You have to train for your private pilot's license, your commercial license, your twin engine rating, your flight instructor's license...
I don't know how I could have forgotten it: you also have to train for your instrument rating, your instrument instructor rating, which are probably the two most demanding ratings out there, as well as your multiengine instrument instructor rating.
Huge investment? Next time you see a commercial airline pilot, ask him where he/she got their training and you will find that a majority of them will say either the Air Force or the Navy. Cost to former military pilot for training: Almost $0.00.
That may be the case, but from what I understand it's rather difficult to become a pilot in the military. For one thing, your uncorrected vision has to be 20/20 or better, which eliminates a whole bunch of people. By the way, as I understand it, "uncorrected" means just that: no corrective surgery, no glasses, no contacts.
If you want to become a pilot through civilian channels, you do indeed have to make large sacrifices. The training is quite expensive and quite extensive. You have to train for your private pilot's license, your commercial license, your twin engine rating, your flight instructor's license, and then you have to work as an instructor to build enough flight time (at least a thousand hours or so) before anyone (even cargo haulers) will consider you. And when you are finally hired, you won't be hired by the majors -- you'll be hired by the regionals at best. And those guys start off at about $30K per year. Captains in the regionals make around $70K per year. That's for putting in 12-16 hour days, with a "home base" that may change on a yearly basis and which may be quite far from home.
It's ironic, really, because the kind of flying the regional guys do is harder than the flying done by the majors. The regionals typically operate turboprop equipment that flies in the 15,000 to 25,000 foot altitude range, where weather is much more of a factor than the 30,000 to 40,000 foot range the majors fly in. The regionals tend to fly into smaller airports that have fewer or older navigational aids and which also tend to be in areas of more dangerous terrain. And their equipment isn't as good as the equipment the majors fly, so icing (for example) is more of a problem.
If it were up to me, the guys in the regional airlines would be making more than the guys in the majors, simply because their job is harder.
SMTP itself isn't the problem. It actually provides all the information you need to determine whether or not the sending system should be authorized to send the email in question:
The IP address of the sender
The domain the sender is sending on behalf of
What's lacking is DNS support. DNS currently doesn't have a record type indicating which systems are authorized to send email on behalf of the domain, but if it had that then you'd have everything you'd need to know whether or not a given system was authorized to send on behalf of the domain in question.
Now, that's good, but of course it's possible for the spammers to buy tons of domains and spam from them. But the above gives you a solid gold defense.
What defense? Well, imagine how many orders of magnitude more powerful Vipul's Razor would be if you could block entire domains based on whether or not the email in question was reported as spam by more than, say, two independent entities.
Winning the war against spam requires being able to identify and reject spam sources more quickly than those sources can come into being. If spammers are forced to buy a new domain whenever they're blocked in order to get the spam out, they'll lose: getting a domain will almost certainly be a slower process than blacklisting a domain based on reported spam because getting a domain requires a financial transaction, setting up authoritative DNS servers, etc. And the spammer would have the domains, lots and lots of domains, in his name (or at his address, or with his email contact, or something that is common to many of them) for an entire year, which may make it easier to identify spammers.
It amazes me that we haven't already put this system into place. How hard can it be?
The larger, multinational corporations are trying to kill all their competition. This is one way to accomplish that. They are, after all, the wealthiest corporations in both cash and patents, so they stand to gain the most from it and are pushing the process.
It doesn't help, of course, that the UK is the U.S.'s bitch, as proved by Gulf War II. But it wouldn't really matter even if that weren't the case, because all of these governments listen to large multinational corporations first and foremost. Why else do you think it has taken so much popular effort to deal with this one issue alone, and it's not even finished yet? Very few in the general population who care about this issue are on the side of software patents, and yet software patents seem reasonably likely to become a reality in the EU anyway despite all the popular opposition. Remember that the next time you (rightfully) clown on how the U.S. government is 0wn3d by the corporations -- your government is similarly 0wn3d.
a good manager hires people that are knowledgeable in the field that they work. very likely, they will be more knowledgeable than the manager himself.
Yes. But how is the manager to know whether or not someone he's hiring is knowledgeable in the field without having at least some knowledge of the field himself?
This is why it's generally desirable for a manager to have some experience in the field he's managing. If he can't get that experience directly, the least he can do is learn about the field.
If PHBs are getting training, even if it's "secret", then good for them: it means they at least realize that there's something they don't know. That's the most important first step towards improvement.
And if that training is any good, then perhaps it will cause the PHB to finally realize that his technical people really do know what they're talking about, and will therefore grow to trust them more than he had previously.
No, the biggest danger here isn't that the PHBs are getting training -- it's that they may be trained by people who themselves don't know what they're talking about. The latter is the worst situation because it will cause a PHB to be (at best) confused when what he's been taught conflicts with what his technical people tell him.
Today they do. But what about tomorrow? The current fad of offshoring is creating a huge demand for IT workers in India. Their wages go up.
