Obviously the two choices are to do the really cool stuff at work or to do it not at work. In a junior programming position, you probably don't have much ability to guide the technologies being used, unless you work for an extremely small company. OTOH, in a junior programming position, you're probably (hopefully?) not called upon to work more than 40 hrs per week, which leaves the remaining 128 hrs for doing cool stuff. Sleep is not cool, and there are great new pharmacological methods for eliminating it. I'm joking about that last part. Mostly.
I suggest coming up with something using cool technology that you think is marketable, and develop it, learning what you need to learn as you go. By trying to make it marketable, you will make yourself focus on the needs of the end user, which is vital to becoming a good software developer. Businesswise, you will probably fail miserably (but maybe not), but the point is to learn and get experience with cool technology. If you get users, even if it doesn't make a cent, then it can credibly go on your resume, and you can get a paying job using said cool technology.
But in general, if you want to a) stay employable and/or b) know and use cool technologies, you really need to take it upon yourself to make and keep your skillset a) relevent to employers and b) interesting to you. All it takes is a quick search on dice.com to see what technologies are currently being sought by employers.
Hibernation is fine, but it is not what the OP is talking about. There are many times you need to reboot, unless you're lucky. E.g., in many corporate settings, everyone has to reboot every day, to get new patches, updates and whatnot; anyone with any flakey device driver will run in to problems from time to time that will need to be cured with a reboot; there are (still) software installs that require reboots, etc. IANASP (I Am Not A Systems Programmer [I'm an applications programmer]), but I've always gotten the impressions that the bulk of the wait time comes from device drivers initializing. It would seem like this would be a solvable problem, as device drivers would not necessarily need to test their hardware and initialize themselves on every boot if they could each save their states on shutdown. (So the OS doesn't hibernate, but the individual device drivers do.) Of course, you'd also need a way to tell the OS that you'd like to do a "complete" reboot w/o saved states. I remember there have been pushes for speeding up boot times in the past, and they have indeed gotten better (I remember when it was common for the BIOS to require a FULL memory check on boot). But for something like this to happen it would have to be percieved across the industry as an important thing -- or else Microsoft would have to push for it.
Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?
Yes, but you see, the ability to do this, i.e. to practice charity, which is the moral way of life, is in many ways dependent upon having the resources to give, which in turn is dependant upon a healthy free market economy. Obviously, you can be just as moral without any resources, but there is dramatically more that you can do for others if you do have resources. I think that Open Source is largely a result of this spirit. However, it is a result, not a cause, and I think it has exactly NOTHING to do with most the ideals mentioned, such as Justice. Justice has more to do with the free market. Charity is about rising above justice.
Where are all the liberal slashdotters who only know one quote (which they misquote, and most likely misattribute), namely, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." It was the Motto printed on the front of a propaganda book Ben Franklin published, but did not write. (Story, and picture here: http://www.futureofthebook.com/stories/storyReader $605)
The purpose of the book was to convince the king to give the colonists money to buy guns for the Indian tribes allied with them. (The French were arming the Indian tribes allied to them, the bastards;-)
Yes, but this is not how "hackers" make money. They make money by selling spam and pop-ups sent through bot nets. And also by phishing email/websites. (Although the latter is extremely traceable, so it only seems to be done by people in countries where they don't do anything about it, like the former Soviet bloc.)
They probably set the max per click they'll pay to $10000. It's not like they have to pay for it.
Actually they would. The ads that show up on Google search are the same ads that show up through their Ad Sense program on other people's website. So if they bid $10000 per click, they'd end up paying that (half of it, IIRC, and keeping half) for clicks on other web sites.
And they still pay when it's on their own web site, though not as much. They force another ad out of the #1 spot, and they force the bottom ad out altogether. That's less click-through revenue for them.
Can the intrusions in liberty be justified by reduced risk of hijackings or whatever?
I'm still stuck on the question of if an airline turns information we have already given them into a security risk score, can that act be justifiably called "an intrusion in liberty"? I am disinclined to agree that it can.
