Restrictions on social networking may be an example of the "new" technology-driven world reflecting what has always been policy at many large companies.
Thirty years ago, my boss forced me to fire someone who was a member of a social group (outside of work that) my boss found to be objectionable. Mind you, this employee never opened his mouth or said anything unprofessional at work.
My boss took me aside and explained to me that like it or not, every employee's "personal life" could always be construed as a representation of the employer and so any publicly controversial image was grounds for termination.
What I found out then and is even more true in the US today, is that as long as your reason for firing someone is not directly based on their age, race, officially recognized religion, country of national origin, or recognized handicap, that you can pretty much fire them for any other reason (or non-reason), work-related or not.
Some of the freedoms for the "pursuit of happiness" in the US are reserved for the unemployed and entrepreneurs.
I accepted this reality early in my career. It is not the bravest position. Then again, I am not the bravest of people.
Q&A for DOS was the best non-relational database of the pre-windows era. (Ok, so PSF/File and Alpha4 had their fans too.) When I needed to load a copy of Q&A to retrieve some old Q&A data, every version of the Windows Dos box would lock the system up. The early versions of DOS/Box would also crash on Q&A's nasty habit of directly accessing system video.
However, for the last three years (at least), DOS/Box now loads Q&A and at least the Q&A search and export features work just fine.
Not only can your gear affect your speeds, but conflicts with speed auto-sensing can wreak havoc.
We recently swapped out some older edge switches in one site for a beautiful new CISCO core switch. Within days, the help desk had reports that some users' network performance had gone from fine to terrible. (Not our intent.)
As it turns out, a boatload of older NICs were mishandled by the new switch which downgraded speeds, communicated in half-duplex, and even then continually reset the connection.
Had the users not complained, we never would have known there was a problem.
As it turns out, each port on the core switch can be manually set to a fixed 100mb full duplex (and ignore auto-sensing) which then operates just fine.
In Australia you suffer even more so than we do in the western US in that there's LOTS of space between A and B, making any infrastructure cost much higher than Japan where they measure that space in feet or inches.
Higher than Japan, maybe, but for the majority of Aussies, the math doesn't support their outrageous rates in comparison to the US. Here is my rationale:
While Australia and Japan have dramatically different geographies, both countries have majority populations that live near major cities. According to Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia), 14.7 million of Australia's 21.7 million citizens or 67.8% live in the 10 largest cities. The top five cities alone account for 58.6% of the population. On my visits to Sydney and Melbourne, I did not observe those cities to have infrastructure barriers or distances significantly worse than in the United States.
So while the cost to wire the rural areas with the highest speed option is cost-prohibitive, the cost to wire 67.8% of the population should not be appreciably greater than the US (at worst!).
Those Australians who have commented on Slashdot have indicated that they are paying dramatically more than we pay in the US. Unless Australian Slashdotters are largely rural in location, it suggests that there is something deficient in some part of the high-speed business model as it has been implemented in Australia as compared to the US, South Korea, etc.
[/tact translation on]: Aussies appear to be getting screwed on high speed rates [/tact translation off]
The human body is pretty darn good at healing itself. There is absolutely no replacement for a decent diet, moderate exercise, and a positive attitude.
Anyone on the planet born prior to the 1964 ban on above-ground nuclear tests has been exposed to enough nuclear matter to provide a degree of damage to their immune systems.
An amazing number of carcinogenic and other hostile and immune-system challenging chemicals have been used in the manufacture and treatment of everything from toys to clothes for the last 100 years.
The drop in average male sperm count over the last sixty years has been world-wide. The impact has included remote populations living far away from industrial centers and with lifestyles far from developed societies.
What all of this may mean is that the combination of proper administration of diet, exercise, sleep, water, financial security, and satisfying relation and career may all be insufficient for any given individual to live a long and healthy life.
Unless, of course, we actually live in the Matrix and all this bad stuff is fiction.
. ..Most people in India have lived their entire lives without cars and didn't need it. . ..
According to a recent National Public Radio author interview, 40% of the population of India still has no access to plumbing much less money to purchase toilet paper.
Cars are used by the populace for access to better paying jobs and increased standard of living.
It is true that during the industrial revolution of the 1800's that many major US cities (like Pittsburgh) has blackened skies and lung diseases for decades on end.
It is also true that in the 1900's, some major US (and US/Candian) waterways were so polluted that THEY CAUGHT FIRE.
But in the end, this industrialization led to longer life expectancies and higher standards of living. (And later, much LESS polluting industries.)
While I don't want to breath ANY air pollution, I want even more that everyone around the world be given the economic opportunities given to me by the fact that I happened to be born in the US.
So in the end I commend Tata for bringing this vehicle to market. If a less polluting yet equally performing and cost-effective exists, I trust India to eventually find and promote it.
Maybe you had the misfortune to get a lemon or maybe you are a little rough on your laptops.
Right now, I'm supporting several hundred (Windows) laptops divided between Lenovo, Dell, and Panasonic brands. While the Panasonic "Toughbooks" seem to take the most abuse and still run, both our Lenovo and Panasonic laptops routinely last 5 to 7 years before failing.
Yes, we have a few users who will destroy a laptop of ANY brand in less than three years. I would not generalize any one of their experiences to condemn an entire brand as your comment seems to do.
From the name, it sounded like the ship was actually "land and sea" capable. In fact, it ferries copters and truly amphibious vehicles close to shore. This is a ship only and does not appear to intentionally embrace the beach.
When you wrote that FF was using 1.1GB on your machine, I thought that you must have some kind of a unique and unusual virus or other issue.
I went to my task manager and sure enough, I'm past 1.2GB of RAM used by FF!
I uninstalled all my add-ins, reloaded, and was still more than 800 MB of FF RAM.
Sooo, what could be the culprit? I re-installed Firefox and added one add-in at a time. Memory usage BALLOONED with the addition of Video Download Helper, one of the most common add-ins out there.
If there is a way to selectively load V.D.H. and run only when actually needed, that would be a real boon. (I haven't spent time figuring out if this is possible.)
Equally puzzling was merely "uninstalling" the add-in still caused F.F.(or something) to continue to eat RAM. Maybe the V.D.F. uninstall doesn't work 100% or maybe my memory issue is really related to a different add-in.
Your choices seem to be (a) get more memory, (b) do a clean install of FF without V.D.H., (c) live with the situation, or (d) find an alternative to V.D.H. that is less memory hungry.
