I have had this input device idea for years - it's a laser type point and click device with a small button that attaches to.. umm.. a shaft like object.. gone are the days of sticky mouse..
I'm going to start a political party called dictatoronline that'll do exactly the opposite of what senatoronline does. It's important to have opposition in a democracy.
As my economics professor used to say, we could have dropped washing machines on Vietnam and achieved the same result, and probably killed fewer people.
I don't know which history you've been reading, but from here:
Commenting on the use of 'psychological warfare broadcasts' and military tactics in Haifa, Benny Morris writes:
Throughout the Haganah made effective use of Arabic language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Haganah Radio announced that 'the day of judgement had arrived' and called on inhabitants to 'kick out the foreign criminals' and to 'move away from every house and street, from every neighbourhood occupied by foreign criminals'. The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to 'evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven'... Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were 'to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered' and to set alight with fire-bombs 'all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route'. (Morris[3], pp. 191-192)
By mid-May only 4000 Arabs remained in Haifa. These were concentrated in Wadi Nisnas in accordance with Plan D whilst the systematic destruction of Arab housing in certain areas, which had been planned before the War, was implemented by Haifa's Technical and Urban Development departments in cooperation with the IDF's city commander Ya'akov Lublini. (Morris[3], pp. 209-211)
According to Glazer (1980, p.111), from May 15, 1948 onwards, expulsion of Palestinians became a regular practice. Avnery (1971), explaining the Zionist rationale, says,
I believe that during this phase, the eviction of Arab civilians had become an aim of David Ben-Gurion and his government.... UN opinion could very well be disregarded. Peace with the Arabs seemed out of the question, considering the extreme nature of the Arab propaganda. In this situation, it was easy for people like Ben-Gurion to believe the capture of uninhabited territory was both necessary for security reasons and desirable for the homogeneity of the new Hebrew state[9].
Edgar O'Ballance, a military historian, adds,
Israeli vans with loudspeakers drove through the streets ordering all the inhabitants to evacuate immediately, and such as were reluctant to leave were forcibly ejected from their homes by the triumphant Israelis whose policy was now openly one of clearing out all the Arab civil population before them.... From the surrounding villages and hamlets, during the next two or three days, all the inhabitants were uprooted and set off on the road to Ramallah.... No longer was there any "reasonable persuasion". Bluntly, the Arab inhabitants were ejected and forced to flee into Arab territory.... Wherever the Israeli troops advanced into Arab country the Arab population was bulldozed out in front of them[10].
By the estimates of Morris, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians left Israel during this stage (Morris[3], p. 262). Keesing's Contemporary Archives in London place the total number of refugees before Israel's independence at 300,000.[11]
According to a report from the military intelligence SHAI of the Haganah entitled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948", dated 30 June 1948 affirms that:
At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations." To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure o
Read your history. If (say) the Canadians declared unilaterally that they wanted to resettle their people in the US and that everyone in the US was to forfeit their property and move to New Jersey, you'd be bringing that gun out in about half a second.. Get some perspective on issues, read up on your history.. you'll be surprised on how little is black and white.
This is not about programmers it's about R&D, which in turn is about finding people with bright ideas no matter what part of the world they're from. It used to be that the US was where people with great ideas could come and capitalize on them. Unfortunately with all the terrorist hysteria it's become easier to come into the country illegally to pick strawberries than it is to attend a scientific conference. I've heard of innumerable cases of the US arbitrarily denying visas to researchers based on their nationality or appearance. Add to that the difficulty of securing a work visa for professionals and you can see why Canada is an attractive option.
A lot of countries like Canada, Australia and the UK are actively making it easier for professionals to move there and benefiting greatly from the fallout of restrictive US immigration policies as evidenced in their high growth rates since 2001. The US is still a magnet for motivated intelligent people from around the world but with other options opening up I wonder how many of them will put up with the insane obstacles the US puts up for skilled workers while declaring amnesty after amnesty for those who broke the law.
