"Security researchers at a recent summit" obviously have a very limited knowledge of political campaigns. No campaign manager that actually got to the level of being on a serious contender's camapign would risk a media storm over something like that. I'm sure if "Security researchers at a recent summit" managed campaigns, that might happen...but otherwise there's no way to pull that off without paying someone a lot of money...and if you pay them it goes on your FEC report..and if it goes on your FEC report, your opponents' researchers see it as plain as day.
I'll work on an OSS project when McDonald's starts giving me Open Source Hamburgers for my trouble. Or when my landlord decides to "Open Source" my rent.
Until that wonderful utopian time, I find the idea that my highly skilled and productive work should benefit those who see me as an interchangeable part with someone in a third world nation, and benefit them for "free", no less, to be highly distasteful.
People always say, "But if you work on OSS, you'll be making people happy!"....
In response, I can only quote a wise man:
Homer: Oh! Look at me! I'm making people happy! I'm the magical man from Happy Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!...... Oh, by the way, I was being sarcastic.
Marge: Well, duuhh.
-The Simpsons, "Flaming Moe's"
which have been flat... Here's a quote from a Seattle Times article last week, that sums the point up rather nicely:
Businesses bemoan the alleged shortage of Americans trained to do the work. But wait a second -- the law of supply and demand states that a shortage of something causes its price to rise. Wages in information technology have been flat.
The companies fret that not enough young Americans are studying science and technology. Well, cutting the pay in those fields isn't much of an incentive, is it? I have yet to see any of the people complaining about the "lack of U.S. skill" answer that question adequately...
This is obviously coming from an Indian news site, and begins with a charged (and quite honestly offensive) statement reading "IT professionals in the US may soon stop complaining..."
Gee...gee whiz...You think this might be because we are on the eve of the "Trickle Out" Republicans being voted out of congress and India is faced with the unpleasant spectre of actually having balanced trade with America? That they won't have an American congress that gives tax breaks to corporations that ship America's jobs to their country? Gosh, Andy - could it be?
Search engine optimization has been a part of political campaigns for several years now. Smart campaigns have been using it for some time. While it is a new topic for discussion in the media as a result of my campaign, it was even rampant during the 2004 election, when conservative bloggers Google bombed John Kerry as a "flip flopper," and progressive bloggers Google Bombed George Bush as a "miserable failure." If you don't believe me, feel free to try out those keywords in a Google search. The bombs are still active.
There are three main differences between the campaign I started and other, similar campaigns. First, I did it out in the open with full transparency on my blog, using my name, and with my email in full view. Second, it is much more wide ranging, since it has multiple, simultaneous targets. Third, and most importantly, instead of targeting campaign talking points such as "flip flopper" or "miserable failure," this campaign worked to only use non-partisan media reports. No talking points. No opinion columns. A bare minimum use of alternative media. In other words, this campaign works solely to push news reports made by trusted, mainstream news outlets into the foreground during the final two weeks of the campaign season.
At a time when what conservative pundits think about Michael J. Fox has somehow become campaign "news," quite frankly I believe that what I am doing is more substantive and fact-based than much of the reporting we have recently seen on the campaign trail. I am also highly suspicious that I am receiving so many media requests because many might want to use my very small campaign as a way to paint progressives and Democrats as a whole in a negative light. Simply put, I do not trust your motives for wanting to write on this campaign.
Finally, I am running multiple campaigns at the end of this cycle, with absolutely no help outside of volunteers from the progressive netroots. Not only does this mean that my actions are my own, it also means that I do not have a lot of extra time to field interviews every hour. It is more important for me to see these campaigns succeed, and for Democrats to retake Congress, than it is for me to receive press on my efforts. We will see soon enough whether or not these campaigns had their desired effect. Right now, I don't know if they have. At the very least, I would like to see how well these campaigns work before I engage in further discussions concerning them to the press. I will be more than happy to talk with you about this the day after the election, or even to discuss Use It Or Lose right now. Currently, however, discussions of Google Bombs are off the table.
I am constantly astounded by the vigor with which some seemingly otherwise intelligent programmers pick up the Open Source banner and run with it.
Open Source is better for the world-at-large. Make no mistake about it. The world-at-large is more productive for getting software for free. They can spend the money they would have spent on software on other things.
But how could you think that this is better for *programmers*? I *always* ask this of my fellow IT professionals and they *always* respond with some vague argument about how participating in Open Source projects will get you "recognized"...Well, in the sarcastic wrods of Homer Simpson "Look at me: I'm making people _happy_".
