* Fatal teen traffic collisions are more than DOUBLE the rate of all other drivers combined.
* Vehicular collisions are the LEADING cause of death for young Washington citizens ages 15-20.
* From 1993-98 a total of 753 people lost their lives on Washington roads as a result of teen driver crashes.
Fact:
For decades, automobile crashes have been and still are the number one killer of Americans ages 15 to 20. In 1999, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 520,000 teens were injured and more than 4,900 died in automobile crashes. That is an average of over thirteen deaths every day, or approximately one teen in every state every four days. These numbers continue to go up in spite of the fact that deaths and injuries for all other Driver age groups have dropped in the last decade.
No, cars are made here in the US and Canada because the Reagan administration put import controls on those products. Toyota and Honda could only import so many a year, but they could build as many here as they wanted.
Interestingly enough, I saw this argument up until recently being used to support free trade. People didn't know it was protectionism that caused the foreign automakers to set up shop in America.
As for compensating Indians equally to give them equal buying power, that's bunk. Their cost of living is far lower than the equivalent in America. Indians only need the same amount of disposable income as Americans to give them equal buying power. That comes at a level far lower than equal compensation.
I do agree with you that outsourcing is a business fad. It won't end until enough businesses get burned or until all the geeks who were laid off get new jobs in management.
"It is estimated that at least 55% of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins and the tradition is also common among some other South Asian communities and in some Middle Eastern countries." Read more here.
The difference between Alabama and Pakistan or India is that in Alabama, it's not your parents forcing you to marry your cousin. (Unless, of course, she's pregnant!)
This is what people with experience looking back on their lives realize. There is no patronizing involved. From your skepticism, you are probably NOT old enough to realize just how stupid some of the things you did.
8 year-olds are spastic morons. From home movies, I realize I was a spastic moron as well. That is why we don't allow them to drive. Teenagers are a little older, a little less spastic, but they are still morons. That makes them able to get in far greater danger. At 16, I allowed my friends to ride on the hood of my car while I drove up to 50 MPH. At the time, I didn't see any problem with it. No one got hurt, but I now realize that it was COLOSSALLY stupid. This is despite the fact that at 17, I earned a high enough IQ score to enter MENSA. My stupidity was more a factor of my age and immaturity rather than my raw intelligence.
And no, that does not rank the same as driving and talking on a cell phone. There is little danger of me getting into an accident when I am the only one driving on the highway. Even if I do speak on the phone in traffic, then I am only a little more distracted. Even so, I have 15 years of driving experience to fall back on, which is itself not that hard of an activity. I am far less likely to get into an accident than a driving teenager with little experience getting distracted by three other teenagers in the car.
You may not think jumping from your roof into the pool was that dangerous. That's probably because very little ever went wrong. However, had you ever landed on the ground rather than the pool, then you would probably think otherwise. Had you ever cracked your head on the bottom of the pool, then you would probably think otherwise. Give yourself a few years and then you'll realize how colossally stupid you were. Then, that'll land on your top-25 stupid things.
Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.
Bullshit, Mr Moderator. I submitted the exact same story that was accepted. And I submitted it twice before this one came up. The story was not rejected.
You Slashdot people are about as frustrating as the Blizzard people that Taco was complaining about.
Actually, if you reverse your argument and apply it to corporations, then you see they have a huge double-standard as well. They want access to all our private information that by all rights belongs to us. And they want it for free. And they want to be able to buy and sell it at will. Further, they have actually gotten everything they wanted.
However, corporations go apeshit if you suggest that we should have access to all of their private information that belongs to them. They go even more apeshit if you then go out and sell that information. And even more, they bitch and moan and lobby to further restrict access to that information.
Prev: Point 2) My wife (an MD) makes a lot more than I do...
You: That's because she's in a field that is highly subsidised by the government.
Bullshit. She's in a field where:
A) She must be licensed to practise her work.
B) You have to go through an enormous amount of work to get that license.
C) Medical schools limit the number of incoming doctors.
In effect, we have policies in place to keep the number of doctors down, presumably to weed out all but the very best. That is the reason medical doctors can charge so much - basic supply and demand. You have the demand and you can't get it supplied from anyone but them.
