Online degrees are an excellent 'fall back' position if there are limits on time and money, but the difference is that online provides training. A degree from a reasonable institution provides an education - a more rounded individual that is more literate and aware of the world.
Working as a software manager in the US (but not an American) it is always surprising how many degreed people are actually uneducated. By that I mean have a very one track view of their profession.
Having said that such people by and large provide excellent workers. Again one is generalizing - there are plenty of exceptions, but by and large people who can mange well and can think outside the box have usually come from a reputable school.
In the final analysis though it is up to you.
Please let me assure as someone living in Toronto that the Canadian health care system is ghastly.
A friend of mine had to go to Buffalo to be diagnosed with cancer after waiting six months in Toronto without being able to see a specialist. She saw a doctor, but had to go onto the specialist waiting list. Sadly she died.
Either you are a visitor or resident of Kiwi-land as was I (Castor Bay, North Shore, AK) and mediocre as health care is in NZ it is streets above Canada.
The US spends more on health care than Canada because it has better health care. And contrary to left wing opinion most people get damn good treatment money or no. (There are more tomography scanners in Buffalo, NY than in the whole of Canada).
Don't let your lesbo prime minister and her lefty ideas pollute you too much.
Oh get a life. This is the BBC one of the most left news media in the Western world. Harold Evans is famous for his left of center views.
So obviously the article knocks Bush who is hated by BBC journalists. Even right wing friends of mine living in the UK are starting to turn against the US because of the incessant BBC propaganda.
The purpose of the article is to make Bush look like a mad fundamentalist which goes down well in anti-Bush circles.
The truth is that science is alive and well in the US. Research continues apace and compares favorably on a per capita basis to Europe and the UK.
Perhaps I'm just unlucky, but living in Ontario I've been getting as many spam emails as ever. Laws or no laws.
The only difference I've noticed is that the porn spam is now often marked 'Sexually Explicit'.
For the past year I've been getting 30 to 60 spam messages a day. My provider tags many of them and this allows me to filter them directly into the delete folder. Then scan them before deleting so the counts provided are fairly accurate.
To be fair a sample of one. Maybe other Canadians have indeed seen improvements.
It would be more impressive if Nature or some other scientific journal provided documented proof of this.
As it comes from the main mouth piece of the Left Coast one has to view the article with just a hint of skepticism.
The missile defence program; new submarines; new fighter aircraft; the works. China can do it cheaper.
Better work ethic; lower cost; better education. I say know when you are beaten and give in gracefully. It will avoid the coming unpleasantness around 2030 as China takes over global leadership.
Just like people wonder how the Italians ever had a Roman Empire they will wonder how the US with its semi illiterate population was (in the last century) a great power.
Right on - this thread with people going on about poison and truth etc. makes me really despair for geeks. They are so easily distracted....
The fact remains is that the Guardian because of its anti-US bias - make that hatred - will print anything they can to make the US look 'evil'.
The odd thing though is that if you gave a Guardian journalist a lie detector test it would show they are telling the truth. That is the nature of bias - being so steeped in one point of view that all facts are used to point in one direction.
On the subject of China. You are right despite the goody two shoes comments in this thread. I work in Canada with lots of Chinese. They make US patriots look like amateurs. They desperately want China to be number one - as one fellow said to me - we think we will be able to dominate the US by about 2030. Sadly I think they are right.
I am another Canadian, but do not think the US and CNN is full of propaganda.
In fact a lot of what you see in Canada is slanted anti-American and the poor guy is probably simply unaware of this slant. Proof you ask: well in Canada Al-Jazeera is allowed. You can watch the rantings and anti-American diatribes on the infamous network.
But - surprise, surprise - you cannot watch Fox. It is not banned you understand, it is just not available. So poor Canada get this left of center view (and any other view is biased they claim). You may or may not want to watch Fox. That is not the issue. What is at issue is Canada gets a slanted view of information fed from the US.
There are many things from the US that I am not happy with, but I'd like all the information available - Fox and all - before jumping to an ill informed conclusion.
Another infamous source of anti-Americanism is the Canadian Broadcast Corporation that nightly pumps out strong anti-US sentiment.
How do Canadians deal with a dissident like me, you ask?
They simply say I cannot be a true Canadian. True Canadians don't think like you, they say. I believe once Orwell wrote about this. It is called group think.
In US academic insitutions there seems to be more emphasis on who you are than what you can do. So appointments are constantly made as long as the appointee is not a white male regardless of excellence or real competence.
But this is not how excellence is created. China and India certainly are not pushing political correctness at the expense of excellence - and so the decline of US education and the US in general continues apace.