Someone please enlighten me. Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free. I'm not saying it doesn't make the economy-at-large more productive...clearly it benefits all the people with "business" and "creative" degrees, and since there are more of them than us, it clearly benefits the "larger group", so to speak. But how does it make *us* better off? I'm not so engrossed in matrerialism that I think how much I make is the only thing that matters...but I find the idea that my reward for being part of a highly successful OS project might be getting "recognized" and maybe if I'm lucky getting hired on as a code monkey for some "creative" people that used what I worked so hard on for free very distasteful.
I really tried to embrace the idea of the OS movement, but because no one could answer those questions I have come to regard it, at best, an idea for a perfect society (one where *everyone*, not just programmers, works for the common good) that is tragically ahead of its time and at worst a pox on the profession of programming.
I see a lot of threads on here smack-talking the idea that we should unionize based on arguments like "It rewards lazy programmers", "Just quit if you don't like your job, etc."... I'm a little sad to see this narrow and corporate view of what unions are and what they do coming from you guys; Unions are more than just collective bargaining-bins - They offer a way for people who have a common interest to communicate and organize around those interests - to take *action* to see that those interests are protected...A way to communicate with each other. That's why it makes me so sad to see my brothers here, who I think are the best communicators and organizers in the world - if not always the most eloquent, trash-talking the idea that we should have a system...a network...through which we can share information to our mutual benefit. We don't have try to strong-arm companies or force anyone to join...but what the hell is wrong with sharing information with each other? Isn't that what are core competency really is, at the heart of it? We've created this huge internet..we maintain the channels through which everyone else communicates...So why shouldn't *we* use those channels to share information about what employers do to us...not strongarm them...but just to make sure that our brothers are aware when someone treats us poorly...promotes the bad programmers over the good ones...offshores our jobs and then tries to hire us back to fix the mess...Shouldn't we be telling each other this stuff? Maybe just to give those companies something to think about? (i.e. "If I treat my programmers like crap, I won't be able to hire good programmers because they'll all know about me") Wouldn't that help all of us?
You know, I think that Slashdot *is* our union in a way...We're all here reading and posting at the same place and we should start communicating with each other about this kind of stuff; It could be a force that doesn't just *punish* companies that treat their IT workers badly, but *rewards* the ones that treat them well (i.e. "If I treat my programmers well, all the good programmers will want to work for me.) That's not "communist"...in fact, I would argue that it doesn't get more "free market" than that in any flavor.
Hi, I'm John Q. Fratboy. I wasn't intelligent or willing enough to study a falsifiable science in college (math is *hard*), so I decided to major in Psychology.
Pretending that human behavior can be quantified and predicted allowed me to go out drinking on Friday night and puke all over some bar-skank I met while the people studying real science were in "labs" or something.
I was afraid that after I graduated, I wouldn't be able to find a job (especially considering that I live in America, which has become saturated with "soft skills" people like me: I can't make or fix anything, but I'm really "creative" and good at "talking on the phone" to other people, and then calling an engineer or an intern when I actually have to do something). But our culture's blind acceptance of the foolish notion that Psychology is a real science allowed me to get a job creating "artificially intelligent personality tests". Even though it fails the most basic "infinitely repeatable and falsifiable" metric for being scientific, I was able to sell it to some HR managers (they are "creative" just like me) to help them pick-and-choose the engineers that will be working for them. After all, if you're only going to have a few engineers and people that actually "do" and "make" things supporting the rest of the "phone-talkers" in the office, you better make sure they're the best ones you can get, right?
Let me say that I think the "net effect" that these guys have on the political & media scene in America is, in fact, a very _very_ positive one; They have played a critical role in bringing America back to the yellow-fedora-wearing-"get-the-story-at-any-cost" style of journalism that the mainstream media has been denying the public for a long time. Granted- most of their stories lean to the left, but the right has the "Drudge Report" to balance that out. So, insofar as they act as "channels" for information, they are very valuable: They've played an important role in making sure that the MSM doesn't "pin" stories like the Abramoff/Delay/Culture-of-Corruption stories under the public's radar.
As political analysts? Take it with a grain..no, a _block_ of salt. It's ironic that this topic would get posted today...as it marks the 0-for-20 record for them in backing House candidates (they couldn't even get Cuellar [TX-28] into a stinking _runoff_!). They want to harp and harp about how bad the "party establishment" is...and they propose that they should be the shining leaders of this movement to replace that establishment...But it's hard to buy their arguments when their record is as poor as it has been. They are kelp being tossed around in the waves of American politics. They might like to think that they are making those waves - and I'm sure their book contains all manner of self-congratulating passages telling the reader how they think they did that - but they aren't. If you are reading this article - Congratulations! You have a better record at supporting democratic candidates than either of them do!! But if you want to get a book that tells you why their "New Establishment" is so much better than the ones put together by Democrats _who actually got elected at some point_, then go pick it up at your local book store.