Your little rant on the history of insurance really doesn't factor in. Your little rant on Medicare doesn't factor in either. If you want to lower the cost of medicine, then train more doctors. You're just going to have to live with the possibility that he/she may not be that great when you need them the most.
Oh, and your preference that old people should just go off into the woods and die is both repugnant and barbaric. You may praise the Native Americans for this. But, there is a reason why they hadn't even invented the wheel when the Europeans found them. They were primitives that hadn't progressed from the stone age. We've come a long way since then, but obviously you haven't.
If you're requiring a certain structure, it ceases to be a free free market.
A free free market? What the hell is that? It sounds like you are the one promoting a certain structure, especially one that is different from the current structure.
And yes, despite the fact that we are a free market, there is a structure to our market. There are rules and laws to follow. That is true of any society outside of pure anarchy, which you seem to promote by your definition of "free". Those rules cover who gets to participate and who doesn't. That includes rules regarding immigrants. That does not mean the market lacks freedom.
What you're attempting to do is prop up the economy by limiting the number of competent workers that can come in and work here.
I'm not "attempting" anything. I'm describing the market as it currently exists.
What corporations are attempting to do is manipulate the market structure to suit their own ends. They are re-wording a change in immigration law to make it sound like a free market move. They know that no one wants to increase immigration, but that quite a few people like the idea of free markets. They are the ones attempting to prop up their wallets at the expense of Americans and the American standard of living.
This mindset has failed miserably in the past. It happened to the textile industry. It happened to the steel industry. It's happened to the automotive industry. Now, it's hitting the IT industry.
Bullshit. We are talking about immigration. That's people and lives, not products and business. Your analogy does not hold.
The standard of living will go down (or, more likely will remain stagnant until the rest of the world catches up). You simply don't get it. It will happen and there isn't a damn thing that you can do about it.
I have a bachelors in business as well as a bachelors in computer science. I get it all too well. And no, it is not inevitable that our standard of living will stagnate. As I said previously, there are a certain number of jobs that companies will never outsource. If we keep foreigners from taking those jobs, then our wages will stay where they are or improve. Companies will still make huge profits and they'll have to pay their fair share for American workers.
You can blame evil corporations all you want. There isn't a single one that can steer a global market. They aren't looking at controlling things. They're worried about survival in a future that you are incapable of picturing.
No, this has nothing to do with survival. These corporations are making huge profits even now. No, this has to do with improving the bottom line a little more so that top executives can give themselves another million dollar raise.
Why you want to defend these people is beyond me. For one, they didn't ask for nor need your help. For another, they'd just as quickly get rid of you, your job, and everyone else's job if they could.
You are naive to think that corporations do not want to control things. There are mountains of evidence that suggest otherwise.
What, are we playing finders keepers? Why don't we go back about 20,000 years and kick out anyone whose direct ancestors weren't here by then.
That's a bullshit argument if I ever saw one. It ignores the changes of the last 500 years. And it ignores the fact that the United States is a legitimate government that can legitimately decide who enters and who doesn't. And no, that did not originally include Native Americans.
Me: These companies would rather have completely open borders in the US where everyone from everywhere could freely enter.
You: That would kind of be the definition of "free market" any market that doesn't fit that description would be a "non-free market".
The idea that the US labor market is not currently free is pure rubbish. Companies are free to hire any worker in the market who they want. And workers are free to work for whatever company in the market that they want. Further, the fact that companies may not hire just anyone from outside the US market and bring them to the US to work does not mean the US labor market itself lacks freedom. That is a discussion for immigration law, not "free market" labor.
What we have here are companies attempting to re-define the market to their advantage. That is the definition of market manipulation.
Me: Also, the majority US citizens, both Democrats and Republicans, don't want any more foreigners entering the country to take away jobs. If anything, people want the foreigners to leave so we could actually get some work and decent pay raises around here.
You: Pretty much not going to happen with capital growth being the goal for everything these days. It's just too damn ineffective to pay some people several times the average wage just because they happen to be born in a specific place.
You must not be from the US. We happen to be a democratic republic. Our representatives do what we want. And if we want them to cut immigration and enforce existing immigration laws, then they better do it. Otherwise, they will be next in the unemployment line.