Funnily enough the country that probably benefits most out of this is India because Indian firms no longer have to worry about losing their best workers to the US so can get away with paying lower wages than they otherwise would have (and in turn taking more American jobs)
I don't think the OP was denying that terrorist attacks have happened, but the fact that they're all attributed to Al Queda without any kind of proper evidence - that means no torture confessions, no secret prisons, no "terrorists" held for five years without a trial, and no secret evidence that's only shown to "world leaders". By your argument, a murder trial would go something like this "We found a dead body, therefore clearly the defendant is guilty".
There are nutjobs who want to blow things up, but that does not mean that they're part of some international organisation that wants to kill us because of our freedoms (I'm willing to bet that most people in Iran, Iraq, Palestine, etc. couldn't care less about your freedom or values, they just want to get by like the rest of us without being invaded, blown up or walled in).
I'm surprised that the usually skeptical mob at slashdot is so filling to be bottle fed by fear mongering crap-a-minute governments. It's not treacherous to ask for evidence and information before making your own judgement about who's guilty. We fought long and hard to have free and fair trials in a *public* court and there's a good reason why.
as they know they're lamp oil salesmen (no pun intended) and the light bulb is coming, so they want to get in on the ground floor rather than get left in the dust. Do you get paid by the metaphor?
I know that it can be done.. I had my wallet stolen in Washington DC - called a friend to wire some money to the western union at the bus terminal after explaining the situation to them. They said that since I didn't have any ID, my friend could set a password with the transfer and as long as I got the password right I could have the money..
Just off the top of my head, something like a distributed page rank might work.. each node crawls a certain number of pages depending on the resources available to it. It shares its top keywords and associated scores with its neighbours. The neighbours then send the top keywords out of their own crawl set combined with those of their neighbours to their other neighbours and so on..
When a node gets a query it generates it's top 40 results and passes the query and result set on to the neighbours it thinks would have the best results for the query. As the query passes from node to node the result set gets refined until a certain threshold is reached, at which point the results are returned to the user..
When a node drops out its neighbours adjust their top keyword list by adjusting the scores of the keywords given by that node. When a node changes its crawl set it initiates a top keyword exchange with its neighbours..
Just an idea, but I'd be happy to work on something like this if other people are interested..
You should read up on German language schools in Pennsylvania.. the US has always been a polyglot nation with linguistic and cultural minorities that migrated or were assimilated (Louisiana purchase, Hawaii, the absorption of large parts of Mexico (CA, NM, etc) into the US, Puerto Rico, etc.). You can read more here.
In Europe visible minorities have faced social exclusion, unemployment and rampant racism. You'd be hard pressed to see a minority on French television.. people with Muslim names are far less likely to get a job interview or have equal access to housing. In Germany, until very recently even third generation Turkish minorities were not granted citizenship and often deported for petty crimes to a country they or their parents had never been to.. Imagine being told that you, your children, your grand children and your great grand children will never be considered French or German or whatever and you will forever be discriminated against even though you were born and raised in that country, went to the same schools and participated in the same culture. Would you decide that it's your own fault for not being "French" enough or would you decide you'd had enough and go back to your ancestral culture which grants you unconditional acceptance and identity?
The next time you find yourself saying something like 'they are violent' or 'they are angry' think of how you rationalise your own behavior ("I was tired" or "I work with idiots", etc.).. it's never "I'm angry because I'm Polish".. give other people the same benefit of the doubt. I strongly recommend you read this book - "Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind" by David Berreby.
In the/. view of the world, India consists of two kinds of people - one who make curry and the other who answer phones. Obviously the rocket scientists who helped launch this were answering phones at night..or making curry in your local Indian restaurant.. it's funny even if it's repeated ad nauseam.
Oh and I love how Microsoft are anti competitive and the RIAA are bullies but/.'ers think nothing of constantly making disparaging remarks about Indians when it's their jobs that are being threatened. For the record I don't like the RIAA or Microsoft, but I don't like hypocrisy either.
In Australia, there are Australians (of anglo backgrounds) and there are the rest (including aboriginals, asians, south europeans and middle eastern people who are never referred to as 'Australian' even if they're second or third generation).. and there is a huge difference in the way the law is applied to the two..