I guess this is a potential question for Firehose.
There are many fine arguments posted here in favor of open source, especially when focused on total costs.
However, a point to keep in mind is the competitive disadvantages that many will face after completing school if we are talking about school and subsequent employment in the United States.
While my data center servers are a mixture of Windows, Linux, IOS, VM, Xen, and Solaris, my user's desktops are 90% Windows, 10% Mac, and 0% anything else.
When we interview for interns and entry level support people, those with the Windows background get the job 100% of the time. We don't hire on philosophy; we hire because there is Windows support to be done.
I'm not here to argue that businesses should or should not use open source. Accept that they do. I am strongly in favor of sending my kids to school where they will learn the technologies that will help them in the job market.
At home, I supported Open Office for my kids for four years. The differences only caused aggravation at home and school. Each kid now has their own copy of Office 2007 and haven't asked me for any support this school year for word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet problems. (They are also heavy users of Visio). They are happy. They can run the software that is run at school. Did all of this cost me? Yes. (All of our home software is legal.)
But after putting in 12 hours away from home, I like coming home to a happy wife and happy kids.
After WWII and again after the Vietnam War, veterans were given the options of college loans with low interest rates and long repayment terms. Those individuals not only bettered their own economic standing, but the increased taxes they paid after becoming doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, accountants, engineers, scientists, teachers, computer scientists, and jobs-creating entrepreneurs provided the government and the economy a great return on their investment.
The costs of a 4-year undergrad degree and another 3 â" year graduate degree today total about $250,000.
Taking these people out of the workforce during time of high unemployment and returning them with higher skills to a recovering economy in seven years is one of the five intelligent things our government could do that makes financial sense in the long term and alleviates some anxiety and misery right now.
Beware the law of unintended consequences!
When I interview 1st year graduates for tech support or combined tech support and programming positions, applicants skilled in MS Office are almost always hired over those skilled in Open Office and others. The reason is simple. Even in an office with less than 200 employees, our help desk receives more than 5,000 support calls a year related either to Windows or MS Office.
Staffing with people who can resolve those problems result in very high user scores in satisfaction surveys.
With regard to those staffing the business positions, experienced people with industry-specific knowledge all seem to come with MS experience and no desired to embrace open source.
I've been able to gain a limited degree of acceptance for Firefox instead of IE, but getting users to give up MS Office risks complete user revolt.
As my coders are receptive to using open server-side tools, that is where open opportunities have the best chance.
If your university fails to consider these items, your graduates will be selected for far fewer jobs than those from other schools.
Just wait until their lack of appreciation makes it back to those who failed to prepare them for the real-world saturated with MS Office users willing to slam those who try to help them with different tools.
Good luck in your quest.
OK, so I grow one special breed of apple from the apple tree that is delicious, but bruises easily.
I contract with and certify authorized fruit distributors who certify me that in advance of doing business with me, they must staff up and provide gentle handling and quickly respond to consumer complaints. In return for their investing in this staffing up, I set a minimum retail price they will charge and maximum wholesale price so the distributors of all sizes will have some assurance of gross profit.
My distributors make the investment, build my reputation among buyers, and my buyers and distributors are happy and make me wealthy.
I also offer volume discounts. (I didn't say that all distributors would have the SAME profit margin, just an agreed-to MINIMUM profit margin.)
A rogue distributor starts buying in larger lots than he can handle to get the larger discounts. He takes the units he can't sell and sells them to an unauthorized "gray market" distributor. The gray market distributor can sell them because they cut corners on staffing customer service and support.
Consumers have no idea why, but word-of-mouth is that service and support at the (gray/unauthorized) retail level is degrading. Small problems are repeated over and over as they are not addressed. Eventually, the market-wide brand perception is damaged and my business is eventually on the brink of being ruined.
I cut off shipments to the rogue distributor. He takes me to court. The court agrees that I am operating legally and I am in the right to cutoff any distributor who violates our contractual terms.
Some people on web discussion boards present me as a monster intent on excessive and unfair profiteering.
Business should be a series of voluntary transactions between all parties. If a product is priced too high or service is too low, then the product deserves to suffer. Monopoly laws apply only to products deemed by the authorities as essential to the economy and where alternatives do not exist.
That is why monopoly laws apply to the vendor of the world's largest operating system (i.e. the US vs. Microsoft and the E.U. vs. Microsoft) and not to minority OS players (i.e. US court ruled Apple could put out of business the Apple clone maker).
Just another day among the chattering lunatics. (Yes, I appear to be one too.)
I don't know where you are from, but electricians in New Jersey who practice solo without certification (exam and license after apprentice time) do so at the risk of fines and other forms of prosecution.
While there have been a zillion postings on/. about uselessness of certifications and degrees when interviewing sys admins, dba's, programmers, and engineers, I look for both certs and degrees as evidence that the applicant can not only learn, but put up with the inevitable aggravations of any organization of 100+ employees.
If you don't want to go to college or take exams for certs, then your outstanding professional skills should get you past the interview process for an underpaying job in a smaller company. Then, you can build references and real-life skills and interview for larger organizations more likely to pay more for your time.
Just remember that lack of certs and degrees will always mean that some companies won't even let you interview. Fortunately, you don't NEED a million jobs, just one at any one moment in your life.
Best of luck....
If I have a choice between being lucky or being good, I'll take lucky every time.
There is too much adoration of personal database favorites and excessive condemnation of competing products
While I'm currently a CIO for a small-to-mid-sized company, I've been using relational databases now for more than twenty years.
For years, I've been HEARING about crash issues using MySQL for transactions. For as many years, I've been designing databases and supervising application design that use MySQL for small transaction systems without corruption problems at all. During this time, I've also designed many large read-only tables used by query systems with millions of records without corruption problems.
For more than a decade, I experienced crash after crash when using SQL/Server for databases above a few million records and/or above a couple of hundred gig. Over time, the product got better. Today, my group uses SQL/Server for production applications with almost a hundred million records updated daily with no corruption reported in YEARS.
I've been using Oracle since the 1980's on many platforms. Yes, the early days (pre version 7) were grief and suffering when building OLAP applications. However, each version since Version 7 (1995? 1996?) has been better than every alternative that my employers would consider (including IBM's DB2,) and I am still very comfortable betting my job on Oracle when data warehousing is involved.