And as soon as that happens to a sufficient degree, the corporations will just shift their demand for labor elsewhere, thus causing the Indian economy to drop. I doubt they'll get anywhere near $60+K/year before that happens.
Bear with me a minute and I think you'll understand my point.
Ask yourself this: from the point of view of a corporation, what's the most desirable worker? The answer is: someone whom you can get away with paying just enough that he can barely provide a minimal existence for himself.
The problem with outsourcing isn't merely that it's possible. The problem is that it's now possible for corporations to shift demand for labor more quickly than the economic differences between countries can be adjusted to compensate.
Normally we'd expect the economy of whichever country happens to be "graced" with corporate demand for labor to grow, for the standard of living to rise, and for the wages of people in that economy to rise along with it. The problem is that as soon as that happens, corporations will shift their demand for labor to some other country that doesn't have that problem. When that happens, what do you think will happen to the economy of the country they just left? Bingo: it's slide downhill. Just like it has here in the U.S.
Corporations are now in a position to find and hire their perfect candidate, because they can shift their demand for labor fast enough to take advantage of the hysteresis in the economic system.
But as if that weren't bad enough, consider this: the very people that ultimately are these corporations' customers (either directly or indirectly, the latter happening as a result of being a customer of a corporation that in turn is itself a customer) are the very people who are losing their jobs. The current U.S. economy is running on credit -- that's what happens during a recession. But if the U.S. economy doesn't turn around then the creditors will start to demand payment and the flow of credit will stop. And at that point, those people will stop spending money for anything other than the bare essentials. The U.S. economy will thus collapse (making the Great Depression look like a boom period in comparison).
Worse, when people stop buying (as they must once their credit runs out), the corporations they buy from stop bringing in money. What happens then? Those corporations lay off people, thus causing the economy to spiral down even steeper.
The only people who can afford to buy anything are the people who are paid more than a subsistence wage. Yet the ability of corporations to move their demand for labor more quickly than economies can adjust guarantees that, in the end, the only people who are making more than a subsistence wage are the people who own those corporations. And the people who don't have jobs won't be making any money at all. The global average wage will thus be at most equal to that necessary for subsistence.
Now apply those same economic principles everywhere, and you'll see that, given the ability of corporations to shift demand faster than economies can adjust, the average wage will be at or below the subsistence level as long as the global supply of labor is larger than the demand for labor.
Technology actually makes this worse. The reason is that technology tends to eliminate the need for people to perform tasks. "Great! That just means they'll be free to do something else!" you may argue. That's true -- for some of them. Historically people have found ways to be more productive in sufficient numbers to more than offset this effect, but that is by accident only. There's absolutely nothing that says that there will always be some new thing for everyone who finds themselves out of a job to do that will give them more than a subsistence wage, if that.
And the reason all this is true comes down to one simple fact: in the global economy where there is no "outside", the buying power of money is a conserved quantity because money is ultimately a direct measure of expended human labor, and the supply of human labor changes only as the population does.
I imagine he would rather stop the distribution of IE and not get a dime than be bought out for a few measly millions of dollars.
<tin foil hat mode>
I have to wonder at this point in time what would happen if this guy suddenly had an "accident".
Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash. That kind of money can buy all sorts of favors. So the question is whether or not Microsoft, or someone who wants to get onto Microsoft's "good side" badly enough, is immoral enough to "encourage" such an "accident"...
I don't fear them making the machine MS only, as I doubt that would fly with their recent monopoly troubles in court,
Huh? What "troubles"? The ones where the courts basically said "stop, or I shall say 'stop' again!"?
In the U.S., Microsoft doesn't have any monopoly troubles in court. They've got the "Justice" Department and the rest of the government so deep in their pockets that we'll never see another antitrust suit against them in the U.S. in our lifetimes.
Europe might be another matter, but that remains to be seen (it's not like Europe is much less subject to corporate influence than the U.S.).
Well, if they work out a deal with the RIAA that ends up screwing me, then the situation has changed, hasn't it?
Sure. But until you consider their motives, you cannot know how likely it is that they'll take an action such as that. And if their motives are something you would tend to disagree with, then it's probably only a matter of time before they result in actions you'd be vehemently opposed to.
Actions certainly matter, and it's nice that the telcos appear to be fighting the RIAA right now. But allies like that are just as likely to fight against you as for you.
One other thing: another big reason motives are important is that they may give you an indication of the price you're likely to pay if you accept someone's help. The telcos are fighting the RIAA right now but because they're probably doing so only for financial reasons, there may be a hidden price tag attached to the help. For instance, we don't know what kind of deals they may be trying to make with the legislators, but I think it's reasonable to assume they're trying. In the end, we may all end up regretting their help, even though right now it looks okay.
I'd feel a lot more comfortable about the whole thing if I knew that the telcos were motivated by a desire to maximize freedom and liberty for all, but we all know that's not one of their motives. And I think it's important to know that.
I could care less about their motives, that they're fighting the RIAA is enough for me.
