What I don't understand is, why not run the "card" experiment? Commit to shutting down (or delayng for 30 yeas) the LHC if three one-in-a-million consecutive dice-throws turn negative. That would beat wasting so much money on a failed experiment. The chance of "false positives" would be negligibly small.
And for the majority of users, for whom ipv6 is at best useless and at worst an annoyance, blacklist the ipv6 module. E.g. in Debian / Ubuntu add the line
blacklist ipv6
to/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
While you're at it, you might also want to blacklist pcspkr (get rid of annoying console beeps), lp, parport and parport_pc (parallel port printer) and joydev (unless you have a joystick of course).
Will companies still be able to google for various keywords and contact the people whose resumes show up in the search results? I am getting a lot of calls from companies that found my resume on my homepage, by googling. I would hate that to change.
BTW, I never got a call from someone who found me on Monster. Go figure.
The only solid, persuasive cross-cutting concern in all AOP literature is logging (e.g. logging when a method is invoked and such). This would be properly solved by having an easy-to-use "tracing" infrastructure in the language, like Lisp has.
First of all, it's not "illegal", but merely against Google's Terms of Service. Breaking a contract isn't "illegal", and sometimes it's the right thing to do.
Secondly, they might have used Google's search API-- but I can't be bothered to check the Perl code.
Except that pay=per=click is fun and you get to be your own boss.
Additionally, once you set up a good ad site, the income comes in even after you stop working on it.
You're right -- not everyone can be in business for themselves. But many "knowledge workers" could. Being a contractor (or better, consultant) isn't that hard.
You mentioned IP rights -- and I agree with you. They are definitely anti-small-biz. However, you'd have to go a long way to enter Amazon's radar. When and if they attack you, you should have taken enough cash out of your small biz to be able to let it go bankrupt without regrets and move on to the next thing. You just need to be careful that you don't become personally liable for your company's debts (which takes planning).
What amazes me is that many intelligent people accept to be "employees" and thus forego the great surplus available in the economy -- the surplus that is used to cover CEOs' multi-million-dollar salaries. Intelligent, educated people choose the enrich a plantation owner and thereby waste their lives.
I realize that outside IT there are indeed greater barriers to entry. However, "we are not them". We can't fix everyone's life, but we could start by fixing our own.
Don't waste your time thinking about politics and Bush, unless you want to become a political activist. There is no connection between what we want and what laws get passed. Most voters and jurors are "employees" (modern-day slaves); most campaign contributors are big corporations. Therefore there's no way to improve either the courts or the legislature (this is one of the fallacies of "universal suffrage": democracy only works for communities of freemen).
In the rare circumstances when slave-voters and slave-jurors have their way, they only make it harder for everyone to get out of slavery (by imposing high business-insurance costs, high "social security" taxes and complex, scary regulations in the name of "social justice").
You mentioned the equalization of wages resulting from free market / free trade. That is very possible. It's especially sad to hear about programmers forced to train their indian H1B replacements. Which is why Everyone who is still "employed" in this type of "job" should very keenly look for a way out. Possible avenues for those with some mobility and taste for adventure:
* become a consultant/contractor
* move to India (or Eastern Europe) and become a manager there. Enjoy the low cost of living differential.
* if you have some money, start an outsourcing business and hire people in India (or contract with an Indian company).
Whatever you do, don't be a sitting duck (like HP or Sun "employees").
Remember that wage equalization ultimately brings cost-of-living equalization; until such equalization comes about (maybe 30 years ?), try to move to those parts of the world where you benefit from the process. I think India and Eastern Europe are fairly feasible; China would probably be less acessible and desirable for most.
In other words, there are two sides to globalization and outsourcing; if you are currently a victim, you are simply sitting on the wrong side of the fence. By moving to the other side you will help yourseld and also speed up the process of equalization, thus helping the ones who remain behind.
The proof of the pudding is in eating it, so let's stop talking and act today.
With lower CEO wages, there would be even more fraud -- you may agree or you may disagree. Note that fraud can be a lot more subtle than Enron.
The point isn't that CEOs would extract a "proper" pay; they would be tempted to extract whatever they can get that is worth their time and risks. With a higher pay, fraud may not be worth the risk and the time (apparently, sometimes it still is).
With regards to skills -- the skills you listed bring better pay not because they are "harder", but because the demmand/supply curve is better. True, higher-level skills are less accessible to the masses, so the supply is more limited (to a certain point -- see the offshore blues).
Since you mentioned education -- do you have any idea how much a plumber earns and what kind of "job security" he has, without having spent X years in school racking up dept?
Anyway... The fact that your skills are more in demand MIGHT increase your income to a higher multiple of the minimum wage (= level of subsistence necessities). It MIGHT also leave you "unemployed" (see the offshore blues, again). But the reference level is still the minimum wage, not the economic value of the products you create.