When faced with new challenges, I'm free to select any database application so long as I know my job is on the line when something fails. As a result, mission critical applications will still be coded in Oracle and non-critical applications that we can take our time stress testing are mostly done in MySQL.
I still have to use SQL/Server as commercial tools our accountants use (MS Dynamics and Clarity) will work on nothing else.
Instead of cursing every product with which a writer has had bad experiences, the key to reducing grief is to remain aware of the likely risks and rewards of each approach. Yes, Oracle is expensive, but the risks to one's company and personal employment often make it the right choice. Yes, using tools that cost the most will sometimes put a business at a pricing disadvantage and that is when looking at MySQL is sometimes a key to success.
What I could really use is a grid that compares current versions of each product and recommends the likely characteristics of appropriate applications. (For all I know, my own preferences and rules may already be out of date.)
I work in an environment where all techies are issued Blackberries and audible ringing is PROHIBITED. Vibration is the only permissible way for the devices to go off.
Meanwhile, I miss most of my calls because of the BB's pathetically trivial degree of vibration.
What can be done? Can the BB be modded to vibrate more? Probably not. That is why I'm considering VOIP solution where my calls simultaneously go to my BB & my personal cell phone. My cell phone has a decent vibration and if I can get this to work, I can still answer the call using my BB as required.
At least I understand the reasons for some restrictions in this area.
I had a friend who spent a good part of his teen years in his basement, experimenting toward the goal of perfecting the "potato gun."
[While you could Google this, potato guns are the combination of plastic piping, potatoes, and all manner of common propellants used to develop "potato rifles," "potato bazookas," and even "potato canons."]
Potato guns are cheap, loud, fun, and besides, how much damage could a person do with potatoes? (Danger Will Robinson, foreshadowing alert!)
[For the remainder of this text, we'll refer to my friend only as "Mike."]
At first, Mike experimented with tube diameters of one, three, and six inches.
Each round was fired at his basement wall, a sturdy cinderblock structure backed up by more than twelve feet of soil.
Then, Mike graduated to a twelve inch diameter pipe. He securely tied to the pipe a plank mounted on top of a saw-horse. He lit the fuse and then ran to crouch behind the sofa in case something unsafe happened with the pipe itself. (Who says hobby chemists aren't also focused on safety.)
Unfortunately, the mass of potatoes at the rear of the pipe weighed the pipe in an unbalanced manner.
The cannon tipped backwards and before my friend could jump up and right it, the device ignited with a deafening blast.
Did I say deafening? Yes. Intentionally. It would be days before he heard anything else.
A split-second after the blast there was a tremendous (silent) crash of dust and debris. Mike had not merely blown a hole in the basement ceiling. He had not merely blown a hole in his mother's previously meticulously maintained kitchen floor. He blew the ENTIRE floor up to damage the kitchen ceiling whereupon the entire floor then crashed back down to the basement. As Mike told the story, his mother, who had been taking laundry from the line in their backyard, rushed to house and opened the door only to peer straight down to a stunned Mike looking up from the basement.
No, there is no type of hobby chemist regulations that should be endorsed by the readers of slash dot. After all, what teenage boy would pay attention anyway?
Before we get hysterical boasting or blaming from either camp (after all, this is/.)....
McCain and Obama each represented competent, thoughtful, but philosophically different choices for the US voter.
Each is human and each made some errors. (For example, McCain in his choice of Palin and association in the Keating 5 Scandal and Obama in some of his past associations.) In general, most voters in both parties surveyed dismissed focusing on these mistakes as silliness.
Each presented sufficient life experiences and public interpretation of those experiences to convince more than half of the country that either would be at least a decent president. (That is why in the US, supporters of losing candidates rarely leave the country or react with violence of any kind.)
However, each represented very different approaches to resolving domestic issues. This at a when many voters felt their retirement accounts decimated; the income of those employed flat for a decade; and the job opportunities for the unemployed to be bleak.
John McCain has a long and honorable career of representing the school of thought that in the long run, less government intervention will increase prosperity for all. Considering Katrina and the retirement account melt-down, Obama represents the old FDR response to the 1930's Great Depression that "people don't eat in the long run," and so must have faith in the net good of government aid, government intervention, and taxes to fund such an approach.
There are some conservatives who will argue that too MUCH regulation caused the current financial crisis by laws mandating "community lending" to those who couldn't afford to borrow, resulting in massive defaults and systemic risk. Whether or not this proves to be true, not enough voters were convinced that even less regulation (and less taxes) are the solution.
During my lifetime, I have seen some politicians who after careers of vocal viciousness retired from politics to practice law with their opponents. (New York's Senator Al D'Amato (wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator_Pothole) is my favorite example.) Don't be surprised if John McCain winds up either in a multi-party law firm or runs Veterans' Affairs in an Obama administration. (In either case the extreme vitriol of partisans from either party look silly in the long run.)
At the same time, expecting Obama to succeed in addressing every situation is a recipe for failure. George Bush did not anticipate 9/11 or Katrina or the financial system meltdown. He did the best he could with the tools he had. Who knows what campaign promises Obama will have to break when walking into an administration where troops are fatigued and the budget deficit is almost beyond comprehension?
It is time to return to topics of the most impact to Slash Dot readers such as Net Neutrality and the next release of Duke Nukem. (Time for an Open Source browser-based version?)
"Performance" is only a valid topic after addressing reliability.
In my company, we gave up on PGP's whole disk encryption after it consistently locked up (but was ok after many multiple reboots) on both Panasonic Laptops and Lenovo Laptops.
For the last few months, we have been trying TrueCrypt on the above brand laptops and also and HP desktops with no issues (as of yet).
If you load RAM by opening a bunch of simultaneous Windows and then run some mathematical loops that represent the kind of calculations your environment demands, you can then determine whether the overhead of TrueCrypt (or whatever) is worth the security benefit.
Good luck.
No matter where you go . . . there you are. - Buckeroo Bonzai
From your post, it sounds like South Africa has a tremendous bandwidth cost burden.
This might be an opportunity for a European or US ISP (or university) to offer a Citrix (or VNC or other similar) connection where the processing is done at the ISP and (relatively) low bandwidth screenshots are all that are sent between the user and the ISP.
In my own company, this approach reduces bandwidth consumed by remote sites more than 90% when compared to using straight VPN to our corporate network. While the analogy is not precisely the same, it is similar enough to be useful here.