I see. So if their motives are purely to maximize their income and, as such, they suddenly work out a deal with the RIAA that the RIAA pays them whenever they have to comply with any of the RIAA subpoenas, and keep this a secret all the while continuing to appear to fight the RIAA, you'll have no problem with that? They'll continue to appear to fight the RIAA so it's not like you'll notice any difference.
Motive matters a great deal. It's one way you can tell the difference between who you can trust and who you can't. Someone who does the right thing for the wrong reason is much more likely to do the wrong thing later on.
I don't expect corporations to be saints. I expect them to be ethical, just as I expect an individual to be ethical. Give me one good reason a corporation, which wields orders of magnitude more power than an individual, should be less ethical than an individual.
The company you work for does not love you and is not loyal to you. That does not mean that individuals at your company are not compassionate and loving. However, they are not your family members.
I sometimes wonder how successful a company could be as a result of being loyal to its employees. How much loyalty on the part of employees would that generate?
I would not be surprised in the slightest if such a company, if composed of highly talented people, were more successful than a company that doesn't have such loyalty, given otherwise roughly the same starting conditions. Say what you will about the current economy, but really good people are still rare and still hard to find (if not because such people are already employed, then because you have to sort through a whole bunch of untalented or moderately talented people to find the real gems).
Perhaps we as a society have lost sight of what can be accomplished by a talented group of people who are loyal to each other. Before you dismiss the value of loyalty to one's comrades, remember that the military tries to maximize this loyalty during training -- they know that loyalty such as that can make the difference in battle. Would it really be so different in business?
I once worked Kraft foods, pizza, and they had at the time, 19% of the market share. Problem, they were constantly whining they needed more. WTH for! So you got 19% and a pile of garunteed income, STICK WITH IT, and stop being such a whiney bunch of greedy money grubbing corporate a-holes.
Welcome to the U.S. economy, where growth of profit, not amount of profit, is the only measure of a company's worth.
This is why some people regard the current economic system as unsustainable in the long term: it forces suppliers to succumb to greed and (in order to satisfy that greed) forces them to try to drive buyers to succumb to gluttony.
That can only go so far. Markets are by definition limited because there are only so many people on the planet and an individual can only produce (and thus buy) only so much. That means that the total market size is finite. What happens to the stock market when most of the producers hit a wall? As it is right now, the stock market will crash. With a dividend-based market the stock market will merely stabilize.
What Lancaster says in the cited article may have been true at the time he wrote it. I don't think it's true anymore.
He argues that one should publish any worthy idea in all its glory in a trade journal because it "safely tucks all your ideas away in the public domain, preventing most others from attempting to patent them".
But that assumes that the patent office bothers to check for prior art in such journals.
It doesn't appear to anymore. Quite a number of the patents that are approved today have definite and obvious prior art, yet that didn't stop the USPTO from approving the patents. And the primary reason patent suits are a danger isn't the possibility that the patent holder will win, but the expense of defending against them to begin with.
And even then, does anyone here know of recent patent cases where the defendant won by citing prior art that the USPTO had overlooked? I'd bet that such cases are very rare.
Lancaster's arguments about obviousness are equally naive. If anything, the courts appear to ignore arguments about obviousness, else patent suits would cost much less to defend against, because (as Lancaster says) it's always possible to find someone to testify that the idea in question would have been obvious to them. Patent holders know that obviousness isn't a real defense anymore, otherwise they would be much less inclined to use patents as offensive weapons, and companies whose sole business is to own and prosecute patents would have a much harder time surviving.
No, if Lancaster was correct when he wrote his article then times have changed very much for the worse since then -- something I'm quite sure I'm not alone in believing.
So, what you are saying is that, even though Diebold's ability to rig elections will stop big media companies having (almost) total control over elections, it's willing to cover Diebold's ass, because Diebold will probably (s)elect somebody who will help out big media companies?
It will not stop big media's control over elections, it will enhance it.
Just ask yourself what's better for the media companies:
A situation in which the politician that gets elected will probably, but not certainly, be in the pocket of the media corporations.
A situation in which the politician that gets elected will certainly, no questions asked, be in the pocket of the media corporations.
I'd say they'd prefer the second, wouldn't you?
To make that happen, they need to be able to rig elections. They can't do so right now because there's no central point of control. But with the Diebold machines in place, there's a central point of control: Diebold. So now it becomes a question of how to control Diebold.
The media corporations won't say anything about it as long as Diebold plays ball with them. If Diebold stops cooperating, the media corps blow the whistle with a big scam that would immediately remove Diebold's control and would make the media corps a bunch of money as a result of the heightened interest on the part of viewers and readers. That would put the media corporations back into the current situation, in which their control is probabilistic and not certain, but it would reduce Diebold to irrelevance.
And that is why the media hasn't said shit about it, and won't; and why Diebold will defer to the media corporations when necessary.
But nothing in your post explains why the media would look out for Diebold, a maker of banking and security equipment.
