(The interesting-link site is slashdotted already...)
IANAL, so I would appreciate it if anyone with substantial relevant expertise could tell us:
Are these actions of Digital Convergence perhaps in violation of the First Amendment?
If so, is there a possibility of certifying a suit against Digital Convergence as a class action?
Are there any statutory damages we could expect, or just a "cease and desist"? I know it would be nice to just take a company with a stupid legal-driven business plan and get them to shut up, but driving them out of business for trying to mess with people's free speech rights would be much harder for the rest of the business community to ignore.
Just my ruminations... --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Hear, hear. I keep re-structuring my life to avoid burnout. I've had some brushes with it, but nothing that's kept me from going back after a period of rest. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
In the case of the Luddites, clever engineers figured out how to make an electric loom.
Electric loom? You're dreaming. The looms of that era were powered by steam or even water. There wouldn't be widespread electric power for the better part of a century.
Introducing technology that is more efficient and makes you money and more secure is a good thing-- but if the cost is destroying the livelyhood of large parts of your society, it's time to figure out a plan for them to succeed as well.
The best way for the others to succeed is for them to upgrade their skills and become part of the new, more productive system. For instance, with today's labor shortage someone might invent a semi-automated fast-food restaurant. Imagine machines which load magazines of frozen patties and bins of potato fingers, and crank out fries and half-made sandwiches to meet the orders put into the system. The amount of labor required to run the shop goes down by maybe half. Is this bad? You tell me; the person maintaining the machines is going to make a lot of money due to the skills involved, and can afford a bunch more free time. Meanwhile the price of fast food might drop a bit instead of inflating due to labor costs and shortages.
The losers will be people who can't or won't learn new skills to keep up with the new tasks that are part of the changing nature of work. I put part of the blame for this at the feet of "educators" who think that schools ought to be easy, silly and fun instead of rigorous, challenging and fun. Teachers ought to be drawn from the best people in their specialities, and paid enough to keep them from defecting to industry. Instead we have something like an 800 average SAT score among ed-school entrants. People like that don't have what it takes to challenge kids; many of them are barely literate themselves. There's a lot more that's wrong with the system today, but that's a big part of it. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The current "Native Americans" mostly came here across the Bering Straits, but they were not the first Americans. The first Americans apparently came from Australia. If priority is everything, the tribes who happened to be here in 1492 shouldn't be assumed to have any greater right to live in the Americas than later immigrants. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
This type of rider is actually less sinister than riders that both parties want passed, but which the public or interested parties might find sinister or disgusting. Ane example was the "Work for Hire" rider...
The "work for hire" thing was actually inserted in a conference committee session after both houses had passed (incompatible) bills. There was no debate on the changes.
There are states which have Constitutional restrictions on bills so that they must all deal with the subject matter of the title. This eliminates unrelated riders. The USA needs this on a national level. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
However, the companies forget that there are capable people in their own organization who could achieve the same results with added training and a little faith from their employer. They offer the excuse that those (typically older) workers are "untrainable in new technology", or they say "why should we pay these well-paid workers the same high salary when they don't have any experience in the new technology".
You're spot-on, and don't forget:
Why don't we have a decent crop of American candidates for these jobs? Could it be that American corporations are expecting someone else to support the schools and perform the on-the-job training?
What happens when the H-1B entrants hit age 40 or so and their skills aren't quite up to date? Do they get dumped as unemployable and a new crop of worker bees imported?
Will this be an excuse for tech firms to cut wages and employment heavily in the next downturn (like the last one), which will cause the smart people to make career choices outside the tech sphere and exacerbating (hell, creating) the problem that Silicon Valley allegedly needs solved?
Will this be an excuse to tolerate crappy schools, illiterate teachers and "zero questioning of authority" administrations in the USA, because "we can always hire talent from (Mumbai, Beijing, St. Petersburg)?
Just a few questions that ought to be answered before expanding, or even extending, the H1 visa program. As far as I'm concerned the whole thing should be cancelled immediately, no new ones, no renewals, start learning to train local talent or give up and die because the alternative is to have a nation of worker-rejects and that's what a nation of rejects is going to do. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
A friendly reminder that ratified treaties supercede the constitution.
I don't believe it for a minute. The Constitution holds that treaty law should be held as equal to itself. Besides, if it comes to a treaty which was ratified by the Senate, and an amendment to the Constitution which was passed by 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress AND then by 3/4 of the States, which has more backing if there is a conflict between the two?