While this adds to the computing burden at the ISP, someone would need to do a break-even analysis as to the point where it makes more economic sense until more bandwidth connects South Africa to the rest of the world.
In the very short term, perhaps you (or your university) could investigate a remote connection with another University overseas?
IMO, speed is only a consideration after dealing with compatibility and safety issues.
With regard to compatibility:
In my company, we educate users to use IE only when accessing a known commercial site that works only with IE.
With regard to safety:
For general use all other users are educated to use Firefox (WITH Adblock Plus and WITH NoScript)
Why not Chrome?
I am still waiting for Google to give me believable reasons why Chrome is significantly safer than Firefox OR more compatible with commercial web sites than IE before I will permit it to be seriously evaluated for ease-of-use or speed considerations.
I guess I should add an "ask Slashdot" query as to the best combination of Firefox add-ins for a corporate environment. (It was the safety factors that enabled me to promote Firefox within my employer's organization in the first place.)
I've been in the business starting as a programmer progressing to a DBA and now a PHB since 1979. Thus the basis for my observations:
Most of those programmers who make average or below average wages, (see www.salary.com) work for big companies, enjoy maintenance, and keep their desirable skills current, and work ethic sharp will work right on through each recession.
Go "for the brass ring" and hold out for the high paying consultancy jobs or work on leading edge development will make you expendable each time companies retrench from new projects for a year or more. Make the big bucks and be prepared for (typically) a month or two of unemployment for each $10k you were making in salary every time a recession happens.
Don't think that being available for lower paying jobs is always an option. Many employers won't look at you as they assume you will take off when the economy improves anyway.
Seems gloomy? Not necessarily. The time I do get to work on leading edge projects that increase my employer or clients' profitability gives me great satisfaction. The opportunity to mentor others is even more of an ego boost. I just make sure to bank 40% of my take home pay and keep my standard of living to the least expensive home in a neighborhood populated by real professionals (doctors and lawyers) so my kids have great schools and peer groups. My wife and I both make great geek-derived incomes, but you would never know it to look at our outward standard-of-living. Relatively cheap house, older cars, no expensive hobbies like 2nd homes, golf, boating, or season tickets to major league sports all translate to the ability to be able to put money away for a rainy day while buying all the geek toys (big tv, new computers, software, etc,)that we really want.
In addition, you may need to relocate more than once to follow the job of your dreams and value job satisfaction higher than the satisfaction of making above average wages.
You may also need to develop your "soft" skills as a manager and/or sales person as insurance to be marketable.
In my own case I added less technical certifications (M.S. and P.M.P.)to enable me to get management jobs where I was allowed to design and code as well.
I've largely worked for the joy of what I do and been rewarded when not unemployed. I wish you well and hope you will not find it to difficult choosing between the steady work of the maintainer and the sexy work of the new program with lost of customization awaiting your wisdom.
There is always the possibility that you are
(a)among the best at whatever in-demand technical skills you possess, (b) have developed winning interpersonal skills, (c) developed 1st rate business expertise, (d) maintain the latest in academic and technical credentials, and (e) have the good fortune to be employed by someone with stable sales and a good balance sheet going into the recession. Meet all of these criteria and you will be fine. If not, you may have to scramble, invest in more education even though times are now tough, work more than job, and accept lower pay when it can be found,
It is no fun when you don't have those noted "keys" but one or two bad experiences may cause you to take actions to protect you for the rest of your career.
I have a collection of hundreds of comic books from the early 1900's. (So all of their copyrights have expired.) I'd scan and share them with the world but find scanning with my 30+ second per page flat bed scanner (in hi res) to be a time consuming.
No, I will NOT slice the spines.
The idea of 2-part solution where my digital camera is mounted and a separate stand that holds the comic perfectly is appealing. The solution would have to enable rapid turning of pages and the pages will have to remain as flat as possible.
A non-glare glass plate that does not reduce picture quality is probably too much of a dream, but I'm open for suggestions.
Give me some ideas and I may donate the images to Guttenberg or other worthwhile repository.
Ok, lets assume for just a minute that letting some kind of query capability is appropriate for your customer base and that you already know enough about Oracle views and roles and general security that your concern is improper SQL syntax, run-away queries, etc.
Instead of giving them open access to feed SQL to the database, see if they would be open to using a PHP (or other web) screen where they could check off specified field names, add conditions (like, , and a value, etc.).
You could then construct well-behaved SQL statements and kill requests that your code defines as unreasonable.
If an interactive screen is not acceptable, then consider a facility where they feed you a SQL string and then you use PERL (or other program of choice) to extract simple queries that you can then re-feed to Oracle. Any sufficiently complex or burdensome query could trigger emails to your DBA who could then gently provide guidance to your customer.
While corporations certainly do exist and are located in multiple countries, your implications that they are above and beyond the legal or ethical reach of each local country assumes facts not presented as a base to your argument.
The parent post disregards the very nature and essence of what a corporation IS. A "corporation" is a FICTION defined by a government relieving individual employees and owners of liability and prosecution from most (but not all) of the potentially bad things the company can do. [I know "fiction" seems like a terrible choice of words. But it is actually the legal term used in law books and law journals. Look it up yourself.]
If the president of General Electric could be held personally responsible and jailed when one worker in one plant out of many across the world went on a killing rampage, or when a consumer was accidentally killed by a GE delivery truck, then there would be precious few organizations larger than the family business.
The creation of the corporate fiction has enabled the creation, operation, and growth of all of the large corporations in the world.
Whatever your political view, the corporation (and the peoples within the corporations) have raised the standard of living of billions of people. After more than 100,000 years of history, we may for the first time be within 100 years of a time when no one in the world is malnourished.
Back to the parent post topic, a corporation can only operate within a country subject to the laws in that country. That is why the executives at Google were so upset at the choice between "doing no evil" (by protecting dissident human rights and withdrawing from doing business in China) and the "evil" choice of obeying the local laws (and also protecting advertising revenues from that country and rationalizing that a "greater good" would be served by giving Google's services to the people not in Chinese labor camps).
In the case of American and China, current tensions over intellectual property are a natural byproduct of continuing negotiations between the countries (bilateral trade agreements and treaties) and the evolving international standards being slowly embraced by all major trading partners (through the WTO also known as the World Trade Organization).
