If you want that job in another country, you apply for citizenship in that country and once you become a citizen, then get a job there.
Do you know anything about living in a foreign country? You cannot just "apply for citizenship" in whatever country you want.* To be eligible for citizenship, you you first have to live there on a residency visa for a number of years. And how do you get into a foreign country and live there? One of the most common ways is being invited to work there. Pretty much all countries in the world have the concept of the work visa. One might wish to set higher or lower quotas, but every country is fine with some amount of skilled workers coming in.
* (Yes, there are countries like Malta that give you a passport if you invest a seven-figure amount, but we are talking here about ordinary workers, not oligarchs. And while Ireland gives citizenship on the basis of ancestry, that is not an option for e.g. IT workers in India.)
Every time we do this, we make the immigrant countries' problems our problems.
[Citation needed] There is a huge difference historically between immigrants to the US, with a strong work ethic and likely to be educated, and the northern European experience where low-skilled refugees have to stay on the dole for at least a generation because they cannot or don't want to work.
There is some social tension in the latter case and the Far Right has often ran campaign that claim the local culture is being swamped by outsiders. In the US, however, immigrants always have and continue to assimilate very quickly, and while you can probably dredge up tabloid scandals to villify the immigrant from overseas demographic of your choice, it means little in the big picture.
I oppose the massive use of H1Bs myself, but if they are coming in anyway, it will only aid assimilation if the wife can go out and work everyday instead of just sitting at home.
You're joking, right? Asimov's late-career spotwelding of what were originally three separate universes (the Robots, Empire and Foundation novels) drew massive criticism.
Harvard divested from tobacco investments over two decades ago and, in retrospect, pretty much everyone agrees it was a good thing. In any event, activists can only push universities to consider their investments. If the university is sitting on a massive endowment and it can easily weather the divestment, then the activists will have their way, but if it were to pose a serious threat to the university, then I think such calls would face great resistance.
So if they don't register and do blog anonymously and hide their IP, how are they going to catch them?
VKontakte has for years now required giving a mobile phone number (in Russia, your ID goes into a government database when you purchase a SIM card) to sign up, to prevent anonymous commentary then. The same may already be true of LiveJournal, one of the country's most popular blogging platforms. There will always be a few people who have the savvy to stay anonymous, but a lot of the small-scale bloggers presently exposing local corruption are not particularly knowledgeable about computers and wouldn't be able to safely use e.g. Tor. So, government efforts really do pose a risk to Joe Blogs in Russia.
You go to some federal office where you show who you are
I don't think this is a workable solution. One of the reasons for low voter turnout in the US is that going to a special location to vote is burdensome (and some employers won't allow their employees to leave work to vote). The future surely has to be online.
Democracy OS is not designed to be anonymous (i.e., no secret ballots, no anonymous comments)
That helps to avoid problems with anonymous trolling (the online disinhibition effect or "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory"). It also would help to avoid outright floods from foreign agents in discussions on foreign policy-related issues. On the other hand, if ballots are secret, then it is troubling that political lobbying by individuals (as opposed to corporations) is not held anonymous, and if people's voting choices are exposed, there can be a chilling effect. Is there no perfect balance here?
Let me guess, you're new here? A decade or so ago the GNAA was able to flood the comments section with troll posts (complete with Last Measure links). Other copy-paste posts like the interview with CmdrTaco who had become a "nullo", pitches for MyCleanPC, and BSD is Dying often brought mirth to the comments. If anything, there is too high a proportion of on-topic posts these days, and the few trolls you get are boring one-sentence attacks on African-Americans. In a way, that's a more poignant sign of Slashdot's decline than any of the complaining over Dice and the beta.
My experiences cycling across South Africa last winter, where I often stopped for the night at a local farm because there wasn't anything else for the next 100km, did much to disabuse me of the notion that large-scale farmers and ranchers are uneducated. Many of them had done rigorous university studies in the big city before coming back to the middle of nowhere, and they still kept up with the latest scholarly literature to maximise gains.
However, their education was specifically on fields useful to farming and ranching such as chemistry, biology, veterinary sciences, economics, etc. They had no background in computer science, and though they had a network brought out to the farm to allow them to track e.g. feed prices, they didn't know much about how said network or their computers worked. So, I understand the OP's suspicion that Montana may lack an educated workforce capable of luring IT firms.
How have your experiences with LSD affected your later work? (For those unaware, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters went around turning people onto the substance, as documented in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). Many participants in the counterculture speak of having new spiritual perspectives after taking LSD, but has it given you any special insights into working with new computer technology?