Just because a capitalist economy has happened to distribute wealth in such and such a manner does not imply that those who received the wealth that they did are somehow ethically justified in spending that wealth.
You proceed from a bad presupposition. High earners do not "receive" wealth from the economy. High earners CREATE wealth in the economy. It is therefore unethical for anyone but them to determine what becomes of that wealth, constrained by the fact that all must be taxed to pay for the necessities of government.
Yes, you are right. Tell that to the 80% without any money.
Oh, the 80% DON'T HAVE ANY money, now??? Ok, now we're getting scientific.
How naive can you get? It's a huge injustice.
Yeah, if justice means seeing something someone else has, and saying, "hey, I should have that." News Flash: Bill Gates didn't steal all his money from poor children, he started with some worthless stock, and made that stock valuable. He CREATED wealth. IOW, it is HIS, NOT YOURS.
How can you say that while kids keep dying for not having something to eat??? It's amazing how we have the technology for almost anything and children keep dying of hunger.
No one dies of hunger in the U.S. or anywhere else where there is a free market economy. It is socialism and other forms of tyranny that starves people to death. The only starving children in America are supermodels.
The fact that 2% of the people owns half the world's wealth is not only mind boggling... to read to such news and read such idiotic comments sickens me.
The sickness you experience is called "envy" and it is the source of your problems.
And they keep asking themselves why Chavez keeps winning...
Do they? People support people like Chavez because they are ignorant and greedy.
It seems to me that the poor in this country only get richer as a result of inflation, nothing else. I don't understand what you mean by "the poor get richer" when they may get raises, but the cost of living goes up faster than their pay.
Inflation makes everyone poorer (unless you're investing in a foreign currency, but I don't think many of the poor do that). When the economy increases, the earning power of the poor increases (faster than the cost of living). (and also the earning power of the rich increases, and the difference between rich and poor increases.)
So to summarize your post, you are a white person who is afraid of white people, and there is a corporate conspiracy to charge black people too much for groceries and make sure not to sell them produce?
It is a bad thing. As you say, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. That is system unsustainable, and will eventually collapse.
That has never -- and could never -- happen in a free market. When the rich get richer, and ONLY when the rich get richer, the poor get richer too. And when that happens the dreaded "gap between the rich and poor" increases, and the UN and the Democrats have hissy fits. The only ideology that can honestly oppose the "gap between the rich and poor" is one that is based upon envy of the rich, not compassion for the poor.
If you look at an average income of say $25,000/yr for a low income person, then realize that the wealth accumulated by people like Gates could pay the yearly salary of ~1.7 million people, it kinda makes you think what exactly are they doing with this money anyways?
Um, they are paying the salaries of ~1.7 million people.
Am I the only noticing that 1% of the top earners own 40% of the wealth (as in one of the 5-rated comments) and 1% of the top tax payers pay only 30% of all taxes is kind of strange and suspicious?
Does that mean that 1% of the richest are not quite the same as 1% of the top tax payers? What happened to the progressive tax system?
Income tax systems taxes income, not wealth. The top 1% of earners presumably make A LOT less than 30% of the world's income. That said, a progressive tax system is immoral. Everyone should be taxed at the same rate.
There is no such thing as intellectual property. Property has to have some sort of physical presence.
Really? This is very good to know. I guess that means that your bank account balance is not property, and if I were to make that balance be transferred into my account, that would not be stealing. You wouldn't mind signing an affidavit to that effect, would you?
If the world is full of people creating music, and some do it for profit and some do it for love, what do you think will be left when the people doing it for profit leave the scene?
Um, less talented musicians?
content creation only costs money if you're trying to sell the content for a profit in today's market. Content creation on its own costs nothing but labor, and if it's a labor of love, you get emotionally paid.
Which means so much when it comes to paying a mortgage and educating and feeding your children. What if really talented musicians could actually make a living by creating music, so that they could do it all day long instead of only after they get home from their day job? Wouldn't that be better for everyone? Yes, it would.