About the censorship issue, here's an excerpt from Alan Jones (who has the largest radio audience in Australia) discussing "men of middle eastern appearance" with a caller ( from mediawatch )- AJ is Alan Jones and Y is the caller:
AJ: Yep, Well Australia is for all Australians. Isn't it?
Y: Well it is Alan.
AJ: And there is standard that has to apply and if you don't meet this standard you should be rounded up.
Y: And if we don't have enough police what's wrong with getting the army in?
AJ: Uh-ha.
Y: Get these blokes a bit of a rifle butt in the face and they'll, they'll back off, they're cowards!
AJ: Well if it gets to that we might have to do that, you follow what I'm saying?
A radio host who tells millions of listeners to bash dark skinned people at a beach is simply violating the broadcasting code and gets a slap on the wrist (see this) but a Muslim who says anything similar would be in for sedition (punishable with imprisonment for 7 years). Conincidentally, the new sedition law considers it an offence if:
(a) the person urges a group or groups (whether distinguished by race, religion, nationality or political opinion) to use force or violence against another group or other groups (as so distinguished); and
(b) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Alan Jones is not explicitly mentioned in the law.. I've looked.
Actually India is ranked 44th and you've got dyslexia. Also the study measures ICT readiness, not access to toilets. You can have access to the internet, but not to a toilet.. if you've ever been to India you'll see this is true
They had a pretty big meeting in Davos in January this year at which several heads of state were present - including Tony Blair and Angela Merkel (also Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and several other industry leaders)
Read about it at that other "USA hating jack-off organization":
I agree with this completely. Every IT manager / CIO should have to read Peopleware.
In no other job are you asked to do the equivalent of tracing through 10000 lines of code to track a potential threading problem while working around people answering phones and having loud conversations about TV shows. Meanwhile your manager keeps asking you what a thread is and why it takes so long to find one because he needs to present a 10 word summary of the problem to his manager and hasn't programmed since 1973..
After 4 days when you finally find the problem and explain that it's a three line code fix, you're not given the slightest bit of credit because as we know, IT workers are a commodity and anyone could have solved that problem. Even the guy who created the threading issue by putting a static PreparedStatement in a servlet to make it 'efficient' could have fixed it. It said on his resume that he knew JDBC..
Good IT workers are rare. Our office is filled with people with 10 years of experience in XML who try to emulate transactions by writing delete statements for inserted rows because they haven't heard of distributed transactions. They code everything according to 'design patterns' making it a nightmare to debug. Eventually you're the one who gets stuck with the problem of figuring out why credit card transactions are being credited to the wrong customers. Management doesn't see the difference between you and Mr. Design Patterns, except that he gets all his projects in on time and you're always late. The time you spend cleaning that dung heap of design patterns gets charged to 'General Maintenance' and is invisible...
If IT people built cars, they would randomly start reversing on the highway and about every 10 minutes the steering wheel would get stuck while the car tried to figure out what it should do next. Sometimes it would just explode without any reason. Upper management would send a retail manager to put together a team to fix the problem.
Coding is just as much of a thinking job as research.. sometimes it's easy because the problem is simple and well known (power cable not plugged in). Sometimes it's esoteric, and then you really need good IT people with a breadth of knowledge and excellent problem solving skills - you know, the ones you drove away with idiotic management and commoditisation.
That article is full of errors and omissions, e.g. from
"- Count Dracula is a Vampire
- Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
- Transylvania is a region of Romania
- Vampires are not real"
he concludes that "You can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions -- Romania isn't real.". That isn't true - the only conclusion you can draw is that Count Dracula is not real. (just because A implies B doesn't mean B implies A).
He uses examples like 'People who live in Brooklyn have a Brooklyn accent' is false because he lives in Brooklyn but doesn't have a Brooklyn accent.. in that case a more accurate representation would be '(some percent) of people in Brooklyn have a Brooklyn accent'. It's possible to have probability associated with your beliefs (see 'An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic' by Ian Hacking). It's also possible to have strength associated with your beliefs (see any book on the field of Belief Change dynamics), choose between contradictory beliefs, etc. It's an interesting field with many problems but this was one of the more ill informed opinions I have seen on it.