No way do I believe that the Supreme Court would hold that a treaty overrides the Constitution. However, I sure wouldn't mind an amendment which holds the limitations the Constitution places on our government, and the rights and privileges recognized thereunder, override the terms of any and all treaties which are to the contrary. Even freedoms need backups. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
there is no proof that the NSA weakened the protocol, or even broke it entirely with the S-Box changes.
There is actually proof to the contrary. The S-box design in DES is resistant to differential cryptanalysis, which IBM apparently did not know about at the time. After the academic discovery of differential cryptanalysis, it was found that DES resisted it well, and that NSA's expertise had actually been put to use to keep data secure from such an attack (NSA obviously knew about differential cryptanalysis before DES was designed). OTOH, NSA had enough resources to brute-force just about anything they wanted to with keys as short as 56 bits. This at least protected secrets from people with small to medium amounts of money, like criminal organizations and non-great powers. It probably also protected those secrets well enough that other, cheaper methods of going around the cryptosystem would have been used instead regardless of any additional strength. If it did that, it was enough. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
For really big epoxy mirrors (a meter or so in diameter), I would imagine you would want to drill out some of the material from the backside
Or you just glue blocks of something lightweight (styrofoam, balsa, etc.) to the bottom of the mold. It's been done already. What you probably want is some kind of reinforcement to go between the lightening holes, to prevent the mirror from bending under gravitational stress (which is a serious problem even with glass mirrors in the larger sizes). Getting all the thermal coefficients worked out properly is going to be tough (epoxy contracts more than the steel reinforcing during a winter star party - CRACK!) --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
And now you people just told me a price tag of one mil is "dirt cheap".
Yeah, but what were you looking at, maybe an 8 inch or ten inch? That $1 mil for a six meter mirror is a bargain. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Use low thermal expansion/long setting time epoxies.
Unfortunately, the expoxies aren't strong or stable enough to make good mirrors.
IIRC University of Arizona, years ago, used spinning cooling ovens to pre-shape mirror blanks to a roughly parabolic profile. It drastically reduced the amount of grinding which had to be done, and thus the cost of the mirror. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
So as to avoid losing sales from those who would be offended, truth is sacrificed.
There is a way to avoid this, and that is standardized testing with coverage of the controversial material required. If the text omits the material or fails to cover the relevant parts in sufficient detail,
The students fail to learn it;
The district scores deteriorate;
People start asking, "Why aren't our kids learning?"
This is currently a big problem in science classes, where evolution is under fire from fundamentalist religious groups. It would not be terribly difficult to use examples from contemporary agricultural or public health issues (evolution of insect pests in response to agri-chemicals, evolution of pathogens under selective pressure of antibiotics) as underpinnings for the evolution section of a text. That would make it very hard to avoid, and also ground the material in issues which are familiar to the students, making it more likely to be retained.
The fact that it would tend to shoot down the fundamentalists and raise lots of skeptics is completely unintentional, really, I mean it... --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
If they had used their brains, they would've used ALL the wires to transmit the ID code.
Can't do that with a serial EEPROM, by definition. And you still could have hacked it with an X-acto knife.
Digital Convergence actually made two very different mistakes:
They used an external EEPROM, instead of one on the same chip as their microcontroller.
They used a meaningless obfuscation algorithm instead of a block cypher to "protect" the results.
Had they done something as simple as DES-encrypting the scanned output with a serial number key that couldn't be scanned by watching an external EEPROM's lines with a storage 'scope, their "IP" would be secure today. However, Digital Convergence either cannot find people who know what a security model is, or management doesn't listen to them. Either way, their tough luck. Dumb business model; I hope they go broke. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
...exactly what a certain Orson Wells described in his famous book '1984'
You mean George Orwell, not Orson Wells. Orson Wells did "War of the Worlds" and "Citizen Kane"; he had nothing to do with "Nineteen Eighty-Four". --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
but as for *nivore, the access to the data is not unlimited. The collection is only enabled on a certain person for a certain period of time.
Carnivore is a black box; how do you know that?
So long as the innards of Carnivore are not open to the public, the FBI could easily track anything they want to. Given this, the following scenario becomes not only possible but likely:
FBI becomes interested in person X, for political or other non-criminal reasons.
FBI agent takes out a pseudo-account in the name of Y on person X's ISP, begins exchanging "suspicious" traffic.
