United States, however, is separate from the United States of America because according to Title 28 Section 3002 15a, "United States" is a Federal corporation.
How's that tinfoil hat fitting? First, just because you see the word "corporation" used in a sentence doesn't mean that somehow it's a business being run by investors just like whatever private-sector company you love to hate.
First, the definition of the word:
1. A body that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members.
2. Such a body created for purposes of government. Also called body corporate.
3. A group of people combined into or acting as one body.
From the latin word for body, you can use the term "incorporate" all sorts of ways. As in, "This comment incorporates my thoughtful response to your not very creative attempt to perpetuate hatred for American businesses."
Think in terms of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, or any other similar structure set up to act under a charter established by the federal government. You might also want to get to know the definition of the word federal:
"Of, relating to, or being a form of government in which a union of states recognizes the sovereignty of a central authority while retaining certain residual powers of government."
Yes, the states have some rights and powers, but the federal government exists expressly because there are some things best handled by a central authority. Some of those things are agencies or organizations chartered to perform certain roles. Those organizations incorporate certain rules, limits, responsibilities, and missiones that outlive the tenure of any particular individual citizens that happen to work within those structures. They are the embodiment of their charter. That allows the organization's mission to continue without constant reinvention every time someone leaves. Sort of like the difference between a store owned by one person (which goes away when that person goes away), or a store owned by a group of people that have incorporated in order to allow the store to thrive, grow, and continue to employ its people and serve its customers whether or not one person leaves or stays. But the most important aspect of it is the charter, which defines where the authority is, and how it's applied to the organization's activities.
The sections of code you're reading don't convey anything at all like what you're saying they do, and you of course know that. What you're trying to do is increase the "evil" quotient associated with the word "corporation" just because it's fashionable to do so, and because when that works, you can then tie that word to people you don't like (politically, for example), and spare yourself the trouble of having to actually explain rationally what you don't like. It's like using the word "witch" 400 years ago - a catch-all instant condemnation (but only for other people already caught up thinking that way).
Gees! It must of killed him to be limited to so few words.
Perhaps this is just the first of a three part Editorial Cycle.
Actually, I'd like to see him do a regular column in a serious outlet (Washington Post or something). He's as articulate and encyclopedic (and more lyrical) in his own way George Will, and his take on things, given his sense of cultural history (seen through the lens of technology) is really interesting. Like, or not, some of his conclusions or predictions, you just can't stop reading anything he writes. I've never put down one of his chapters without doing more history and language homework in the following hour than I did during my entire stay in high school.
They were not military targets. They were industrial targets
Japan's entire industrial complex was, at that point, dedicated to bolstering their military capabilities. They sure as hell should have surrendered by then already, as badly as we were depleting their ships, planes, munitions, etc. But they were either convinced they could still win, or felt bound to making their defeat as difficult as possible... and so they continued to steer all of their industrial resources into the production of war-related items. Both of the final targets were chosen explicitly because of the degree to which their activities helped power the empire's offensive capabilities.
Of course some poor bastard working in a factory in Nagasaki wasn't very in charge of his own fate, since one year he was making, say, bicycles or girders for new buildings, and by the time we struck those factories, he was building Zeros, AA guns, mines, and other things that were killing Allied solidiers. At that point, pretty much every plane they were producing was going to pointlessly be used in mostly suicidal attacks on Allied servicemen and women. Denying the Japanese their Navy's use of the port and factory facilities involved couldn't have been a more important strategic and tactical task. And it was done without landing thousands of troops into a meat grinder (or having to deploy them as a meat grinder to march across all of Japan).
it wasn't as if the US was particularly fond of those people (you were happily dropping napalm on them a few decades later
Fondness doesn't have a lot to do with it, either way. We certainly weren't fond of the concept of sprawling communism, but those places (China, and the Soviets) were a secondary threat, compared to the Axis. Of course, "a few decades later" the expansionist, opressive nature of those regimes became abundantly clear as they sought to take places like Vietnam by force. And I'd hardly call disrupting North Vietnamese supply lines and marching troops by the most effective jungle methods (like napalm) the same as "happily" dropping napalm on "those people." We were in Korea and Vietname specifically to protect and promote anti-communist interests for "those people."
The number of civillians killed in those two attacks is comparable to the US's total casualties over the entire war in both theaters.
If the Soviets hadn't lost millions of people pushing back the Nazis, we would have had to have done it. Are you taking those numbers into account as you do your Hiroshima/Nagasaki math? And if we had had to slog through mainland Japan in the same way that we did Saipan, Okinowa, Iwojima, and every other ferociously defended scrap of land, many, many more Japanese would have died, including civilians in that densely populated country. You're selectively leaving out what would have been hundreds (plural) of thousands of deaths just to make the destruction of those two targets sound worse than they were by describing them out of any context.
attacks have killed about 100000 people who weren't even born at the time
How many people do you suppose would have been born to all of those that were killed by the Japanese, had they not started the aggression? The thousands killed at Pearl Harbor alone would have had more children and grand children than that, never mind the thousands that died as young men during the ensuing conflict. That's whole generations and family trees cut off by the war the Japanese started.
It may have resulted in less deaths, but in my view deaths of soldiers are acceptable in war
You're pretty twisted, then. When is it ever "acceptable" for our soldiers to be killed? Are they just trash to you? Disposable? They put their lives at risk to do what they do, but they don't sign up to die. Deaths are deaths. These were nations at war, not armies at war. The Empire Of Japan attacked the United States, which includes its citizens. Citizens by the m
of course the lawyers get involved with what exactly a "presence" is, but that's besides the point
No, that exactly is the point. In the case in question, the fact that the online Borders brand has no nexus in California other than brand and marketing similarity with the separately incorporated brick-and-mortars, wasn't enough to insulate them from remitting CA sales tax.
In this case, it's pretty clear that Borders was trying to be a little slippery, but at a technical level, they're exactly as removed from nexus in California as, say, a small mom-and-pop mail order operation in South Dakota might be.
If a local retailer in California that sells some complementary product or service does any cross-promotion or referring to that business in South Dakota, that mom-and-pop could wind up in exactly the same boat. Likewise basic web affiliate marketing... any affiliate who happens to be in CA, referring traffic to a non-CA business (and there are thousands of examples of this) could be dragging all of those companies into the CA revenue stream by proxy. Likewise, any intermediary (like Commission Junction, or Performics) that enables that activity, could be a bridge to making their entire network of merchants "entangled" with California businessses.
Borders' web ops do not have a presence in CA "as defined by law", but the court found that it was close enough to count. Result: taxes due, despite that lack of nexus. Other indirectly related companies will find themselves in the same boat, by the thousands, given CA's dire finacial straights.
dropping tonnes of bombs and chemicals on Viet Nam
That's like saying that when the police are forced to kill a pair of armed bank robbers in a running gunfight that they are "just out shooting innocent residents of the city" because the two bank robbers happen to live there, and haven't been convicted of anything yet, even as they shoot wildly on the roadway attempting to fend off those interfering with their crime. If the US's purpose in Viet Nam was to "drop bombs on it," that would have been a lot easier than losing countless lives and spending untold resources trying to track down which jungle trails the murderous North Vietnamese Army (as proxies for their communist sponsors) were using as they tried their damndest to take the South by force. Bombing the supply lines and weapons of an invading aggessor is not the same as bombing "the country." Of course, you already know all of that, and you're just hoping that you can score some rhetorical points by making transparently emotion-based, sweeping generalizations designed to make the US look bad for getting involved in trying to defend South Viet Nam from the same fate as the North.
