What are the chances that this guy just did something against the Chinese Government's wishes, and so they faked this whole scandal.
Why? I mean, come on. Not everything done by China is something sneaky and awful. It's just another country, abeit one with a leadership that has some policies that most of us don't like much.
That's like hearing about someone being arrested for plagiarism in the US and assuming that a bunch of guys with black helicopters trumped up the scandal.
How come no political party makes this a central campaign argument ?
That's an easy one. What grabs the eyes and attention of Bobby the Wal-Mart checker more effectively?
(a) Gays are planning to marry...to *take over*!
(b) There is a computer security problem related to unverifiability (Bobby just stopped reading here, guys) in voting kiosks produced by a certain company. Flash drives could be used to...
There are a *lot* more Bobbys than Slashdotters in the US. That means Bobby's vote matters a lot more.
Now, given that a political party is basically a marketing machine to acquire and sell influence, you'd have to be a pretty damn incompetent party to target Slashdotters when you could target Bobby.
And there we have one of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, all in one. Our democracy is pretty stable because the majority more-or-less support what is happening, but it's also limited to the understanding of the general public. It's hard to get complicated, specialized issues addressed. If you can get a one- or maybe two-sentence summary that produces a strong emotional reaction, your issue has a chance.
Take, say, Social Security. Social Security went through because the general public understood it to be some sort of savings system rather than an unmaintainable subsidy for the elderly. Given that economic systems are often hard to understand and that they involve, well, money, they're a good place to exploit a lack of understanding.
Larry Lessig, on the other hand, is not going to start a mass movement for the reduction of copyright terms, because aside from "free music", there's no general draw to do so. One has to have a reasonable understanding of what the point of copyright is and what the drawbacks are to have an issue with over-extended copyright, and most people just don't care enough to find out.
On the other hand, something like the Elian Gonzalez issue produces emotional response, and though it has little impact on the country as a whole, is what gets attention.
The only reason you even KNOW about these problems is because the government is far more open and accountable than any corporation, who would have had a much easier time covering it up.
Err..no. The reason I know about these problems is because I work with people who pull in said government contracts. And were you to look back, with Google, over my long-term posting history on Slashdot, you'd find that I not infrequently bash the LP as being far too extremist and impractical.
Do I dislike wasting money? Sure, the same is true for everyone. I don't have a great *fix* for the problem -- and I think the LP's approach of "basically, cut off half the government" causes more harm than benefit.
They make a voting machine that is atrocious and faulty.
To be fair, even if it were someone else, voting machines that submit the vote in electronic form simply have fundamental problems with accountability. Yes, Diebold has had some atrocious engineering problems, but even if you took the best group of engineers on the planet and asked them to replace the pencil or hole punch machine with a fully electronic form, they'd still have a vastly more exploitable system than the traditional system.
I view Diebold as representative of a lot of companies that get government contracts -- obtaining unneeded pork, doing a fairly half-assed job. However, while some things (like the criminal records of people presiding over the project) were a little disturbing, I'm more willing to say that Diebold probably has nothing more malicious in mind than getting as much money as possible and not caring much as to how useful (or dangerous) their work is.
The real problem is that no voting administrator wants to be in the shoes of the Florida people, where questionable ballots exceeded the margin by which Bush won. An electronic form throws away all data other than a simple vote -- it may not be more accurate, but it covers the asses of voting administrators.
The fact that the whole system is much less accountable and more open to abuse and attacks than a physical system is more an issue that not of the involved people (voting officials and Diebold) just don't care about than one that I expect that they intend to personally exploit.
Better yet, why doesn't every country get together and decide what a child is? Or how about every U.S. state?
For the same reason that having other laws differ across nations is a good idea -- it provides a number of different approaches being tried out that everyone can learn from, and means that people who dislike the laws of one country can move to somewhere that they prefer. Like drugs? The Netherlands! Like guns? The US!
I think that having a single set of laws imposed across the whole world is likely to cause a bit of friction...
All right, fair enough -- but to achieve that, MLton requires whole-program compilation, which is probably going to be too expensive for large projects.