Between the United State's dependence on imports to keep inflation down, and China's dependence on exports and growth to prevent unrest and revolution, neither country can bully the other into doing anything they really don't want to do. In addition, any moves that are made are rarely made quickly. Only when China develops more intellectual property based businesses like America's Hollywood or India's Bollywood will they see the value of protecting intellectual rights. Until then, we get a lot of Slashdot articles on the topic.
Considering the amazing progress China has made since the 1970's, it is entirely possible that their next generation of leaders may improve the protections of human rights, property rights, and intellectual rights. We can only hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Restrictions on social networking may be an example of the "new" technology-driven world reflecting what has always been policy at many large companies.
Thirty years ago, my boss forced me to fire someone who was a member of a social group (outside of work that) my boss found to be objectionable. Mind you, this employee never opened his mouth or said anything unprofessional at work.
My boss took me aside and explained to me that like it or not, every employee's "personal life" could always be construed as a representation of the employer and so any publicly controversial image was grounds for termination.
What I found out then and is even more true in the US today, is that as long as your reason for firing someone is not directly based on their age, race, officially recognized religion, country of national origin, or recognized handicap, that you can pretty much fire them for any other reason (or non-reason), work-related or not.
Some of the freedoms for the "pursuit of happiness" in the US are reserved for the unemployed and entrepreneurs.
I accepted this reality early in my career. It is not the bravest position. Then again, I am not the bravest of people.
Q&A for DOS was the best non-relational database of the pre-windows era. (Ok, so PSF/File and Alpha4 had their fans too.) When I needed to load a copy of Q&A to retrieve some old Q&A data, every version of the Windows Dos box would lock the system up. The early versions of DOS/Box would also crash on Q&A's nasty habit of directly accessing system video.
However, for the last three years (at least), DOS/Box now loads Q&A and at least the Q&A search and export features work just fine.
This is one fine product.
Not only can your gear affect your speeds, but conflicts with speed auto-sensing can wreak havoc.
We recently swapped out some older edge switches in one site for a beautiful new CISCO core switch. Within days, the help desk had reports that some users' network performance had gone from fine to terrible. (Not our intent.)
As it turns out, a boatload of older NICs were mishandled by the new switch which downgraded speeds, communicated in half-duplex, and even then continually reset the connection.
Had the users not complained, we never would have known there was a problem.
As it turns out, each port on the core switch can be manually set to a fixed 100mb full duplex (and ignore auto-sensing) which then operates just fine.
So much for plug-n-pray.
In Australia you suffer even more so than we do in the western US in that there's LOTS of space between A and B, making any infrastructure cost much higher than Japan where they measure that space in feet or inches.
Higher than Japan, maybe, but for the majority of Aussies, the math doesn't support their outrageous rates in comparison to the US. Here is my rationale:
While Australia and Japan have dramatically different geographies, both countries have majority populations that live near major cities. According to Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia), 14.7 million of Australia's 21.7 million citizens or 67.8% live in the 10 largest cities. The top five cities alone account for 58.6% of the population. On my visits to Sydney and Melbourne, I did not observe those cities to have infrastructure barriers or distances significantly worse than in the United States.
So while the cost to wire the rural areas with the highest speed option is cost-prohibitive, the cost to wire 67.8% of the population should not be appreciably greater than the US (at worst!).
Those Australians who have commented on Slashdot have indicated that they are paying dramatically more than we pay in the US. Unless Australian Slashdotters are largely rural in location, it suggests that there is something deficient in some part of the high-speed business model as it has been implemented in Australia as compared to the US, South Korea, etc.
[/tact translation on]: Aussies appear to be getting screwed on high speed rates [/tact translation off]
The human body is pretty darn good at healing itself. There is absolutely no replacement for a decent diet, moderate exercise, and a positive attitude.
Anyone on the planet born prior to the 1964 ban on above-ground nuclear tests has been exposed to enough nuclear matter to provide a degree of damage to their immune systems.
An amazing number of carcinogenic and other hostile and immune-system challenging chemicals have been used in the manufacture and treatment of everything from toys to clothes for the last 100 years.
The drop in average male sperm count over the last sixty years has been world-wide. The impact has included remote populations living far away from industrial centers and with lifestyles far from developed societies.
What all of this may mean is that the combination of proper administration of diet, exercise, sleep, water, financial security, and satisfying relation and career may all be insufficient for any given individual to live a long and healthy life.
Unless, of course, we actually live in the Matrix and all this bad stuff is fiction.
. . .Most people in India have lived their entire lives without cars and didn't need it. . . .
According to a recent National Public Radio author interview, 40% of the population of India still has no access to plumbing much less money to purchase toilet paper.
Cars are used by the populace for access to better paying jobs and increased standard of living.
It is true that during the industrial revolution of the 1800's that many major US cities (like Pittsburgh) has blackened skies and lung diseases for decades on end.
It is also true that in the 1900's, some major US (and US/Candian) waterways were so polluted that THEY CAUGHT FIRE.
But in the end, this industrialization led to longer life expectancies and higher standards of living. (And later, much LESS polluting industries.)
While I don't want to breath ANY air pollution, I want even more that everyone around the world be given the economic opportunities given to me by the fact that I happened to be born in the US.
So in the end I commend Tata for bringing this vehicle to market. If a less polluting yet equally performing and cost-effective exists, I trust India to eventually find and promote it.
Right now, I'm supporting several hundred (Windows) laptops divided between Lenovo, Dell, and Panasonic brands. While the Panasonic "Toughbooks" seem to take the most abuse and still run, both our Lenovo and Panasonic laptops routinely last 5 to 7 years before failing.
Yes, we have a few users who will destroy a laptop of ANY brand in less than three years. I would not generalize any one of their experiences to condemn an entire brand as your comment seems to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibious_transport_dock
From the name, it sounded like the ship was actually "land and sea" capable. In fact, it ferries copters and truly amphibious vehicles close to shore. This is a ship only and does not appear to intentionally embrace the beach.
I went to my task manager and sure enough, I'm past 1.2GB of RAM used by FF!
I uninstalled all my add-ins, reloaded, and was still more than 800 MB of FF RAM.
Sooo, what could be the culprit? I re-installed Firefox and added one add-in at a time. Memory usage BALLOONED with the addition of Video Download Helper, one of the most common add-ins out there.
If there is a way to selectively load V.D.H. and run only when actually needed, that would be a real boon. (I haven't spent time figuring out if this is possible.)