If you start with a base assumption everything is being recorded and monitored, then you can build systems that have protections against that designed in from the start. Math is awesome.
Math, such as crypto algorithms, is awesome, but implementations are not. Nerds have been aware for well over a decade (the EU Parliament's ECHELON report came out in 2001) that certain states seek to monitor and store as much online communication as possible, but coding practices even in sensitive privacy-defending applications have continued to be lax, as the recent Heartbleed episode shows.
Ghostery is under a proprietary license and Evidon, the company that owns it, is involved in the online advertising industry. I trust the EFF a lot more.
FWIW, though, you can get many of the same benefits of Ghostery without installing that plugin by simply processing its lists through a Privoxy filter (the conversion is fairly easy to script and then automate), so Privoxy zaps all those IPs before they even get to the browser.
This may prompt you to ask: why do we need LE at all? What *is* their role? They are Officers of the Court.
Oh, please. Since the founding of the US (and before, as it essentially preserved the British system), the local constabulary has been tasking with ensuring public order, with much of its work, such separating brawlers, getting drunks into the drunk tank, etc., not even intended to escalate all the way to court.
By quoting Kubrick's film (Heywood Floyd travels in a Pan-Am spaceflight in 2001: A Space Odyssey), the summary suggests that Boeing is preparing to send commercial travellers to space stations or the moon. In that case, unveiling a concept would just be meaningless fluff PR, like those architecture firms that show off plans for mile-high arcologies but have no initiative to actually build them. For the time being, the only prospects for human commercial spaceflight is sending people up to enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness, not even real orbit.
Note the OP's wording that I was responding to, "I have never seen a STEM major glorifying his ignorance". If he paid attention in Slashdot discussions on the topic, he would have seen a STEM major, indeed he would have seen multiple ones. Whether that is a significant proportion of STEM majors, however, is another debate.
If I have a disease, I want my doctor to heal me; not ponder my deeply felt cultural traditions.
During the Cold War, linguists and anthropologists interested in the deeply felt cultural traditions of individual peoples in Russia's multiethnic society proved a key strategic resource to the US military. In the 1990s and even more so after 9/11, scholars who understood the relationship between deeply felt cultural traditions in the Muslim world and the spread of extremism were a help in finding ways to defend against said extremism.
Any part of the humanities that looks at a different culture has a potential real-world application in foreign policy and defence.
I beg your pardon but I have never seen a STEM major glorifying his ignorance in any area, especially language.
Whenever discussions of foreign languages come up on Slashdot, one gets posts from among the STEM-heavy crowd here that "Learning a foreign language is a waste of time, because everyone around the world should just -- and does -- learn English" (nevermind benefits in terms of getting a window into those foreigners' culture and what they are saying about you). I don't see how that any different from people flaunting their innumeracy by saying things like "Oh, maths is hard, and I don't need it, so why learn it?"
Larry Niven will be glad to know that since he used opaque shields in "The Mote in God's Eye"
Even before that Niven had proposed a different opaque shielding device. The Slaver stasis field, introduced in World of Ptaavs in 1962, is a forcefield inside of which time doesn't move and which completely reflects all light shone on it (so any object encased in it looks like a mirror). Later, in Ringworld, the Slaver stasis field is automatically triggered to protect the passengers on a starship when under fire.
Who is this "we" that wants that, and when did they decide it was the university's mission to provide?
"We" could be seen as the universities' own mission statements. For example, the university I did my undergraduate studies at claims that it is "working to expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice and faith." But it's not just my fairly small Jesuit institution that has such social goals. I searched for the mission statements of Ivy League unis and got things like the following:
Cornell also aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of our students, the people of New York, and others around the world.
...
Dartmouth fosters lasting bonds among faculty, staff, and students, which encourage a culture of integrity, self-reliance, and collegiality and instill a sense of responsibility for each other and for the broader world.
I am fairly sure that this kind of talk, that a university trains graduates to go and make the world a better place for their fellow human beings, is no contemporary political correctness but probably goes back centuries -- Victorian literature, for example, often ascribes that mission to Cambridge and Oxford.
It's still wrong though, because in English it's not a noun at all which is the only type of word that can correctly appear in that place.