And just because I like nitpicking, here is another error of omission from that opinion. He says that from:
- US citizens are people
- The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens
- Nike is protected by the First Amendment
we can conclude that Nike is a person because the First Amendment covers the rights of Nike.
This is untrue. The set of statements is incomplete because it doesn't define what Nike is or that the First Amendment covers people and corporations.
Take this example:
John likes dogs
Dogs are animals
Books are not animals.
Would you conclude that John doesn't like books?
The true problems with the semantic web is the volume of meta data and its credibility. I guess I should add to that list people who criticise over 2000 years of logic without understanding its fundamentals.
That's because its cheaper to install a bunch of speed limit signs and cameras than to actually build roads that facilitate safer and faster driving. The lanes in Australia are really narrow, curves aren't graded, lane merges are ridiculously short which means you have to slam your brakes even on freeways. At the same time traffic volumes are increasing, so rather than solve the basic problem (upgrade the infrastructure), the government just slows traffic down to a crawl to get its job done.
We have the exact same problem. If the higher ups are to be believed there are no Java programmers to be had for love or for money. So the CIO has taken to poaching people from his ex-company, except that his ex-company was all Microsoft which means that now in addition to supporting the existing system, working on new projects and answering user queries I have to train our new 'senior' programmers.. I'm not even a senior programmer, I'm just a regular programmer. I guess if I didn't know what an ant script was or understand multi threading issues, I could have made senior programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had this input device idea for years - it's a laser type point and click device with a small button that attaches to.. umm.. a shaft like object.. gone are the days of sticky mouse..
I'm going to start a political party called dictatoronline that'll do exactly the opposite of what senatoronline does. It's important to have opposition in a democracy.
or in the case of a suicide bomber - SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX...
You also won't get sunlight 24 hours a day (unless you're at one of the poles).
As my economics professor used to say, we could have dropped washing machines on Vietnam and achieved the same result, and probably killed fewer people.
Commenting on the use of 'psychological warfare broadcasts' and military tactics in Haifa, Benny Morris writes:
.... UN opinion could very well be disregarded. Peace with the Arabs seemed out of the question, considering the extreme nature of the Arab propaganda. In this situation, it was easy for people like Ben-Gurion to believe the capture of uninhabited territory was both necessary for security reasons and desirable for the homogeneity of the new Hebrew state[9].
.... From the surrounding villages and hamlets, during the next two or three days, all the inhabitants were uprooted and set off on the road to Ramallah.... No longer was there any "reasonable persuasion". Bluntly, the Arab inhabitants were ejected and forced to flee into Arab territory.... Wherever the Israeli troops advanced into Arab country the Arab population was bulldozed out in front of them[10].
Throughout the Haganah made effective use of Arabic language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Haganah Radio announced that 'the day of judgement had arrived' and called on inhabitants to 'kick out the foreign criminals' and to 'move away from every house and street, from every neighbourhood occupied by foreign criminals'. The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to 'evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven'... Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were 'to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered' and to set alight with fire-bombs 'all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route'. (Morris[3], pp. 191-192)
By mid-May only 4000 Arabs remained in Haifa. These were concentrated in Wadi Nisnas in accordance with Plan D whilst the systematic destruction of Arab housing in certain areas, which had been planned before the War, was implemented by Haifa's Technical and Urban Development departments in cooperation with the IDF's city commander Ya'akov Lublini. (Morris[3], pp. 209-211)
According to Glazer (1980, p.111), from May 15, 1948 onwards, expulsion of Palestinians became a regular practice. Avnery (1971), explaining the Zionist rationale, says,
I believe that during this phase, the eviction of Arab civilians had become an aim of David Ben-Gurion and his government
Edgar O'Ballance, a military historian, adds,
Israeli vans with loudspeakers drove through the streets ordering all the inhabitants to evacuate immediately, and such as were reluctant to leave were forcibly ejected from their homes by the triumphant Israelis whose policy was now openly one of clearing out all the Arab civil population before them
By the estimates of Morris, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians left Israel during this stage (Morris[3], p. 262). Keesing's Contemporary Archives in London place the total number of refugees before Israel's independence at 300,000.[11]
According to a report from the military intelligence SHAI of the Haganah entitled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948", dated 30 June 1948 affirms that:
At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations." To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure o
Read your history. If (say) the Canadians declared unilaterally that they wanted to resettle their people in the US and that everyone in the US was to forfeit their property and move to New Jersey, you'd be bringing that gun out in about half a second.. Get some perspective on issues, read up on your history.. you'll be surprised on how little is black and white.