People who can't find jobs programming go on to find other kinds of jobs, those that are more profitable.
I hear this protest being regurgitated by everyone who advocates unbalanced trade. They always expectorate this vague vision of "other kinds of jobs that are more profitable".
So I go back to school (that's assuming I can afford it...most Americans have to suport families and probably can't) and learn $New_Thing. Before I can even get hired with the skills I learned for $New_Thing, Cambodia starts doing $New_Thing at wage-slave rates, and a new cycle of unbalanced trade starts. I go to the Slashdot forums and read a post by someone who thinks he's an economic genius that reads: People who can't find jobs doing $New_Thing go on to find other kinds of jobs, those that are more profitable.
So I go back to school and learn $New_Thing.2...
You know...in programming we learn about these things called "loops"....
This summer is a big congressional election season. Offer to help one of these campaigns (most have contact info on their websites) with their financial/FEC-filing software: sell your CIS background and prove that you can help the finance director handle the "logical flow" of information from checks/donors to the FEC. The earlier you can get on a campaign, the better.
None of your peers thought of this - trust me. And if you're on a campaign that wins, your future employer will piss themselves and hire you on the spot when they get a recommendation call from a U.S. Congressman. If you don't win, you still get a lot of good contacts and you prove to potential employers that you can handle working in a high-pressure "people-centric" environment.
The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer.
What do you think the "great user interface artist" and the "star" programmer did to become good at what they do? I'm guessing it took a little bit of time to get that good. It's not really the amount of time you spend doing things but what you spend your time doing that matters the most; A truth that is reflected in real life (the star programmer spent years studying to understand what he knows) and, to a certain extent, in WoW (You could sit around and spend all your time getting great at fishing, but that wouldn't get you in the endgame areas like Molten Core, where the best loot is).
And come to think of it, I kind of like the idea in WoW; your character gets better for spending your "time" doing things that are challenging for their skill level. I think there's a lot of people that could learn something from that.
No: WoW (or any other MMOG) will not be replacing all other forms of socialization. I don't think anyone claimed that. And, realistically, it will not be "completely replacing" golf, which some 25 million people play in America alone (although, I wouldn't mind if it did; I hate golf with a burning passion). It does, however, offer an interesting place where people can have discussions and work together on solving what is, essentially, a dynamic "sliding-scale" puzzle. And look at the numbers: 5,000,000 people play WoW. Do you really think that the preconception of gamers as "social trolls" and "kiddi3s" really applies to _all_ 5 million of those people?... Well after having the general chat channel turned on for five minutes, I can see how you might reasonably draw that conclusion... but still.
My reason for playing the game is not that I don't have anything else to do, or that I don't have any friends. In fact, my best friend _is_ the reason I play the game. He had to move overseas for a job. Neither of us are really "gamers" (or maybe we are now?...in any case, we won't be wearing "i roll 20s" tshirts any time soon) and we are contantly dismayed by the seemingly endless supply of douchebag "kidd13s" that seem to populate every guild we try to join, but it's been really cool to have this "puzzle" thing that we can do together, even though he's on another continent.
That's all I'm saying: I think MMOGs offer a unique new (at least new to me, anyway) forum for people- even if it's just to a subset of people that are predisposed to enjoying that sort of thing.
It applies to this situation because of what the Chinese government is trying to do and what the Google name (at least up to this point) has stood for.
The Chinese government doesn't just want to block the searches of it's citizens; They are keenly aware of the sentiment that Goethe wrote about in that quote- They want their people to think that they are free without actually being free at all (in effect "hopelessly enslaving" them). The Chinese citizen that searches for "Falun Gong" and the first thing he sees is a Chinese propaganda site calling them a "violent" cult while hiding all of the stories about the torture and brutality that these people have endured at the hands of the Chinese government... now I don't know if those stories are true or not..but at least I have the _Freedom_ to see both sides of the story. If that were my government, at least I would be able to look into it...to question it. The Chinese guy can't do that now....
And the worst part about it...the _worst_ part...
It's done under the name of an _American_ company; A country that represents freedom (or at least it did before the Bush era) to everyone across the globe. Google doesn't just take it's own name in there...it takes the name of America with it. So it makes the Goethe quote that much more poignant, because the guy searching for information about the Chinese government's brutality associates that Google/American image with the site he's using and says to himself "Hey...these guys are Americans...the paragons of freedom...if there was something bad to report here, then they would certainly be telling me"...So it's worse than getting _no_ information because the _some_ information is _specifically designed to prevent him from trying to do justice for his countrymen_.
