In theory, in practice, at least where I'm at, it's a lot easier to get rid of someone than it is to hire them. I've been working with a guy who has been here for years, and had to start looking for a job before they would change him from contractor to an employee. If you do something someone doesn't like? Bam, you're walked out the door.
Hmm. Lousy employer, if they care that little about their employees. Maybe you should change the criteria you use when conducting a job search to be more selective.
About half of the people here are going to be outsourced in the next two months. These are my social connections. Not too useful for finding me a job at this point.
Establish better social connections. It's not that hard -- join local LUGs and special-interest groups; go to social events organized by your local software yuppies; etc.
Well you're awful at making your points. You started off with "People should just make themselves better" and went to "I have lots of inside connections and can easily get a job."
Do you think I got those social connections by luck? I made it a point to cultivate them. It's work, like anything else.
Your original point was people shouldn't be given a chance.
Wrong. My original point is that it's not unreasonable to expect people to work within the system. Part of that is cultivating social connections, knowing how to talk to HR types, etc.
It must be nice to have that kind of power and access to people who actually have the authority to make those kinds of decisions.
Do you think I got it by accident? I chose to work for the kind of (small) company where I would reasonably expect to have ready access to management, then I worked my butt off to gain their respect.
How the heck do you get hired as an embedded systems programmer anyway? I know of one guy who did that and he was top of his class coming out of college.
Personally, I got hired because Employee #7 at MontaVista Software (their first intern) was impressed by the assistance I gave him while volunteering at a LUG event -- an event I was volunteering at with the intent of cultivating just such connections.
It seems to me that you've picked up this bizarre worldview from going to failing startup to failing startup.
Every last one of my former employers is, to the best of my knowledge, still in business.
In theory. In practice, at least where I'm at, it's a lot easier to approve of hiring someone than it is to push through their termination.
What the heck are you talking about? Are you saying that the reason that one resume out of hundreds got the job was because he was more "Presentable"? Are these "Presentable" people "gems"?
You're claiming that there are good people that the hiring process filters out. I'm using "presentable to the hiring process" to mean "having characteristics such as to avoid being filtered by the hiring process". Simple enough?
Job openings are for specific positions and tasks and they want years of experence in VERY specific languages/OSs/whatevers. Good luck being good at what you do when you are never given a chance to do it.
Jobs are frequently posted that way, sure. That's not to say it isn't possible to get them anyhow if you play your cards right. "Playing your cards right" can mean plenty of things -- finding someone on staff who you already know to put in a good word, chatting up the HR droid enough to get an interview with a member of technical staff despite missing the outer qualifications, or just walking in and giving off the right kind of mojo. Knowing how to put together an impressive-looking resume never hurts, either.
And yes, I'm a geek-of-all-trades myself -- embedded systems coder, system level coder, revision control advisor, security advisor, senior deployment engineer, sysadmin (of several flavors -- once lead, now advisory), backup DBA, script monkey, and other assorted stuff I don't remember right now. Despite spreading myself thin this way (and, by your view, making myself ineligible for hiring because I don't have 5 years' contiguous experience in any single technology), I have the personal connections necessary to find new work in less than a week should my company fold. Which is my point.
(Oh -- I actually practice more than half of the specializations I listed above on a regular basis; having that kind of opportunity is, IMNSHO, one of the nice things about working for startups and small companies, which my last 6 years' of employers have been. In general, though, if you want to gain general experience, you don't wait to be "given a chance" to practice some different line of work, you make your chances -- I'm going to be becoming an Asterisk admin, too, when we move into our new office, because I cornered the director of operations and insisted on it).
I'm sorry -- but the economy's recovered to the point where if you can't get hired, it's your own damn fault. Stop whining and fix yourself, or go find a different profession.
Do you love particle physics and super-colliders enough to pay for them?
Not sure. The promise of cheap, abundant energy if only we can figure out how to make fusion-based power generation practical is quite an alluring one -- enough to tempt me to throw at least a few bucks that way each year. Right now, of course, the decision is made for me.
But then you'd not be reading this, thanks to CERN's WWW development?!?
Maybe, maybe not. Just because something comes about one way doesn't mean it wouldn't have come about a different way otherwise.
If we don't love Hubble's images enough to pay for them -- perhaps, when push comes to shove, we don't really want the space program as a whole that much.
(On a different topic, and no longer playing devil's advocate: Why the hell is a "post 9-11" government so different from a pre 9-11 government as to rebalance priorities so much? Some people died. It happens every day, and it's about time we @$#% well get over it).