To use your logic, the air strikes used to disarm the paramilitary thugs in the Balkans were inappropriate, too. Should the US and those NATO partners that finally helped out have just let Serbia continue to grind away at the civilians in the neighboring parts of former Yugoslavia? We dropped lots of weapons there, too (so that we didn't have to have a hundred thousand troops and armor marching through the mountains of that region), and very effectively shut down the militants that were busy killing so many civilians and showing no sign of stopping.
I think you're looking at WWII through the lens of our current military capabilities, which are magically surgical by comparison. Hiroshoma and Nagasaki were vital military targets (for industrial and naval port reasons). Imperial Japan had already demonstrated that loss of civilian life wasn't going to do anything to end their attempt to hold onto the territory they'd be trying to seize - think in terms of the huge loss of civilians in the fires that ravaged Tokyo because of conventional weapons use there - the destruction could be said to have been far uglier than in Hiroshima.
Having to plow ahead and get the Japanese rulers to give up their war the old fashioned way (pummeling targets spread out all over their [at the time] fortress-like country, manned by people demonstrably willing to fight to the last), would have made a train wreck of the entire country. Hundreds of thousands more (than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) would have died on both sides, over a much longer and consumptive period. And yes, saving American lives first is by itself a reasonable pursuit (remember who started the conflict, and the misery they spread throughout the entire Pacific rim, including the systematic rape, starvation, and enslavement of untold innocents in China and throughout the southern islands), so the fact that less conflict in areas populated by Japanese civilians was a result of the two bombings is just frosting on the cake, and lucky for the Japanese civilians at the time.
Is it a shame that anyone who wasn't actively supporting the Emporer's conflict was killed in those two cities? At least as much of a shame as the deaths of all those that he had killed elsewhere (including in Hawaii). But with the entire might of the US military bearing down on Japan, the examples that the Japanese military showed is in Okinawa, Iwojima, and so on gave US military planners no indication that Japan would be less defensive of their main ancestral island.
I'm actually sort of amazed sometimes that some people suggest that they'd rather see even more people slowly ripped to shreds and burned alive through weeks of "conventional" conflict than the abrupt, localized, and completely effective end that the two other fission bombs put to things.
Because he won't quit. He'll simply open a new account with a new ISP and start all over again.
That's exactly where a robust, million-member network would shine. When that guy and his tactics surface again, he get's stomped by what amounts to an immune system that's seen that strain before. It's the stomping I'm started to get interested in, not just having thicker skin.
While I understand the desire to stick it to these creeps, from a purely cost/benefit analysis point-of-view, it doesn't seem to me to make a lot of sense
When you pay these clowns, all you're doing is proving to their apprentices that they've chosen the right career. It's exactly like giving terrorists or kidnappers what they want, and with exactly the same results.
Self defense is one thing, but attacking back is another
This is sophistry. Attacking "back" means by definition that you are responding to someone else's act. If you're standing in a bar and get hit in the face, well, you've just been hit in the face. There's time between that blow, and the next one. Between those blows, you're not "still" being hit in the face, but simply girding yourself for the next blow to the face isn't really enough, morally or practically. Physically stopping such an assault (or the online equivalent) is an appropriate response. And to the extent that disabling your physical attacker is the surest defense against him landing another blow, then you are (in a sense) "attacking back." But it's for defensive reasons, and only in response to an obvious provocation.
I've never seen a network attack from a dedicated, professional bad guy that didn't get repeated if you didn't do something about it. Increasingly, passive defenses don't hold up to the onslaught, and not everyone runs an online casino making enough money to buy $100,000 in instant remediation by some of the firms that specialize in trapping the traffic from gigantic zombie attacks.
When every merchant on the block is being abused by a gang of thugs, and the cops won't (or really, in the case of overseas cyber attacks, can't) do anything about it, it's reasonable for the shopkeepers on the block to band toghether and make attacking any one of them a provocation that is dramatically too expensive, or which takes away the attacker's tools.
Considering the huge horsepower of things like the SETI screensavers and P2P networks, I don't think it's a question of whether or not a conflict between spare-CPU/BW Good Guys and zombie-army bad guys could be won by the good guys. Or at least, make things painful for the bad guys. The main issue is counter-counter-counter-craftiness that might stealthily turn such a network to the dark side.
Several sys admins I know who have never had the time or inclination to put up a honeypot or opt for similar tactics absolutely light up at the prospect of actually making the attackers miserable. In fact, it's not even the attackers they complain about, it's the ISPs that (with copious documentation about the bad acts of specific customers) don't do anything about it. To the extent that foreign governments are those ISPs, well, same sentiment.
So, the real issue is governance of such a system. It's sort of like sharing time on a big research telescope. What committee can be trusted to put the resource to use effectively? I know that a lot of people with network resources are so fed up with the probes, the phishing, the DoS extortion and all the rest that they'd have absolutely no problem deploying a box or two, and a couple of MB/sec to the cause. But the liability(ies) for having it used unwisely are pretty scary, so I'm all ears if someone comes up with an interesting approach. If the worst thing that happens is I get a block of my IPs null routed on their way to Moscow, well, goshky, I'll take that deal.
Some things we have to take into our own hands. And just turning the other cheek with more and fancier firewalls and intrustion detection is too passive for my taste, at least in the face of concerted, bad-to-the-core coordinated efforts by professional, organized crackers. Have I wanted to burn up every inch of some basement-dwelling script kiddie's DSL before? Sometimes. But nothing like I've wanted to blot out entire pieces of some Asian and eastern-European networks. And not just for my sake - for all of my clients, and their clients, and everyone it impacts.
Don't mean to rant, but I've just spent all morning explaining this stuff to a suffering dot-com. His much-repeated question was "Why can't we just do this back at him until he quits? I'll spend the money... this is pissing me off."
No, my real point is that if the law of the land is that you have to have a particular form of insurance, then make that the law of the land. But let competitive private sector people provide the service. This is how car insurance works in the US, for example. I'm glad, myself, that I don't have to "buy" my car insurance from my state government. I understand the reason why the state law says that you have to carry it, but they leave it up to me to buy it from the most competitive place I can find.
In the case of earthquake insurance, the real issue is that some people build houses, or live in areas where the risk is intrinsicly higher for ultimately making a claim. If everyone is taxed so that that subset of people can have "government provided" earthquake coverage, then it's just a scheme to obscure the true costs, and to obscure the inequity in providing it. In private insurance arrangements, the provider has to compete with other providers (which forces the rates as low as they can go), but they also get to set rates differently for people who are, through their actions (like choosing to build a house on a fault line, or choosing to get speeding tickets every 3 months, or choosing to smoke), riskier.