The good news is that the world as a whole will get a standard of living. The bad news is that USian programmers will have to settle for being in the economic top.01% of the world instead of the.005. Excuse me for not shedding any tears.
I knew you weren't American. Any American programmer knows they're not in the top.01% amongst the likes of Bill Gates, aka richest man in the world.
Rather than say, "Hey, you're trying to pay less for programmers!" we should be saying "Hey, are we getting paid too much? Are we pricing ourselves out of positions?"
No. Any cheap work that could be done overseas is already being done overseas. The work that's left in the US would stay in the US regardless of what pay programmers demand. So, companies can only reduce the amount they pay in wages by artifically increasing the workforce and reducing the demand for high-skilled workers.
This has nothing to do with "free" trade in labor and everything to do with market manipulation. These companies do not want to deal with the free market as it's currently structured. So, instead of dealing in the free market, they'd rather redefine the labor market in their terms.
These companies would rather have completely open borders in the US where everyone from everywhere could freely enter. We've already heard Bush say exactly that. Labor costs in the US would plummet. So would the standard of living, but companies and the current administration don't actually care. The only reason they don't push that through now is that they've been pounding security for the last four years. Also, the majority US citizens, both Democrats and Republicans, don't want any more foreigners entering the country to take away jobs. If anything, people want the foreigners to leave so we could actually get some work and decent pay raises around here.
First, there are only so many tech companies that schools use. The idea that everyone in technology should "bite the bullet" in order for schools to save money on computers makes no sense whatsoever.
Second, you are presenting this false dichotomy regarding school spending. Schools have many more choices of where to spend their money than just technology or teachers' salaries. Nothing says the money these schools save in technology won't go into buying new uniforms for the football team.
Third, there are reasons why teachers are underpaid compared to IT workers. The primary reason is that just about anyone smart and determined enough to get a college degree can do their job. However, you can not say the same thing regarding technology workers. There are plenty of smart, determined people out there who are completely incapable of becoming a technology worker for one reason or another.
Exactly how much money did the US (as in the US government) spent in my country's (Brazil) Internet physical infrastucture
Irrelevant. The fact that the US has been working on internet technology since 1962 is the main reason why Brazil has an internet now. The fact that the US created companies to work, improve, and sell this techology is also part of why Brazil has internet now. So, before you congratulate your country, you need to realize that Brazil's internet infrastructure would not be possible without the huge contributions the US made over the years to develop internet technology in the first place.
The good news is I never did care what the rest of the world thought, and I still don't.
I totally agree. There seems to be some implicit argument that people in the US should care. Usually, this point of view comes from European countries where each country is the size of one of our states. Germany is roughly the size of Montana. England is roughly the size of Oregon. France is roughly twice the size of Colorado. All of the European Union would fit in less than half the space of the US.
And yet they think we should listen to each of their arguments. How about this, we break the 50 US states into countries and then start collectively bitching at them.
Bullshit, the "Internet" stopped being American military property with the first off-shore connection to a non US military installation.
And therefore, I suppose you think the US should then disregard the untold amount of money and effort spent since 1962 developing and implementing the internet and thus hand over control of US property for free? You are out of your mind.
Believe it or not other countries have contributed plenty to the development of the network including the development of the WWW which was a European invention NOT American.
Let's see, the www was developed in 1990, a full 28 years after the US started work on ARPANET.
Here's something to think about, the Internet as it stands now can survive without the US(redundant network remember) however, can the US survive without the Internet?
Yes. Most people in the US were completely unaware of the internet until around 1995. We got along just fine without it up until then and we could get along just fine without it now. Even so, no one is proposing or even capable of removing the internet from the US against our wishes.
The real question is whether the US could survive without international internet connections, which could be conceivable. In this case, I doubt most Americans would notice that they couldn't connect overseas since most Americans hit American websites. If anything, people from overseas would be the most affected from lack of access to the US internet. Companies in China would have trouble accepting orders from American manufacturers. And companies in India would have to completely stop their services exporting to American companies. The Europeans wouldn't have access to websites like Slashdot, which in my mind would probably be preferable.
Do you think the US makes money off doing that and that other countries will thereby deprive it of some kind of investment?
Irrelevant.
The rights to DNS that the US holds is a direct result of that investment. The control of the root DNS servers is worth a great deal of money. The fact that the US does not leverage that into actual cash flow does not negate that investment nor that rights to that control.