Within 30 years one will look back at the US (as China dominates) and wonder how it could have ever been a great nation. In much the same way one looks at Italy and wonders about the Roman empire.
Only difference is the time frame is faster. Americans by then will be so poorly educated they will not be able to figure out how it happened. It is already a standing joke in Europe that the US needs educated immigrants simply to maintain a pool of people capable of dealing with modern complexities.
Sadly in the future Americans won't realize that their society's obsession with political correctness and confusing equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes has weakened their educational system and hence their society to the point that they will no longer be a real world power.
Think I'm crazy: remember these words. China will win more medals than the US in the next Olympic games. China will have a base on the moon by 2020. China will be economically more powerful than the US by 2025/2030. China will be militarily more powerful than the US by 2035 (by then Taiwan will be taken back)
Chinese and Indian universities will gain in stature to the point that ambitious students will aspire to attend those institutions rather than Harvard, Yale or MIT. (Similar thing has occurred in England where Oxford and Cambridge are not the institutions they once were.)
Still it is good to know that they are getting rid of gender bias. In effete academia that is what really matters.
(PS -I'm not Chinese or American - just an observer from another country)
Exactly - OSS destroys jobs and allows IP to be easily copied. No other industry that gives away the fruits of its labor for free has ever survived. Once the US loses control of the software industry it is unlikely that other (eastern) countries will be so obliging.
Of course, so the argument goes this is irrelevant - just look at Linux created in Finland. The overlooked point though is that without Unix and Bell labs there would be no Linux (or other Unix look alike). Dennis Ritchie and the others that developed Unix and C did not work for free and the company that funded their research did not give its product away for free.
The absurd crusade to give away software is the dumbest business model there has ever been. If you are unemployed there is no doubt that OSS is part of your problem.
Microsoft was and is right. You gotta make money to survive.
But this is now all academic.
By 2012 the US software industry - except for defence contractors - will have completely moved off shore. All the stupid argument will be over and there will be (alas) a glut of burger flippers. At least MacDonalds and Burger King will have benefited from OSS.
Typical uninformed geek political comment. America is engaged in a war with people who will happily kill all Americans (including geeks), the US is losing jobs to China so rapidly that by the time 30 year old geeks are in their 40's there will be only drudge software jobs in the US and increasingly the world rejoices everytime there is a set back in the US.
And twits like Dreyfus blather on about censorship. If you've lived - not visited, lived -outside of the US (and Europe) you will realize that the US is VERY democratic, VERY free and VERY uncensored.
Where I come from people are removed from office only by shooting them. In many parts of the world rules classes are there for life. Not so in the US.
So it is doubly irritating that people who know a whole lot about bits and bytes, but sweet nothing about how US politics and government compares to other parts of the world, make pathetically uninformed comments about the US.
Perhaps these commentators should be forced to spend 5 years in a nice African, Asian or Middle-Eastern dictatorship before making adolescent comments.
"By 2015 when the US software industry is completely destroyed"
Your comments - of course it will survive - I agree, but I am saying that it will NOT survive in the US. Open source has greatly helped intellectual capital flight. There will be a thriving and healthy software industry in China and India, but it will not be thriving in the US.
But by then the decline of the US will be so obvious that Americans will have bigger things to worry about that software.
Who cares even if they get their funding from the devil. Open Source does destroy jobs, helps intellectual property theft and generally damages the US software industry.
The irony is that many of the software developers standing in unemployment lines are proponents of Open Source.
No other industry in history has successfully survived giving away products for free. (The problem has recently dawned on Red Hat. That is why they are trying to charge for their new product.)
By 2015 when the US software industry is completely destroyed Open Source will be remembered - less than warmly - for being a major contributor to the collapse of the industry.
If you are software developer under 35 get another profession. And by the way I am not funded by Microsoft or anybody. Simply a software manager with 30 years experience who is tickled by the naivety of geeks when it comes to business reality.
As I said - if you are under under 35 get out of software now before it is too late.
I always thought that open source was anti-US and this proves it. Do you think the French would be going to Open Office if Microsoft was a French company. Not on your Nelly.
They'd be espousing the benefits of the proprietary way in fine Gallic prose. But Microsoft is American so the slime balls - oops sorry, French - are all for it.
It never fails to amaze me how politically naive American software developers are. The apolitical geek, oblivious to the fact that the whole world is 'borrowing' US IP, hacks on bad mouthing Microsoft and aiding and abetting the loss of their own jobs. Maybe now with US geeks being made unemployed by Chong and Gupta (and Ivan) you guys will wake up and see how you've undermined your own careers by giving away the secrets of the software kingdom(and I write this from Canada, not the US.)