If everyone has to have the insurance, that's a known X number of insurance accounts that competitors can gun for. It's a captive audience, but an audience provided with choices is going to force margins down as far as they can go. If the situation is that no insurance company could stay afloat selling earthquake insurance, then you have to question the overall fiscal sanity of the concept in the first place. As it is, it's probably a money loser, so they're just sticking it to the taxpayers of New Zealand.
At least in the US, flood insurance is optional - though it's handled through a government brokerage-type agency. The point is that a lot of people don't need (or want) it, and you have to pay for it yourself if you think you do. It's not the most optimal situation (since the feds are part of the equation), because it artifically encourages people to keep rebuilding right where the river is inevitably going to flood them right back out again in few years anyway.
If you have read other posts in this thread you would see that private sector does not handle earthquake insurance in Calfornia at all, let along more efficiently.
Right. But if you read the post I'm actually responding to, you'd see that we're talking about New Zealand.
Is, of course, ourselves. My experience with phishing and other social-hacks-by-email suggest that the ones that seem to really trip people up are the ones that recipients think are about themselves. I have seen the enemy and he is us.
Scientists do not peddle "truths" or "falsehoods". Conclusions are not "true" or "false", because nothing is provable through emperical means, and nothing unprovable can be "true" or "false".
But this doesn't stop scientists from demonstrating compelling enough practical understandings of how something actually is, and allowing us then to have a solid (as in useful enough) knowledge of it to then guide our actions. The "truth" of oribital mechanics, for example, is true enough to keep satellites in orbit and my HBO working. Empirical evidence suggests that we have a pretty good grip on this, but Chomsky could certainly cite several people whose studies suggest that satellites are actually help up by captive fairies enslaved by evil corporations. This is, of course, a rhetorical example, but you get my drift. People already disposed to his (or any) point of view are going to swallow citations and references pretty much without question.
A significant disruption in the Bay Area would have a real, tangible impact on many of the businesses and services that make the 'net work. Yes, it's decentralized, but it would be ugly. If nothing else, just having Cisco headquarters dissappear from the map would make a lot of ongoing network implementation projects, well, a lot more annoying.
our government kindly provides us with natural disaster insurance for earthquakes.
Um... doesn't that really just equate to everyone who lives there buys the insurance through taxes, and thus you've got not a benefit, but a mandatory service you have to buy? Doesn't mean you wouldn't want it, but since it's handled by the government, doesn't that imply an additional overhead/bureaucracy load that would be more efficiently handled through the private sector?
The problem is that different states, counties, municipalities have different tax rates for different types of merchandise, with the different taxes due under different circumstances on different schedules to different agencies. And a retailer that ships into those places, if it turns out they have to collect and remit those, has to keep up to date on constantly changing rules, rates, exceptions, and so on, through every little taxing zone everywhere in the country.
Not too long ago, DC was running a "no sales tax weekend" during back-to-school shopping season, to encourage shoppers to stay in DC rather than go out to the suburbs. Merchants had to exempt certain sorts of merchandise (specific types of clothing, certain school supplies, etc) from sales tax receipts for three days. And they also had to report on those sales for which they did NOT collect tax. Now multiply that sort of regulatory burden by all of the taxing authorities around the country, and then imagine a small business selling online trying to keep up.
We're talking about an impending March Of The Consultants to every mail order operation, and higher costs of doing business as a result. All of this will be passed along to shoppers (and the addition to the end prices will, of course, raise even more sales taxes!).
The traditional media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- will be the ones to go, if they don't adapt to the new situation. And this should please anyone that considers themselves a liberal person
Really? The majority of those outlets work specifically around a more liberal/'progressive' perspective. Sure, there are comparitively minor (in terms of actual audience headcount) places like FNC that don't deliberately lean left, but people who "consider themselves liberal" probably would be dissapointed to see NPR, or CNN, or Pacifica, or NBC, or CBS, etc. go away. They're major contributors to the lefter side of politics (coverage/opinion-wise) - no doubt a lot of liberal audiences would cringe if they couldn't get their Diane R in the afternoon, or watch CBS do their best to attack Republicans.
If you are confused, threatened, or just curious why not simple ask?
Again, that's exactly my point. If an employer is looking at hiring one of two people to do important IT work that involves interacting under time pressure with other people, and all other things being equal, why would she hire the person who brings - to every meeting with new vendors, customers or co-workers - the baggage of having to field questions (and take time to explain) it? Deliberately outlandish, provocative dress or body art are, well, provocative. It provokes behavior, response, and the time those things require. Meanwhile, no IT business is getting done. Nothing's being created, protected, backed up, maintained. It's bad enough when once in a while an employee's behavior distracts from the actual work for which everyone's getting paid... but when someone brings a deliberate, built-in, high-profile distraction designed to take attention away from other people/things - and it's there every day - that says something about how much that person values the business, the clients, the staff, and the financial health of the organization writing the paycheck and providing the benefits.
MS is pushing its way into all corners of the computing space by leveraging the *platform* on which all others must run
Here's where I'm a little foggy... what is the "must" part you're talking about? I'm betting that all of the Mac and *nix people out there don't really feel that they "must" use an MS platform. And Photoshop, of course, ran first and still runs better on a Mac (as any career graphic artist can tell you).
What Adobe gets out of bundling and price cutting is the same thing that any business gets: market share, at the expense of other products (like Corel's suite, for example).
Besides, Adobe has not be found guilty of monopolistic practices
And? Are you saying that Microsoft is doing something illegal right now, and continues to plan for more? You don't think that the intense scrutiny under which they, and every publicly held company now operate has changed things in the last few years?
Adobe merged with Macromedia so that they could own more of the market, not so that competition would get a leg up. Their patent on the PDF format means that they are the complete authority on how it's used. It's not some open source play-pen, it's something that they allow people to license under pretty strict terms (like not messing with the format in any way). Forthcoming expansions to that format (say, fancier media embedding, etc) can only be added to the PDF universe by Adobe, and they can do anything they want in terms of who can create software that works with a changed version of the PDF when the time comes. The PDF format - in the universe of this sort of file - is more of a "must use" (in your sense of that phrase) than MS's operating systems.
Unless, that is, Bezos and/or Branson think the first-mover advantage will really translate into significant profits. I suspect, however, that those profits are in the pretty distant future, and the best way to bring the profits closer would be to cooperate.
Sure, but then after they get the whole thing making a buck, some guy in his basement will complain that his own personal open source ballistic rocket ship is being unfairly kept out of the hands of users by the $pace$hipOne evil monopolists.
I want to live off the grid and independent of society; grow my own food, make my own fuel, grow my own food and live an undisturbed life.
See, I'm an outdoors person. I hunt and eat wild game, and put a stupid amount of my time and resources in being able to work in the field with my beloved dogs. I work 60-80 hours a week so I can afford to do it, and put in those extra hours so that there's no opportunity for the people who pay me to object when I alter the situation by working mostly from home.