Nobody should pay to get a great pictures of discovery
No, nobody should, but this is the real world, and people do pay already, whether they want to or not -- do you think Hubble got up there for free, or that the folks on the ground controlling it work without pay?
Placing the financial burden for maintaining a resource on the folks making use of it makes substantially more sense than placing it on unwilling 3rd parties; anything else lends itself to suboptimal resource allocation.
What sort of private entity needs a fucking space telescope?
One that makes its money by selling images from that telescope to research institutions, of course.
If the research institutions aren't willing to pay enough to the private entity to keep it in the black, then the images obviously aren't worth what the telescope (and supporting organization) costs to operate. (If nobody is willing to pay the research institutions enough to pay the telescope-operation entity, then obviously the research institutions aren't worth it either).
First off, the DMCA has a loophole for reverse engineering done for purposes of interoperability.
Second, it's quite straightforward to demonstrate that one engaged in reverse-engineering -- the same way you demonstrate in court that you went through a clean-room process: Affidavats and work-product from the involved staff. (In clean-room reverse engineering, one maintains a Chinese wall between reverse-engineering and product development staff; this was the process used when reproducing the IBM PC's BIOS).
The rest of your post is too convoluted for me to parse without rereading it more than three times, which is my limit.
It's not really about the protocol. Even though you are interested in the protocol's innerworkings, you are essentially eavesdropping on a private 'conversation'
Remember: In this example, the two endpoints are on systems run by my friends. It's their own content that's being moved over the wire, and it's understood that they don't mind me watching.
There's a reason it's called "taking a chance" -- hiring people who seem iffy up-front on account of desparation may bring in a few gems, but it's likely to bring in a lot more trash. I don't see a good reason why good people can't make themselves presentable to "the hiring process", presuming they aren't already.
My employer largely hires through personal relationships -- one of our current programming staff is willing to vouch for a friend's skill? They've at least got an interview. What good programmer doesn't have employed friends of similar skill?
There are plenty of ways to get hired, presuming you're actually good at what you do (as opposed to thinking you're good at what you do).
A lot of those retards hung on to their jobs while good people got canned.
It's quite hard to find good people still on the market these days, though, unlike 2-3 years ago (in Austin). Conclusion: Good people may have gotten canned, but by and large they've since been reemployed.
Probably for the exact same reason you can't legally use a DirecTV decoder; even though you may have never agreed to their terms of service, and even though their signal is being broadcast onto your property.
Seems a non-sequitur to me: DirecTV's broadcasts include anti-circumvention technology, so the DMCA applies to attempts to reverse-engineer them. The same isn't true of SMB/CIFS.
Yup, our VP of Engineering signed us up, much to IT's dismay -- as part of the contract we agreed to do a bunch of stuff we never had any intention of (like building a MS-certified product, though we're a Java shop) and agreed to let the BSA audit us at will... and in return we got a bunch of licenses (time-limited unless we renew), most of which have enough strings on them to be useful for nothing except building products that interoperate with the MS products in question. Bah!
PS - This post is a work of fiction. It's quite certainly not intended to reflect the politics, actions, etc. of any employer of mine, past or present, and any such similarity is mere coincidence.
The individual making the moderation probably meant to infer that the parent post was created not based on genuine information, but rather to stir up flames and/or controvercy about the genuinely patent-free status of Vorbis, or Apple's management, or somesuch.
There's no more, or less reason to trust the AA employees than Doctorow.
If the AA employee made a public account of the event that contradicted Doctorow's, and put their name behind that account, I would agree with you. Otherwise, I give the benefit of a doubt to the individual who is willing to state, in public, on the record, what they understood to occur.
I've no reason to take his, or AA's, version of events at face value.
No, you don't -- but constant suspicion is an awfully unpleasent way to live.
Bottom line: We only have Doctorow's word that this incident took place, and took place in the way that he described.
And I'm silly enough to actually trust that a non-anonymous accounts of events by an individual in the public eye is a genuine retelling of that individual's perceptions of the event, unless I have substantial reason to believe otherwise.
This is nothing about admiration for Doctorow -- I don't know the man, and my reference to him as a "civil rights crusader" was based merely on my knowledge of his association with the EFF; perhaps I should have referred to him as an "activist" instead, since that likewise would have conveyed the relevant point. This is about trusting people in general -- something I've long considered good policy, and will continue to do so as long as I can.
We have no confirmation that this AA was acting to enforce a TSA regulation, or that such a regulation even exists.
Yes, I think that was part of Doctorow's intended point -- that the airline was quite plausibly hiding behind the "TSA" name in acting to carry out their own whims.