I wonder how US geeks will fare as burger flippers?
What bunk - simply that the students in the CS department feel guilty so they want to do some good and this is the only way than can think of.
Here's a tip: save the money on the hard disks, put it together and install a new water source (called a stand pipe in Africa - pipe with a faucet on the end).
It will do more good, help more people and improve the quality of life far far more than a fat hard disk. Puleez!
All good and well 'cos you work in an environment (Quebec) where the tax payer subsidizes your efforts.
Despite the hoopla about OSS I wonder how many people would really be great supporters of it it they understood that it is helping undermine your software development job and sending it off to India.
Imagine what the car industry would be like if poor geeky smucks made cars in the evening after work and distributed them for free.
Of course Linux is better than Windows, but not a 'lot' better. I wonder though if you were standing in the unemployment line whether you'd be less enamoured with Linux
THings are different now: between India and China the US is now facing a challenge of more than 2 billion people.
Very different to anything they have faced before - (I'm not writing this from the US) - and so platitudes like 'we've faced challenges before' are simplistic.
The US worker has not ever before faced the combined force of 2 billion low cost smart and increasingly educated people.
What we are seeing is the beginning of the end for the US. And to all you Clinton lovers remember he was the one that gave the Chinese the 'favored nation' status.
I reckon 2020 will be the time the US slips into second place. Good luck to you all.
Oh get real...... one incident out of 300 (or so) million people doesn't imply a whole country is that way inclined.
Problem with modern youth is that they are so badly educated (especially in the UK) except at hacking code that they simply have no perspective on the broad stats of what they are pronouncing on.
I write from the UK
or China where they want you only to take your knowledge and then throw you out.....
I am not living in the US, but surely the point about the US is that it is open - everyone sees its successes and failures.
Believe me if the Chinese space shot had failed you'd hear very little about it. Also nobody seems to mention that essentially this was a copy of Russian technology - same old same old copying
In 5,000 years the best they have been able to do is invent gunpowder that they used for fireworks.
I am glad you are pleased re the Chinese launch, but clearly you don't work with the arrogant bastards who think everything from China is great even though they don't live there any more.
It would have been more impressive if they had not bought everything from the Russians and then copied it. Do you see a pattern there somewhere?
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Online degrees are an excellent 'fall back' position if there are limits on time and money, but the difference is that online provides training. A degree from a reasonable institution provides an education - a more rounded individual that is more literate and aware of the world. Working as a software manager in the US (but not an American) it is always surprising how many degreed people are actually uneducated. By that I mean have a very one track view of their profession. Having said that such people by and large provide excellent workers. Again one is generalizing - there are plenty of exceptions, but by and large people who can mange well and can think outside the box have usually come from a reputable school. In the final analysis though it is up to you.
Please let me assure as someone living in Toronto that the Canadian health care system is ghastly. A friend of mine had to go to Buffalo to be diagnosed with cancer after waiting six months in Toronto without being able to see a specialist. She saw a doctor, but had to go onto the specialist waiting list. Sadly she died. Either you are a visitor or resident of Kiwi-land as was I (Castor Bay, North Shore, AK) and mediocre as health care is in NZ it is streets above Canada. The US spends more on health care than Canada because it has better health care. And contrary to left wing opinion most people get damn good treatment money or no. (There are more tomography scanners in Buffalo, NY than in the whole of Canada). Don't let your lesbo prime minister and her lefty ideas pollute you too much.
Oh get a life. This is the BBC one of the most left news media in the Western world. Harold Evans is famous for his left of center views.
So obviously the article knocks Bush who is hated by BBC journalists. Even right wing friends of mine living in the UK are starting to turn against the US because of the incessant BBC propaganda.
The purpose of the article is to make Bush look like a mad fundamentalist which goes down well in anti-Bush circles.
The truth is that science is alive and well in the US. Research continues apace and compares favorably on a per capita basis to Europe and the UK.
Perhaps I'm just unlucky, but living in Ontario I've been getting as many spam emails as ever. Laws or no laws. The only difference I've noticed is that the porn spam is now often marked 'Sexually Explicit'. For the past year I've been getting 30 to 60 spam messages a day. My provider tags many of them and this allows me to filter them directly into the delete folder. Then scan them before deleting so the counts provided are fairly accurate. To be fair a sample of one. Maybe other Canadians have indeed seen improvements.
It would be more impressive if Nature or some other scientific journal provided documented proof of this. As it comes from the main mouth piece of the Left Coast one has to view the article with just a hint of skepticism.