That being said: I like having dependable electricity (refridgeration is nice), I like my broadband net connection (so I can have discussions like this), and I like delightful little "corporate" products like canned food with no botulism, anti-biotics for when I stab myself with a stick while out hunting pheasants, and all of the microelectronics that allow me to have things like climate control, power generation when I'm not plugged into the grid, and so on.
You can't have the technology that makes off-the-grid living safe and pleasant without the research horsepower and production scales of large companies. Further, if you're going to grow your own food, you're going to use more land and resources than you would if you paid a highly efficient in-the-business farmer to grow it for you. There's no way you can put as much food on the table from the same acre of land without the economies of scale that represents.
Now, if you really want to be "independent of society" (which is little hypocritical, because you can do that right now by walking off into the woods, but you're not doing it) you're going to have to admit that you don't want doctors that can set a broken bone, metal workers that can help you make farming implements, and everything else that separates us from a 1000-years-ago existence. Hell even a thousand years ago we had blacksmiths, farmers, wainwrights, and other specialists that worked in barter or trade so that every person didn't have to know how to and have the time to do everything in order to survive past the age of 25.
I'm betting you do want society, you just want it in your own version. So, you've got to find enough other people that will subscribe to your exact vision and be physically near each other enough that you can barter (since you're not going to depend on societal constructs like banks, or corporate-made vehicles to convey your vegetables to the blacksmith in exchange for repairing your plow blade). And, good luck perpetuating that micro-society, because most women will want to give birth in a hospital (possibly run by a corporation, but certainly filled with high tech supplies and equipment made by companies who also train life-long career medical people in how to use them) where they and their babies are more likely to survive the process than they were back when we all lived in "villages."
Nonsense. I want the perfect 200-acre place myself - with a well-built, modern, fuel-efficient, self-reliant home. I want the time to enjoy it before I die. But I know that in order to finance that (in less "corporate" times, living in a decent house on land you called your own and on which you could completely depend for your sustinence would have made you an aristrocratic and loathed "landowner" or perhaps a minor earl or similar), you've got to come to it with major resources up front. There are too many people in the country, and too little land for people to just stake a claim. It's not like that any more (nor anywhere else... try doing that in, say, South America, Africa, or Asia, and you risk simply having what you've built taken away by thugs or socialist movements). So, good luck doing what the rest of us are doing: trying to earn enough to buy your little fiefdom and live privately. By most people's standards, that's called "being rich." And it doesn't happen in a vacuum.
your translation is a subjective fabrication of what you think someone else is thinking.
But that's exactly my point. Unless you come right out and say what the 1-inch hole in your earlobe and the four studs in your forehead do mean, you're leaving it up to the average person to guess. And most people are going to assume that whatever it "means" to the person who did it, the highly visible nature of it, especially on the face, is so that it will be seen. The vast majority of the things we all do to our appearance are done to project some facet of a larger image, to convey alignment with a particular way of life or attitude. Even if that's not true for a particular person (say, they have to have six eyebrow rings for... medical reasons?), they have to know that hanging a hardware store off of their face is going to suggest a certain need for attention, and willingness to present an atmosphere of discomfort in order to get that attention.
But it still doesn't matter - it's in the eye of the beholder, and when you staple your lips, you're going to be subject to whatever the average person thinks about what you're trying to say. And if you aren't going to continually start all of your business conversations with an explanation of "it's not really what you think" or "don't worry, it only looks like it hurts" or "people have been piercing faces for thousands of years, get over it" before you talk about buying and implementing that new load balancing router pair, well... then you have to put up with me, and everyone else, jumping to contextual conclusions about what you are trying to say. People in an environment where they can afford to pay real career-type IT salaries to quality nerds (which is what this whole thread is all about) don't usually have time sort through all of that, and aren't going to want to wonder if every staffer, vendor, or customer that Mr. Pierced is going to be in front of is going to want to take the time either.
The shorthand interpretation of the look in question is registered pretty solidly on the wider culture. Never mind the irony of people trying so hard to be "unique" that they look just like half a million other Goths or whatever, the issue is that most people have at least some notion that the heavily pierced, tatooed person is hoping that all that decoration will be seen (especially when it's in places, like on the face, where it can't be missed). And the desire for it to be seen equates to an expectation that the underlying message is either obvious, or is suitable for speculation. And to the 40-year-old who manages the department (and the budget that would pay the tatooed IT person wanting that stable paycheck and health benefits) is going to make some snap decisions based on that first impression that Mr. Pierce is forcing her to digest. It doesn't matter what his reason is for the body art, any more than it matters what Mark Rothko was thinking when he painted: the audience will draw its own conclusions unless you provide a running commentary, and you can't spend your day at work providing one and still expect that time to be as valuable (and well paid) as someone who spends that same time, say, writing code or tuning servers.
That's why I'm trying to immerse myself as little as possible for the shortest amount of time I can, and then leave it forever.
"The corporate world" doesn't exist. I've never seen any two that operate in just the same way. Some groups of two or three people incorporate just to avoid being frivalously sued out of existance, and bigger operations have no choice but to carry on in way that their shareholders expect... or there won't be shareholders, which means the company doesn't exist, doesn't have customers, doesn't employee people, and doesn't cough up any paychecks to people like you who want... what, exactly? Resume fodder, training, stable income, until you can start your own company?
Once you do have your own company, will everyone that you hire do whatever they want, how they want, when they want, and you get to pay them no matter what? Or might you set some expectations about what your employees are expected to do? Would you keep employees around no matter what they said or did to a customer? Would you keep paying them if they produced something that no one wants or would be willing to buy? Is there any chance that an employee might consider your having some actual, measurable, objective expectations as "sucking" in the same way you say you hate?
Sure, if someone has every skill you need, lots of experience in the real world, can communicate clearly and professionally... that's a great start. But let's not pretend that the huge tatoos and copious, highly visible piercings are just a simple "style." They are very potent messages, which don't jive too well with the other messages we're talking about, here.
For example (if we translate all of the messages involved into the spoken word): "Hi, I'm a talented, certified Cisco jockey - just what you need. You can trust me with your crucial data, and trust that I will protect you from Starbucks-fueled anarchist semi-punks trying to break through your firewall to deface The Man's web site. Also, whenever I'm in a meeting with management, you'll see that I specifically (and permanently) have chosen to slightly shock and unsettle the average person, and send a not-very-subtle disturbing message of dark counter-culture and pseudo-tribal pop cultism that will completely go against the grain of your company's typical customers, vendors, employees, and management. But despite my doing everything I can to make you stare at me, I insist that you do not, and only consider me just another applicant. All of this stuff I've done to myself means nothing in the context of what I do at work, because who I really am doesn't matter at work, even though I want the salary of a dedicated IT professional for whom the career actually is important. So, let's talk money! And, are you staring at my eyebrow piercings, my mohawk, or my reptile-eye contact lenses? I can't see very well with them in, and I want to be sure that I'm coming across well in this interview."