Until the rest of the world ponies up to reimburse the US for the untold amount of money spent for decades of research plus interest, then the rest of the world has no right asking the US to freely hand over its property.
Even so, those root servers are still the rightful property of the US. If they decide not to sell, then that is their rightful decision.
Your argument makes as much sense as CERN saying they invented HTML and now the rest of the world wants to "take for free all their investment."
That is not a correct analogy. CERN gave away the rights to control HTML long ago. The US never gave away the rights to control DNS.
Your argument smacks of colonialism and I don't really see how it applies today.
The internet was created by the United States with development starting in 1962 and the first connection in 1969. The US performed all the initial grunt work. The US poured the money into its creation for the last 36 years. The US is the rightful owner. Now these other nations want for free all the benefits of the decades of work and investment that the United States made. As such, any "colonialism" comes from other nations attempting to usurp control over the internet that the US created and generously shared with them.
A democracy is "one person one vote". But, you vote for everything that a state needs to run. The United States is not this kind of democracy.
The United States is actually a representative democracy. There you vote for a representative who does your voting for you, such as Senators and Representatives. Then, you don't have to spend all your time reading and voting on all the bills that Congress focuses on.
Actually, you are incorrect regarding the age of the internet. Work on the ARPANET (precursor to the internet) started in 1962, bidders submitted proposals in 1968, and the first ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the UCLA and Stanford. You can read about it here.
Look at the gnu debugger. The last time I checked it had more than 87 authors. Show me a commercial debugger that gets that much attention.
Let's see, the only commercial debugger worth talking about is Visual Studio. Microsoft definitely has more than 87 people working on it. Oh, and those are full-timers whose only responsibility is Visual Studio.
Score two for free software - in the end, what needs to get done gets done better.
Considering the market share of Visual Studio, I think you picked a bad example to score points on.
No, as I said, I gave him my plan, which he promptly shot down. This guy thought he was absolutely correct, although it was clear to the rest of us that he was not.
The guy was an idiot. It was obvious to all of us, except his boss, that he was an idiot. He got there because of nepotism and wouldn't be let go anytime soon, whether he failed miserably or not. The only solution was to leave.
This guy's comments about clueless "old hand" managers was spot on. I had one of those managers. I've even talked about him before.
The guy's sole qualification for director of IT was previous experience at Boeing as an electrician twenty years ago. (We also worked in an office that actively promoted nepotism.) This guy was an absolute train wreck. He set up our entire office to connect to the internet through dialup, without a firewall. There was no anti-virus products installed on any machine. And one time he asked me for a plan to connect to our outlying offices. I gave him a plan for VPN, which he promptly shot down. It was around that point that I left. Turns out about six months later he resurrected my plan and put his name on it.
The original poster was completely correct to say "expedite your job search" in a situation like this. I would say, don't walk - run!
Lol. I didn't even notice WorldNetDaily was a bunch of crackpots until just now that you pointed it out and I took a second look. I actually found their link through another site that I do regularly read, iFeminists.net. (Yes, I was the one who posted the original Slashdot report.)
They did accurately report the results of the peer-reviewed study, even though the got the name of the journal incorrect in their article (which I did correct in my post). Considering that, I thought it was a great piece of important research that I hadn't read anywhere else. I don't particularly care that the right-wing is using this as propaganda, but I still think that the research is important to highlight.
The fact that they don't include the title, author, or volume for the journal article isn't particularly damning. None of the regular news articles from general news sites ever has this level of detail. The fact that they reported the actual journal name is a step up from most news sites. You could have found the correct article from that alone had you tried, like several of the other posters.
The damning part, as you pointed out, is the fact that they only talk to the Discovery Institute. Most news sites wouldn't even think of talking to these people since they had nothing to do with the actual discovery. Places like Fox News might call them up, but only to obtain a false sense of "balance" in order to be "fair", as if it actually matters what a bunch of non-scientists think regarding science reporting.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you do a little research. Teenagers are far more dangerous when driving than an experienced driver with a cell phone.
The effect of teen crashes in Washington State:
* Fatal teen traffic collisions are more than DOUBLE the rate of all other drivers combined.