Words can and regularly do shift from one lexical category to another. Pas was a noun in late Latin (meaning 'step'), it is now a negation marker in French and Occitan. Latin nescio quid was a verb-object phrase ('I don't know what") and then became a noun meaning "something". In the language I work with most intensively, Meadow Mari, a phrase "necessary-unnecessary" has come to mean "rubbish" (in the sense "You're talking rubbish"). It's after midnight here and I'm tired, but if you really wanted I could come back tomorrow and post probably another fifty examples off the top of my head. This is the sort of thing I deal with on a daily basis.
Human speech is malleable and continually undergoes various aspects of language change. It all starts in the speech of individuals using a lexeme in a new context where other speakers of the language can grasp at what he or she means, and in an utterance like "I used the so to pump gas" it's clear as day what "so" means.
I am aware of FIRE's work and they 1) deal with only 400 institutions (the US has nearly 5,000, and furthermore the humanities are studied worldwide), 2) they are interested in speech by students, which may in some cases overlap with what faculty at humanities departments are lecturing in, but is by no means the same.
Then, in a rant on "outliers" versus "the middle of a trend", you link to a YouTube video dealing with one single university. Again, can we have some sense of perspective, please?
For example, "I used the so to pump gas," "When so lighting struck so barn, so fire department was called." or "So so so so so, so so so so so so so!" are all incorrect uses of the word "so" when it is intended to mean what it is generally intended to mean.
If those first two utterances were actually produced in real speech, then there is a good chance that they cannot be called "objectively incorrect" ways of using the world, inasmuch as human speech naturally features semantic shift or coining of new lexemes in the idiolects of individuals. This has been well understood now for over a century (everyone would benefit from reading a little Saussure).
This gap has been talked about since C.P. Snow's famous Two Cultures lecture, but this describes only a general trend, and one more prevalent in general society than the academy;. It certainly does not mean that all humanities students are ignorant of the sciences, and when one works in an academic setting one regularly finds counterexamples. For example, a Classics scholar working with papyri or other manuscripts will probably gain a solid knowledge of optics, the chemistry of paper, etc. I have read publications on aspects of philology that employed statistics to a degree you would think the writer had read maths at uni instead. Historians often have to read detailed archeological dig reports, and that brings in other scientific phenomena they are more likely to be aware of than many peopel who gained a degree in other science fields.
Well, he's right, but unfortunately, the study of humanities in modern higher education has become a wasteland of anti-academic thinkers who viciously punish nonconformity and "ists" with an ax to grind and a debt to wring out of people whose ancestors they believe slighted their ancestors.
It is sad when people interested in the sciences, who should be trained in recognizing a range of values at their hands, tar everyone with the same brush.
Though I later moved into linguistics, I began my academic career at a Classics department at a US university, and I never heard any of my lecturers pushing any particular political agenda or trying to evoke outrage. Even the one faculty member there deeply interested in the position of women in antiquity was producing interesting, accessible scholarship for people interested in daily life in earlier eras of history, and none of it was coloured by the agenda some attribute to Women's Studies.
As I have had contact with other universities, I've encountered many other such scholars. Sure, there are odd, agenda-driven departments out there, but let's have some perspective, please.
While population density might explain the dearth of fiber in rural areas of the United States, it does not explain the lack of fiber in many US metropolitan areas. "pure rent-seeking monopoly behavior" is probably all that it comes down to.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know anything about living in a foreign country? You cannot just "apply for citizenship" in whatever country you want.* To be eligible for citizenship, you you first have to live there on a residency visa for a number of years. And how do you get into a foreign country and live there? One of the most common ways is being invited to work there. Pretty much all countries in the world have the concept of the work visa. One might wish to set higher or lower quotas, but every country is fine with some amount of skilled workers coming in.
* (Yes, there are countries like Malta that give you a passport if you invest a seven-figure amount, but we are talking here about ordinary workers, not oligarchs. And while Ireland gives citizenship on the basis of ancestry, that is not an option for e.g. IT workers in India.)
[Citation needed] There is a huge difference historically between immigrants to the US, with a strong work ethic and likely to be educated, and the northern European experience where low-skilled refugees have to stay on the dole for at least a generation because they cannot or don't want to work.
There is some social tension in the latter case and the Far Right has often ran campaign that claim the local culture is being swamped by outsiders. In the US, however, immigrants always have and continue to assimilate very quickly, and while you can probably dredge up tabloid scandals to villify the immigrant from overseas demographic of your choice, it means little in the big picture.
I oppose the massive use of H1Bs myself, but if they are coming in anyway, it will only aid assimilation if the wife can go out and work everyday instead of just sitting at home.
You're joking, right? Asimov's late-career spotwelding of what were originally three separate universes (the Robots, Empire and Foundation novels) drew massive criticism.