Slashdot Mirror
United States, however, is separate from the United States of America because according to Title 28 Section 3002 15a, "United States" is a Federal corporation.
How's that tinfoil hat fitting? First, just because you see the word "corporation" used in a sentence doesn't mean that somehow it's a business being run by investors just like whatever private-sector company you love to hate.
First, the definition of the word:
1. A body that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members.
2. Such a body created for purposes of government. Also called body corporate.
3. A group of people combined into or acting as one body.
From the latin word for body, you can use the term "incorporate" all sorts of ways. As in, "This comment incorporates my thoughtful response to your not very creative attempt to perpetuate hatred for American businesses."
Think in terms of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, or any other similar structure set up to act under a charter established by the federal government. You might also want to get to know the definition of the word federal: "Of, relating to, or being a form of government in which a union of states recognizes the sovereignty of a central authority while retaining certain residual powers of government."
Yes, the states have some rights and powers, but the federal government exists expressly because there are some things best handled by a central authority. Some of those things are agencies or organizations chartered to perform certain roles. Those organizations incorporate certain rules, limits, responsibilities, and missiones that outlive the tenure of any particular individual citizens that happen to work within those structures. They are the embodiment of their charter. That allows the organization's mission to continue without constant reinvention every time someone leaves. Sort of like the difference between a store owned by one person (which goes away when that person goes away), or a store owned by a group of people that have incorporated in order to allow the store to thrive, grow, and continue to employ its people and serve its customers whether or not one person leaves or stays. But the most important aspect of it is the charter, which defines where the authority is, and how it's applied to the organization's activities.
The sections of code you're reading don't convey anything at all like what you're saying they do, and you of course know that. What you're trying to do is increase the "evil" quotient associated with the word "corporation" just because it's fashionable to do so, and because when that works, you can then tie that word to people you don't like (politically, for example), and spare yourself the trouble of having to actually explain rationally what you don't like. It's like using the word "witch" 400 years ago - a catch-all instant condemnation (but only for other people already caught up thinking that way).
Gees! It must of killed him to be limited to so few words.
Perhaps this is just the first of a three part Editorial Cycle.
Actually, I'd like to see him do a regular column in a serious outlet (Washington Post or something). He's as articulate and encyclopedic (and more lyrical) in his own way George Will, and his take on things, given his sense of cultural history (seen through the lens of technology) is really interesting. Like, or not, some of his conclusions or predictions, you just can't stop reading anything he writes. I've never put down one of his chapters without doing more history and language homework in the following hour than I did during my entire stay in high school.
They were not military targets. They were industrial targets
Japan's entire industrial complex was, at that point, dedicated to bolstering their military capabilities. They sure as hell should have surrendered by then already, as badly as we were depleting their ships, planes, munitions, etc. But they were either convinced they could still win, or felt bound to making their defeat as difficult as possible... and so they continued to steer all of their industrial resources into the production of war-related items. Both of the final targets were chosen explicitly because of the degree to which their activities helped power the empire's offensive capabilities.
Of course some poor bastard working in a factory in Nagasaki wasn't very in charge of his own fate, since one year he was making, say, bicycles or girders for new buildings, and by the time we struck those factories, he was building Zeros, AA guns, mines, and other things that were killing Allied solidiers. At that point, pretty much every plane they were producing was going to pointlessly be used in mostly suicidal attacks on Allied servicemen and women. Denying the Japanese their Navy's use of the port and factory facilities involved couldn't have been a more important strategic and tactical task. And it was done without landing thousands of troops into a meat grinder (or having to deploy them as a meat grinder to march across all of Japan).
it wasn't as if the US was particularly fond of those people (you were happily dropping napalm on them a few decades later
Fondness doesn't have a lot to do with it, either way. We certainly weren't fond of the concept of sprawling communism, but those places (China, and the Soviets) were a secondary threat, compared to the Axis. Of course, "a few decades later" the expansionist, opressive nature of those regimes became abundantly clear as they sought to take places like Vietnam by force. And I'd hardly call disrupting North Vietnamese supply lines and marching troops by the most effective jungle methods (like napalm) the same as "happily" dropping napalm on "those people." We were in Korea and Vietname specifically to protect and promote anti-communist interests for "those people."
The number of civillians killed in those two attacks is comparable to the US's total casualties over the entire war in both theaters.
If the Soviets hadn't lost millions of people pushing back the Nazis, we would have had to have done it. Are you taking those numbers into account as you do your Hiroshima/Nagasaki math? And if we had had to slog through mainland Japan in the same way that we did Saipan, Okinowa, Iwojima, and every other ferociously defended scrap of land, many, many more Japanese would have died, including civilians in that densely populated country. You're selectively leaving out what would have been hundreds (plural) of thousands of deaths just to make the destruction of those two targets sound worse than they were by describing them out of any context.
attacks have killed about 100000 people who weren't even born at the time
How many people do you suppose would have been born to all of those that were killed by the Japanese, had they not started the aggression? The thousands killed at Pearl Harbor alone would have had more children and grand children than that, never mind the thousands that died as young men during the ensuing conflict. That's whole generations and family trees cut off by the war the Japanese started.
It may have resulted in less deaths, but in my view deaths of soldiers are acceptable in war
You're pretty twisted, then. When is it ever "acceptable" for our soldiers to be killed? Are they just trash to you? Disposable? They put their lives at risk to do what they do, but they don't sign up to die. Deaths are deaths. These were nations at war, not armies at war. The Empire Of Japan attacked the United States, which includes its citizens. Citizens by the m
of course the lawyers get involved with what exactly a "presence" is, but that's besides the point
No, that exactly is the point. In the case in question, the fact that the online Borders brand has no nexus in California other than brand and marketing similarity with the separately incorporated brick-and-mortars, wasn't enough to insulate them from remitting CA sales tax.
In this case, it's pretty clear that Borders was trying to be a little slippery, but at a technical level, they're exactly as removed from nexus in California as, say, a small mom-and-pop mail order operation in South Dakota might be.
If a local retailer in California that sells some complementary product or service does any cross-promotion or referring to that business in South Dakota, that mom-and-pop could wind up in exactly the same boat. Likewise basic web affiliate marketing... any affiliate who happens to be in CA, referring traffic to a non-CA business (and there are thousands of examples of this) could be dragging all of those companies into the CA revenue stream by proxy. Likewise, any intermediary (like Commission Junction, or Performics) that enables that activity, could be a bridge to making their entire network of merchants "entangled" with California businessses.
Borders' web ops do not have a presence in CA "as defined by law", but the court found that it was close enough to count. Result: taxes due, despite that lack of nexus. Other indirectly related companies will find themselves in the same boat, by the thousands, given CA's dire finacial straights.
dropping tonnes of bombs and chemicals on Viet Nam
That's like saying that when the police are forced to kill a pair of armed bank robbers in a running gunfight that they are "just out shooting innocent residents of the city" because the two bank robbers happen to live there, and haven't been convicted of anything yet, even as they shoot wildly on the roadway attempting to fend off those interfering with their crime. If the US's purpose in Viet Nam was to "drop bombs on it," that would have been a lot easier than losing countless lives and spending untold resources trying to track down which jungle trails the murderous North Vietnamese Army (as proxies for their communist sponsors) were using as they tried their damndest to take the South by force. Bombing the supply lines and weapons of an invading aggessor is not the same as bombing "the country." Of course, you already know all of that, and you're just hoping that you can score some rhetorical points by making transparently emotion-based, sweeping generalizations designed to make the US look bad for getting involved in trying to defend South Viet Nam from the same fate as the North.