One reason the media corporations might not be interested in covering something like the Diebold situation is that there's little corporations hate more than uncertainty. The ability to rig elections via voting machines like the Diebold ones introduces certainty into the election process itself. While the current situation means that the person elected will probably be someone favorable to the corporations that own the media (at the very least), the ability to rig an election will make that a certainty.
The media has covered (to death) lots of stories that hurt corporations, big and small. Alar? Firestone tires? Faked truck explosion?
The Firestone tire incident was over two years ago! What has the media done since then that has actually caused a large corporation to lose significant money? And how often does the media do so? I'd say it's relatively rare. The Firestone tire incident is the last such incident I can think of that really qualifies.
You seem to be going on the assumption that corporations just like to help each other out, but that same short-sighted greedy nature you correctly identified means that corporations generally don't help each other out, even when it would be easy or beneficial.
Huh? Then what exactly do you call all the partnerships, preferred providers, mergers, etc. that happen all the time in the business world? What do you think collusion is
?
You're right that corporate greed will hinder corporations from assisting each other, but that's only when the corporations in question are in direct competition with each other. And even direct competitors might assist each other at some level when they all stand to gain in the short term by doing so.
What else do you call the RIAA, but a partnership between corporations that would otherwise be in competition with each other?
No, there are far too many examples of corporations, even competitors, cooperating with each other to ignore it, especially when talking about something as important and lucrative as influence over the government.
If you take off the biased glasses, you'll see that the media is just dumb and slow to respond. Eventually some lazy, plagiarizing journalist will copy the story from Salon and Wired, and it will trickle through the normal channels. About six months after you're completely sick of it. See RIAA lawsuits for another example.
If the media is slow to respond then why is it reporting RIAA lawsuits as they happen, but not saying anything about Diebold? No, the media is perfectly capable of reporting events quickly when it wants to.
The RIAA lawsuits are a good example, actually: they're reporting them, but they're doing so in such a way that it makes the RIAA look good (or at least not look bad). What do you think is the most plausible explanation for that spin?
Seriously, is this the best we can do? Of course there are vile reasons behind Diebold's getting away with this, but do you have to resort to this tired, adolescent "mass media loves big corporations loves evil government" schtick to get your point across?
Of course, since mass media is big corporations, the above reduces to "big corporations love evil government", something which has been proven repeatedly over time.
Jesus, do you need us to spell it out for you?
Large corporations have a common set of interests and attributes:
They want to lock out as much competition as possible.
They want their labor pool to be as cheap as possible.
They want their customer base to be as captive as possible.
They want to be as free as possible to do whatever they want.
They are short-term thinkers, so they don't care about the long term consequences of their actions upon their market.
They are driven only by profit, so ethics never enters the equation when they decide upon an action, only law (and then, only law that they don't think they can get away with breaking) and profit.
Because of (1), they will naturally tend to lobby for roughly the same things, and these things will often be at odds with things that would be beneficial to the general population.
The media is owned, and thus controlled, by some of those very same corporations.
Because of (2) and (3), no federal-level politician who is unwilling to cater to the needs of the corporations that own the media is likely to win their first election, because you can't win an election if the voters don't know about you. In fact, such a politician would be very unlikely to win for that very reason.
You're a moron if you think the media corporations and other corporations don't talk to each other about their common interests.
Hence, the only politicians that, in general, can win an election are those who bow to the demands of this country's large corporations.
And hence, the politicians will listen to large corporations to a much greater degree than they will listen to the voters directly. Rare indeed is the issue that will galvanize an entire voter population against you if you side with the corporations. Rarer still is such an issue that the voter population hears about through the mass media; because, as I said, you're a moron if you think the media corporations don't talk with other corporations about their common interests.
Call it a "tired conspiracy theory" if you want, but the links in the chain from a to b to c are so strong and backed by so much evidence (circumstantial or otherwise) that you'd be a fool to discount this "schtick" out of hand.
Come up with a hypothesis that does a better job of explaining both what we've been seeing and what we haven't been seeing and is consistent with everything we currently know and I, for one, will sit up and take notice. But until then, this "conspiracy theory" does a better job of explaining just about everything that has been happening than anything else I've seen.
I'm no conspiracy nut. My most valuable tool is the scientific method, and most conspiracy theories are certainly crap. But this particular "schtick" is very different, and I'll continue to use it to explain the goings on until I find a better explanation.
That's because most Microsoft patches require you to reboot the box, while most open source patches only require you to restart the affected service.
When I updated ssh on my box (Debian is awesome for this), all it did was restart the ssh listener. It didn't even affect existing ssh connections.
Had this been a Microsoft box, a reboot would probably have been required.
So: it's the difference between having to take down all services just to keep up to date on patches, and having to (very briefly) take down individual services as they're patched. That's a huge difference, and that's why frequent patches from MS are a bad thing.
Apparently they're not used to actually representing their constituents, as opposed to just their industry lobbyists.
Yes, it's been clear for some time now that many/most European governments are 0wn3d by the corporations just like the U.S. government is. The only difference is which corporations can claim 0wn3r5h1p.