I called my representative, Tim Ryan (OH-17), about this and as an answer to your statement celebrating Google's submission to the Chinese government, I will leave you his statement:
"Americans were told that globalization and free trade would make countries like China more democratic. But the recent decisions by Microsoft, Yahoo, and now Google, show otherwise and are cause for great concern. These companies share more than just an American address. They've all benefited richly from America's democratic values and our free market system-not to mention billions of taxpayer dollars that helped develop the Internet and other information technologies. As such, American citizens and lawmakers have every right to demand that U.S. companies advance freedom rather than oppression."
Is the illusion of freedom more dangerous than its absence?
"There is no man so hopelessly enslaved as he who believes, falsely, that he is free" - Von Goethe
"My business partner and I run a small but growing software company."... "They would develop and support some products while we would be solely responsible for sales, marketing"
It sounds to me like what you're _really_ running is a marketing company for offshored programming.
So I'm going to give you the kind of advice you might expect from posting in a place where the primary audience consists of "on-shore" programmers that have watched their quality of life get torpedoed by marketdroids patting themselves on the back for trading our jobs, standards of living, and our nation's economic backbone overseas:
How else is a potential employer going to realize that you have a given skill set?
IT Certs are not a guarantee of knowledge, nor are they exclusive indicators of knowledge. A good employer will be willing to look beyond the certification- but at least that piece of paper gives them a little bit of validation from a trusted 3rd party.
Is this the beginning of the end of the dominance of India in the tech offshoring market?
No- it's the beginning of the "poverty as a comparitive advantage" economic model. Just like we've been predicting for years.
These corporations were getting high off of the fact that they had an easy way to undermine American labor and trade standards- India was the perfect "fertile ground" for that; They had the education system of a developed nation (skilled workers), but the labor standards of a third-world nation. Now that they are actually establishing some standards for themselves, they are losing their "poverty advantage".
Welcome to the new World Economy- a "round robin" game where your nation wins when your standards of living have eroded to a point less than everyone else's; and you lose as soon as you try to start making them better.
And let's not forget: those stats are by degrees awarded. That doesn't mean they were rewarded to Americans. Honestly...how many people do you think came here from overseas to study History and Social Sciences. Let's be honest; maybe 1% at most. How many of those awarded CIS degrees went to people who will be going back home and using them? It's tough to say...but at Ohio State, where I went, the percentage of foreign students in that program was EASILY 30% - 40%.
So let's take a look at some real numbers and see what that means:
History/Social S = 132,874
CIS = 47,299 (about 65% of the total)
But hey, at least if we go crazy we'll have 76,671
psychologists to talk us down.
"CNET fails to cover the real threat to American technological competitiveness, the hidden agendas of Chicken Littles like Jim Foley of the Computing Research Association, David Patterson of the ACM and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, all of whose organizations have a vested interest in playing the education card."
So...improving our education system is a threat?
I heartily disagree. First, let me say that I believe that American universities still have the best CIS programs in the world (evidenced by the fact that the best programmers come to US universities to study). The problem is that they are not populated by US students as much as they have been in the past. So this guy says "Big Deal, we're still pretty good".
If you want to have a mediocre economy and way of life, maybe it isn't a big deal. We can just sit back and let our CIS and other science programs fester; We'll become a nation of bullsht psychology and history majors- "Idea People" who can't really do anything but form abstract opinions about other people's abstract opinions..
But wait...maybe I'm jumping the gun here...
Maybe we should strive for something a little bit more than just mediocrity...Maybe we don't need 20 history BAs for every science degree in this country. Maybe..just maybe..We should try to embrace the spirit of hard work (yes CIS is a little bit harder than most of the "High-school" degrees our universities pass out these days) and ingenuity that made us a leader on the world stage.
Is it "more scary"? I don't really think so, but that's not really the point of the article either.
It does, however, make very eminent the issue of unscrupulous "bad citizen" corporations sending private information of good citizens overseas where they have no control over it or legal recourse for that matter.
We slashdotters "told you so", so it makes the story more ironic as well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Security researchers at a recent summit" obviously have a very limited knowledge of political campaigns. No campaign manager that actually got to the level of being on a serious contender's camapign would risk a media storm over something like that. I'm sure if "Security researchers at a recent summit" managed campaigns, that might happen...but otherwise there's no way to pull that off without paying someone a lot of money...and if you pay them it goes on your FEC report..and if it goes on your FEC report, your opponents' researchers see it as plain as day.