To use your logic, the air strikes used to disarm the paramilitary thugs in the Balkans were inappropriate, too. Should the US and those NATO partners that finally helped out have just let Serbia continue to grind away at the civilians in the neighboring parts of former Yugoslavia? We dropped lots of weapons there, too (so that we didn't have to have a hundred thousand troops and armor marching through the mountains of that region), and very effectively shut down the militants that were busy killing so many civilians and showing no sign of stopping.
I think you're looking at WWII through the lens of our current military capabilities, which are magically surgical by comparison. Hiroshoma and Nagasaki were vital military targets (for industrial and naval port reasons). Imperial Japan had already demonstrated that loss of civilian life wasn't going to do anything to end their attempt to hold onto the territory they'd be trying to seize - think in terms of the huge loss of civilians in the fires that ravaged Tokyo because of conventional weapons use there - the destruction could be said to have been far uglier than in Hiroshima.
Having to plow ahead and get the Japanese rulers to give up their war the old fashioned way (pummeling targets spread out all over their [at the time] fortress-like country, manned by people demonstrably willing to fight to the last), would have made a train wreck of the entire country. Hundreds of thousands more (than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) would have died on both sides, over a much longer and consumptive period. And yes, saving American lives first is by itself a reasonable pursuit (remember who started the conflict, and the misery they spread throughout the entire Pacific rim, including the systematic rape, starvation, and enslavement of untold innocents in China and throughout the southern islands), so the fact that less conflict in areas populated by Japanese civilians was a result of the two bombings is just frosting on the cake, and lucky for the Japanese civilians at the time.
Is it a shame that anyone who wasn't actively supporting the Emporer's conflict was killed in those two cities? At least as much of a shame as the deaths of all those that he had killed elsewhere (including in Hawaii). But with the entire might of the US military bearing down on Japan, the examples that the Japanese military showed is in Okinawa, Iwojima, and so on gave US military planners no indication that Japan would be less defensive of their main ancestral island.
I'm actually sort of amazed sometimes that some people suggest that they'd rather see even more people slowly ripped to shreds and burned alive through weeks of "conventional" conflict than the abrupt, localized, and completely effective end that the two other fission bombs put to things.
Because he won't quit. He'll simply open a new account with a new ISP and start all over again.
That's exactly where a robust, million-member network would shine. When that guy and his tactics surface again, he get's stomped by what amounts to an immune system that's seen that strain before. It's the stomping I'm started to get interested in, not just having thicker skin.
While I understand the desire to stick it to these creeps, from a purely cost/benefit analysis point-of-view, it doesn't seem to me to make a lot of sense
When you pay these clowns, all you're doing is proving to their apprentices that they've chosen the right career. It's exactly like giving terrorists or kidnappers what they want, and with exactly the same results.
Self defense is one thing, but attacking back is another
This is sophistry. Attacking "back" means by definition that you are responding to someone else's act. If you're standing in a bar and get hit in the face, well, you've just been hit in the face. There's time between that blow, and the next one. Between those blows, you're not "still" being hit in the face, but simply girding yourself for the next blow to the face isn't really enough, morally or practically. Physically stopping such an assault (or the online equivalent) is an appropriate response. And to the extent that disabling your physical attacker is the surest defense against him landing another blow, then you are (in a sense) "attacking back." But it's for defensive reasons, and only in response to an obvious provocation.
I've never seen a network attack from a dedicated, professional bad guy that didn't get repeated if you didn't do something about it. Increasingly, passive defenses don't hold up to the onslaught, and not everyone runs an online casino making enough money to buy $100,000 in instant remediation by some of the firms that specialize in trapping the traffic from gigantic zombie attacks.
When every merchant on the block is being abused by a gang of thugs, and the cops won't (or really, in the case of overseas cyber attacks, can't) do anything about it, it's reasonable for the shopkeepers on the block to band toghether and make attacking any one of them a provocation that is dramatically too expensive, or which takes away the attacker's tools.
Considering the huge horsepower of things like the SETI screensavers and P2P networks, I don't think it's a question of whether or not a conflict between spare-CPU/BW Good Guys and zombie-army bad guys could be won by the good guys. Or at least, make things painful for the bad guys. The main issue is counter-counter-counter-craftiness that might stealthily turn such a network to the dark side.
Several sys admins I know who have never had the time or inclination to put up a honeypot or opt for similar tactics absolutely light up at the prospect of actually making the attackers miserable. In fact, it's not even the attackers they complain about, it's the ISPs that (with copious documentation about the bad acts of specific customers) don't do anything about it. To the extent that foreign governments are those ISPs, well, same sentiment.
So, the real issue is governance of such a system. It's sort of like sharing time on a big research telescope. What committee can be trusted to put the resource to use effectively? I know that a lot of people with network resources are so fed up with the probes, the phishing, the DoS extortion and all the rest that they'd have absolutely no problem deploying a box or two, and a couple of MB/sec to the cause. But the liability(ies) for having it used unwisely are pretty scary, so I'm all ears if someone comes up with an interesting approach. If the worst thing that happens is I get a block of my IPs null routed on their way to Moscow, well, goshky, I'll take that deal.
Some things we have to take into our own hands. And just turning the other cheek with more and fancier firewalls and intrustion detection is too passive for my taste, at least in the face of concerted, bad-to-the-core coordinated efforts by professional, organized crackers. Have I wanted to burn up every inch of some basement-dwelling script kiddie's DSL before? Sometimes. But nothing like I've wanted to blot out entire pieces of some Asian and eastern-European networks. And not just for my sake - for all of my clients, and their clients, and everyone it impacts.
Don't mean to rant, but I've just spent all morning explaining this stuff to a suffering dot-com. His much-repeated question was "Why can't we just do this back at him until he quits? I'll spend the money... this is pissing me off."
No, my real point is that if the law of the land is that you have to have a particular form of insurance, then make that the law of the land. But let competitive private sector people provide the service. This is how car insurance works in the US, for example. I'm glad, myself, that I don't have to "buy" my car insurance from my state government. I understand the reason why the state law says that you have to carry it, but they leave it up to me to buy it from the most competitive place I can find.
In the case of earthquake insurance, the real issue is that some people build houses, or live in areas where the risk is intrinsicly higher for ultimately making a claim. If everyone is taxed so that that subset of people can have "government provided" earthquake coverage, then it's just a scheme to obscure the true costs, and to obscure the inequity in providing it. In private insurance arrangements, the provider has to compete with other providers (which forces the rates as low as they can go), but they also get to set rates differently for people who are, through their actions (like choosing to build a house on a fault line, or choosing to get speeding tickets every 3 months, or choosing to smoke), riskier.