If this is a TSA reg, and if it is a requirement for entry
It is obviously neither, since the airline waived it and admitted him once it became known to them that he was an AAdvantage Platinum member, and other airlines have made no such requests to him under similar circumstances. Read the article?
If Doctorow refused to complete such a form, he would be reponsible for the consequences (e.g., being refused entry).
And given Doctorow's status as a civil rights crusader, it's plausible that he would balk TSA regs to make a point / test case / etc -- even if it were true, which it is apparently not, that this is genuinely required under TSA regs.
If you want to let the poor senior citizens who didn't realize what money was starve, well, that's your belief. Fine. Please don't cover it up by expecting people to get better.
I think it's reasonable to believe that forcing some people to starve will encourage other people to take action to avoid that fate -- to deny that is to deny that we can learn from the examples of others.
We had six thousand years without government pension programs, and during those six thousand years, people starved to death regularly because they hadn't properly dealt with money.
Some, sure. I don't think anyone ever meant to claim that everyone would suddenly become fiscally responsible -- just that the populace in general would become more fiscally responsible -- hopefully enough so that the number of people who starve to death on a regular basis is substantially smaller than the number who currently rely on social security.
The children of rich, responsible people don't even necessarily tend to the responsible.
All the better to weed out those that aren't. Some children of rich, responsible people do indeed inherit their parents' memes -- with a bit of reinforcement, those memes would be better propagated. (Not that you need to be a child of someone responsible to pick up good memes -- but it's one popular source).
I don't disagree at all wrt the "clever apes" bit -- but we're reasonably adaptable apes, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect individuals to display a bit of that adaptability in acting in their own best interests.
The idea that SS taxes shouldn't be applied to capital gains and other forms of income is basically a huge giveaway to the rich.
So... I've been at this startup for a few years, making just barely enough cash to get by and lots of non-qualified options to buy with a very low strike price. (This isn't hypothetical -- this is me). I exercise the options (to get actual stock in a nonpublic company which I can't pay the rent with and can't sell 'till IPO), and in doing so incur over $20,000 in tax liability, bumping myself up a few brackets in the process, but not yet receiving any cash I can actually pay those taxes (or my mortgage, or anything else) with. I then have to hold that stock for at least a year if I don't want to pay the short-term gains rate (which is huge), and during that year need to pay these capital gains taxes in cash I don't have (because I've been working for stock, remember), before I can sell the stock just to get soaked with capital gains again, presuming it's worth anything at that time. If it isn't, I'm in serious debt to the IRS and have nothing at all to show for it.
I really try to avoid using profanity in my public postings -- but for the reasons above, this "let's add social security on to the capital gains taxes" suggestion is truly deserving of a big "FUCK YOU". I suppose it might be worth considering if capital gains taxed only gains that could actually be converted into cash -- but as it stands, that's simply not the case.
Jamestown, NY and Erie, PA were two of the areas she was looking at. She's also positive there are a number in the Midwest, but hasn't looked for them.
Not handy, I'm afaid. Last time I looked into it was back when one of my friends was considering leaving Austin for such a place. I looked at a few of the MLS listings -- but I don't recall what state they were in.
(I bought a house in Austin recently. My realtor was thrilled to have a client from California -- the folks from the rest of Texas have trouble getting over how high the prices in Austin are, whereas I was thrilled to be able to find nice homes with good locations in the $120-150 region).
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I'm a geek-of-all-trades myself -- embedded systems coder, system level coder, revision control advisor, security advisor, senior deployment engineer, sysadmin (of several flavors -- once lead, now advisory), backup DBA, script monkey, and other assorted stuff I don't remember right now. Despite spreading myself thin this way (and, by your view, making myself ineligible for hiring because I don't have 5 years' contiguous experience in any single technology), I have the personal connections necessary to find new work in less than a week should my company fold. Which is my point.
(Oh -- I actually practice more than half of the specializations I listed above on a regular basis; having that kind of opportunity is, IMNSHO, one of the nice things about working for startups and small companies, which my last 6 years' of employers have been. In general, though, if you want to gain general experience, you don't wait to be "given a chance" to practice some different line of work, you make your chances -- I'm going to be becoming an Asterisk admin, too, when we move into our new office, because I cornered the director of operations and insisted on it).
I'm sorry -- but the economy's recovered to the point where if you can't get hired, it's your own damn fault. Stop whining and fix yourself, or go find a different profession.
Do you love particle physics and super-colliders enough to pay for them?
Not sure. The promise of cheap, abundant energy if only we can figure out how to make fusion-based power generation practical is quite an alluring one -- enough to tempt me to throw at least a few bucks that way each year. Right now, of course, the decision is made for me.