Not gonna happen.
Until that wonderful utopian time, I find the idea that my highly skilled and productive work should benefit those who see me as an interchangeable part with someone in a third world nation, and benefit them for "free", no less, to be highly distasteful.
People always say, "But if you work on OSS, you'll be making people happy!"....
In response, I can only quote a wise man:
Homer: Oh! Look at me! I'm making people happy! I'm the magical man from Happy Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!...... Oh, by the way, I was being sarcastic.
Marge: Well, duuhh.
-The Simpsons, "Flaming Moe's"
Here's a quote from a Seattle Times article last week, that sums the point up rather nicely: Businesses bemoan the alleged shortage of Americans trained to do the work. But wait a second -- the law of supply and demand states that a shortage of something causes its price to rise. Wages in information technology have been flat.
The companies fret that not enough young Americans are studying science and technology. Well, cutting the pay in those fields isn't much of an incentive, is it? I have yet to see any of the people complaining about the "lack of U.S. skill" answer that question adequately...
This is obviously coming from an Indian news site, and begins with a charged (and quite honestly offensive) statement reading "IT professionals in the US may soon stop complaining..."
Gee...gee whiz...You think this might be because we are on the eve of the "Trickle Out" Republicans being voted out of congress and India is faced with the unpleasant spectre of actually having balanced trade with America? That they won't have an American congress that gives tax breaks to corporations that ship America's jobs to their country? Gosh, Andy - could it be?
From one of the main bloggers at MyDD:
Search engine optimization has been a part of political campaigns for several years now. Smart campaigns have been using it for some time. While it is a new topic for discussion in the media as a result of my campaign, it was even rampant during the 2004 election, when conservative bloggers Google bombed John Kerry as a "flip flopper," and progressive bloggers Google Bombed George Bush as a "miserable failure." If you don't believe me, feel free to try out those keywords in a Google search. The bombs are still active.
There are three main differences between the campaign I started and other, similar campaigns. First, I did it out in the open with full transparency on my blog, using my name, and with my email in full view. Second, it is much more wide ranging, since it has multiple, simultaneous targets. Third, and most importantly, instead of targeting campaign talking points such as "flip flopper" or "miserable failure," this campaign worked to only use non-partisan media reports. No talking points. No opinion columns. A bare minimum use of alternative media. In other words, this campaign works solely to push news reports made by trusted, mainstream news outlets into the foreground during the final two weeks of the campaign season.
At a time when what conservative pundits think about Michael J. Fox has somehow become campaign "news," quite frankly I believe that what I am doing is more substantive and fact-based than much of the reporting we have recently seen on the campaign trail. I am also highly suspicious that I am receiving so many media requests because many might want to use my very small campaign as a way to paint progressives and Democrats as a whole in a negative light. Simply put, I do not trust your motives for wanting to write on this campaign.
Finally, I am running multiple campaigns at the end of this cycle, with absolutely no help outside of volunteers from the progressive netroots. Not only does this mean that my actions are my own, it also means that I do not have a lot of extra time to field interviews every hour. It is more important for me to see these campaigns succeed, and for Democrats to retake Congress, than it is for me to receive press on my efforts. We will see soon enough whether or not these campaigns had their desired effect. Right now, I don't know if they have. At the very least, I would like to see how well these campaigns work before I engage in further discussions concerning them to the press. I will be more than happy to talk with you about this the day after the election, or even to discuss Use It Or Lose right now. Currently, however, discussions of Google Bombs are off the table.
Best,
Chris Bowers
I am constantly astounded by the vigor with which some seemingly otherwise intelligent programmers pick up the Open Source banner and run with it.
Open Source is better for the world-at-large. Make no mistake about it. The world-at-large is more productive for getting software for free. They can spend the money they would have spent on software on other things.
But how could you think that this is better for *programmers*? I *always* ask this of my fellow IT professionals and they *always* respond with some vague argument about how participating in Open Source projects will get you "recognized"...Well, in the sarcastic wrods of Homer Simpson "Look at me: I'm making people _happy_".
Someone please enlighten me. Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free. I'm not saying it doesn't make the economy-at-large more productive...clearly it benefits all the people with "business" and "creative" degrees, and since there are more of them than us, it clearly benefits the "larger group", so to speak. But how does it make *us* better off? I'm not so engrossed in matrerialism that I think how much I make is the only thing that matters...but I find the idea that my reward for being part of a highly successful OS project might be getting "recognized" and maybe if I'm lucky getting hired on as a code monkey for some "creative" people that used what I worked so hard on for free very distasteful.