It's funny, in a sad sort of way, how many people in Europe (that post here, at least) believe their government is immune to the corporate ownership crap we in the U.S. put up with all the time. Now they're learning the truth: they're no more immune than we are.
It's too bad they didn't figure it out sooner. They might have been able to do something about it earlier. Now it's probably too late, just like it is for us here in the U.S.
With that one phrase, Microsoft reveals the actual intent of DRM and, more broadly, of recent "intellectual property" legislation: to turn information into a consumable item like food.
But information isn't a consumable no matter how much corporations might want it to be, nor should it ever be treated as such. To do so is, ultimately, to turn us into mental slaves.
I swear, if a quick and easy method existed for making someone forget something, its use would be mandated by governments faster than you could say "intellectual property". Pray that day never comes (but, of course, it will, since it's merely a matter of technology).
...but it almost certainly won't. Even so, the effort should be made (any chance of winning is better than no chance).
I think it should be pretty clear by now (given the passage of the EU version of the DMCA, among other things) that the EU parliament and other European governments are very much in the pockets of corporations just like the U.S. government is. It's more a matter of degree than anything else.
That's why I don't think we who value our basic liberties have much time left. Others might ask why I haven't moved (I live in the U.S.), without realizing that there really isn't any place on the globe worth moving to. As far as I know, there isn't a single government on the planet that cherishes liberty and works towards maximizing that for its people. And even if there were, chances are most people wouldn't be able to go there anyway because of strict immigration laws.
Re:After 20+ years of buffer overflow exploits...
on
Remote Root Exploit In lsh
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'll agree that C lends itself to these things, but its the standard for a number of reasons, and frankly, anything else will introduce the same types of problems.
There will always be security vulnerabilities in software, of course. But buffer overflows are a class of vulnerabilities that simply shouldn't exist. C is unsuitable for system software because there are far too many ways (both subtle and gross) to wind up with buffer overflow bugs. It's what happens when the language is designed to make direct memory access easy.
You have to remember that C wasn't created to make writing system software easy, it was created to make writing operating systems easy. For that you have to be able to manipulate memory directly, and C is very well suited to that mission.
System software has different needs. It needs to be able to send and receive data, to manipulate strings, and to store and retrieve information from files, and do so securely. You may still need to manipulate buffers but that's a far cry from needing to manipulate memory directly. System software is very different from operating systems, and calls for a different language.
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I don't know how I could have forgotten it: you also have to train for your instrument rating, your instrument instructor rating, which are probably the two most demanding ratings out there, as well as your multiengine instrument instructor rating.
That may be the case, but from what I understand it's rather difficult to become a pilot in the military. For one thing, your uncorrected vision has to be 20/20 or better, which eliminates a whole bunch of people. By the way, as I understand it, "uncorrected" means just that: no corrective surgery, no glasses, no contacts.
If you want to become a pilot through civilian channels, you do indeed have to make large sacrifices. The training is quite expensive and quite extensive. You have to train for your private pilot's license, your commercial license, your twin engine rating, your flight instructor's license, and then you have to work as an instructor to build enough flight time (at least a thousand hours or so) before anyone (even cargo haulers) will consider you. And when you are finally hired, you won't be hired by the majors -- you'll be hired by the regionals at best. And those guys start off at about $30K per year. Captains in the regionals make around $70K per year. That's for putting in 12-16 hour days, with a "home base" that may change on a yearly basis and which may be quite far from home.
It's ironic, really, because the kind of flying the regional guys do is harder than the flying done by the majors. The regionals typically operate turboprop equipment that flies in the 15,000 to 25,000 foot altitude range, where weather is much more of a factor than the 30,000 to 40,000 foot range the majors fly in. The regionals tend to fly into smaller airports that have fewer or older navigational aids and which also tend to be in areas of more dangerous terrain. And their equipment isn't as good as the equipment the majors fly, so icing (for example) is more of a problem.
If it were up to me, the guys in the regional airlines would be making more than the guys in the majors, simply because their job is harder.
The Supreme Court also ruled that corporations have all of the same Constitutional protections that individuals have. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
What's lacking is DNS support. DNS currently doesn't have a record type indicating which systems are authorized to send email on behalf of the domain, but if it had that then you'd have everything you'd need to know whether or not a given system was authorized to send on behalf of the domain in question.
Now, that's good, but of course it's possible for the spammers to buy tons of domains and spam from them. But the above gives you a solid gold defense.
What defense? Well, imagine how many orders of magnitude more powerful Vipul's Razor would be if you could block entire domains based on whether or not the email in question was reported as spam by more than, say, two independent entities.
Winning the war against spam requires being able to identify and reject spam sources more quickly than those sources can come into being. If spammers are forced to buy a new domain whenever they're blocked in order to get the spam out, they'll lose: getting a domain will almost certainly be a slower process than blacklisting a domain based on reported spam because getting a domain requires a financial transaction, setting up authoritative DNS servers, etc. And the spammer would have the domains, lots and lots of domains, in his name (or at his address, or with his email contact, or something that is common to many of them) for an entire year, which may make it easier to identify spammers.