I don't have the Sun JDK on my Fedora system by default because of the Sun license.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been adopting ocaml as the next big language. For once, Microsoft is technically ahead of its competitors -- ocaml (which Microsoft did not produce) is very fast and safe, and from a technical standpoint is much more impressive than C# and Java.
Plus, ocaml can be used as a pure functional language -- such languages eliminate almost all the reason to use (error-prone, difficult to guarantee correctness with) threads. Pure functional code is inherently parallelizable any time the compiler can say "hey, no data dependency here".
Ocaml is picking up quite a bit of steam -- there are a slew of open-source libraries for it out there, it's the only safe language that I'm aware of that provides performance comparable to C and C++, yadda yadda yadda. The INRIA ocaml compiler is open source (though, annoyingly, QPL instead of GPL). The runtimes and the stuff that you stuff into your code is LGPL. I didn't realize that Microsoft was backing it and integrating ocaml support into Visual Studio until quite recently, though. There have been gtk+ bindings for ocaml for a while, but MS may actually be ahead of the OSS world in providing complete ocaml bindings.
If you've never used ocaml before, wait until the first time you break in the debugger at a problem...and then step *backwards* to watch the problem occurring. It's simply delightful.:-) Plus, it's even more concise than C (which is saying quite a bit), is safe and garbage-collected, has very strict typing (I've heard one ML fan say "If your code compiles, it's correct" in only half-jest)...ah.
What's particularly satisfying is that C was well-designed -- for a specific set of systems and circumstances that don't apply to most application software development today. Ocaml is the first language in a long time that I've seen where I can say not just that the language has good ideas, but that it is really well-designed. It's also a lot better-suited to application development than C is.
I'm no longer entirely convinced that open source has a huge benefit for video card drivers.
Okay, yes, it's probably not a bad idea, but I read an article from some guy at Precision Insight about this.
The argument was that video card drivers are among the most complex of drivers. It's kind of like Mozilla -- there is a significant barrier to just dropping in and hacking away -- so you don't accrue programmers left and right.
Granted, I'd still buy any card that has good open-source driver support and is more modern than my Radeon 9250, but I'm part of a limited set of people.
Open source works very well for a number of things, but there are definitely systems that it's less effective at:
* Systems that require a significant understanding of a large deal of code before commits can be made. People get scared away from Open Office and Mozilla. Emacs has done very well, but even though it's a sizeable codebase, it's also extremely modular on a by-feature basis. You don't need to learn much to be able to write a new useful feature or understand how a particular feature works.
Anything that requires non-general knowledge has a significant cost in an open-source package. Custom code that replaces standard code (string classes, replacement data structure code), knowledge of the software package's threading model, strange conventions, you name it. Having a codebase that is easy to drop into and start working is always nice, but it is especially important for open source projects.
* Systems that cannot be used by the developer. Okay, this probably isn't an issue for graphics card drivers. Really, really esoteric stuff or things that few programmers have interest in (like simplified interfaces for existing software) don't tend to attract many volunteer developers.
Games with limited replay value are another example. Successful open-source games, almost without exception, have very high replayability and make relatively little use of elements like plot twists, eye candy, or anything else where the enjoyment only comes through once or a few times. Such games tend to either be multiplayer or involve a significant random element. If games can't be played over and over by the developers, the developer doesn't get much enjoyment out of playing them and drifts away.
Because the university made all the students sign some form saying (among other things) that the university could monitor their network usage and so forth.
You're right that the RIAA can't install this themselves, and cannot *force* the schools to install this (well, unless they get additional laws passed). However, if they convince the school to voluntarily install sniffing tools, the school can do whatever it wants with the data, including sending it to the RIAA.
Of course, college students are educated, vocal, often hard-up for money, and the prospect of a lot of them with incentive to hack on P2P clients that encrypt or hide their traffic has a certain degree of risk for the RIAA...
Our copy-right and patent laws were orginaly set up to protect the small people.
I don't know about that. They were set up with the intent of funding content creation. Copyright laws may still do that -- abused and stretched as they may be -- but software patents are actively harming the ability of engineers to function in the United States.
(And engineers who want to make a product that can be sold in the United States, which is damn near everyone.)
And for people who don't sympathize, remember -- if you work at a successful tech company that makes unusual products, you're liable to be put in this guy's shoes any day.