But then you'd not be reading this, thanks to CERN's WWW development?!?
Maybe, maybe not. Just because something comes about one way doesn't mean it wouldn't have come about a different way otherwise.
If we don't love Hubble's images enough to pay for them -- perhaps, when push comes to shove, we don't really want the space program as a whole that much.
(On a different topic, and no longer playing devil's advocate: Why the hell is a "post 9-11" government so different from a pre 9-11 government as to rebalance priorities so much? Some people died. It happens every day, and it's about time we @$#% well get over it).
Placing the financial burden for maintaining a resource on the folks making use of it makes substantially more sense than placing it on unwilling 3rd parties; anything else lends itself to suboptimal resource allocation.
What sort of private entity needs a fucking space telescope?
One that makes its money by selling images from that telescope to research institutions, of course.
If the research institutions aren't willing to pay enough to the private entity to keep it in the black, then the images obviously aren't worth what the telescope (and supporting organization) costs to operate. (If nobody is willing to pay the research institutions enough to pay the telescope-operation entity, then obviously the research institutions aren't worth it either).
First off, the DMCA has a loophole for reverse engineering done for purposes of interoperability.
Second, it's quite straightforward to demonstrate that one engaged in reverse-engineering -- the same way you demonstrate in court that you went through a clean-room process: Affidavats and work-product from the involved staff. (In clean-room reverse engineering, one maintains a Chinese wall between reverse-engineering and product development staff; this was the process used when reproducing the IBM PC's BIOS).
The rest of your post is too convoluted for me to parse without rereading it more than three times, which is my limit.
In theory, I suppose that's possible. I've yet to see it done in practice.
Remember, the top of this thread was roughly someone saying "I can't believe Samba was developed without breaching any EULAs".
Why would they go to jail?
Name a law that they'd be breaching.
It's not really about the protocol. Even though you are interested in the protocol's innerworkings, you are essentially eavesdropping on a private 'conversation'
Remember: In this example, the two endpoints are on systems run by my friends. It's their own content that's being moved over the wire, and it's understood that they don't mind me watching.
There's a reason it's called "taking a chance" -- hiring people who seem iffy up-front on account of desparation may bring in a few gems, but it's likely to bring in a lot more trash. I don't see a good reason why good people can't make themselves presentable to "the hiring process", presuming they aren't already.
My employer largely hires through personal relationships -- one of our current programming staff is willing to vouch for a friend's skill? They've at least got an interview. What good programmer doesn't have employed friends of similar skill?
There are plenty of ways to get hired, presuming you're actually good at what you do (as opposed to thinking you're good at what you do).
A lot of those retards hung on to their jobs while good people got canned.
It's quite hard to find good people still on the market these days, though, unlike 2-3 years ago (in Austin). Conclusion: Good people may have gotten canned, but by and large they've since been reemployed.
Probably for the exact same reason you can't legally use a DirecTV decoder; even though you may have never agreed to their terms of service, and even though their signal is being broadcast onto your property.
Seems a non-sequitur to me: DirecTV's broadcasts include anti-circumvention technology, so the DMCA applies to attempts to reverse-engineer them. The same isn't true of SMB/CIFS.
Yup, our VP of Engineering signed us up, much to IT's dismay -- as part of the contract we agreed to do a bunch of stuff we never had any intention of (like building a MS-certified product, though we're a Java shop) and agreed to let the BSA audit us at will... and in return we got a bunch of licenses (time-limited unless we renew), most of which have enough strings on them to be useful for nothing except building products that interoperate with the MS products in question. Bah!
PS - This post is a work of fiction. It's quite certainly not intended to reflect the politics, actions, etc. of any employer of mine, past or present, and any such similarity is mere coincidence.
Let's say that I'm a UNIX guy. I don't own a copy of Microsoft Windows. I never agreed to their EULA.
I observe and reverse-engineer an over-the-wire file transfer protocol between two computers owned by my friends.
Now, tell me: How is any EULA violated? I never agreed to it in the first place, so I can't be violating it.
The individual making the moderation probably meant to infer that the parent post was created not based on genuine information, but rather to stir up flames and/or controvercy about the genuinely patent-free status of Vorbis, or Apple's management, or somesuch.
There's no more, or less reason to trust the AA employees than Doctorow.
If the AA employee made a public account of the event that contradicted Doctorow's, and put their name behind that account, I would agree with you. Otherwise, I give the benefit of a doubt to the individual who is willing to state, in public, on the record, what they understood to occur.
I've no reason to take his, or AA's, version of events at face value.