If you're a Java programmer in a successful company -- do you realize how great the value of the software you create is? The owners make millions, while you earn a multiple of the minimum wage (i.e. a multiple of your susbsistence needs).
I'm not a communist, so I'm not suggesting that you unionize or revolt. Rather, try to be in business for yourself -- you don't have to be an "employee". You too could earn according to the economic value of the fruits of your labor.
Yes, I know most new businesses fail within a year, but I also know that most successful businesman have gone through several failures initially. There are few things that you can do as an employee but not being self-employed (things like cancer research or a military career).
CEO compensation is not driven by the "skills" required for the job; CEO compensation is high because the CEO has absolute power and might otherwise be tempted to fraud the company. To a lesser degree, the same applies to managers.
The same reasoning SHOULD apply to high-leve government employess -- pay them a large salary so they have less incentive to take bribes.
Another thing to remember is that, as an employee, your income is essentially determined by your necessities, while as a business owner, your income is determined by the economic value of your products. For successful businesses the economic value of the products is much higher than any person's necessities -- but the workers don't capture any of the surplus.
So, two conclusions:
1) Stop thinking about the "fair" value of the SKILLS required for your work. You are either paid according to your necessities (give or take some multiple of the minimum wage), or if you run a business you are paid according to however much others value your products. You are NOT paid according to your skills.
2) Either try to start a business, or try to get into management. It sucks to be in the "workforce".
One of the reasons Skype is successful is because SIP is such a big, complicated mess. It tries to be everything to everyone. It tries to address the problems of user agents and proxies at the same time time.
The funniest part ? SIP isn't designed for VoIP specifically. It couldn't be that -- they HAD to make it very "general". The INVITE may or may not carry an SDP, and the SDP may or may not be about telephony.
Additionally, SIP was not designed with firewalls and NAT in mind. There are hacks, of course, but that's all they are -- hacks.
And if you think about it, all we asked from the signalling protocols (SIP, H323) was to negotiate a pair of IP addresses and ports for an RTP stream -- perhaps in the presence of NAT. Everything else is sugar. "Presence" and other features should have been relegated to a higher-level protocol.
I admire the Skype folks. Instead of following a big dumb standard and struggling with its idiocies just because it's an "open standard", they created their own standard and implemented it.
I'd be curious to see how much of $750M goes toward production, distribution, and so on and how much ends up as profit for the pharmaceutical companies.
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What I don't understand is, why not run the "card" experiment? Commit to shutting down (or delayng for 30 yeas) the LHC if three one-in-a-million consecutive dice-throws turn negative. That would beat wasting so much money on a failed experiment. The chance of "false positives" would be negligibly small.
And for the majority of users, for whom ipv6 is at best useless and at worst an annoyance, blacklist the ipv6 module. E.g. in Debian / Ubuntu add the line
blacklist ipv6
to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
While you're at it, you might also want to blacklist pcspkr (get rid of annoying console beeps), lp, parport and parport_pc (parallel port printer) and joydev (unless you have a joystick of course).
So this kind of search will no longer be allowed under the new rules?
Will companies still be able to google for various keywords and contact the people whose resumes show up in the search results? I am getting a lot of calls from companies that found my resume on my homepage, by googling. I would hate that to change.
BTW, I never got a call from someone who found me on Monster. Go figure.
The only solid, persuasive cross-cutting concern in all AOP literature is logging (e.g. logging when a method is invoked and such). This would be properly solved by having an easy-to-use "tracing" infrastructure in the language, like Lisp has.
First of all, it's not "illegal", but merely against Google's Terms of Service. Breaking a contract isn't "illegal", and sometimes it's the right thing to do.
Secondly, they might have used Google's search API-- but I can't be bothered to check the Perl code.
Except that pay=per=click is fun and you get to be your own boss. Additionally, once you set up a good ad site, the income comes in even after you stop working on it.
You're right -- not everyone can be in business for themselves. But many "knowledge workers" could. Being a contractor (or better, consultant) isn't that hard.
You mentioned IP rights -- and I agree with you. They are definitely anti-small-biz. However, you'd have to go a long way to enter Amazon's radar. When and if they attack you, you should have taken enough cash out of your small biz to be able to let it go bankrupt without regrets and move on to the next thing. You just need to be careful that you don't become personally liable for your company's debts (which takes planning).
What amazes me is that many intelligent people accept to be "employees" and thus forego the great surplus available in the economy -- the surplus that is used to cover CEOs' multi-million-dollar salaries. Intelligent, educated people choose the enrich a plantation owner and thereby waste their lives.
I realize that outside IT there are indeed greater barriers to entry. However, "we are not them". We can't fix everyone's life, but we could start by fixing our own.