If everyone has to have the insurance, that's a known X number of insurance accounts that competitors can gun for. It's a captive audience, but an audience provided with choices is going to force margins down as far as they can go. If the situation is that no insurance company could stay afloat selling earthquake insurance, then you have to question the overall fiscal sanity of the concept in the first place. As it is, it's probably a money loser, so they're just sticking it to the taxpayers of New Zealand.
At least in the US, flood insurance is optional - though it's handled through a government brokerage-type agency. The point is that a lot of people don't need (or want) it, and you have to pay for it yourself if you think you do. It's not the most optimal situation (since the feds are part of the equation), because it artifically encourages people to keep rebuilding right where the river is inevitably going to flood them right back out again in few years anyway.
If you have read other posts in this thread you would see that private sector does not handle earthquake insurance in Calfornia at all, let along more efficiently.
Right. But if you read the post I'm actually responding to, you'd see that we're talking about New Zealand.
Is, of course, ourselves. My experience with phishing and other social-hacks-by-email suggest that the ones that seem to really trip people up are the ones that recipients think are about themselves. I have seen the enemy and he is us.
Scientists do not peddle "truths" or "falsehoods". Conclusions are not "true" or "false", because nothing is provable through emperical means, and nothing unprovable can be "true" or "false".
But this doesn't stop scientists from demonstrating compelling enough practical understandings of how something actually is, and allowing us then to have a solid (as in useful enough) knowledge of it to then guide our actions. The "truth" of oribital mechanics, for example, is true enough to keep satellites in orbit and my HBO working. Empirical evidence suggests that we have a pretty good grip on this, but Chomsky could certainly cite several people whose studies suggest that satellites are actually help up by captive fairies enslaved by evil corporations. This is, of course, a rhetorical example, but you get my drift. People already disposed to his (or any) point of view are going to swallow citations and references pretty much without question.
A significant disruption in the Bay Area would have a real, tangible impact on many of the businesses and services that make the 'net work. Yes, it's decentralized, but it would be ugly. If nothing else, just having Cisco headquarters dissappear from the map would make a lot of ongoing network implementation projects, well, a lot more annoying.
our government kindly provides us with natural disaster insurance for earthquakes.
Um... doesn't that really just equate to everyone who lives there buys the insurance through taxes, and thus you've got not a benefit, but a mandatory service you have to buy? Doesn't mean you wouldn't want it, but since it's handled by the government, doesn't that imply an additional overhead/bureaucracy load that would be more efficiently handled through the private sector?
The problem is that different states, counties, municipalities have different tax rates for different types of merchandise, with the different taxes due under different circumstances on different schedules to different agencies. And a retailer that ships into those places, if it turns out they have to collect and remit those, has to keep up to date on constantly changing rules, rates, exceptions, and so on, through every little taxing zone everywhere in the country.
Not too long ago, DC was running a "no sales tax weekend" during back-to-school shopping season, to encourage shoppers to stay in DC rather than go out to the suburbs. Merchants had to exempt certain sorts of merchandise (specific types of clothing, certain school supplies, etc) from sales tax receipts for three days. And they also had to report on those sales for which they did NOT collect tax. Now multiply that sort of regulatory burden by all of the taxing authorities around the country, and then imagine a small business selling online trying to keep up.
We're talking about an impending March Of The Consultants to every mail order operation, and higher costs of doing business as a result. All of this will be passed along to shoppers (and the addition to the end prices will, of course, raise even more sales taxes!).
The traditional media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- will be the ones to go, if they don't adapt to the new situation. And this should please anyone that considers themselves a liberal person
Really? The majority of those outlets work specifically around a more liberal/'progressive' perspective. Sure, there are comparitively minor (in terms of actual audience headcount) places like FNC that don't deliberately lean left, but people who "consider themselves liberal" probably would be dissapointed to see NPR, or CNN, or Pacifica, or NBC, or CBS, etc. go away. They're major contributors to the lefter side of politics (coverage/opinion-wise) - no doubt a lot of liberal audiences would cringe if they couldn't get their Diane R in the afternoon, or watch CBS do their best to attack Republicans.
If you are confused, threatened, or just curious why not simple ask?
Again, that's exactly my point. If an employer is looking at hiring one of two people to do important IT work that involves interacting under time pressure with other people, and all other things being equal, why would she hire the person who brings - to every meeting with new vendors, customers or co-workers - the baggage of having to field questions (and take time to explain) it? Deliberately outlandish, provocative dress or body art are, well, provocative. It provokes behavior, response, and the time those things require. Meanwhile, no IT business is getting done. Nothing's being created, protected, backed up, maintained. It's bad enough when once in a while an employee's behavior distracts from the actual work for which everyone's getting paid... but when someone brings a deliberate, built-in, high-profile distraction designed to take attention away from other people/things - and it's there every day - that says something about how much that person values the business, the clients, the staff, and the financial health of the organization writing the paycheck and providing the benefits.
MS is pushing its way into all corners of the computing space by leveraging the *platform* on which all others must run
Here's where I'm a little foggy... what is the "must" part you're talking about? I'm betting that all of the Mac and *nix people out there don't really feel that they "must" use an MS platform. And Photoshop, of course, ran first and still runs better on a Mac (as any career graphic artist can tell you).
What Adobe gets out of bundling and price cutting is the same thing that any business gets: market share, at the expense of other products (like Corel's suite, for example).
Besides, Adobe has not be found guilty of monopolistic practices
And? Are you saying that Microsoft is doing something illegal right now, and continues to plan for more? You don't think that the intense scrutiny under which they, and every publicly held company now operate has changed things in the last few years?
Adobe merged with Macromedia so that they could own more of the market, not so that competition would get a leg up. Their patent on the PDF format means that they are the complete authority on how it's used. It's not some open source play-pen, it's something that they allow people to license under pretty strict terms (like not messing with the format in any way). Forthcoming expansions to that format (say, fancier media embedding, etc) can only be added to the PDF universe by Adobe, and they can do anything they want in terms of who can create software that works with a changed version of the PDF when the time comes. The PDF format - in the universe of this sort of file - is more of a "must use" (in your sense of that phrase) than MS's operating systems.
Unless, that is, Bezos and/or Branson think the first-mover advantage will really translate into significant profits. I suspect, however, that those profits are in the pretty distant future, and the best way to bring the profits closer would be to cooperate.
Sure, but then after they get the whole thing making a buck, some guy in his basement will complain that his own personal open source ballistic rocket ship is being unfairly kept out of the hands of users by the $pace$hipOne evil monopolists.
I want to live off the grid and independent of society; grow my own food, make my own fuel, grow my own food and live an undisturbed life.
See, I'm an outdoors person. I hunt and eat wild game, and put a stupid amount of my time and resources in being able to work in the field with my beloved dogs. I work 60-80 hours a week so I can afford to do it, and put in those extra hours so that there's no opportunity for the people who pay me to object when I alter the situation by working mostly from home.