I've decided that Google-bashing comes down to largely two areas:
* SEO people and website proprietors bitter that they don't have a higher ranking.
* People who are alarmed by the growing influence and power of Google and want to cap it.
The "China thing" was possibly the most absurd slam I've ever seen, where people were complaining that Google was horrible because it followed a country's laws within that country. Good lord. Google doesn't finance private armies to overthrow China's leadership, either. Darn them for not forcibly spreading democracy and promoting revolution. [rolls eyes] I'll take Google's approach over Bush's approach any day, and let the mass of the Chinese people decide whether to revolt or not on their own.
Google is making an incredibly useful set of products in a highly competitive market and still stomping the competition. While doing so, they are not using underhanded business tactics, they are providing funding to a number of highly-cost-effective open source efforts, and so forth. They have generally done a better job of advocating the privacy of their users than their competitors. They promote interesting CS development. They helped reverse the slide into unusable "media-rich" flashy, slow websites.
As you said -- they may not be perfect, but they're one of the best things you're going to run into. Maybe someday, when the growth slows and they hit a (real) scandal or two, there will be good reasons to dislike them. Until them, I'm going to sit back and enjoy.
If there was a way to filter out used and third-party products from the Amazon search results, I might be more interested in using their service. As it is, I have to dig through many results from "partners".
What the US is lacking is individuals who are sincerely interested in developing their technical skills and solving interesting problems for their own sake, rather than people who are trying to find the easiest way into a high paying position that they care very little about -- having worked with both, I'd choose a British Literature major who does programming on her own, just for fun, over a Computer Science major who hates computers, but just wants a high paying job.
Good conclusion, but I can summarize it more briefly:
I graduated in 2000 when life was sweet for Computer Science majors. When the bubble burst, there was a false impression that computer related fields were doomed. I always found that amusing because our whole society is based on technology and will always need people to run it. Media reports and articles on websites like this didn't help either. They gave the impression that Computer Science wasgoing the way of the dinosaur when it truly was healthy.
Think about it.
"Computer science job prospects are good, but in less less ridiculous overdemand than they were two years ago"
"Tech industry collapsing! Anecdotal evidence from college students switching majors here!"
If we truly* have such a shortage of computer scientists, then let's recruit the foreigners and bring them in as immigrants.
This is one of my favorite statements to make to Southerners.
There are lots of low-skill workers in southern states who are heavily opposed to allowing Mexicans into the country. They claim to be opposed to "illegal immigration". They claim that it takes money out of their pocket, as they subsidize, with their taxes, Mexican workers.
They say that they aren't in favor of protectionist laws, that they aren't trying to just be subsidized by higher-skill workers.
Yet the moment you propose eliminating the immigration quota, which should make them incredibly happy -- it would essentially eliminate any tax subsidization that they are upset about -- they continue being upset. They *really* want that troublesome competition to just vanish...
-I won't even mention the USPTO and american fair justice system ("the one with the more money always win") that would make us european laugth if it wasn't hype for our politicians to copy your mistakes.
This IMHO the largest threat, actually. This may irrepairably damage our tech industry. It is becoming increasingly risky for a company with money to produce new systems, because of the sheer number of infringements this involves and how much someone would like to sue that company. I've seen this from both the open source developer side and the huge company side, and what is going on is appalling -- mass siphoning of resources from developers and engineers to lawyers and "patent entrepreneurs".
I can think of a number of reasons why the US does well.
* Europe generally has heavily protectionist labor laws. In the US, if a programmer sucks, he's generally fireable at-will. If a company sucks, a programmer can walk out tomorrow. In Europe, you tend to be looking at mandated long warning periods on each side, mandated severance pay, and so forth. The benefit of the European approach is more stable employment. This doesn't come for free though -- it's harder to establish a meritocracy and connect with the best workers. The recent protests over French employment law were incomprehensible to me, as an American (where laws guaranteeing that employees could not be fired without "just cause" for a a certain number of years after they started working were possibly going to be rolled back). If you're worthwhile, your employer isn't going to fire you, and your employee isn't going to leave you. Forcing the employer to do otherwise is not economically free.