No, you don't -- but constant suspicion is an awfully unpleasent way to live.
Bottom line: We only have Doctorow's word that this incident took place, and took place in the way that he described.
And I'm silly enough to actually trust that a non-anonymous accounts of events by an individual in the public eye is a genuine retelling of that individual's perceptions of the event, unless I have substantial reason to believe otherwise.
This is nothing about admiration for Doctorow -- I don't know the man, and my reference to him as a "civil rights crusader" was based merely on my knowledge of his association with the EFF; perhaps I should have referred to him as an "activist" instead, since that likewise would have conveyed the relevant point. This is about trusting people in general -- something I've long considered good policy, and will continue to do so as long as I can.
We have no confirmation that this AA was acting to enforce a TSA regulation, or that such a regulation even exists.
Yes, I think that was part of Doctorow's intended point -- that the airline was quite plausibly hiding behind the "TSA" name in acting to carry out their own whims.
Since when has running a web site and wanting to let people steal things that don't belong to them amounted to crusading for civil rights?
I think that's a severe mischaracterization of the EFF's work.
If this is a TSA reg, and if it is a requirement for entry
It is obviously neither, since the airline waived it and admitted him once it became known to them that he was an AAdvantage Platinum member, and other airlines have made no such requests to him under similar circumstances. Read the article?
If Doctorow refused to complete such a form, he would be reponsible for the consequences (e.g., being refused entry).
And given Doctorow's status as a civil rights crusader, it's plausible that he would balk TSA regs to make a point / test case / etc -- even if it were true, which it is apparently not, that this is genuinely required under TSA regs.
I suspect if he'd been given a form to fill this info out on the whole thing wouldn't have bothered him, or not nearly as much.
Given who he is, I consider that unlikely.
If you want to let the poor senior citizens who didn't realize what money was starve, well, that's your belief. Fine. Please don't cover it up by expecting people to get better.
I think it's reasonable to believe that forcing some people to starve will encourage other people to take action to avoid that fate -- to deny that is to deny that we can learn from the examples of others.
We had six thousand years without government pension programs, and during those six thousand years, people starved to death regularly because they hadn't properly dealt with money.
Some, sure. I don't think anyone ever meant to claim that everyone would suddenly become fiscally responsible -- just that the populace in general would become more fiscally responsible -- hopefully enough so that the number of people who starve to death on a regular basis is substantially smaller than the number who currently rely on social security.
The children of rich, responsible people don't even necessarily tend to the responsible.
All the better to weed out those that aren't. Some children of rich, responsible people do indeed inherit their parents' memes -- with a bit of reinforcement, those memes would be better propagated. (Not that you need to be a child of someone responsible to pick up good memes -- but it's one popular source).
I don't disagree at all wrt the "clever apes" bit -- but we're reasonably adaptable apes, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect individuals to display a bit of that adaptability in acting in their own best interests.
The idea that SS taxes shouldn't be applied to capital gains and other forms of income is basically a huge giveaway to the rich.
So... I've been at this startup for a few years, making just barely enough cash to get by and lots of non-qualified options to buy with a very low strike price. (This isn't hypothetical -- this is me). I exercise the options (to get actual stock in a nonpublic company which I can't pay the rent with and can't sell 'till IPO), and in doing so incur over $20,000 in tax liability, bumping myself up a few brackets in the process, but not yet receiving any cash I can actually pay those taxes (or my mortgage, or anything else) with. I then have to hold that stock for at least a year if I don't want to pay the short-term gains rate (which is huge), and during that year need to pay these capital gains taxes in cash I don't have (because I've been working for stock, remember), before I can sell the stock just to get soaked with capital gains again, presuming it's worth anything at that time. If it isn't, I'm in serious debt to the IRS and have nothing at all to show for it.
I really try to avoid using profanity in my public postings -- but for the reasons above, this "let's add social security on to the capital gains taxes" suggestion is truly deserving of a big "FUCK YOU". I suppose it might be worth considering if capital gains taxed only gains that could actually be converted into cash -- but as it stands, that's simply not the case.
Aforementioned friend answered back.
Jamestown, NY and Erie, PA were two of the areas she was looking at. She's also positive there are a number in the Midwest, but hasn't looked for them.
Not handy, I'm afaid. Last time I looked into it was back when one of my friends was considering leaving Austin for such a place. I looked at a few of the MLS listings -- but I don't recall what state they were in.
(I bought a house in Austin recently. My realtor was thrilled to have a client from California -- the folks from the rest of Texas have trouble getting over how high the prices in Austin are, whereas I was thrilled to be able to find nice homes with good locations in the $120-150 region).