Inventing ways for crowd control is almost like admitting that the "powers that be" recongnize that people do not like what they do and flat-out expect dissent on a wide scale. The fact that these devices are actually made proves that not only do they expect it, but they don't care about the reasons behind the dissent, and only want to control it.
Nor should they care. The people have the power to completely change the entire government at will (except the Supreme Court, so yes go do your mob violence against the supreme court). This is the political power of the people. It would completely undermine the democratic principle if our elected representatives gave greater weight to the people who block the streets and chant than to the rest of the people who vote.
It's this kind of mentality that has caused foriegn terrorism to blossim.
All I can possibly say to that, is that compared to your reasoning, your spelling is exceptional.
This is why peaceful protests make me nervous. If "just trying to deny the intersections to protesters with sawhorses" nearly touched off a riot, then I'm not convinced that the demonstration was all that peaceful in the first place. People only show up to demonstrations when they're angry about something, and the odds of them achieving their goal immediately to appease them are essentially nonexistent.
I've always wondered just how effective protests really are. Presumably the people you're protesting to have at least a rough idea of how many people are in favor of their idea and how many are opposed.
Now you're on to something. The reason to mass a large group of people and chant is to threaten (even if it's subtle) violence or forceful disruption. There's no other reason -- especially in the information age when there are means of expression that are thousands of times more powerful. In the civil rights era this was valid because people were being denied their right to vote. When your rightful political power has been removed from you, it is valid to try to get it back by threat of violence -- there is no other recourse. Subsequent street protests and disruptive protests have all be invalid abuses of the right to assemble. I've personally never been closer to violence than when the protesters came to my city of Philadelphia because the RNC was here, and chained themselves across the streets to block traffic for miles, so they could tell everyone that they don't agree with the Republicans. Mobs of them roamed our streets, some of them committed vandalism. They tried to prevent delegates from making it to the convention center. My blood still boils just thinking about it. These people are the very antithesis of the republican form of government. If they really want a government based upon who can muster the most force, I for one am ready and willing to stand opposed to them.
During the protest against the invasion of Iraq in New York, just trying to deny all the intersections to protesters with sawhorses and mounted police caused surging to begin in the crowd and the NYPD came within a hair's breadth of inciting a riot that would have burned out Midtown Manhattan and killed a lot of people.
And if any police department or government agency in the United States gets the bright idea to employ this kind of means here against people exercising their constitutional rights, they should think very carefully and deeply and consider that I and many of my patriotic countrymen are very jealous of our rights and also possess automatic weapons. How far do you want to push us, Mr. Man?
How 'bout into the f-ing East River? YOU HAVE NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO TAKE OVER THE INTERSECTIONS OR BLOCK THEIR USE BY NORMAL PEOPLE!!! People taking such actions in this day and age are inherently undemocratic. If they wanted their voice to be heard, they would start a blog, not block the street. Rather, they are about expressing themselves with the threat of physical force, and the threat of disruption of the political process. I think you should reevaluate how many of your well-armed freedom-loving patriotic countrymen would be fighting with you versus against you.
It is not a bad idea if you are for the system and the establishment, trying to protect your own interests and the status quo. Fry them hippies.
It is a bad idea if you are not a member of the elite, and you are trying to resist tyranny and fight for freedom and human rights via non-violent civil disobedience.
I'm not part of any elite, but I've had my freedoms trampled on far more by protesters blocking my streets and trying to disrupt the nominating process of my political party, than I have ever had, or ever expect to have, by the supposed "tyranny" they oppose. So yes, please, by God, fry the damned hippies.
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Obviously the two choices are to do the really cool stuff at work or to do it not at work. In a junior programming position, you probably don't have much ability to guide the technologies being used, unless you work for an extremely small company. OTOH, in a junior programming position, you're probably (hopefully?) not called upon to work more than 40 hrs per week, which leaves the remaining 128 hrs for doing cool stuff. Sleep is not cool, and there are great new pharmacological methods for eliminating it. I'm joking about that last part. Mostly.