Equally puzzling was merely "uninstalling" the add-in still caused F.F.(or something) to continue to eat RAM. Maybe the V.D.F. uninstall doesn't work 100% or maybe my memory issue is really related to a different add-in.
Your choices seem to be (a) get more memory, (b) do a clean install of FF without V.D.H., (c) live with the situation, or (d) find an alternative to V.D.H. that is less memory hungry.
I guess this is a potential question for Firehose.
However, a point to keep in mind is the competitive disadvantages that many will face after completing school if we are talking about school and subsequent employment in the United States.
While my data center servers are a mixture of Windows, Linux, IOS, VM, Xen, and Solaris, my user's desktops are 90% Windows, 10% Mac, and 0% anything else.
When we interview for interns and entry level support people, those with the Windows background get the job 100% of the time. We don't hire on philosophy; we hire because there is Windows support to be done.
I'm not here to argue that businesses should or should not use open source. Accept that they do. I am strongly in favor of sending my kids to school where they will learn the technologies that will help them in the job market.
At home, I supported Open Office for my kids for four years. The differences only caused aggravation at home and school. Each kid now has their own copy of Office 2007 and haven't asked me for any support this school year for word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet problems. (They are also heavy users of Visio). They are happy. They can run the software that is run at school. Did all of this cost me? Yes. (All of our home software is legal.)
But after putting in 12 hours away from home, I like coming home to a happy wife and happy kids.
It is 8 PM and I'm going home now.
After WWII and again after the Vietnam War, veterans were given the options of college loans with low interest rates and long repayment terms. Those individuals not only bettered their own economic standing, but the increased taxes they paid after becoming doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, accountants, engineers, scientists, teachers, computer scientists, and jobs-creating entrepreneurs provided the government and the economy a great return on their investment. The costs of a 4-year undergrad degree and another 3 â" year graduate degree today total about $250,000. Taking these people out of the workforce during time of high unemployment and returning them with higher skills to a recovering economy in seven years is one of the five intelligent things our government could do that makes financial sense in the long term and alleviates some anxiety and misery right now.
Beware the law of unintended consequences! When I interview 1st year graduates for tech support or combined tech support and programming positions, applicants skilled in MS Office are almost always hired over those skilled in Open Office and others. The reason is simple. Even in an office with less than 200 employees, our help desk receives more than 5,000 support calls a year related either to Windows or MS Office. Staffing with people who can resolve those problems result in very high user scores in satisfaction surveys. With regard to those staffing the business positions, experienced people with industry-specific knowledge all seem to come with MS experience and no desired to embrace open source. I've been able to gain a limited degree of acceptance for Firefox instead of IE, but getting users to give up MS Office risks complete user revolt. As my coders are receptive to using open server-side tools, that is where open opportunities have the best chance. If your university fails to consider these items, your graduates will be selected for far fewer jobs than those from other schools. Just wait until their lack of appreciation makes it back to those who failed to prepare them for the real-world saturated with MS Office users willing to slam those who try to help them with different tools. Good luck in your quest.
OK, so I grow one special breed of apple from the apple tree that is delicious, but bruises easily.
I contract with and certify authorized fruit distributors who certify me that in advance of doing business with me, they must staff up and provide gentle handling and quickly respond to consumer complaints. In return for their investing in this staffing up, I set a minimum retail price they will charge and maximum wholesale price so the distributors of all sizes will have some assurance of gross profit.
My distributors make the investment, build my reputation among buyers, and my buyers and distributors are happy and make me wealthy.
I also offer volume discounts. (I didn't say that all distributors would have the SAME profit margin, just an agreed-to MINIMUM profit margin.)
A rogue distributor starts buying in larger lots than he can handle to get the larger discounts. He takes the units he can't sell and sells them to an unauthorized "gray market" distributor. The gray market distributor can sell them because they cut corners on staffing customer service and support.
Consumers have no idea why, but word-of-mouth is that service and support at the (gray/unauthorized) retail level is degrading. Small problems are repeated over and over as they are not addressed. Eventually, the market-wide brand perception is damaged and my business is eventually on the brink of being ruined.
I cut off shipments to the rogue distributor. He takes me to court. The court agrees that I am operating legally and I am in the right to cutoff any distributor who violates our contractual terms.
Some people on web discussion boards present me as a monster intent on excessive and unfair profiteering.
Business should be a series of voluntary transactions between all parties. If a product is priced too high or service is too low, then the product deserves to suffer. Monopoly laws apply only to products deemed by the authorities as essential to the economy and where alternatives do not exist.
That is why monopoly laws apply to the vendor of the world's largest operating system (i.e. the US vs. Microsoft and the E.U. vs. Microsoft) and not to minority OS players (i.e. US court ruled Apple could put out of business the Apple clone maker).
Just another day among the chattering lunatics. (Yes, I appear to be one too.)
While there have been a zillion postings on /. about uselessness of certifications and degrees when interviewing sys admins, dba's, programmers, and engineers, I look for both certs and degrees as evidence that the applicant can not only learn, but put up with the inevitable aggravations of any organization of 100+ employees.
If you don't want to go to college or take exams for certs, then your outstanding professional skills should get you past the interview process for an underpaying job in a smaller company. Then, you can build references and real-life skills and interview for larger organizations more likely to pay more for your time.
Just remember that lack of certs and degrees will always mean that some companies won't even let you interview. Fortunately, you don't NEED a million jobs, just one at any one moment in your life.
Best of luck....
If I have a choice between being lucky or being good, I'll take lucky every time.
There is too much adoration of personal database favorites and excessive condemnation of competing products
While I'm currently a CIO for a small-to-mid-sized company, I've been using relational databases now for more than twenty years.
For years, I've been HEARING about crash issues using MySQL for transactions. For as many years, I've been designing databases and supervising application design that use MySQL for small transaction systems without corruption problems at all. During this time, I've also designed many large read-only tables used by query systems with millions of records without corruption problems.
For more than a decade, I experienced crash after crash when using SQL/Server for databases above a few million records and/or above a couple of hundred gig. Over time, the product got better. Today, my group uses SQL/Server for production applications with almost a hundred million records updated daily with no corruption reported in YEARS.
I've been using Oracle since the 1980's on many platforms. Yes, the early days (pre version 7) were grief and suffering when building OLAP applications. However, each version since Version 7 (1995? 1996?) has been better than every alternative that my employers would consider (including IBM's DB2,) and I am still very comfortable betting my job on Oracle when data warehousing is involved.