It amazes me that we haven't already put this system into place. How hard can it be?
It doesn't help, of course, that the UK is the U.S.'s bitch, as proved by Gulf War II. But it wouldn't really matter even if that weren't the case, because all of these governments listen to large multinational corporations first and foremost. Why else do you think it has taken so much popular effort to deal with this one issue alone, and it's not even finished yet? Very few in the general population who care about this issue are on the side of software patents, and yet software patents seem reasonably likely to become a reality in the EU anyway despite all the popular opposition. Remember that the next time you (rightfully) clown on how the U.S. government is 0wn3d by the corporations -- your government is similarly 0wn3d.
Yes. But how is the manager to know whether or not someone he's hiring is knowledgeable in the field without having at least some knowledge of the field himself?
This is why it's generally desirable for a manager to have some experience in the field he's managing. If he can't get that experience directly, the least he can do is learn about the field.
If PHBs are getting training, even if it's "secret", then good for them: it means they at least realize that there's something they don't know. That's the most important first step towards improvement.
And if that training is any good, then perhaps it will cause the PHB to finally realize that his technical people really do know what they're talking about, and will therefore grow to trust them more than he had previously.
No, the biggest danger here isn't that the PHBs are getting training -- it's that they may be trained by people who themselves don't know what they're talking about. The latter is the worst situation because it will cause a PHB to be (at best) confused when what he's been taught conflicts with what his technical people tell him.
And as soon as that happens to a sufficient degree, the corporations will just shift their demand for labor elsewhere, thus causing the Indian economy to drop. I doubt they'll get anywhere near $60+K/year before that happens.
Ask yourself this: from the point of view of a corporation, what's the most desirable worker? The answer is: someone whom you can get away with paying just enough that he can barely provide a minimal existence for himself.
The problem with outsourcing isn't merely that it's possible. The problem is that it's now possible for corporations to shift demand for labor more quickly than the economic differences between countries can be adjusted to compensate.
Normally we'd expect the economy of whichever country happens to be "graced" with corporate demand for labor to grow, for the standard of living to rise, and for the wages of people in that economy to rise along with it. The problem is that as soon as that happens, corporations will shift their demand for labor to some other country that doesn't have that problem. When that happens, what do you think will happen to the economy of the country they just left? Bingo: it's slide downhill. Just like it has here in the U.S.
Corporations are now in a position to find and hire their perfect candidate, because they can shift their demand for labor fast enough to take advantage of the hysteresis in the economic system.
But as if that weren't bad enough, consider this: the very people that ultimately are these corporations' customers (either directly or indirectly, the latter happening as a result of being a customer of a corporation that in turn is itself a customer) are the very people who are losing their jobs. The current U.S. economy is running on credit -- that's what happens during a recession. But if the U.S. economy doesn't turn around then the creditors will start to demand payment and the flow of credit will stop. And at that point, those people will stop spending money for anything other than the bare essentials. The U.S. economy will thus collapse (making the Great Depression look like a boom period in comparison).
Worse, when people stop buying (as they must once their credit runs out), the corporations they buy from stop bringing in money. What happens then? Those corporations lay off people, thus causing the economy to spiral down even steeper.
The only people who can afford to buy anything are the people who are paid more than a subsistence wage. Yet the ability of corporations to move their demand for labor more quickly than economies can adjust guarantees that, in the end, the only people who are making more than a subsistence wage are the people who own those corporations. And the people who don't have jobs won't be making any money at all. The global average wage will thus be at most equal to that necessary for subsistence.
Now apply those same economic principles everywhere, and you'll see that, given the ability of corporations to shift demand faster than economies can adjust, the average wage will be at or below the subsistence level as long as the global supply of labor is larger than the demand for labor.
Technology actually makes this worse. The reason is that technology tends to eliminate the need for people to perform tasks. "Great! That just means they'll be free to do something else!" you may argue. That's true -- for some of them. Historically people have found ways to be more productive in sufficient numbers to more than offset this effect, but that is by accident only. There's absolutely nothing that says that there will always be some new thing for everyone who finds themselves out of a job to do that will give them more than a subsistence wage, if that.
And the reason all this is true comes down to one simple fact: in the global economy where there is no "outside", the buying power of money is a conserved quantity because money is ultimately a direct measure of expended human labor, and the supply of human labor changes only as the population does.
<tin foil hat mode>
I have to wonder at this point in time what would happen if this guy suddenly had an "accident".
Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash. That kind of money can buy all sorts of favors. So the question is whether or not Microsoft, or someone who wants to get onto Microsoft's "good side" badly enough, is immoral enough to "encourage" such an "accident"...
</tin foil hat mode>
Huh? What "troubles"? The ones where the courts basically said "stop, or I shall say 'stop' again!"?
In the U.S., Microsoft doesn't have any monopoly troubles in court. They've got the "Justice" Department and the rest of the government so deep in their pockets that we'll never see another antitrust suit against them in the U.S. in our lifetimes.