That being said: I like having dependable electricity (refridgeration is nice), I like my broadband net connection (so I can have discussions like this), and I like delightful little "corporate" products like canned food with no botulism, anti-biotics for when I stab myself with a stick while out hunting pheasants, and all of the microelectronics that allow me to have things like climate control, power generation when I'm not plugged into the grid, and so on.
You can't have the technology that makes off-the-grid living safe and pleasant without the research horsepower and production scales of large companies. Further, if you're going to grow your own food, you're going to use more land and resources than you would if you paid a highly efficient in-the-business farmer to grow it for you. There's no way you can put as much food on the table from the same acre of land without the economies of scale that represents.
Now, if you really want to be "independent of society" (which is little hypocritical, because you can do that right now by walking off into the woods, but you're not doing it) you're going to have to admit that you don't want doctors that can set a broken bone, metal workers that can help you make farming implements, and everything else that separates us from a 1000-years-ago existence. Hell even a thousand years ago we had blacksmiths, farmers, wainwrights, and other specialists that worked in barter or trade so that every person didn't have to know how to and have the time to do everything in order to survive past the age of 25.
I'm betting you do want society, you just want it in your own version. So, you've got to find enough other people that will subscribe to your exact vision and be physically near each other enough that you can barter (since you're not going to depend on societal constructs like banks, or corporate-made vehicles to convey your vegetables to the blacksmith in exchange for repairing your plow blade). And, good luck perpetuating that micro-society, because most women will want to give birth in a hospital (possibly run by a corporation, but certainly filled with high tech supplies and equipment made by companies who also train life-long career medical people in how to use them) where they and their babies are more likely to survive the process than they were back when we all lived in "villages."
Nonsense. I want the perfect 200-acre place myself - with a well-built, modern, fuel-efficient, self-reliant home. I want the time to enjoy it before I die. But I know that in order to finance that (in less "corporate" times, living in a decent house on land you called your own and on which you could completely depend for your sustinence would have made you an aristrocratic and loathed "landowner" or perhaps a minor earl or similar), you've got to come to it with major resources up front. There are too many people in the country, and too little land for people to just stake a claim. It's not like that any more (nor anywhere else... try doing that in, say, South America, Africa, or Asia, and you risk simply having what you've built taken away by thugs or socialist movements). So, good luck doing what the rest of us are doing: trying to earn enough to buy your little fiefdom and live privately. By most people's standards, that's called "being rich." And it doesn't happen in a vacuum.
your translation is a subjective fabrication of what you think someone else is thinking.
... medical reasons?), they have to know that hanging a hardware store off of their face is going to suggest a certain need for attention, and willingness to present an atmosphere of discomfort in order to get that attention.
But that's exactly my point. Unless you come right out and say what the 1-inch hole in your earlobe and the four studs in your forehead do mean, you're leaving it up to the average person to guess. And most people are going to assume that whatever it "means" to the person who did it, the highly visible nature of it, especially on the face, is so that it will be seen. The vast majority of the things we all do to our appearance are done to project some facet of a larger image, to convey alignment with a particular way of life or attitude. Even if that's not true for a particular person (say, they have to have six eyebrow rings for
But it still doesn't matter - it's in the eye of the beholder, and when you staple your lips, you're going to be subject to whatever the average person thinks about what you're trying to say. And if you aren't going to continually start all of your business conversations with an explanation of "it's not really what you think" or "don't worry, it only looks like it hurts" or "people have been piercing faces for thousands of years, get over it" before you talk about buying and implementing that new load balancing router pair, well... then you have to put up with me, and everyone else, jumping to contextual conclusions about what you are trying to say. People in an environment where they can afford to pay real career-type IT salaries to quality nerds (which is what this whole thread is all about) don't usually have time sort through all of that, and aren't going to want to wonder if every staffer, vendor, or customer that Mr. Pierced is going to be in front of is going to want to take the time either.
The shorthand interpretation of the look in question is registered pretty solidly on the wider culture. Never mind the irony of people trying so hard to be "unique" that they look just like half a million other Goths or whatever, the issue is that most people have at least some notion that the heavily pierced, tatooed person is hoping that all that decoration will be seen (especially when it's in places, like on the face, where it can't be missed). And the desire for it to be seen equates to an expectation that the underlying message is either obvious, or is suitable for speculation. And to the 40-year-old who manages the department (and the budget that would pay the tatooed IT person wanting that stable paycheck and health benefits) is going to make some snap decisions based on that first impression that Mr. Pierce is forcing her to digest. It doesn't matter what his reason is for the body art, any more than it matters what Mark Rothko was thinking when he painted: the audience will draw its own conclusions unless you provide a running commentary, and you can't spend your day at work providing one and still expect that time to be as valuable (and well paid) as someone who spends that same time, say, writing code or tuning servers.
That's why I'm trying to immerse myself as little as possible for the shortest amount of time I can, and then leave it forever.
"The corporate world" doesn't exist. I've never seen any two that operate in just the same way. Some groups of two or three people incorporate just to avoid being frivalously sued out of existance, and bigger operations have no choice but to carry on in way that their shareholders expect... or there won't be shareholders, which means the company doesn't exist, doesn't have customers, doesn't employee people, and doesn't cough up any paychecks to people like you who want... what, exactly? Resume fodder, training, stable income, until you can start your own company?
Once you do have your own company, will everyone that you hire do whatever they want, how they want, when they want, and you get to pay them no matter what? Or might you set some expectations about what your employees are expected to do? Would you keep employees around no matter what they said or did to a customer? Would you keep paying them if they produced something that no one wants or would be willing to buy? Is there any chance that an employee might consider your having some actual, measurable, objective expectations as "sucking" in the same way you say you hate?
Sure, if someone has every skill you need, lots of experience in the real world, can communicate clearly and professionally... that's a great start. But let's not pretend that the huge tatoos and copious, highly visible piercings are just a simple "style." They are very potent messages, which don't jive too well with the other messages we're talking about, here.
For example (if we translate all of the messages involved into the spoken word): "Hi, I'm a talented, certified Cisco jockey - just what you need. You can trust me with your crucial data, and trust that I will protect you from Starbucks-fueled anarchist semi-punks trying to break through your firewall to deface The Man's web site. Also, whenever I'm in a meeting with management, you'll see that I specifically (and permanently) have chosen to slightly shock and unsettle the average person, and send a not-very-subtle disturbing message of dark counter-culture and pseudo-tribal pop cultism that will completely go against the grain of your company's typical customers, vendors, employees, and management. But despite my doing everything I can to make you stare at me, I insist that you do not, and only consider me just another applicant. All of this stuff I've done to myself means nothing in the context of what I do at work, because who I really am doesn't matter at work, even though I want the salary of a dedicated IT professional for whom the career actually is important. So, let's talk money! And, are you staring at my eyebrow piercings, my mohawk, or my reptile-eye contact lenses? I can't see very well with them in, and I want to be sure that I'm coming across well in this interview."