has increased dramatically during that time. AT&T is also adding fiber as is one of their smaller competitors. Sorry about your situation.
That long cycle worked fine for the telephone lines that serve your house. They served us well for a long time.
Yes, and the amount of data pushed over those lines didn't change for 100 years. During the last 15 years a home internet connection has went from 28.8Kbps to 50Mbps - about a 2000 times increase. Governments cannot move at that speed.
Capitalism works just fine. What I described above is known around here as "crony capitalism", and it's a whole nother ballgame. And it's a problem of government, not business. Having honest people in government puts an end to cronyism and allows actual capitalists to do their thing. That's better for the economy, too.
In case you're honestly asking: city-owned roads are much the same as they were 50 years ago, same for sewer pipes. We can do things like that in a publicly owned manner due to the long cycles, and even then it's often not optimal. Note, too, that most roads that you travel on were not built by a government but were built by a developer and simply maintained by the government.
Trying to get government to run networks would work well up front, but in 5 years it would be outdated and there would be no money to upgrade it. It would end up being a ghettoized mess.
The other issue is that it works fairly well right now, it's just stupidity like this that we have to overcome. And it should be easy to overcome this using law, public pressure, or both.
But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices.
However, if you believe in capitalism this creates a space for an aggressive innovator to come in with new reduced-energy practices/processes, and pass those savings onto consumers, causing the existing players to either likewise update their practices/processes to compete, or have them diminish/die. Such changes don't happen overnight however -- it could take many years for the selective pressure to bear.
Yaz
And here's what the problem is: it's cheaper for the capitalist to simply buy some sort of "exemption" from the government through "campaign donations" or outright bribery. This gives the company a leg up on their competition, then, and the tax simply becomes a barrier to entry into a market that existing players don't have to deal with.
I'll assume that there were industries that donated heavily to whoever had the previous majority in the parliament and were exempted from the carbon tax. Am I correct?
Or how about the other side that we see in America where politically connected "green energy" scams rake in millions?
Objectivists aren't libertarians.
What's really needed (short of scrapping the whole thing) is to change the law so that DMCA takedowns must be of the form "I declare under penalty of perjury that I am the owner of this copyrighted material, and it is being used here in violation of my copyright." And start putting some of these bastards in jail for perjury if they keep this crap up.
That's how the DMCA is already written. The problem is the lack of enforcement, not the law.
Read a DMCA claim wording _carefully_.
What is sworn under penalty of perjury is that you are, or are authorised to act for, the copyright owner of the allegedly infringed work....
Correct. And since they're not authorized by the copyright owner of the allegedly infringed work the statute should kick in.
There's no way out. Someone perjured themselves and it's high time they get to see the inside of a jail cell. This crap stops tomorrow with one single example. Right now, there's literally no downside to filing thousands of frivolous claims. The worst that happens is... nothing. The whole point of the DMCA is that you can take stuff down but you have to put your own ass on the line in order to do so.
There's tons of precedent for this, by the way. If I call the police and say "so and so robbed my house today" and then, when they come and investigate and find no evidence that my house was robbed I say "oh, well, not really" - I'm going to jail in that case. That's filing a false report and it's a crime.
We do this for a reason. The DMCA was written like that for a reason. What we see right now is the direct result of lack of enforcement.
Is it me or is the mere fact that they automated the takedown notices speaking volumes of how frivolous the whole matter has become? Take them all down and let God sort them out, or how is that supposed to be?
Am I the only one who thinks it's about time for some (serious) fines for frivolous takedown notices? It's not like they don't cost the media providers anything.
They're already supposed to be sworn under penalty of perjury, which beats the hell out of a "fine". The mechanism is already there, it's just that nobody seems to be interested in enforcing it.
Whoever sent the takedown notice should be looking at jail time according to the law.
...an unnamed small Nevada hosting provider was the subject of an intense and unannounced BSA audit on Thursday...
I get the feeling that the actual headline is "Vitalwerks staff vacationing in the Caribbean for the next couple of months".
While a simpler and more conservative design, a helicopter like this already exists: The Eurocopter (now Airbus) X3.
Not yet in production but several functioning machines that already reached speeds of 472 km/h.
Yeah, but we need one that travels in miles per hour.
Am i the only one who thought the may day was about the soviet style communist celebrations?
I have trouble trusting it on name alone. But you have a good point as well ss many others.
You're not the only one who noticed that. The utter cluelessness to start with "May One" and they move to calling it "May Day" is staggering.
see no problem with continuing their association with him. It's the double standard.
OR there's a flaw in your logic somewhere.
...which you can't seem to identify.
The problem with your analogy is that Obama also sucker punched somebody and yet the people who refuse to associate with you - supposedly because you sucker punched somebody - see no problem with continuing their association with him. It's the double standard.
The whole "winshape" part of the "controversy" came after Cathy's comments. It was his comments that set it off, and his comments were no different than those expressed by Obama and Clinton (both) over the years. The difference is that he's an evil "conservative" and they're "Democrats".
Chick-fil-A were attacked because they were openly bigoted.
Were there any documented cases of Chic-Fil-A refusing to serve someone because they were gay? Refusing to hire someone because they were gay? Attacking someone because they were gay?
LK
Since the guy you're actually asking seems to be uninterested in answering, I'll answer for you.
The answers are "no", "no", and "no".
What happened was that the president of Chik-Fil-A, Dan Cathy, expressed an opinion on same-sex marriage that was exactly what Barack Obama had expressed just a couple of years earlier and that HIllary Clinton had also expressed. Oddly, only one of these three people were harassed for their opinion.
Oddly, it happens to be the one of the three with the least power to effect any change in regard to the subject matter at hand. But, he doesn't claim to be a "Democrat", which is an allegiance which absolves one from all responsibility and repercussions from their opinions.
Obama seems to be the first mainstream US presidential candidate in a long time to "talk the talk" to the kind of people who read Slashdot. The others have been spouting ignorant crap or simply ignoring the topics that most Slashdotters care about. Therefore Obama is the first president that we can be disappointed in -- the others were known bad before they became presidents.
Um, maybe to you. I saw Obama coming a mile away, he's admittedly even more of a let down than I or anyone else could imagine but I knew the vapid talk was just that. I'm glad you admit that he fooled you, most on your side keep claiming that he's actually not an embarrassing failure and that things are way better than when Bush was in office.
nut kick the guy who keeps asking "what if you could...." in the screencast? That got annoying real fast.
Keep preaching this. I have had to explain this over and over again, mainly to wingnuts of both persuasions who like to point out how the Constitution doesn't prohibit their pet laws so they must be okay.
Yeah, but taken by itself "the celtics" has no implications. The "fighting irish", on the other hand, manages to incorporate a negative stereotype in the name. This isn't like "redskins". It would be like the "drunken indians".
It doesn't bother me personally, I'm just pointing out the double standard.