The missile defence program; new submarines; new fighter aircraft; the works. China can do it cheaper. Better work ethic; lower cost; better education. I say know when you are beaten and give in gracefully. It will avoid the coming unpleasantness around 2030 as China takes over global leadership. Just like people wonder how the Italians ever had a Roman Empire they will wonder how the US with its semi illiterate population was (in the last century) a great power.
Right on - this thread with people going on about poison and truth etc. makes me really despair for geeks. They are so easily distracted.... The fact remains is that the Guardian because of its anti-US bias - make that hatred - will print anything they can to make the US look 'evil'. The odd thing though is that if you gave a Guardian journalist a lie detector test it would show they are telling the truth. That is the nature of bias - being so steeped in one point of view that all facts are used to point in one direction. On the subject of China. You are right despite the goody two shoes comments in this thread. I work in Canada with lots of Chinese. They make US patriots look like amateurs. They desperately want China to be number one - as one fellow said to me - we think we will be able to dominate the US by about 2030. Sadly I think they are right.
I am another Canadian, but do not think the US and CNN is full of propaganda. In fact a lot of what you see in Canada is slanted anti-American and the poor guy is probably simply unaware of this slant. Proof you ask: well in Canada Al-Jazeera is allowed. You can watch the rantings and anti-American diatribes on the infamous network. But - surprise, surprise - you cannot watch Fox. It is not banned you understand, it is just not available. So poor Canada get this left of center view (and any other view is biased they claim). You may or may not want to watch Fox. That is not the issue. What is at issue is Canada gets a slanted view of information fed from the US. There are many things from the US that I am not happy with, but I'd like all the information available - Fox and all - before jumping to an ill informed conclusion. Another infamous source of anti-Americanism is the Canadian Broadcast Corporation that nightly pumps out strong anti-US sentiment. How do Canadians deal with a dissident like me, you ask? They simply say I cannot be a true Canadian. True Canadians don't think like you, they say. I believe once Orwell wrote about this. It is called group think.
In US academic insitutions there seems to be more emphasis on who you are than what you can do. So appointments are constantly made as long as the appointee is not a white male regardless of excellence or real competence. But this is not how excellence is created. China and India certainly are not pushing political correctness at the expense of excellence - and so the decline of US education and the US in general continues apace. Within 30 years one will look back at the US (as China dominates) and wonder how it could have ever been a great nation. In much the same way one looks at Italy and wonders about the Roman empire. Only difference is the time frame is faster. Americans by then will be so poorly educated they will not be able to figure out how it happened. It is already a standing joke in Europe that the US needs educated immigrants simply to maintain a pool of people capable of dealing with modern complexities. Sadly in the future Americans won't realize that their society's obsession with political correctness and confusing equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes has weakened their educational system and hence their society to the point that they will no longer be a real world power. Think I'm crazy: remember these words. China will win more medals than the US in the next Olympic games. China will have a base on the moon by 2020. China will be economically more powerful than the US by 2025/2030. China will be militarily more powerful than the US by 2035 (by then Taiwan will be taken back) Chinese and Indian universities will gain in stature to the point that ambitious students will aspire to attend those institutions rather than Harvard, Yale or MIT. (Similar thing has occurred in England where Oxford and Cambridge are not the institutions they once were.) Still it is good to know that they are getting rid of gender bias. In effete academia that is what really matters. (PS -I'm not Chinese or American - just an observer from another country)
Exactly - OSS destroys jobs and allows IP to be easily copied. No other industry that gives away the fruits of its labor for free has ever survived. Once the US loses control of the software industry it is unlikely that other (eastern) countries will be so obliging. Of course, so the argument goes this is irrelevant - just look at Linux created in Finland. The overlooked point though is that without Unix and Bell labs there would be no Linux (or other Unix look alike). Dennis Ritchie and the others that developed Unix and C did not work for free and the company that funded their research did not give its product away for free. The absurd crusade to give away software is the dumbest business model there has ever been. If you are unemployed there is no doubt that OSS is part of your problem. Microsoft was and is right. You gotta make money to survive. But this is now all academic. By 2012 the US software industry - except for defence contractors - will have completely moved off shore. All the stupid argument will be over and there will be (alas) a glut of burger flippers. At least MacDonalds and Burger King will have benefited from OSS.