FBI "notices" Y's traffic, asks for a mail-header warrant to see if there is cause for a criminal investigation.
FBI installs Carnivore on person X's ISP, allegedly to watch Y. However, the Carnivore system is also set to capture all traffic pertaining to X.
Now prove to me that that can't happen. Given our police agencies' record of using illegal wiretaps, try making a case that it isn't inevitable. You have two chances of making your case, slim and none. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Unless you are a Native American, you, or one of your ancestors, was an immigrant to this country.
Even Native Americans are "immigrants" under that definition. The first Americans were not from Asia, they were Australians. The Asian-immigrant population killed and/or displaced the original Americans, and the only remnants of their descendants are apparently found in Tierra del Fuego.
This does make Native American claims of eternal ownership of "tribal lands" to be a crock. If they got pushed off by another "tribe" with superior numbers or technology, it's no worse than what they did to get "their" land in the first place. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Hell, no. The problem with H1-B is that it ties a worker to a particular job, and they have to get a new visa if they want to change jobs (the so-called "slave labor" part). This also makes them unfair competition for US citizens, because the threat of deportation allows them to be paid a lot less.
If you just gave them green cards, they'd not have to leave after a fixed interval and they'd be able to get a market rate instead of a sub-market rate. This would eliminate the incentive to import "coolies" to code in the US. It's better for everyone except the companies trying to hold wages down (which means it probably doesn't have a chance in hell of coming about). --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
It's ironic that so many years after the civil war the US has managed to recreate slavery. Don't like the working conditions, well, how would you like to go back to the poverty in your own country?
Slavery? Don't make me laugh. People on H1-B visas get to choose their own jobs, and can quit any time they like. The only thing the H1-B restricts is their job mobility while they decide to stay here. While this does depress their earnings potential (by taking away a lot of their bargaining position), it isn't slavery by a long shot. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
When people say they don't understand these professors or TA's, they usually mean it is not possible to understand them.
Hear, hear. I once got into a class taught by an oriental TA, and his accent, unfamiliarity with English, and my own lack of previous knowledge of the course material left me totally unable to learn from his lecture.
I transferred to the equivalent course in another department, taught by an American TA. I did just fine, though I didn't truly understand some of the important concepts until some time after I took the final exam. The important thing was, the essentials got through once I got rid of the communications barriers (in the only way I could).
Every major university has a foreign-languages department, with language labs. I see no reason why TA's whose English vocabulary or accent aren't up to par shouldn't spend time in intensive education or speech therapy as required to get them functioning well enough to get by with the native speakers. This would help the TA's, too. They're almost universally smart cookies, it wouldn't take them long. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Many suppliers of electronic gear have moved their manufacturing operations to Mexico. They don't do any engineering in Mexico, just the dirty stuff.
Very true. This still bothers me, I mean, Mexicans are humans too.
Indeed they are... but this is work that was just fine for Americans, too. The machines and lines have just moved. Now the Mexicans are enjoying wage rates much higher than they had before, and the working conditions are probably better than most of the previous opportunities. Would you rather scratch in the dirt to grow corn, or run a machine that assembles switches for a Chevy dashboard? That's a no-brainer.
The increasing number of technically-trained production workers and manufacturing engineers will be good for Mexico, if they can keep them from emigrating to the US. The economy of Mexico has been kept down by corruption and neglect for so long, it's going to take a long time to catch up. But catch up it will; it all starts with a bunch of people with know-how. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Tech vs. line, union vs. freelance.
on
Me-Commerce
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· Score: 2
In manufacturing, or semi-skilled office work, and others, the outlook often isn't so great, where demand is average and workers are a dime a dozen.
Notice that these are also occupations where depth of knowledge, thinking ability and originality are neither common nor required. Tech work, especially engineering-type work, is different.
I believe that labor unions are the main reason that the middle class is where it is today.
Union membership in the market sector has been falling for years. The only place where union membership is growing, if I recall correctly, is among public-sector employees. Unions may have kick-started the middle class, but today they aren't more than a fraction of it.
This should not surprise anyone. Unions began in the era of large monopolies. There isn't any one company big enough to be called a monopoly employer in the tech business (with the possible exception of Microsoft, and they do not employ a very large fraction of the total tech heads). Today there is no company with the kind of power over employees to set their wages and working conditions with impunity (though I hear that the auto companies have managed to institute a contractor wage cap in Detroit). The conditions for a union are not met; there is no small number of entities to be bargained with.