When faced with new challenges, I'm free to select any database application so long as I know my job is on the line when something fails. As a result, mission critical applications will still be coded in Oracle and non-critical applications that we can take our time stress testing are mostly done in MySQL.
I still have to use SQL/Server as commercial tools our accountants use (MS Dynamics and Clarity) will work on nothing else.
Instead of cursing every product with which a writer has had bad experiences, the key to reducing grief is to remain aware of the likely risks and rewards of each approach. Yes, Oracle is expensive, but the risks to one's company and personal employment often make it the right choice. Yes, using tools that cost the most will sometimes put a business at a pricing disadvantage and that is when looking at MySQL is sometimes a key to success.
What I could really use is a grid that compares current versions of each product and recommends the likely characteristics of appropriate applications. (For all I know, my own preferences and rules may already be out of date.)
I work in an environment where all techies are issued Blackberries and audible ringing is PROHIBITED. Vibration is the only permissible way for the devices to go off.
Meanwhile, I miss most of my calls because of the BB's pathetically trivial degree of vibration.
What can be done? Can the BB be modded to vibrate more? Probably not. That is why I'm considering VOIP solution where my calls simultaneously go to my BB & my personal cell phone. My cell phone has a decent vibration and if I can get this to work, I can still answer the call using my BB as required.
I had a friend who spent a good part of his teen years in his basement, experimenting toward the goal of perfecting the "potato gun."
[While you could Google this, potato guns are the combination of plastic piping, potatoes, and all manner of common propellants used to develop "potato rifles," "potato bazookas," and even "potato canons."]
Potato guns are cheap, loud, fun, and besides, how much damage could a person do with potatoes? (Danger Will Robinson, foreshadowing alert!)
[For the remainder of this text, we'll refer to my friend only as "Mike."]
At first, Mike experimented with tube diameters of one, three, and six inches.
Each round was fired at his basement wall, a sturdy cinderblock structure backed up by more than twelve feet of soil.
Then, Mike graduated to a twelve inch diameter pipe. He securely tied to the pipe a plank mounted on top of a saw-horse. He lit the fuse and then ran to crouch behind the sofa in case something unsafe happened with the pipe itself. (Who says hobby chemists aren't also focused on safety.)
Unfortunately, the mass of potatoes at the rear of the pipe weighed the pipe in an unbalanced manner.
The cannon tipped backwards and before my friend could jump up and right it, the device ignited with a deafening blast.
Did I say deafening? Yes. Intentionally. It would be days before he heard anything else.
A split-second after the blast there was a tremendous (silent) crash of dust and debris. Mike had not merely blown a hole in the basement ceiling. He had not merely blown a hole in his mother's previously meticulously maintained kitchen floor. He blew the ENTIRE floor up to damage the kitchen ceiling whereupon the entire floor then crashed back down to the basement. As Mike told the story, his mother, who had been taking laundry from the line in their backyard, rushed to house and opened the door only to peer straight down to a stunned Mike looking up from the basement.
No, there is no type of hobby chemist regulations that should be endorsed by the readers of slash dot. After all, what teenage boy would pay attention anyway?
Before we get hysterical boasting or blaming from either camp (after all, this is /.)....
McCain and Obama each represented competent, thoughtful, but philosophically different choices for the US voter.
Each is human and each made some errors. (For example, McCain in his choice of Palin and association in the Keating 5 Scandal and Obama in some of his past associations.) In general, most voters in both parties surveyed dismissed focusing on these mistakes as silliness.
Each presented sufficient life experiences and public interpretation of those experiences to convince more than half of the country that either would be at least a decent president. (That is why in the US, supporters of losing candidates rarely leave the country or react with violence of any kind.)
However, each represented very different approaches to resolving domestic issues. This at a when many voters felt their retirement accounts decimated; the income of those employed flat for a decade; and the job opportunities for the unemployed to be bleak.
John McCain has a long and honorable career of representing the school of thought that in the long run, less government intervention will increase prosperity for all. Considering Katrina and the retirement account melt-down, Obama represents the old FDR response to the 1930's Great Depression that "people don't eat in the long run," and so must have faith in the net good of government aid, government intervention, and taxes to fund such an approach.
There are some conservatives who will argue that too MUCH regulation caused the current financial crisis by laws mandating "community lending" to those who couldn't afford to borrow, resulting in massive defaults and systemic risk. Whether or not this proves to be true, not enough voters were convinced that even less regulation (and less taxes) are the solution.
During my lifetime, I have seen some politicians who after careers of vocal viciousness retired from politics to practice law with their opponents. (New York's Senator Al D'Amato (wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator_Pothole) is my favorite example.) Don't be surprised if John McCain winds up either in a multi-party law firm or runs Veterans' Affairs in an Obama administration. (In either case the extreme vitriol of partisans from either party look silly in the long run.)
At the same time, expecting Obama to succeed in addressing every situation is a recipe for failure. George Bush did not anticipate 9/11 or Katrina or the financial system meltdown. He did the best he could with the tools he had. Who knows what campaign promises Obama will have to break when walking into an administration where troops are fatigued and the budget deficit is almost beyond comprehension?
It is time to return to topics of the most impact to Slash Dot readers such as Net Neutrality and the next release of Duke Nukem. (Time for an Open Source browser-based version?)
"Performance" is only a valid topic after addressing reliability.
In my company, we gave up on PGP's whole disk encryption after it consistently locked up (but was ok after many multiple reboots) on both Panasonic Laptops and Lenovo Laptops.
For the last few months, we have been trying TrueCrypt on the above brand laptops and also and HP desktops with no issues (as of yet).
If you load RAM by opening a bunch of simultaneous Windows and then run some mathematical loops that represent the kind of calculations your environment demands, you can then determine whether the overhead of TrueCrypt (or whatever) is worth the security benefit.
Good luck.
No matter where you go . . . there you are. - Buckeroo Bonzai
From your post, it sounds like South Africa has a tremendous bandwidth cost burden.
This might be an opportunity for a European or US ISP (or university) to offer a Citrix (or VNC or other similar) connection where the processing is done at the ISP and (relatively) low bandwidth screenshots are all that are sent between the user and the ISP.