Typical uninformed geek political comment. America is engaged in a war with people who will happily kill all Americans (including geeks), the US is losing jobs to China so rapidly that by the time 30 year old geeks are in their 40's there will be only drudge software jobs in the US and increasingly the world rejoices everytime there is a set back in the US. And twits like Dreyfus blather on about censorship. If you've lived - not visited, lived -outside of the US (and Europe) you will realize that the US is VERY democratic, VERY free and VERY uncensored. Where I come from people are removed from office only by shooting them. In many parts of the world rules classes are there for life. Not so in the US. So it is doubly irritating that people who know a whole lot about bits and bytes, but sweet nothing about how US politics and government compares to other parts of the world, make pathetically uninformed comments about the US. Perhaps these commentators should be forced to spend 5 years in a nice African, Asian or Middle-Eastern dictatorship before making adolescent comments.
"By 2015 when the US software industry is completely destroyed" Your comments - of course it will survive - I agree, but I am saying that it will NOT survive in the US. Open source has greatly helped intellectual capital flight. There will be a thriving and healthy software industry in China and India, but it will not be thriving in the US. But by then the decline of the US will be so obvious that Americans will have bigger things to worry about that software.
Who cares even if they get their funding from the devil. Open Source does destroy jobs, helps intellectual property theft and generally damages the US software industry. The irony is that many of the software developers standing in unemployment lines are proponents of Open Source. No other industry in history has successfully survived giving away products for free. (The problem has recently dawned on Red Hat. That is why they are trying to charge for their new product.) By 2015 when the US software industry is completely destroyed Open Source will be remembered - less than warmly - for being a major contributor to the collapse of the industry. If you are software developer under 35 get another profession. And by the way I am not funded by Microsoft or anybody. Simply a software manager with 30 years experience who is tickled by the naivety of geeks when it comes to business reality. As I said - if you are under under 35 get out of software now before it is too late.
I always thought that open source was anti-US and this proves it. Do you think the French would be going to Open Office if Microsoft was a French company. Not on your Nelly. They'd be espousing the benefits of the proprietary way in fine Gallic prose. But Microsoft is American so the slime balls - oops sorry, French - are all for it. It never fails to amaze me how politically naive American software developers are. The apolitical geek, oblivious to the fact that the whole world is 'borrowing' US IP, hacks on bad mouthing Microsoft and aiding and abetting the loss of their own jobs. Maybe now with US geeks being made unemployed by Chong and Gupta (and Ivan) you guys will wake up and see how you've undermined your own careers by giving away the secrets of the software kingdom(and I write this from Canada, not the US.) I wonder how US geeks will fare as burger flippers?
What bunk - simply that the students in the CS department feel guilty so they want to do some good and this is the only way than can think of.
Here's a tip: save the money on the hard disks, put it together and install a new water source (called a stand pipe in Africa - pipe with a faucet on the end).
It will do more good, help more people and improve the quality of life far far more than a fat hard disk. Puleez!
All good and well 'cos you work in an environment (Quebec) where the tax payer subsidizes your efforts. Despite the hoopla about OSS I wonder how many people would really be great supporters of it it they understood that it is helping undermine your software development job and sending it off to India. Imagine what the car industry would be like if poor geeky smucks made cars in the evening after work and distributed them for free. Of course Linux is better than Windows, but not a 'lot' better. I wonder though if you were standing in the unemployment line whether you'd be less enamoured with Linux
THings are different now: between India and China the US is now facing a challenge of more than 2 billion people.
Very different to anything they have faced before - (I'm not writing this from the US) - and so platitudes like 'we've faced challenges before' are simplistic.
The US worker has not ever before faced the combined force of 2 billion low cost smart and increasingly educated people.
What we are seeing is the beginning of the end for the US. And to all you Clinton lovers remember he was the one that gave the Chinese the 'favored nation' status.
I reckon 2020 will be the time the US slips into second place. Good luck to you all.
Oh get real...... one incident out of 300 (or so) million people doesn't imply a whole country is that way inclined. Problem with modern youth is that they are so badly educated (especially in the UK) except at hacking code that they simply have no perspective on the broad stats of what they are pronouncing on. I write from the UK
or China where they want you only to take your knowledge and then throw you out..... I am not living in the US, but surely the point about the US is that it is open - everyone sees its successes and failures. Believe me if the Chinese space shot had failed you'd hear very little about it. Also nobody seems to mention that essentially this was a copy of Russian technology - same old same old copying
In 5,000 years the best they have been able to do is invent gunpowder that they used for fireworks. I am glad you are pleased re the Chinese launch, but clearly you don't work with the arrogant bastards who think everything from China is great even though they don't live there any more. It would have been more impressive if they had not bought everything from the Russians and then copied it. Do you see a pattern there somewhere?