Europe might be another matter, but that remains to be seen (it's not like Europe is much less subject to corporate influence than the U.S.).
Sure. But until you consider their motives, you cannot know how likely it is that they'll take an action such as that. And if their motives are something you would tend to disagree with, then it's probably only a matter of time before they result in actions you'd be vehemently opposed to.
Actions certainly matter, and it's nice that the telcos appear to be fighting the RIAA right now. But allies like that are just as likely to fight against you as for you.
One other thing: another big reason motives are important is that they may give you an indication of the price you're likely to pay if you accept someone's help. The telcos are fighting the RIAA right now but because they're probably doing so only for financial reasons, there may be a hidden price tag attached to the help. For instance, we don't know what kind of deals they may be trying to make with the legislators, but I think it's reasonable to assume they're trying. In the end, we may all end up regretting their help, even though right now it looks okay.
I'd feel a lot more comfortable about the whole thing if I knew that the telcos were motivated by a desire to maximize freedom and liberty for all, but we all know that's not one of their motives. And I think it's important to know that.
I see. So if their motives are purely to maximize their income and, as such, they suddenly work out a deal with the RIAA that the RIAA pays them whenever they have to comply with any of the RIAA subpoenas, and keep this a secret all the while continuing to appear to fight the RIAA, you'll have no problem with that? They'll continue to appear to fight the RIAA so it's not like you'll notice any difference.
Motive matters a great deal. It's one way you can tell the difference between who you can trust and who you can't. Someone who does the right thing for the wrong reason is much more likely to do the wrong thing later on.
I don't expect corporations to be saints. I expect them to be ethical, just as I expect an individual to be ethical. Give me one good reason a corporation, which wields orders of magnitude more power than an individual, should be less ethical than an individual.
I sometimes wonder how successful a company could be as a result of being loyal to its employees. How much loyalty on the part of employees would that generate?
I would not be surprised in the slightest if such a company, if composed of highly talented people, were more successful than a company that doesn't have such loyalty, given otherwise roughly the same starting conditions. Say what you will about the current economy, but really good people are still rare and still hard to find (if not because such people are already employed, then because you have to sort through a whole bunch of untalented or moderately talented people to find the real gems).
Perhaps we as a society have lost sight of what can be accomplished by a talented group of people who are loyal to each other. Before you dismiss the value of loyalty to one's comrades, remember that the military tries to maximize this loyalty during training -- they know that loyalty such as that can make the difference in battle. Would it really be so different in business?
Welcome to the U.S. economy, where growth of profit, not amount of profit, is the only measure of a company's worth.
This is why some people regard the current economic system as unsustainable in the long term: it forces suppliers to succumb to greed and (in order to satisfy that greed) forces them to try to drive buyers to succumb to gluttony.
That can only go so far. Markets are by definition limited because there are only so many people on the planet and an individual can only produce (and thus buy) only so much. That means that the total market size is finite. What happens to the stock market when most of the producers hit a wall? As it is right now, the stock market will crash. With a dividend-based market the stock market will merely stabilize.
He argues that one should publish any worthy idea in all its glory in a trade journal because it "safely tucks all your ideas away in the public domain, preventing most others from attempting to patent them".
But that assumes that the patent office bothers to check for prior art in such journals.
It doesn't appear to anymore. Quite a number of the patents that are approved today have definite and obvious prior art, yet that didn't stop the USPTO from approving the patents. And the primary reason patent suits are a danger isn't the possibility that the patent holder will win, but the expense of defending against them to begin with.
And even then, does anyone here know of recent patent cases where the defendant won by citing prior art that the USPTO had overlooked? I'd bet that such cases are very rare.
Lancaster's arguments about obviousness are equally naive. If anything, the courts appear to ignore arguments about obviousness, else patent suits would cost much less to defend against, because (as Lancaster says) it's always possible to find someone to testify that the idea in question would have been obvious to them. Patent holders know that obviousness isn't a real defense anymore, otherwise they would be much less inclined to use patents as offensive weapons, and companies whose sole business is to own and prosecute patents would have a much harder time surviving.
No, if Lancaster was correct when he wrote his article then times have changed very much for the worse since then -- something I'm quite sure I'm not alone in believing.
Ah, the power of a good Slashdotting. :-)
It will not stop big media's control over elections, it will enhance it.
Just ask yourself what's better for the media companies:
I'd say they'd prefer the second, wouldn't you?
To make that happen, they need to be able to rig elections. They can't do so right now because there's no central point of control. But with the Diebold machines in place, there's a central point of control: Diebold. So now it becomes a question of how to control Diebold.
The media corporations won't say anything about it as long as Diebold plays ball with them. If Diebold stops cooperating, the media corps blow the whistle with a big scam that would immediately remove Diebold's control and would make the media corps a bunch of money as a result of the heightened interest on the part of viewers and readers. That would put the media corporations back into the current situation, in which their control is probabilistic and not certain, but it would reduce Diebold to irrelevance.