In my own company, this approach reduces bandwidth consumed by remote sites more than 90% when compared to using straight VPN to our corporate network. While the analogy is not precisely the same, it is similar enough to be useful here.
While this adds to the computing burden at the ISP, someone would need to do a break-even analysis as to the point where it makes more economic sense until more bandwidth connects South Africa to the rest of the world.
In the very short term, perhaps you (or your university) could investigate a remote connection with another University overseas?
With regard to compatibility:
In my company, we educate users to use IE only when accessing a known commercial site that works only with IE.
With regard to safety:
For general use all other users are educated to use Firefox (WITH Adblock Plus and WITH NoScript)
Why not Chrome?
I am still waiting for Google to give me believable reasons why Chrome is significantly safer than Firefox OR more compatible with commercial web sites than IE before I will permit it to be seriously evaluated for ease-of-use or speed considerations.
I guess I should add an "ask Slashdot" query as to the best combination of Firefox add-ins for a corporate environment. (It was the safety factors that enabled me to promote Firefox within my employer's organization in the first place.)
Most of those programmers who make average or below average wages, (see www.salary.com) work for big companies, enjoy maintenance, and keep their desirable skills current, and work ethic sharp will work right on through each recession.
Go "for the brass ring" and hold out for the high paying consultancy jobs or work on leading edge development will make you expendable each time companies retrench from new projects for a year or more. Make the big bucks and be prepared for (typically) a month or two of unemployment for each $10k you were making in salary every time a recession happens.
Don't think that being available for lower paying jobs is always an option. Many employers won't look at you as they assume you will take off when the economy improves anyway.
Seems gloomy? Not necessarily. The time I do get to work on leading edge projects that increase my employer or clients' profitability gives me great satisfaction. The opportunity to mentor others is even more of an ego boost. I just make sure to bank 40% of my take home pay and keep my standard of living to the least expensive home in a neighborhood populated by real professionals (doctors and lawyers) so my kids have great schools and peer groups. My wife and I both make great geek-derived incomes, but you would never know it to look at our outward standard-of-living. Relatively cheap house, older cars, no expensive hobbies like 2nd homes, golf, boating, or season tickets to major league sports all translate to the ability to be able to put money away for a rainy day while buying all the geek toys (big tv, new computers, software, etc,)that we really want.
In addition, you may need to relocate more than once to follow the job of your dreams and value job satisfaction higher than the satisfaction of making above average wages.
You may also need to develop your "soft" skills as a manager and/or sales person as insurance to be marketable.
In my own case I added less technical certifications (M.S. and P.M.P.)to enable me to get management jobs where I was allowed to design and code as well.
I've largely worked for the joy of what I do and been rewarded when not unemployed. I wish you well and hope you will not find it to difficult choosing between the steady work of the maintainer and the sexy work of the new program with lost of customization awaiting your wisdom.
There is always the possibility that you are (a)among the best at whatever in-demand technical skills you possess, (b) have developed winning interpersonal skills, (c) developed 1st rate business expertise, (d) maintain the latest in academic and technical credentials, and (e) have the good fortune to be employed by someone with stable sales and a good balance sheet going into the recession. Meet all of these criteria and you will be fine. If not, you may have to scramble, invest in more education even though times are now tough, work more than job, and accept lower pay when it can be found,
It is no fun when you don't have those noted "keys" but one or two bad experiences may cause you to take actions to protect you for the rest of your career.
Much luck to you.
No, I will NOT slice the spines.
The idea of 2-part solution where my digital camera is mounted and a separate stand that holds the comic perfectly is appealing. The solution would have to enable rapid turning of pages and the pages will have to remain as flat as possible.
A non-glare glass plate that does not reduce picture quality is probably too much of a dream, but I'm open for suggestions.
Give me some ideas and I may donate the images to Guttenberg or other worthwhile repository.
Instead of giving them open access to feed SQL to the database, see if they would be open to using a PHP (or other web) screen where they could check off specified field names, add conditions (like, , and a value, etc.).
You could then construct well-behaved SQL statements and kill requests that your code defines as unreasonable.
If an interactive screen is not acceptable, then consider a facility where they feed you a SQL string and then you use PERL (or other program of choice) to extract simple queries that you can then re-feed to Oracle. Any sufficiently complex or burdensome query could trigger emails to your DBA who could then gently provide guidance to your customer.
While corporations certainly do exist and are located in multiple countries, your implications that they are above and beyond the legal or ethical reach of each local country assumes facts not presented as a base to your argument.
The parent post disregards the very nature and essence of what a corporation IS. A "corporation" is a FICTION defined by a government relieving individual employees and owners of liability and prosecution from most (but not all) of the potentially bad things the company can do. [I know "fiction" seems like a terrible choice of words. But it is actually the legal term used in law books and law journals. Look it up yourself.]
If the president of General Electric could be held personally responsible and jailed when one worker in one plant out of many across the world went on a killing rampage, or when a consumer was accidentally killed by a GE delivery truck, then there would be precious few organizations larger than the family business.
The creation of the corporate fiction has enabled the creation, operation, and growth of all of the large corporations in the world.
Whatever your political view, the corporation (and the peoples within the corporations) have raised the standard of living of billions of people. After more than 100,000 years of history, we may for the first time be within 100 years of a time when no one in the world is malnourished.
Back to the parent post topic, a corporation can only operate within a country subject to the laws in that country. That is why the executives at Google were so upset at the choice between "doing no evil" (by protecting dissident human rights and withdrawing from doing business in China) and the "evil" choice of obeying the local laws (and also protecting advertising revenues from that country and rationalizing that a "greater good" would be served by giving Google's services to the people not in Chinese labor camps).
In the case of American and China, current tensions over intellectual property are a natural byproduct of continuing negotiations between the countries (bilateral trade agreements and treaties) and the evolving international standards being slowly embraced by all major trading partners (through the WTO also known as the World Trade Organization).
Between the United State's dependence on imports to keep inflation down, and China's dependence on exports and growth to prevent unrest and revolution, neither country can bully the other into doing anything they really don't want to do. In addition, any moves that are made are rarely made quickly. Only when China develops more intellectual property based businesses like America's Hollywood or India's Bollywood will they see the value of protecting intellectual rights. Until then, we get a lot of Slashdot articles on the topic.
Considering the amazing progress China has made since the 1970's, it is entirely possible that their next generation of leaders may improve the protections of human rights, property rights, and intellectual rights. We can only hope.