I really tried to embrace the idea of the OS movement, but because no one could answer those questions I have come to regard it, at best, an idea for a perfect society (one where *everyone*, not just programmers, works for the common good) that is tragically ahead of its time and at worst a pox on the profession of programming.
I see a lot of threads on here smack-talking the idea that we should unionize based on arguments like "It rewards lazy programmers", "Just quit if you don't like your job, etc." ... I'm a little sad to see this narrow and corporate view of what unions are and what they do coming from you guys; Unions are more than just collective bargaining-bins - They offer a way for people who have a common interest to communicate and organize around those interests - to take *action* to see that those interests are protected...A way to communicate with each other. That's why it makes me so sad to see my brothers here, who I think are the best communicators and organizers in the world - if not always the most eloquent, trash-talking the idea that we should have a system...a network...through which we can share information to our mutual benefit. We don't have try to strong-arm companies or force anyone to join...but what the hell is wrong with sharing information with each other? Isn't that what are core competency really is, at the heart of it? We've created this huge internet..we maintain the channels through which everyone else communicates...So why shouldn't *we* use those channels to share information about what employers do to us...not strongarm them...but just to make sure that our brothers are aware when someone treats us poorly...promotes the bad programmers over the good ones...offshores our jobs and then tries to hire us back to fix the mess...Shouldn't we be telling each other this stuff? Maybe just to give those companies something to think about? (i.e. "If I treat my programmers like crap, I won't be able to hire good programmers because they'll all know about me") Wouldn't that help all of us?
You know, I think that Slashdot *is* our union in a way...We're all here reading and posting at the same place and we should start communicating with each other about this kind of stuff; It could be a force that doesn't just *punish* companies that treat their IT workers badly, but *rewards* the ones that treat them well (i.e. "If I treat my programmers well, all the good programmers will want to work for me.) That's not "communist"...in fact, I would argue that it doesn't get more "free market" than that in any flavor.
Hi, I'm John Q. Fratboy. I wasn't intelligent or willing enough to study a falsifiable science in college (math is *hard*), so I decided to major in Psychology.
Pretending that human behavior can be quantified and predicted allowed me to go out drinking on Friday night and puke all over some bar-skank I met while the people studying real science were in "labs" or something.
I was afraid that after I graduated, I wouldn't be able to find a job (especially considering that I live in America, which has become saturated with "soft skills" people like me: I can't make or fix anything, but I'm really "creative" and good at "talking on the phone" to other people, and then calling an engineer or an intern when I actually have to do something). But our culture's blind acceptance of the foolish notion that Psychology is a real science allowed me to get a job creating "artificially intelligent personality tests". Even though it fails the most basic "infinitely repeatable and falsifiable" metric for being scientific, I was able to sell it to some HR managers (they are "creative" just like me) to help them pick-and-choose the engineers that will be working for them. After all, if you're only going to have a few engineers and people that actually "do" and "make" things supporting the rest of the "phone-talkers" in the office, you better make sure they're the best ones you can get, right?
Start thinking "outside the box". You need to take a more solution-oriented approach to your problem and focus on your deliverables.
I think you'll find that if you shift your paradigm a little bit, your growth intensity will increase by orders of magnitude.
Just create a win-win big picture for yourself and you're success strategy will manifest itself with "positive team margins" for everyone around you.
Let me say that I think the "net effect" that these guys have on the political & media scene in America is, in fact, a very _very_ positive one; They have played a critical role in bringing America back to the yellow-fedora-wearing-"get-the-story-at-any-cost" style of journalism that the mainstream media has been denying the public for a long time. Granted- most of their stories lean to the left, but the right has the "Drudge Report" to balance that out. So, insofar as they act as "channels" for information, they are very valuable: They've played an important role in making sure that the MSM doesn't "pin" stories like the Abramoff/Delay/Culture-of-Corruption stories under the public's radar.
As political analysts? Take it with a grain..no, a _block_ of salt. It's ironic that this topic would get posted today...as it marks the 0-for-20 record for them in backing House candidates (they couldn't even get Cuellar [TX-28] into a stinking _runoff_!). They want to harp and harp about how bad the "party establishment" is...and they propose that they should be the shining leaders of this movement to replace that establishment...But it's hard to buy their arguments when their record is as poor as it has been. They are kelp being tossed around in the waves of American politics. They might like to think that they are making those waves - and I'm sure their book contains all manner of self-congratulating passages telling the reader how they think they did that - but they aren't. If you are reading this article - Congratulations! You have a better record at supporting democratic candidates than either of them do!! But if you want to get a book that tells you why their "New Establishment" is so much better than the ones put together by Democrats _who actually got elected at some point_, then go pick it up at your local book store.