This will prevent unions from forming. So long as someone can go submit resumes to two other companies down the road and bargain for pay and working conditions with them, there is no need to have pay scales and contract negotiations.
Tech compaines are highly profitable, but this is part of the downside. They can get away with WAY too much. This is a significant part of their profitability. Tax breaks, land deals, and union busting/preventing. Since they bring in high paying jobs, they can get away with this (and don't forget the increasing corporate influence in Washington). Environmentally tech companies are bad as well among manufacturers of circuitboards and microelectronics.
Most tech jobs are not in the processing and manufacturing of devices, which is where the hazardous chemicals are. The tech jobs are mostly design, programming and prototyping. Many suppliers of electronic gear have moved their manufacturing operations to Mexico. They don't do any engineering in Mexico, just the dirty stuff. A person in a tech job can go for years without looking at a wave-solder machine.
This is one reason why unionization of tech workers is so unlikely. In the current business climate, long before a company could be unionized all their tech people would have jumped ship for better pay elsewhere; they'd be out of business. If the economy cooled to the point where reduced employee mobility no longer made this a foregone conclusion, the sheer overhead of union pay scales (just WRITING them!), grievance procedures and so forth would overwhelm the company which had a unionized workforce. How do you rate the pay scale of an embedded assembler/C programmer versus a Perl/CGI web-head? Trying to do this while things change so fast is a ticket on the slow train to bankruptcy, while the more flexible, nimble competitors eat the unionized company's dinner.
Things aren't going to change terribly much for a while. Might as well get used to it. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
... I wanted to use the Windows 2000 license that came with the machine in VMWare (i.e. use Linux, but also use windows, only in a Virtual Machine). Not possible. Becuase the recovery CD detects the BIOS type, and perhaps other methods and so it *won't* work with VMWare.
What stops you from having VMWare tell the recovery CD that its BIOS type is whatever you want it to be? Isn't it configurable? --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Make a null-filtering program that doesn't actually do any filtering, but advertise it as offering perfect 100% blocking of whatever parents happen to want. Yes, this would be fraudulent, but if your licenses were correctly worded, DMCA and UCITA would guarantee that proving that your software did nothing would be illegal.
All they'd have to do is try a list of sites against it. Then they'd sue you for taking money for a product which works 0% of the time, and either in discovery (during which all your company documents would be made available to the plaintiff's lawyers) or in expert testimony (during which any DMCA restriction against reverse-engineering would not apply, believe me), your secret would come out. You might get off with probation, and then again you wind up with a roommate named Bubba who thinks you're cute and likes it rough. Dumb idea. Real dumb. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Picture a storefront. Above the window, in huge letters: "ADULT BOOKSTORE".
Out front is a sort of sleazy looking chubby white guy smoking a cigar.
In the window of the store are piles of books with titles like:
Recombinant DNA
Calculus
Z Particles (whole stack of these)
The problem is that "students" in public schools feel like they're being force-fed with garbage, and all the interesting stuff is forbidden. If you told them that math and bio and physics were "adult subjects" they'd probably be falling all over themselves to learn about it; "forbidden fruit" and all that.
(You'll find this (and a lot more) on T-shirts from these folks; I'm not a rep, just a satisfied customer. The shirt design doesn't seem to be part of their on-line store, you'll have to get a catalog.) --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
... why not just let the library install broken filters that stop accidental viewing of pornography (i.e, going to a search engine looking for summer camps for girls that have ponies, typing "girls ponies" and getting some _very_ interesting reading).
Probably not a problem. Don't most of the sites which show that stuff want a credit card before they'll show it to you? Someone looking for a summer-camp brochure would just keep going.
As a matter of fact, I haven't ever seen anything porn-like on the web unless I was looking for it. It does make me wonder about the people who go around claiming that it's everywhere. I think this says little about the world and a lot about the people who are allegedly offended, kind of like the "christiangallery" web site a few years ago where they had all the images of aborted fetuses, extremes of homosexual acts, and stuff that was just plain weird (coprophagy, anyone?) all collected on one page. What kind of person seeks this out? Not too hard to figure out that the kind of people these nitwits are worried about are, in reality, themselves. --
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, so I would appreciate it if anyone with substantial relevant expertise could tell us:
- Are these actions of Digital Convergence perhaps in violation of the First Amendment?
- If so, is there a possibility of certifying a suit against Digital Convergence as a class action?