* Vehicular collisions are the LEADING cause of death for young Washington citizens ages 15-20.
* From 1993-98 a total of 753 people lost their lives on Washington roads as a result of teen driver crashes.
Fact:
For decades, automobile crashes have been and still are the number one killer of Americans ages 15 to 20. In 1999, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 520,000 teens were injured and more than 4,900 died in automobile crashes. That is an average of over thirteen deaths every day, or approximately one teen in every state every four days. These numbers continue to go up in spite of the fact that deaths and injuries for all other Driver age groups have dropped in the last decade.
No, cars are made here in the US and Canada because the Reagan administration put import controls on those products. Toyota and Honda could only import so many a year, but they could build as many here as they wanted.
Interestingly enough, I saw this argument up until recently being used to support free trade. People didn't know it was protectionism that caused the foreign automakers to set up shop in America.
As for compensating Indians equally to give them equal buying power, that's bunk. Their cost of living is far lower than the equivalent in America. Indians only need the same amount of disposable income as Americans to give them equal buying power. That comes at a level far lower than equal compensation.
I do agree with you that outsourcing is a business fad. It won't end until enough businesses get burned or until all the geeks who were laid off get new jobs in management.
Given the idiocy of some of the questions, it makes me wonder whether they do this on purpose so they can take the day off.
Yeah, but people in India and Pakistan might be forced by their parents into taking the afternoon off to marry their cousin.
"It is estimated that at least 55% of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins and the tradition is also common among some other South Asian communities and in some Middle Eastern countries." Read more here.
The difference between Alabama and Pakistan or India is that in Alabama, it's not your parents forcing you to marry your cousin. (Unless, of course, she's pregnant!)
Well, I call BS on your BS!
This is what people with experience looking back on their lives realize. There is no patronizing involved. From your skepticism, you are probably NOT old enough to realize just how stupid some of the things you did.
8 year-olds are spastic morons. From home movies, I realize I was a spastic moron as well. That is why we don't allow them to drive. Teenagers are a little older, a little less spastic, but they are still morons. That makes them able to get in far greater danger. At 16, I allowed my friends to ride on the hood of my car while I drove up to 50 MPH. At the time, I didn't see any problem with it. No one got hurt, but I now realize that it was COLOSSALLY stupid. This is despite the fact that at 17, I earned a high enough IQ score to enter MENSA. My stupidity was more a factor of my age and immaturity rather than my raw intelligence.
And no, that does not rank the same as driving and talking on a cell phone. There is little danger of me getting into an accident when I am the only one driving on the highway. Even if I do speak on the phone in traffic, then I am only a little more distracted. Even so, I have 15 years of driving experience to fall back on, which is itself not that hard of an activity. I am far less likely to get into an accident than a driving teenager with little experience getting distracted by three other teenagers in the car.
You may not think jumping from your roof into the pool was that dangerous. That's probably because very little ever went wrong. However, had you ever landed on the ground rather than the pool, then you would probably think otherwise. Had you ever cracked your head on the bottom of the pool, then you would probably think otherwise. Give yourself a few years and then you'll realize how colossally stupid you were. Then, that'll land on your top-25 stupid things.
Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.
Bullshit, Mr Moderator. I submitted the exact same story that was accepted. And I submitted it twice before this one came up. The story was not rejected.
You Slashdot people are about as frustrating as the Blizzard people that Taco was complaining about.
Funny... especially since I submitted this story twice and got shot down both times.
Good going Slashdot.
Actually, if you reverse your argument and apply it to corporations, then you see they have a huge double-standard as well. They want access to all our private information that by all rights belongs to us. And they want it for free. And they want to be able to buy and sell it at will. Further, they have actually gotten everything they wanted.
However, corporations go apeshit if you suggest that we should have access to all of their private information that belongs to them. They go even more apeshit if you then go out and sell that information. And even more, they bitch and moan and lobby to further restrict access to that information.
Prev: Point 2) My wife (an MD) makes a lot more than I do...
You: That's because she's in a field that is highly subsidised by the government.
Bullshit. She's in a field where:
A) She must be licensed to practise her work.
B) You have to go through an enormous amount of work to get that license.
C) Medical schools limit the number of incoming doctors.