I suggest coming up with something using cool technology that you think is marketable, and develop it, learning what you need to learn as you go. By trying to make it marketable, you will make yourself focus on the needs of the end user, which is vital to becoming a good software developer. Businesswise, you will probably fail miserably (but maybe not), but the point is to learn and get experience with cool technology. If you get users, even if it doesn't make a cent, then it can credibly go on your resume, and you can get a paying job using said cool technology.
But in general, if you want to a) stay employable and/or b) know and use cool technologies, you really need to take it upon yourself to make and keep your skillset a) relevent to employers and b) interesting to you. All it takes is a quick search on dice.com to see what technologies are currently being sought by employers.
Hibernation is fine, but it is not what the OP is talking about. There are many times you need to reboot, unless you're lucky. E.g., in many corporate settings, everyone has to reboot every day, to get new patches, updates and whatnot; anyone with any flakey device driver will run in to problems from time to time that will need to be cured with a reboot; there are (still) software installs that require reboots, etc. IANASP (I Am Not A Systems Programmer [I'm an applications programmer]), but I've always gotten the impressions that the bulk of the wait time comes from device drivers initializing. It would seem like this would be a solvable problem, as device drivers would not necessarily need to test their hardware and initialize themselves on every boot if they could each save their states on shutdown. (So the OS doesn't hibernate, but the individual device drivers do.) Of course, you'd also need a way to tell the OS that you'd like to do a "complete" reboot w/o saved states. I remember there have been pushes for speeding up boot times in the past, and they have indeed gotten better (I remember when it was common for the BIOS to require a FULL memory check on boot). But for something like this to happen it would have to be percieved across the industry as an important thing -- or else Microsoft would have to push for it.
Yes, but you see, the ability to do this, i.e. to practice charity, which is the moral way of life, is in many ways dependent upon having the resources to give, which in turn is dependant upon a healthy free market economy. Obviously, you can be just as moral without any resources, but there is dramatically more that you can do for others if you do have resources. I think that Open Source is largely a result of this spirit. However, it is a result, not a cause, and I think it has exactly NOTHING to do with most the ideals mentioned, such as Justice. Justice has more to do with the free market. Charity is about rising above justice.
Where are all the liberal slashdotters who only know one quote (which they misquote, and most likely misattribute), namely,r $605)
;-)
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
It was the Motto printed on the front of a propaganda book Ben Franklin published, but did not write. (Story, and picture here: http://www.futureofthebook.com/stories/storyReade
The purpose of the book was to convince the king to give the colonists money to buy guns for the Indian tribes allied with them. (The French were arming the Indian tribes allied to them, the bastards
Yes, but this is not how "hackers" make money. They make money by selling spam and pop-ups sent through bot nets. And also by phishing email/websites. (Although the latter is extremely traceable, so it only seems to be done by people in countries where they don't do anything about it, like the former Soviet bloc.)
Actually they would. The ads that show up on Google search are the same ads that show up through their Ad Sense program on other people's website. So if they bid $10000 per click, they'd end up paying that (half of it, IIRC, and keeping half) for clicks on other web sites.
And they still pay when it's on their own web site, though not as much. They force another ad out of the #1 spot, and they force the bottom ad out altogether. That's less click-through revenue for them.
...someone might steal the Windows code and come out with a competing operating system. :P
I'm still stuck on the question of if an airline turns information we have already given them into a security risk score, can that act be justifiably called "an intrusion in liberty"? I am disinclined to agree that it can.
You proceed from a bad presupposition. High earners do not "receive" wealth from the economy. High earners CREATE wealth in the economy. It is therefore unethical for anyone but them to determine what becomes of that wealth, constrained by the fact that all must be taxed to pay for the necessities of government.
So if you tax net assets, I guess all those old people with barely any incomes, but who own their homes, can just liquidate and live in nursing homes.
CRAP! It sucks that there are still that many people richer than me!
Oh, the 80% DON'T HAVE ANY money, now??? Ok, now we're getting scientific.
Yeah, if justice means seeing something someone else has, and saying, "hey, I should have that." News Flash: Bill Gates didn't steal all his money from poor children, he started with some worthless stock, and made that stock valuable. He CREATED wealth. IOW, it is HIS, NOT YOURS.