This is not about programmers it's about R&D, which in turn is about finding people with bright ideas no matter what part of the world they're from. It used to be that the US was where people with great ideas could come and capitalize on them. Unfortunately with all the terrorist hysteria it's become easier to come into the country illegally to pick strawberries than it is to attend a scientific conference. I've heard of innumerable cases of the US arbitrarily denying visas to researchers based on their nationality or appearance. Add to that the difficulty of securing a work visa for professionals and you can see why Canada is an attractive option.
A lot of countries like Canada, Australia and the UK are actively making it easier for professionals to move there and benefiting greatly from the fallout of restrictive US immigration policies as evidenced in their high growth rates since 2001. The US is still a magnet for motivated intelligent people from around the world but with other options opening up I wonder how many of them will put up with the insane obstacles the US puts up for skilled workers while declaring amnesty after amnesty for those who broke the law.
Funnily enough the country that probably benefits most out of this is India because Indian firms no longer have to worry about losing their best workers to the US so can get away with paying lower wages than they otherwise would have (and in turn taking more American jobs)
I don't think the OP was denying that terrorist attacks have happened, but the fact that they're all attributed to Al Queda without any kind of proper evidence - that means no torture confessions, no secret prisons, no "terrorists" held for five years without a trial, and no secret evidence that's only shown to "world leaders". By your argument, a murder trial would go something like this "We found a dead body, therefore clearly the defendant is guilty".
There are nutjobs who want to blow things up, but that does not mean that they're part of some international organisation that wants to kill us because of our freedoms (I'm willing to bet that most people in Iran, Iraq, Palestine, etc. couldn't care less about your freedom or values, they just want to get by like the rest of us without being invaded, blown up or walled in).
I'm surprised that the usually skeptical mob at slashdot is so filling to be bottle fed by fear mongering crap-a-minute governments. It's not treacherous to ask for evidence and information before making your own judgement about who's guilty. We fought long and hard to have free and fair trials in a *public* court and there's a good reason why.
I know that it can be done.. I had my wallet stolen in Washington DC - called a friend to wire some money to the western union at the bus terminal after explaining the situation to them. They said that since I didn't have any ID, my friend could set a password with the transfer and as long as I got the password right I could have the money..
Just off the top of my head, something like a distributed page rank might work.. each node crawls a certain number of pages depending on the resources available to it. It shares its top keywords and associated scores with its neighbours. The neighbours then send the top keywords out of their own crawl set combined with those of their neighbours to their other neighbours and so on..
When a node gets a query it generates it's top 40 results and passes the query and result set on to the neighbours it thinks would have the best results for the query. As the query passes from node to node the result set gets refined until a certain threshold is reached, at which point the results are returned to the user..
When a node drops out its neighbours adjust their top keyword list by adjusting the scores of the keywords given by that node. When a node changes its crawl set it initiates a top keyword exchange with its neighbours..
Just an idea, but I'd be happy to work on something like this if other people are interested..
You should read up on German language schools in Pennsylvania.. the US has always been a polyglot nation with linguistic and cultural minorities that migrated or were assimilated (Louisiana purchase, Hawaii, the absorption of large parts of Mexico (CA, NM, etc) into the US, Puerto Rico, etc.). You can read more here.