- Are there any statutory damages we could expect, or just a "cease and desist"? I know it would be nice to just take a company with a stupid legal-driven business plan and get them to shut up, but driving them out of business for trying to mess with people's free speech rights would be much harder for the rest of the business community to ignore.
Just my ruminations...--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Hear, hear. I keep re-structuring my life to avoid burnout. I've had some brushes with it, but nothing that's kept me from going back after a period of rest.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The losers will be people who can't or won't learn new skills to keep up with the new tasks that are part of the changing nature of work. I put part of the blame for this at the feet of "educators" who think that schools ought to be easy, silly and fun instead of rigorous, challenging and fun. Teachers ought to be drawn from the best people in their specialities, and paid enough to keep them from defecting to industry. Instead we have something like an 800 average SAT score among ed-school entrants. People like that don't have what it takes to challenge kids; many of them are barely literate themselves. There's a lot more that's wrong with the system today, but that's a big part of it.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The current "Native Americans" mostly came here across the Bering Straits, but they were not the first Americans. The first Americans apparently came from Australia. If priority is everything, the tribes who happened to be here in 1492 shouldn't be assumed to have any greater right to live in the Americas than later immigrants.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
There are states which have Constitutional restrictions on bills so that they must all deal with the subject matter of the title. This eliminates unrelated riders. The USA needs this on a national level.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
-
Why don't we have a decent crop of American candidates for these jobs? Could it be that American corporations are expecting someone else to support the schools and perform the on-the-job training?
- What happens when the H-1B entrants hit age 40 or so and their skills aren't quite up to date? Do they get dumped as unemployable and a new crop of worker bees imported?
- Will this be an excuse for tech firms to cut wages and employment heavily in the next downturn (like the last one), which will cause the smart people to make career choices outside the tech sphere and exacerbating (hell, creating) the problem that Silicon Valley allegedly needs solved?
- Will this be an excuse to tolerate crappy schools, illiterate teachers and "zero questioning of authority" administrations in the USA, because "we can always hire talent from (Mumbai, Beijing, St. Petersburg)?
Just a few questions that ought to be answered before expanding, or even extending, the H1 visa program. As far as I'm concerned the whole thing should be cancelled immediately, no new ones, no renewals, start learning to train local talent or give up and die because the alternative is to have a nation of worker-rejects and that's what a nation of rejects is going to do.--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
No way do I believe that the Supreme Court would hold that a treaty overrides the Constitution. However, I sure wouldn't mind an amendment which holds the limitations the Constitution places on our government, and the rights and privileges recognized thereunder, override the terms of any and all treaties which are to the contrary. Even freedoms need backups.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
IIRC University of Arizona, years ago, used spinning cooling ovens to pre-shape mirror blanks to a roughly parabolic profile. It drastically reduced the amount of grinding which had to be done, and thus the cost of the mirror.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
- The students fail to learn it;
- The district scores deteriorate;
- People start asking, "Why aren't our kids learning?"
This is currently a big problem in science classes, where evolution is under fire from fundamentalist religious groups. It would not be terribly difficult to use examples from contemporary agricultural or public health issues (evolution of insect pests in response to agri-chemicals, evolution of pathogens under selective pressure of antibiotics) as underpinnings for the evolution section of a text. That would make it very hard to avoid, and also ground the material in issues which are familiar to the students, making it more likely to be retained.The fact that it would tend to shoot down the fundamentalists and raise lots of skeptics is completely unintentional, really, I mean it...
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Digital Convergence actually made two very different mistakes:
- They used an external EEPROM, instead of one on the same chip as their microcontroller.
- They used a meaningless obfuscation algorithm instead of a block cypher to "protect" the results.
Had they done something as simple as DES-encrypting the scanned output with a serial number key that couldn't be scanned by watching an external EEPROM's lines with a storage 'scope, their "IP" would be secure today. However, Digital Convergence either cannot find people who know what a security model is, or management doesn't listen to them. Either way, their tough luck. Dumb business model; I hope they go broke.--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
So long as the innards of Carnivore are not open to the public, the FBI could easily track anything they want to. Given this, the following scenario becomes not only possible but likely:
- FBI becomes interested in person X, for political or other non-criminal reasons.
- FBI agent takes out a pseudo-account in the name of Y on person X's ISP, begins exchanging "suspicious" traffic.