In effect, we have policies in place to keep the number of doctors down, presumably to weed out all but the very best. That is the reason medical doctors can charge so much - basic supply and demand. You have the demand and you can't get it supplied from anyone but them.
Your little rant on the history of insurance really doesn't factor in. Your little rant on Medicare doesn't factor in either. If you want to lower the cost of medicine, then train more doctors. You're just going to have to live with the possibility that he/she may not be that great when you need them the most.
Oh, and your preference that old people should just go off into the woods and die is both repugnant and barbaric. You may praise the Native Americans for this. But, there is a reason why they hadn't even invented the wheel when the Europeans found them. They were primitives that hadn't progressed from the stone age. We've come a long way since then, but obviously you haven't.
If you're requiring a certain structure, it ceases to be a free free market.
A free free market? What the hell is that? It sounds like you are the one promoting a certain structure, especially one that is different from the current structure.
And yes, despite the fact that we are a free market, there is a structure to our market. There are rules and laws to follow. That is true of any society outside of pure anarchy, which you seem to promote by your definition of "free". Those rules cover who gets to participate and who doesn't. That includes rules regarding immigrants. That does not mean the market lacks freedom.
What you're attempting to do is prop up the economy by limiting the number of competent workers that can come in and work here.
I'm not "attempting" anything. I'm describing the market as it currently exists.
What corporations are attempting to do is manipulate the market structure to suit their own ends. They are re-wording a change in immigration law to make it sound like a free market move. They know that no one wants to increase immigration, but that quite a few people like the idea of free markets. They are the ones attempting to prop up their wallets at the expense of Americans and the American standard of living.
This mindset has failed miserably in the past. It happened to the textile industry. It happened to the steel industry. It's happened to the automotive industry. Now, it's hitting the IT industry.
Bullshit. We are talking about immigration. That's people and lives, not products and business. Your analogy does not hold.
The standard of living will go down (or, more likely will remain stagnant until the rest of the world catches up). You simply don't get it. It will happen and there isn't a damn thing that you can do about it.
I have a bachelors in business as well as a bachelors in computer science. I get it all too well. And no, it is not inevitable that our standard of living will stagnate. As I said previously, there are a certain number of jobs that companies will never outsource. If we keep foreigners from taking those jobs, then our wages will stay where they are or improve. Companies will still make huge profits and they'll have to pay their fair share for American workers.
You can blame evil corporations all you want. There isn't a single one that can steer a global market. They aren't looking at controlling things. They're worried about survival in a future that you are incapable of picturing.
No, this has nothing to do with survival. These corporations are making huge profits even now. No, this has to do with improving the bottom line a little more so that top executives can give themselves another million dollar raise.
Why you want to defend these people is beyond me. For one, they didn't ask for nor need your help. For another, they'd just as quickly get rid of you, your job, and everyone else's job if they could.
You are naive to think that corporations do not want to control things. There are mountains of evidence that suggest otherwise.
What, are we playing finders keepers? Why don't we go back about 20,000 years and kick out anyone whose direct ancestors weren't here by then.
That's a bullshit argument if I ever saw one. It ignores the changes of the last 500 years. And it ignores the fact that the United States is a legitimate government that can legitimately decide who enters and who doesn't. And no, that did not originally include Native Americans.
Me: These companies would rather have completely open borders in the US where everyone from everywhere could freely enter.
.01% of the world instead of the .005. Excuse me for not shedding any tears.
.01% amongst the likes of Bill Gates, aka richest man in the world.
You: That would kind of be the definition of "free market" any market that doesn't fit that description would be a "non-free market".
The idea that the US labor market is not currently free is pure rubbish. Companies are free to hire any worker in the market who they want. And workers are free to work for whatever company in the market that they want. Further, the fact that companies may not hire just anyone from outside the US market and bring them to the US to work does not mean the US labor market itself lacks freedom. That is a discussion for immigration law, not "free market" labor.
What we have here are companies attempting to re-define the market to their advantage. That is the definition of market manipulation.
Me: Also, the majority US citizens, both Democrats and Republicans, don't want any more foreigners entering the country to take away jobs. If anything, people want the foreigners to leave so we could actually get some work and decent pay raises around here.