Don't waste your time thinking about politics and Bush, unless you want to become a political activist. There is no connection between what we want and what laws get passed. Most voters and jurors are "employees" (modern-day slaves); most campaign contributors are big corporations. Therefore there's no way to improve either the courts or the legislature (this is one of the fallacies of "universal suffrage": democracy only works for communities of freemen).
In the rare circumstances when slave-voters and slave-jurors have their way, they only make it harder for everyone to get out of slavery (by imposing high business-insurance costs, high "social security" taxes and complex, scary regulations in the name of "social justice").
You mentioned the equalization of wages resulting from free market / free trade. That is very possible. It's especially sad to hear about programmers forced to train their indian H1B replacements. Which is why Everyone who is still "employed" in this type of "job" should very keenly look for a way out. Possible avenues for those with some mobility and taste for adventure:
* become a consultant/contractor
* move to India (or Eastern Europe) and become a manager there. Enjoy the low cost of living differential.
* if you have some money, start an outsourcing business and hire people in India (or contract with an Indian company).
Whatever you do, don't be a sitting duck (like HP or Sun "employees").
Remember that wage equalization ultimately brings cost-of-living equalization; until such equalization comes about (maybe 30 years ?), try to move to those parts of the world where you benefit from the process. I think India and Eastern Europe are fairly feasible; China would probably be less acessible and desirable for most.
In other words, there are two sides to globalization and outsourcing; if you are currently a victim, you are simply sitting on the wrong side of the fence. By moving to the other side you will help yourseld and also speed up the process of equalization, thus helping the ones who remain behind.
The proof of the pudding is in eating it, so let's stop talking and act today.
With lower CEO wages, there would be even more fraud -- you may agree or you may disagree. Note that fraud can be a lot more subtle than Enron.
The point isn't that CEOs would extract a "proper" pay; they would be tempted to extract whatever they can get that is worth their time and risks. With a higher pay, fraud may not be worth the risk and the time (apparently, sometimes it still is).
With regards to skills -- the skills you listed bring better pay not because they are "harder", but because the demmand/supply curve is better. True, higher-level skills are less accessible to the masses, so the supply is more limited (to a certain point -- see the offshore blues).
Since you mentioned education -- do you have any idea how much a plumber earns and what kind of "job security" he has, without having spent X years in school racking up dept?
Anyway... The fact that your skills are more in demand MIGHT increase your income to a higher multiple of the minimum wage (= level of subsistence necessities). It MIGHT also leave you "unemployed" (see the offshore blues, again). But the reference level is still the minimum wage, not the economic value of the products you create.
If you're a Java programmer in a successful company -- do you realize how great the value of the software you create is? The owners make millions, while you earn a multiple of the minimum wage (i.e. a multiple of your susbsistence needs).
I'm not a communist, so I'm not suggesting that you unionize or revolt. Rather, try to be in business for yourself -- you don't have to be an "employee". You too could earn according to the economic value of the fruits of your labor.
Yes, I know most new businesses fail within a year, but I also know that most successful businesman have gone through several failures initially. There are few things that you can do as an employee but not being self-employed (things like cancer research or a military career).
CEO compensation is not driven by the "skills" required for the job; CEO compensation is high because the CEO has absolute power and might otherwise be tempted to fraud the company. To a lesser degree, the same applies to managers.
The same reasoning SHOULD apply to high-leve government employess -- pay them a large salary so they have less incentive to take bribes.
Another thing to remember is that, as an employee, your income is essentially determined by your necessities, while as a business owner, your income is determined by the economic value of your products. For successful businesses the economic value of the products is much higher than any person's necessities -- but the workers don't capture any of the surplus.
So, two conclusions:
1) Stop thinking about the "fair" value of the SKILLS required for your work. You are either paid according to your necessities (give or take some multiple of the minimum wage), or if you run a business you are paid according to however much others value your products. You are NOT paid according to your skills.
2) Either try to start a business, or try to get into management. It sucks to be in the "workforce".
One of the reasons Skype is successful is because SIP is such a big, complicated mess. It tries to be everything to everyone. It tries to address the problems of user agents and proxies at the same time time.
The funniest part ? SIP isn't designed for VoIP specifically. It couldn't be that -- they HAD to make it very "general". The INVITE may or may not carry an SDP, and the SDP may or may not be about telephony.
Additionally, SIP was not designed with firewalls and NAT in mind. There are hacks, of course, but that's all they are -- hacks.
And if you think about it, all we asked from the signalling protocols (SIP, H323) was to negotiate a pair of IP addresses and ports for an RTP stream -- perhaps in the presence of NAT. Everything else is sugar. "Presence" and other features should have been relegated to a higher-level protocol.
I admire the Skype folks. Instead of following a big dumb standard and struggling with its idiocies just because it's an "open standard", they created their own standard and implemented it.
I'd be curious to see how much of $750M goes toward production, distribution, and so on and how much ends up as profit for the pharmaceutical companies.