No one dies of hunger in the U.S. or anywhere else where there is a free market economy. It is socialism and other forms of tyranny that starves people to death. The only starving children in America are supermodels.
The sickness you experience is called "envy" and it is the source of your problems.
Do they? People support people like Chavez because they are ignorant and greedy.
Inflation makes everyone poorer (unless you're investing in a foreign currency, but I don't think many of the poor do that). When the economy increases, the earning power of the poor increases (faster than the cost of living). (and also the earning power of the rich increases, and the difference between rich and poor increases.)
So to summarize your post, you are a white person who is afraid of white people, and there is a corporate conspiracy to charge black people too much for groceries and make sure not to sell them produce?
That has never -- and could never -- happen in a free market. When the rich get richer, and ONLY when the rich get richer, the poor get richer too. And when that happens the dreaded "gap between the rich and poor" increases, and the UN and the Democrats have hissy fits. The only ideology that can honestly oppose the "gap between the rich and poor" is one that is based upon envy of the rich, not compassion for the poor.
Um, they are paying the salaries of ~1.7 million people.
Income tax systems taxes income, not wealth. The top 1% of earners presumably make A LOT less than 30% of the world's income. That said, a progressive tax system is immoral. Everyone should be taxed at the same rate.
Really? This is very good to know. I guess that means that your bank account balance is not property, and if I were to make that balance be transferred into my account, that would not be stealing. You wouldn't mind signing an affidavit to that effect, would you?
Um, less talented musicians?
Which means so much when it comes to paying a mortgage and educating and feeding your children. What if really talented musicians could actually make a living by creating music, so that they could do it all day long instead of only after they get home from their day job? Wouldn't that be better for everyone? Yes, it would.
Nor should they care. The people have the power to completely change the entire government at will (except the Supreme Court, so yes go do your mob violence against the supreme court). This is the political power of the people. It would completely undermine the democratic principle if our elected representatives gave greater weight to the people who block the streets and chant than to the rest of the people who vote.
All I can possibly say to that, is that compared to your reasoning, your spelling is exceptional.
Although, I admit I'm unclear on the definition of "asshat".
Now you're on to something. The reason to mass a large group of people and chant is to threaten (even if it's subtle) violence or forceful disruption. There's no other reason -- especially in the information age when there are means of expression that are thousands of times more powerful. In the civil rights era this was valid because people were being denied their right to vote. When your rightful political power has been removed from you, it is valid to try to get it back by threat of violence -- there is no other recourse. Subsequent street protests and disruptive protests have all be invalid abuses of the right to assemble. I've personally never been closer to violence than when the protesters came to my city of Philadelphia because the RNC was here, and chained themselves across the streets to block traffic for miles, so they could tell everyone that they don't agree with the Republicans. Mobs of them roamed our streets, some of them committed vandalism. They tried to prevent delegates from making it to the convention center. My blood still boils just thinking about it. These people are the very antithesis of the republican form of government. If they really want a government based upon who can muster the most force, I for one am ready and willing to stand opposed to them.
How 'bout into the f-ing East River? YOU HAVE NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO TAKE OVER THE INTERSECTIONS OR BLOCK THEIR USE BY NORMAL PEOPLE!!! People taking such actions in this day and age are inherently undemocratic. If they wanted their voice to be heard, they would start a blog, not block the street. Rather, they are about expressing themselves with the threat of physical force, and the threat of disruption of the political process. I think you should reevaluate how many of your well-armed freedom-loving patriotic countrymen would be fighting with you versus against you.
Right, "look the U.S. has a non-lethal energy beam. Come blow yourself up for Allah." Yeah, that will work great.
Um, all of the Islamic nations that were on our side after 9/11 are still on our side.
I'm not part of any elite, but I've had my freedoms trampled on far more by protesters blocking my streets and trying to disrupt the nominating process of my political party, than I have ever had, or ever expect to have, by the supposed "tyranny" they oppose. So yes, please, by God, fry the damned hippies.