People who can't find jobs programming go on to find other kinds of jobs, those that are more profitable.
...
I hear this protest being regurgitated by everyone who advocates unbalanced trade. They always expectorate this vague vision of "other kinds of jobs that are more profitable".
So I go back to school (that's assuming I can afford it...most Americans have to suport families and probably can't) and learn $New_Thing. Before I can even get hired with the skills I learned for $New_Thing, Cambodia starts doing $New_Thing at wage-slave rates, and a new cycle of unbalanced trade starts. I go to the Slashdot forums and read a post by someone who thinks he's an economic genius that reads: People who can't find jobs doing $New_Thing go on to find other kinds of jobs, those that are more profitable.
So I go back to school and learn $New_Thing.2
You know...in programming we learn about these things called "loops"....
This summer is a big congressional election season. Offer to help one of these campaigns (most have contact info on their websites) with their financial/FEC-filing software: sell your CIS background and prove that you can help the finance director handle the "logical flow" of information from checks/donors to the FEC. The earlier you can get on a campaign, the better.
None of your peers thought of this - trust me. And if you're on a campaign that wins, your future employer will piss themselves and hire you on the spot when they get a recommendation call from a U.S. Congressman. If you don't win, you still get a lot of good contacts and you prove to potential employers that you can handle working in a high-pressure "people-centric" environment.
The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer.
What do you think the "great user interface artist" and the "star" programmer did to become good at what they do? I'm guessing it took a little bit of time to get that good. It's not really the amount of time you spend doing things but what you spend your time doing that matters the most; A truth that is reflected in real life (the star programmer spent years studying to understand what he knows) and, to a certain extent, in WoW (You could sit around and spend all your time getting great at fishing, but that wouldn't get you in the endgame areas like Molten Core, where the best loot is).
And come to think of it, I kind of like the idea in WoW; your character gets better for spending your "time" doing things that are challenging for their skill level. I think there's a lot of people that could learn something from that.
No: WoW (or any other MMOG) will not be replacing all other forms of socialization. I don't think anyone claimed that. And, realistically, it will not be "completely replacing" golf, which some 25 million people play in America alone (although, I wouldn't mind if it did; I hate golf with a burning passion). It does, however, offer an interesting place where people can have discussions and work together on solving what is, essentially, a dynamic "sliding-scale" puzzle. And look at the numbers: 5,000,000 people play WoW. Do you really think that the preconception of gamers as "social trolls" and "kiddi3s" really applies to _all_ 5 million of those people? ... Well after having the general chat channel turned on for five minutes, I can see how you might reasonably draw that conclusion... but still.
My reason for playing the game is not that I don't have anything else to do, or that I don't have any friends. In fact, my best friend _is_ the reason I play the game. He had to move overseas for a job. Neither of us are really "gamers" (or maybe we are now?...in any case, we won't be wearing "i roll 20s" tshirts any time soon) and we are contantly dismayed by the seemingly endless supply of douchebag "kidd13s" that seem to populate every guild we try to join, but it's been really cool to have this "puzzle" thing that we can do together, even though he's on another continent.
That's all I'm saying: I think MMOGs offer a unique new (at least new to me, anyway) forum for people- even if it's just to a subset of people that are predisposed to enjoying that sort of thing.
It applies to this situation because of what the Chinese government is trying to do and what the Google name (at least up to this point) has stood for.
... now I don't know if those stories are true or not..but at least I have the _Freedom_ to see both sides of the story. If that were my government, at least I would be able to look into it...to question it. The Chinese guy can't do that now....
The Chinese government doesn't just want to block the searches of it's citizens; They are keenly aware of the sentiment that Goethe wrote about in that quote- They want their people to think that they are free without actually being free at all (in effect "hopelessly enslaving" them). The Chinese citizen that searches for "Falun Gong" and the first thing he sees is a Chinese propaganda site calling them a "violent" cult while hiding all of the stories about the torture and brutality that these people have endured at the hands of the Chinese government
And the worst part about it...the _worst_ part...
It's done under the name of an _American_ company; A country that represents freedom (or at least it did before the Bush era) to everyone across the globe. Google doesn't just take it's own name in there...it takes the name of America with it. So it makes the Goethe quote that much more poignant, because the guy searching for information about the Chinese government's brutality associates that Google/American image with the site he's using and says to himself "Hey...these guys are Americans...the paragons of freedom...if there was something bad to report here, then they would certainly be telling me"...So it's worse than getting _no_ information because the _some_ information is _specifically designed to prevent him from trying to do justice for his countrymen_.