And that is why the media hasn't said shit about it, and won't; and why Diebold will defer to the media corporations when necessary.
Now: what part of the above is "weak"?
One reason the media corporations might not be interested in covering something like the Diebold situation is that there's little corporations hate more than uncertainty. The ability to rig elections via voting machines like the Diebold ones introduces certainty into the election process itself. While the current situation means that the person elected will probably be someone favorable to the corporations that own the media (at the very least), the ability to rig an election will make that a certainty.
The Firestone tire incident was over two years ago! What has the media done since then that has actually caused a large corporation to lose significant money? And how often does the media do so? I'd say it's relatively rare. The Firestone tire incident is the last such incident I can think of that really qualifies.
Huh? Then what exactly do you call all the partnerships, preferred providers, mergers, etc. that happen all the time in the business world? What do you think collusion is ?
You're right that corporate greed will hinder corporations from assisting each other, but that's only when the corporations in question are in direct competition with each other. And even direct competitors might assist each other at some level when they all stand to gain in the short term by doing so.
What else do you call the RIAA, but a partnership between corporations that would otherwise be in competition with each other?
No, there are far too many examples of corporations, even competitors, cooperating with each other to ignore it, especially when talking about something as important and lucrative as influence over the government.
If the media is slow to respond then why is it reporting RIAA lawsuits as they happen, but not saying anything about Diebold? No, the media is perfectly capable of reporting events quickly when it wants to.
The RIAA lawsuits are a good example, actually: they're reporting them, but they're doing so in such a way that it makes the RIAA look good (or at least not look bad). What do you think is the most plausible explanation for that spin?
Of course, since mass media is big corporations, the above reduces to "big corporations love evil government", something which has been proven repeatedly over time.
Jesus, do you need us to spell it out for you?
Call it a "tired conspiracy theory" if you want, but the links in the chain from a to b to c are so strong and backed by so much evidence (circumstantial or otherwise) that you'd be a fool to discount this "schtick" out of hand.
Come up with a hypothesis that does a better job of explaining both what we've been seeing and what we haven't been seeing and is consistent with everything we currently know and I, for one, will sit up and take notice. But until then, this "conspiracy theory" does a better job of explaining just about everything that has been happening than anything else I've seen.
I'm no conspiracy nut. My most valuable tool is the scientific method, and most conspiracy theories are certainly crap. But this particular "schtick" is very different, and I'll continue to use it to explain the goings on until I find a better explanation.
Yep. Install the cron-apt package if you want this.
That's because most Microsoft patches require you to reboot the box, while most open source patches only require you to restart the affected service.
When I updated ssh on my box (Debian is awesome for this), all it did was restart the ssh listener. It didn't even affect existing ssh connections.
Had this been a Microsoft box, a reboot would probably have been required.
So: it's the difference between having to take down all services just to keep up to date on patches, and having to (very briefly) take down individual services as they're patched. That's a huge difference, and that's why frequent patches from MS are a bad thing.
Yes, it's been clear for some time now that many/most European governments are 0wn3d by the corporations just like the U.S. government is. The only difference is which corporations can claim 0wn3r5h1p.
It's funny, in a sad sort of way, how many people in Europe (that post here, at least) believe their government is immune to the corporate ownership crap we in the U.S. put up with all the time. Now they're learning the truth: they're no more immune than we are.
It's too bad they didn't figure it out sooner. They might have been able to do something about it earlier. Now it's probably too late, just like it is for us here in the U.S.
But information isn't a consumable no matter how much corporations might want it to be, nor should it ever be treated as such. To do so is, ultimately, to turn us into mental slaves.
I swear, if a quick and easy method existed for making someone forget something, its use would be mandated by governments faster than you could say "intellectual property". Pray that day never comes (but, of course, it will, since it's merely a matter of technology).
I think it should be pretty clear by now (given the passage of the EU version of the DMCA, among other things) that the EU parliament and other European governments are very much in the pockets of corporations just like the U.S. government is. It's more a matter of degree than anything else.
That's why I don't think we who value our basic liberties have much time left. Others might ask why I haven't moved (I live in the U.S.), without realizing that there really isn't any place on the globe worth moving to. As far as I know, there isn't a single government on the planet that cherishes liberty and works towards maximizing that for its people. And even if there were, chances are most people wouldn't be able to go there anyway because of strict immigration laws.
There will always be security vulnerabilities in software, of course. But buffer overflows are a class of vulnerabilities that simply shouldn't exist. C is unsuitable for system software because there are far too many ways (both subtle and gross) to wind up with buffer overflow bugs. It's what happens when the language is designed to make direct memory access easy.
You have to remember that C wasn't created to make writing system software easy, it was created to make writing operating systems easy. For that you have to be able to manipulate memory directly, and C is very well suited to that mission.
System software has different needs. It needs to be able to send and receive data, to manipulate strings, and to store and retrieve information from files, and do so securely. You may still need to manipulate buffers but that's a far cry from needing to manipulate memory directly. System software is very different from operating systems, and calls for a different language.