You: Pretty much not going to happen with capital growth being the goal for everything these days. It's just too damn ineffective to pay some people several times the average wage just because they happen to be born in a specific place.
You must not be from the US. We happen to be a democratic republic. Our representatives do what we want. And if we want them to cut immigration and enforce existing immigration laws, then they better do it. Otherwise, they will be next in the unemployment line.
The good news is that the world as a whole will get a standard of living. The bad news is that USian programmers will have to settle for being in the economic top
I knew you weren't American. Any American programmer knows they're not in the top
Rather than say, "Hey, you're trying to pay less for programmers!" we should be saying "Hey, are we getting paid too much? Are we pricing ourselves out of positions?"
No. Any cheap work that could be done overseas is already being done overseas. The work that's left in the US would stay in the US regardless of what pay programmers demand. So, companies can only reduce the amount they pay in wages by artifically increasing the workforce and reducing the demand for high-skilled workers.
This has nothing to do with "free" trade in labor and everything to do with market manipulation. These companies do not want to deal with the free market as it's currently structured. So, instead of dealing in the free market, they'd rather redefine the labor market in their terms.
These companies would rather have completely open borders in the US where everyone from everywhere could freely enter. We've already heard Bush say exactly that. Labor costs in the US would plummet. So would the standard of living, but companies and the current administration don't actually care. The only reason they don't push that through now is that they've been pounding security for the last four years. Also, the majority US citizens, both Democrats and Republicans, don't want any more foreigners entering the country to take away jobs. If anything, people want the foreigners to leave so we could actually get some work and decent pay raises around here.
First, there are only so many tech companies that schools use. The idea that everyone in technology should "bite the bullet" in order for schools to save money on computers makes no sense whatsoever.
Second, you are presenting this false dichotomy regarding school spending. Schools have many more choices of where to spend their money than just technology or teachers' salaries. Nothing says the money these schools save in technology won't go into buying new uniforms for the football team.
Third, there are reasons why teachers are underpaid compared to IT workers. The primary reason is that just about anyone smart and determined enough to get a college degree can do their job. However, you can not say the same thing regarding technology workers. There are plenty of smart, determined people out there who are completely incapable of becoming a technology worker for one reason or another.
Exactly how much money did the US (as in the US government) spent in my country's (Brazil) Internet physical infrastucture
Irrelevant. The fact that the US has been working on internet technology since 1962 is the main reason why Brazil has an internet now. The fact that the US created companies to work, improve, and sell this techology is also part of why Brazil has internet now. So, before you congratulate your country, you need to realize that Brazil's internet infrastructure would not be possible without the huge contributions the US made over the years to develop internet technology in the first place.
The good news is I never did care what the rest of the world thought, and I still don't.
I totally agree. There seems to be some implicit argument that people in the US should care. Usually, this point of view comes from European countries where each country is the size of one of our states. Germany is roughly the size of Montana. England is roughly the size of Oregon. France is roughly twice the size of Colorado. All of the European Union would fit in less than half the space of the US.
And yet they think we should listen to each of their arguments. How about this, we break the 50 US states into countries and then start collectively bitching at them.
Bullshit, the "Internet" stopped being American military property with the first off-shore connection to a non US military installation.
And therefore, I suppose you think the US should then disregard the untold amount of money and effort spent since 1962 developing and implementing the internet and thus hand over control of US property for free? You are out of your mind.
Believe it or not other countries have contributed plenty to the development of the network including the development of the WWW which was a European invention NOT American.
Let's see, the www was developed in 1990, a full 28 years after the US started work on ARPANET.
Here's something to think about, the Internet as it stands now can survive without the US(redundant network remember) however, can the US survive without the Internet?
Yes. Most people in the US were completely unaware of the internet until around 1995. We got along just fine without it up until then and we could get along just fine without it now. Even so, no one is proposing or even capable of removing the internet from the US against our wishes.
The real question is whether the US could survive without international internet connections, which could be conceivable. In this case, I doubt most Americans would notice that they couldn't connect overseas since most Americans hit American websites. If anything, people from overseas would be the most affected from lack of access to the US internet. Companies in China would have trouble accepting orders from American manufacturers. And companies in India would have to completely stop their services exporting to American companies. The Europeans wouldn't have access to websites like Slashdot, which in my mind would probably be preferable.