I called my representative, Tim Ryan (OH-17), about this and as an answer to your statement celebrating Google's submission to the Chinese government, I will leave you his statement:
"Americans were told that globalization and free trade would make countries like China more democratic. But the recent decisions by Microsoft, Yahoo, and now Google, show otherwise and are cause for great concern. These companies share more than just an American address. They've all benefited richly from America's democratic values and our free market system-not to mention billions of taxpayer dollars that helped develop the Internet and other information technologies. As such, American citizens and lawmakers have every right to demand that U.S. companies advance freedom rather than oppression."
"No man is so hopelessly enslaved as the one who believes, falsely, that he is free." - Goethe
From Result #1:: google.cn search for "Falun Gong"
Xinhua Commentary Calls for Long-term Fight Against Falun Gong Cult.
Is the illusion of freedom more dangerous than its absence?
"There is no man so hopelessly enslaved as he who believes, falsely, that he is free" - Von Goethe
"My business partner and I run a small but growing software company." ... "They would develop and support some products while we would be solely responsible for sales, marketing"
It sounds to me like what you're _really_ running is a marketing company for offshored programming.
So I'm going to give you the kind of advice you might expect from posting in a place where the primary audience consists of "on-shore" programmers that have watched their quality of life get torpedoed by marketdroids patting themselves on the back for trading our jobs, standards of living, and our nation's economic backbone overseas:
Go jump off of a cliff.
How else is a potential employer going to realize that you have a given skill set?
IT Certs are not a guarantee of knowledge, nor are they exclusive indicators of knowledge. A good employer will be willing to look beyond the certification- but at least that piece of paper gives them a little bit of validation from a trusted 3rd party.
Is this the beginning of the end of the dominance of India in the tech offshoring market?
No- it's the beginning of the "poverty as a comparitive advantage" economic model. Just like we've been predicting for years.
These corporations were getting high off of the fact that they had an easy way to undermine American labor and trade standards- India was the perfect "fertile ground" for that; They had the education system of a developed nation (skilled workers), but the labor standards of a third-world nation. Now that they are actually establishing some standards for themselves, they are losing their "poverty advantage".
Welcome to the new World Economy- a "round robin" game where your nation wins when your standards of living have eroded to a point less than everyone else's; and you lose as soon as you try to start making them better.
And let's not forget: those stats are by degrees awarded. That doesn't mean they were rewarded to Americans. Honestly...how many people do you think came here from overseas to study History and Social Sciences. Let's be honest; maybe 1% at most. How many of those awarded CIS degrees went to people who will be going back home and using them? It's tough to say...but at Ohio State, where I went, the percentage of foreign students in that program was EASILY 30% - 40%.
So let's take a look at some real numbers and see what that means:
History/Social S = 132,874
CIS = 47,299 (about 65% of the total)
But hey, at least if we go crazy we'll have 76,671 psychologists to talk us down.
These people don't seem to agree with your figures:
ALL SCIENCE DEGREES:
US: 13%
Japan: 51%
"CNET fails to cover the real threat to American technological competitiveness, the hidden agendas of Chicken Littles like Jim Foley of the Computing Research Association, David Patterson of the ACM and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, all of whose organizations have a vested interest in playing the education card."
So...improving our education system is a threat?
I heartily disagree. First, let me say that I believe that American universities still have the best CIS programs in the world (evidenced by the fact that the best programmers come to US universities to study). The problem is that they are not populated by US students as much as they have been in the past. So this guy says "Big Deal, we're still pretty good".
If you want to have a mediocre economy and way of life, maybe it isn't a big deal. We can just sit back and let our CIS and other science programs fester; We'll become a nation of bullsht psychology and history majors- "Idea People" who can't really do anything but form abstract opinions about other people's abstract opinions..
But wait...maybe I'm jumping the gun here...
Maybe we should strive for something a little bit more than just mediocrity...Maybe we don't need 20 history BAs for every science degree in this country. Maybe..just maybe..We should try to embrace the spirit of hard work (yes CIS is a little bit harder than most of the "High-school" degrees our universities pass out these days) and ingenuity that made us a leader on the world stage.
It does, however, make very eminent the issue of unscrupulous "bad citizen" corporations sending private information of good citizens overseas where they have no control over it or legal recourse for that matter.
We slashdotters "told you so", so it makes the story more ironic as well.