In Europe visible minorities have faced social exclusion, unemployment and rampant racism. You'd be hard pressed to see a minority on French television.. people with Muslim names are far less likely to get a job interview or have equal access to housing. In Germany, until very recently even third generation Turkish minorities were not granted citizenship and often deported for petty crimes to a country they or their parents had never been to.. Imagine being told that you, your children, your grand children and your great grand children will never be considered French or German or whatever and you will forever be discriminated against even though you were born and raised in that country, went to the same schools and participated in the same culture. Would you decide that it's your own fault for not being "French" enough or would you decide you'd had enough and go back to your ancestral culture which grants you unconditional acceptance and identity?
The next time you find yourself saying something like 'they are violent' or 'they are angry' think of how you rationalise your own behavior ("I was tired" or "I work with idiots", etc.).. it's never "I'm angry because I'm Polish".. give other people the same benefit of the doubt. I strongly recommend you read this book - "Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind" by David Berreby.
That's what happens when you don't use optimistic transactions. The article shouldn't have committed because the underlying data had changed.
In the /. view of the world, India consists of two kinds of people - one who make curry and the other who answer phones. Obviously the rocket scientists who helped launch this were answering phones at night..or making curry in your local Indian restaurant.. it's funny even if it's repeated ad nauseam.
/.'ers think nothing of constantly making disparaging remarks about Indians when it's their jobs that are being threatened. For the record I don't like the RIAA or Microsoft, but I don't like hypocrisy either.
Oh and I love how Microsoft are anti competitive and the RIAA are bullies but
In Australia, there are Australians (of anglo backgrounds) and there are the rest (including aboriginals, asians, south europeans and middle eastern people who are never referred to as 'Australian' even if they're second or third generation).. and there is a huge difference in the way the law is applied to the two..
About the censorship issue, here's an excerpt from Alan Jones (who has the largest radio audience in Australia) discussing "men of middle eastern appearance" with a caller ( from mediawatch )- AJ is Alan Jones and Y is the caller:
AJ: Yep, Well Australia is for all Australians. Isn't it?
Y: Well it is Alan.
AJ: And there is standard that has to apply and if you don't meet this standard you should be rounded up.
Y: And if we don't have enough police what's wrong with getting the army in?
AJ: Uh-ha.
Y: Get these blokes a bit of a rifle butt in the face and they'll, they'll back off, they're cowards!
AJ: Well if it gets to that we might have to do that, you follow what I'm saying?
A radio host who tells millions of listeners to bash dark skinned people at a beach is simply violating the broadcasting code and gets a slap on the wrist (see this) but a Muslim who says anything similar would be in for sedition (punishable with imprisonment for 7 years). Conincidentally, the new sedition law considers it an offence if:
(a) the person urges a group or groups (whether distinguished by race, religion, nationality or political opinion) to use force or violence against another group or other groups (as so distinguished); and
(b) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Alan Jones is not explicitly mentioned in the law.. I've looked.
"The people stuck in the traffic jams on the East coast will be dead of course, but how long till we can restart our civilization?"
Are you calling New Jersey civilization?
Actually India is ranked 44th and you've got dyslexia. Also the study measures ICT readiness, not access to toilets. You can have access to the internet, but not to a toilet.. if you've ever been to India you'll see this is true
o rum-lead-lead-citizen-davos07_cx_ag_0123davos_land .html
http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gitr/rankings2007.pdf
The WEF is based in Geneva and run by the Swiss government
http://www.weforum.org/en/about/index.htm
They had a pretty big meeting in Davos in January this year at which several heads of state were present - including Tony Blair and Angela Merkel (also Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and several other industry leaders)
Read about it at that other "USA hating jack-off organization":
http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/23/world-economic-f
But don't let the facts get in the way of your opinion.
I agree with this completely. Every IT manager / CIO should have to read Peopleware.
In no other job are you asked to do the equivalent of tracing through 10000 lines of code to track a potential threading problem while working around people answering phones and having loud conversations about TV shows. Meanwhile your manager keeps asking you what a thread is and why it takes so long to find one because he needs to present a 10 word summary of the problem to his manager and hasn't programmed since 1973..