- FBI "notices" Y's traffic, asks for a mail-header warrant to see if there is cause for a criminal investigation.
- FBI installs Carnivore on person X's ISP, allegedly to watch Y. However, the Carnivore system is also set to capture all traffic pertaining to X.
Now prove to me that that can't happen. Given our police agencies' record of using illegal wiretaps, try making a case that it isn't inevitable. You have two chances of making your case, slim and none.--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
This does make Native American claims of eternal ownership of "tribal lands" to be a crock. If they got pushed off by another "tribe" with superior numbers or technology, it's no worse than what they did to get "their" land in the first place.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
If you just gave them green cards, they'd not have to leave after a fixed interval and they'd be able to get a market rate instead of a sub-market rate. This would eliminate the incentive to import "coolies" to code in the US. It's better for everyone except the companies trying to hold wages down (which means it probably doesn't have a chance in hell of coming about).
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
I transferred to the equivalent course in another department, taught by an American TA. I did just fine, though I didn't truly understand some of the important concepts until some time after I took the final exam. The important thing was, the essentials got through once I got rid of the communications barriers (in the only way I could).
Every major university has a foreign-languages department, with language labs. I see no reason why TA's whose English vocabulary or accent aren't up to par shouldn't spend time in intensive education or speech therapy as required to get them functioning well enough to get by with the native speakers. This would help the TA's, too. They're almost universally smart cookies, it wouldn't take them long.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
The increasing number of technically-trained production workers and manufacturing engineers will be good for Mexico, if they can keep them from emigrating to the US. The economy of Mexico has been kept down by corruption and neglect for so long, it's going to take a long time to catch up. But catch up it will; it all starts with a bunch of people with know-how.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
This should not surprise anyone. Unions began in the era of large monopolies. There isn't any one company big enough to be called a monopoly employer in the tech business (with the possible exception of Microsoft, and they do not employ a very large fraction of the total tech heads). Today there is no company with the kind of power over employees to set their wages and working conditions with impunity (though I hear that the auto companies have managed to institute a contractor wage cap in Detroit). The conditions for a union are not met; there is no small number of entities to be bargained with.
This will prevent unions from forming. So long as someone can go submit resumes to two other companies down the road and bargain for pay and working conditions with them, there is no need to have pay scales and contract negotiations.
Most tech jobs are not in the processing and manufacturing of devices, which is where the hazardous chemicals are. The tech jobs are mostly design, programming and prototyping. Many suppliers of electronic gear have moved their manufacturing operations to Mexico. They don't do any engineering in Mexico, just the dirty stuff. A person in a tech job can go for years without looking at a wave-solder machine.This is one reason why unionization of tech workers is so unlikely. In the current business climate, long before a company could be unionized all their tech people would have jumped ship for better pay elsewhere; they'd be out of business. If the economy cooled to the point where reduced employee mobility no longer made this a foregone conclusion, the sheer overhead of union pay scales (just WRITING them!), grievance procedures and so forth would overwhelm the company which had a unionized workforce. How do you rate the pay scale of an embedded assembler/C programmer versus a Perl/CGI web-head? Trying to do this while things change so fast is a ticket on the slow train to bankruptcy, while the more flexible, nimble competitors eat the unionized company's dinner.
Things aren't going to change terribly much for a while. Might as well get used to it.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Out front is a sort of sleazy looking chubby white guy smoking a cigar.
In the window of the store are piles of books with titles like:
Recombinant DNA
Calculus
Z Particles (whole stack of these)
The problem is that "students" in public schools feel like they're being force-fed with garbage, and all the interesting stuff is forbidden. If you told them that math and bio and physics were "adult subjects" they'd probably be falling all over themselves to learn about it; "forbidden fruit" and all that.
(You'll find this (and a lot more) on T-shirts from these folks; I'm not a rep, just a satisfied customer. The shirt design doesn't seem to be part of their on-line store, you'll have to get a catalog.)
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Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
As a matter of fact, I haven't ever seen anything porn-like on the web unless I was looking for it. It does make me wonder about the people who go around claiming that it's everywhere. I think this says little about the world and a lot about the people who are allegedly offended, kind of like the "christiangallery" web site a few years ago where they had all the images of aborted fetuses, extremes of homosexual acts, and stuff that was just plain weird (coprophagy, anyone?) all collected on one page. What kind of person seeks this out? Not too hard to figure out that the kind of people these nitwits are worried about are, in reality, themselves.
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Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.