Harvard divested from tobacco investments over two decades ago and, in retrospect, pretty much everyone agrees it was a good thing. In any event, activists can only push universities to consider their investments. If the university is sitting on a massive endowment and it can easily weather the divestment, then the activists will have their way, but if it were to pose a serious threat to the university, then I think such calls would face great resistance.
VKontakte has for years now required giving a mobile phone number (in Russia, your ID goes into a government database when you purchase a SIM card) to sign up, to prevent anonymous commentary then. The same may already be true of LiveJournal, one of the country's most popular blogging platforms. There will always be a few people who have the savvy to stay anonymous, but a lot of the small-scale bloggers presently exposing local corruption are not particularly knowledgeable about computers and wouldn't be able to safely use e.g. Tor. So, government efforts really do pose a risk to Joe Blogs in Russia.
I don't think this is a workable solution. One of the reasons for low voter turnout in the US is that going to a special location to vote is burdensome (and some employers won't allow their employees to leave work to vote). The future surely has to be online.
That helps to avoid problems with anonymous trolling (the online disinhibition effect or "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory"). It also would help to avoid outright floods from foreign agents in discussions on foreign policy-related issues. On the other hand, if ballots are secret, then it is troubling that political lobbying by individuals (as opposed to corporations) is not held anonymous, and if people's voting choices are exposed, there can be a chilling effect. Is there no perfect balance here?
Let me guess, you're new here? A decade or so ago the GNAA was able to flood the comments section with troll posts (complete with Last Measure links). Other copy-paste posts like the interview with CmdrTaco who had become a "nullo", pitches for MyCleanPC, and BSD is Dying often brought mirth to the comments. If anything, there is too high a proportion of on-topic posts these days, and the few trolls you get are boring one-sentence attacks on African-Americans. In a way, that's a more poignant sign of Slashdot's decline than any of the complaining over Dice and the beta.
My experiences cycling across South Africa last winter, where I often stopped for the night at a local farm because there wasn't anything else for the next 100km, did much to disabuse me of the notion that large-scale farmers and ranchers are uneducated. Many of them had done rigorous university studies in the big city before coming back to the middle of nowhere, and they still kept up with the latest scholarly literature to maximise gains.
However, their education was specifically on fields useful to farming and ranching such as chemistry, biology, veterinary sciences, economics, etc. They had no background in computer science, and though they had a network brought out to the farm to allow them to track e.g. feed prices, they didn't know much about how said network or their computers worked. So, I understand the OP's suspicion that Montana may lack an educated workforce capable of luring IT firms.
How have your experiences with LSD affected your later work? (For those unaware, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters went around turning people onto the substance, as documented in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ). Many participants in the counterculture speak of having new spiritual perspectives after taking LSD, but has it given you any special insights into working with new computer technology?
Math, such as crypto algorithms, is awesome, but implementations are not. Nerds have been aware for well over a decade (the EU Parliament's ECHELON report came out in 2001) that certain states seek to monitor and store as much online communication as possible, but coding practices even in sensitive privacy-defending applications have continued to be lax, as the recent Heartbleed episode shows.
Ghostery is under a proprietary license and Evidon, the company that owns it, is involved in the online advertising industry. I trust the EFF a lot more.
FWIW, though, you can get many of the same benefits of Ghostery without installing that plugin by simply processing its lists through a Privoxy filter (the conversion is fairly easy to script and then automate), so Privoxy zaps all those IPs before they even get to the browser.
Oh, please. Since the founding of the US (and before, as it essentially preserved the British system), the local constabulary has been tasking with ensuring public order, with much of its work, such separating brawlers, getting drunks into the drunk tank, etc., not even intended to escalate all the way to court.
By quoting Kubrick's film (Heywood Floyd travels in a Pan-Am spaceflight in 2001: A Space Odyssey ), the summary suggests that Boeing is preparing to send commercial travellers to space stations or the moon. In that case, unveiling a concept would just be meaningless fluff PR, like those architecture firms that show off plans for mile-high arcologies but have no initiative to actually build them. For the time being, the only prospects for human commercial spaceflight is sending people up to enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness, not even real orbit.
Note the OP's wording that I was responding to, "I have never seen a STEM major glorifying his ignorance". If he paid attention in Slashdot discussions on the topic, he would have seen a STEM major, indeed he would have seen multiple ones. Whether that is a significant proportion of STEM majors, however, is another debate.