Do you think the US makes money off doing that and that other countries will thereby deprive it of some kind of investment?
Irrelevant.
The rights to DNS that the US holds is a direct result of that investment. The control of the root DNS servers is worth a great deal of money. The fact that the US does not leverage that into actual cash flow does not negate that investment nor that rights to that control.
Until the rest of the world ponies up to reimburse the US for the untold amount of money spent for decades of research plus interest, then the rest of the world has no right asking the US to freely hand over its property.
Even so, those root servers are still the rightful property of the US. If they decide not to sell, then that is their rightful decision.
Your argument makes as much sense as CERN saying they invented HTML and now the rest of the world wants to "take for free all their investment."
That is not a correct analogy. CERN gave away the rights to control HTML long ago. The US never gave away the rights to control DNS.
Your argument smacks of colonialism and I don't really see how it applies today.
The internet was created by the United States with development starting in 1962 and the first connection in 1969. The US performed all the initial grunt work. The US poured the money into its creation for the last 36 years. The US is the rightful owner. Now these other nations want for free all the benefits of the decades of work and investment that the United States made. As such, any "colonialism" comes from other nations attempting to usurp control over the internet that the US created and generously shared with them.
A democracy is "one person one vote". But, you vote for everything that a state needs to run. The United States is not this kind of democracy.
The United States is actually a representative democracy. There you vote for a representative who does your voting for you, such as Senators and Representatives. Then, you don't have to spend all your time reading and voting on all the bills that Congress focuses on.
Actually, you are incorrect regarding the age of the internet. Work on the ARPANET (precursor to the internet) started in 1962, bidders submitted proposals in 1968, and the first ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the UCLA and Stanford. You can read about it here.
Look at the gnu debugger. The last time I checked it had more than 87 authors. Show me a commercial debugger that gets that much attention.
Let's see, the only commercial debugger worth talking about is Visual Studio. Microsoft definitely has more than 87 people working on it. Oh, and those are full-timers whose only responsibility is Visual Studio.
Score two for free software - in the end, what needs to get done gets done better.
Considering the market share of Visual Studio, I think you picked a bad example to score points on.
No, as I said, I gave him my plan, which he promptly shot down. This guy thought he was absolutely correct, although it was clear to the rest of us that he was not.
The guy was an idiot. It was obvious to all of us, except his boss, that he was an idiot. He got there because of nepotism and wouldn't be let go anytime soon, whether he failed miserably or not. The only solution was to leave.
This guy's comments about clueless "old hand" managers was spot on. I had one of those managers. I've even talked about him before.
The guy's sole qualification for director of IT was previous experience at Boeing as an electrician twenty years ago. (We also worked in an office that actively promoted nepotism.) This guy was an absolute train wreck. He set up our entire office to connect to the internet through dialup, without a firewall. There was no anti-virus products installed on any machine. And one time he asked me for a plan to connect to our outlying offices. I gave him a plan for VPN, which he promptly shot down. It was around that point that I left. Turns out about six months later he resurrected my plan and put his name on it.
The original poster was completely correct to say "expedite your job search" in a situation like this. I would say, don't walk - run!
Lol. I didn't even notice WorldNetDaily was a bunch of crackpots until just now that you pointed it out and I took a second look. I actually found their link through another site that I do regularly read, iFeminists.net. (Yes, I was the one who posted the original Slashdot report.)
They did accurately report the results of the peer-reviewed study, even though the got the name of the journal incorrect in their article (which I did correct in my post). Considering that, I thought it was a great piece of important research that I hadn't read anywhere else. I don't particularly care that the right-wing is using this as propaganda, but I still think that the research is important to highlight.
The fact that they don't include the title, author, or volume for the journal article isn't particularly damning. None of the regular news articles from general news sites ever has this level of detail. The fact that they reported the actual journal name is a step up from most news sites. You could have found the correct article from that alone had you tried, like several of the other posters.
The damning part, as you pointed out, is the fact that they only talk to the Discovery Institute. Most news sites wouldn't even think of talking to these people since they had nothing to do with the actual discovery. Places like Fox News might call them up, but only to obtain a false sense of "balance" in order to be "fair", as if it actually matters what a bunch of non-scientists think regarding science reporting.