After 4 days when you finally find the problem and explain that it's a three line code fix, you're not given the slightest bit of credit because as we know, IT workers are a commodity and anyone could have solved that problem. Even the guy who created the threading issue by putting a static PreparedStatement in a servlet to make it 'efficient' could have fixed it. It said on his resume that he knew JDBC..
Good IT workers are rare. Our office is filled with people with 10 years of experience in XML who try to emulate transactions by writing delete statements for inserted rows because they haven't heard of distributed transactions. They code everything according to 'design patterns' making it a nightmare to debug. Eventually you're the one who gets stuck with the problem of figuring out why credit card transactions are being credited to the wrong customers. Management doesn't see the difference between you and Mr. Design Patterns, except that he gets all his projects in on time and you're always late. The time you spend cleaning that dung heap of design patterns gets charged to 'General Maintenance' and is invisible...
If IT people built cars, they would randomly start reversing on the highway and about every 10 minutes the steering wheel would get stuck while the car tried to figure out what it should do next. Sometimes it would just explode without any reason. Upper management would send a retail manager to put together a team to fix the problem.
Coding is just as much of a thinking job as research.. sometimes it's easy because the problem is simple and well known (power cable not plugged in). Sometimes it's esoteric, and then you really need good IT people with a breadth of knowledge and excellent problem solving skills - you know, the ones you drove away with idiotic management and commoditisation.
That article is full of errors and omissions, e.g. from
:
"- Count Dracula is a Vampire
- Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
- Transylvania is a region of Romania
- Vampires are not real"
he concludes that "You can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions -- Romania isn't real.". That isn't true - the only conclusion you can draw is that Count Dracula is not real. (just because A implies B doesn't mean B implies A).
He uses examples like 'People who live in Brooklyn have a Brooklyn accent' is false because he lives in Brooklyn but doesn't have a Brooklyn accent.. in that case a more accurate representation would be '(some percent) of people in Brooklyn have a Brooklyn accent'. It's possible to have probability associated with your beliefs (see 'An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic' by Ian Hacking). It's also possible to have strength associated with your beliefs (see any book on the field of Belief Change dynamics), choose between contradictory beliefs, etc. It's an interesting field with many problems but this was one of the more ill informed opinions I have seen on it.
And just because I like nitpicking, here is another error of omission from that opinion. He says that from
- US citizens are people
- The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens
- Nike is protected by the First Amendment
we can conclude that Nike is a person because the First Amendment covers the rights of Nike.
This is untrue. The set of statements is incomplete because it doesn't define what Nike is or that the First Amendment covers people and corporations.
Take this example:
John likes dogs
Dogs are animals
Books are not animals.
Would you conclude that John doesn't like books?
The true problems with the semantic web is the volume of meta data and its credibility. I guess I should add to that list people who criticise over 2000 years of logic without understanding its fundamentals.
In Iran most politicians would be proud to be compared to Hitler or Stalin
If you take anything Murdoch owned as real news then that's your own damned fault.
That's because its cheaper to install a bunch of speed limit signs and cameras than to actually build roads that facilitate safer and faster driving. The lanes in Australia are really narrow, curves aren't graded, lane merges are ridiculously short which means you have to slam your brakes even on freeways. At the same time traffic volumes are increasing, so rather than solve the basic problem (upgrade the infrastructure), the government just slows traffic down to a crawl to get its job done.
We have the exact same problem. If the higher ups are to be believed there are no Java programmers to be had for love or for money. So the CIO has taken to poaching people from his ex-company, except that his ex-company was all Microsoft which means that now in addition to supporting the existing system, working on new projects and answering user queries I have to train our new 'senior' programmers.. I'm not even a senior programmer, I'm just a regular programmer. I guess if I didn't know what an ant script was or understand multi threading issues, I could have made senior programmer.
And this has nothing to do with tall poppy syndrome.
Australia - where idiotic generalisations are a way of life.