During the Cold War, linguists and anthropologists interested in the deeply felt cultural traditions of individual peoples in Russia's multiethnic society proved a key strategic resource to the US military. In the 1990s and even more so after 9/11, scholars who understood the relationship between deeply felt cultural traditions in the Muslim world and the spread of extremism were a help in finding ways to defend against said extremism.
Any part of the humanities that looks at a different culture has a potential real-world application in foreign policy and defence.
Whenever discussions of foreign languages come up on Slashdot, one gets posts from among the STEM-heavy crowd here that "Learning a foreign language is a waste of time, because everyone around the world should just -- and does -- learn English" (nevermind benefits in terms of getting a window into those foreigners' culture and what they are saying about you). I don't see how that any different from people flaunting their innumeracy by saying things like "Oh, maths is hard, and I don't need it, so why learn it?"
Even before that Niven had proposed a different opaque shielding device. The Slaver stasis field, introduced in World of Ptaavs in 1962, is a forcefield inside of which time doesn't move and which completely reflects all light shone on it (so any object encased in it looks like a mirror). Later, in Ringworld, the Slaver stasis field is automatically triggered to protect the passengers on a starship when under fire.
"We" could be seen as the universities' own mission statements. For example, the university I did my undergraduate studies at claims that it is "working to expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice and faith." But it's not just my fairly small Jesuit institution that has such social goals. I searched for the mission statements of Ivy League unis and got things like the following:
I am fairly sure that this kind of talk, that a university trains graduates to go and make the world a better place for their fellow human beings, is no contemporary political correctness but probably goes back centuries -- Victorian literature, for example, often ascribes that mission to Cambridge and Oxford.
Words can and regularly do shift from one lexical category to another. Pas was a noun in late Latin (meaning 'step'), it is now a negation marker in French and Occitan. Latin nescio quid was a verb-object phrase ('I don't know what") and then became a noun meaning "something". In the language I work with most intensively, Meadow Mari, a phrase "necessary-unnecessary" has come to mean "rubbish" (in the sense "You're talking rubbish"). It's after midnight here and I'm tired, but if you really wanted I could come back tomorrow and post probably another fifty examples off the top of my head. This is the sort of thing I deal with on a daily basis.
Human speech is malleable and continually undergoes various aspects of language change. It all starts in the speech of individuals using a lexeme in a new context where other speakers of the language can grasp at what he or she means, and in an utterance like "I used the so to pump gas" it's clear as day what "so" means.
I am aware of FIRE's work and they 1) deal with only 400 institutions (the US has nearly 5,000, and furthermore the humanities are studied worldwide), 2) they are interested in speech by students, which may in some cases overlap with what faculty at humanities departments are lecturing in, but is by no means the same.
Then, in a rant on "outliers" versus "the middle of a trend", you link to a YouTube video dealing with one single university. Again, can we have some sense of perspective, please?
If those first two utterances were actually produced in real speech, then there is a good chance that they cannot be called "objectively incorrect" ways of using the world, inasmuch as human speech naturally features semantic shift or coining of new lexemes in the idiolects of individuals. This has been well understood now for over a century (everyone would benefit from reading a little Saussure).
This gap has been talked about since C.P. Snow's famous Two Cultures lecture, but this describes only a general trend, and one more prevalent in general society than the academy;. It certainly does not mean that all humanities students are ignorant of the sciences, and when one works in an academic setting one regularly finds counterexamples. For example, a Classics scholar working with papyri or other manuscripts will probably gain a solid knowledge of optics, the chemistry of paper, etc. I have read publications on aspects of philology that employed statistics to a degree you would think the writer had read maths at uni instead. Historians often have to read detailed archeological dig reports, and that brings in other scientific phenomena they are more likely to be aware of than many peopel who gained a degree in other science fields.
It is sad when people interested in the sciences, who should be trained in recognizing a range of values at their hands, tar everyone with the same brush.
Though I later moved into linguistics, I began my academic career at a Classics department at a US university, and I never heard any of my lecturers pushing any particular political agenda or trying to evoke outrage. Even the one faculty member there deeply interested in the position of women in antiquity was producing interesting, accessible scholarship for people interested in daily life in earlier eras of history, and none of it was coloured by the agenda some attribute to Women's Studies.
As I have had contact with other universities, I've encountered many other such scholars. Sure, there are odd, agenda-driven departments out there, but let's have some perspective, please.
While population density might explain the dearth of fiber in rural areas of the United States, it does not explain the lack of fiber in many US metropolitan areas. "pure rent-seeking monopoly behavior" is probably all that it comes down to.