I work with some Germans -- they take their eight-hour workday *very* seriously. My understanding is that a German manager that requires an employee to work beyond a certain amount of time becomes personally liable if, say, that employee gets into a car crash on the way home because he is tired. This may be great if you want stable employment; it's not so great if you're trying to get a company going, especially in a market where time-to-market is crucial.
* Venture capital. I remember reading an analysis that dated back before the dot-com boom, and remember reading that it is much easier to get startup funding in the United States than it is in many European countries.
* A large market is easily accessable. The US is well-to-do, and just about everyone speaks English (though Spanish is upcoming). It's easy to write a software product and sell it to everyone in the US. I was debating this subject with a gentleman who runs a German software development firm the other day -- he commented that a US software developer doesn't need to be able to sell to Europe, but that a European software developer generally does need to be able to sell to the US.
* Good education. Expensive, granted. I still see lots of grad students studying in the US from overseas.
* Savings are more liquid. In the US, you tend to have more money going to the employee and staying with him, due to lower tax rates. That means that after a few years, it's easier for someone to take his savings and make a (possibly risky) gamble and start a company. Of course, he might wind up fairly poor in his old age as a result of this; Europe would tend to subsidize that old age more heavily.
* Paul Graham has his own take on this, which seems to be some sort of fuzzy claim that Europeans culturally focus on long-term planning and polishing products, and Americans culturally focus on quick-and-dirty and a rapidly changing market. His arguments seem to be mostly anecdotal, but they are at least fun to read.
* You mentioned deficit financing as a drawback. Deficit financing is bad only *in the future*. It's great in the short term. The faster the national debt grows, the faster resources flow to the US in the short term.
* My understanding (though I'm not aware of the specific
Most retail sales people are simply not going to possess the necessary knowledge to correctly recommend or explain every nuance of a piece of hardware.
Yup, and this isn't just true of computers.
Circuit City sells audio equipment, for example. How many salesmen there know the first thing about any of it? My experience has been zero.
Try asking someone in a Wal-Mart a question about their bicycles.
The replacement of speciality stores with larger, general-purpose stores has, in my opinion, vastly reduced the amount of domain knowledge that the salesmen offer. Of course, it costs more to have salesmen with domain knowledge, and general-purpose stores pass on much of those savings to you, so it's a tradeoff...
Catalonia is already an autonomous region within Spain and there is some sentiment for independence.
And I am certain that after Catalonia decides to go independent, people there will cease being described as Spaniards. Until then, it is hardly reasonable to criticize people for doing so.
In the case of software, at least, this is more significant.
I also have less of a problem with long copyright than, say, patents. They don't prevent other people from creating new works, at least.
However, the point of copyright is completely to create an economic construct to fund the creation of useful new works and move them into the public domain. The drawbacks of a limited-time monopoly are seen as a worthwhile tradeoff for the content that gets created.
However, in the case of software, the stuff will *never* move into the public domain during its useful lifetime. Places like The Home of the Underdogs (currently having some DNS trouble) are not legal, though the service they provide is desireable.
Even in the case of other works, while the damage caused by extremely long copyright is more limited, it certainly goes against the grain of what copyright was intended to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do the legwork when the employees at Google are cool enough to do it for you?
I think that the network, with all its erratic latency, is not really the best source to use as a timing transport.
NTP does not just send a packet saying "Hey, here's the time." It compensates for this. You're thinking of the daytime protocol -- early 1980s tech.
NTP v3 (early 90s) is much more sophisticated.
What are the chances that this guy just did something against the Chinese Government's wishes, and so they faked this whole scandal.
Why? I mean, come on. Not everything done by China is something sneaky and awful. It's just another country, abeit one with a leadership that has some policies that most of us don't like much.
That's like hearing about someone being arrested for plagiarism in the US and assuming that a bunch of guys with black helicopters trumped up the scandal.
As we all know "terrorism" is the root password to the Constitution.
As can be seen by the Reichstag fire, it works nicely to bypass the governmental safeguards of other countries too.
How come no political party makes this a central campaign argument ?
That's an easy one. What grabs the eyes and attention of Bobby the Wal-Mart checker more effectively?
(a) Gays are planning to marry...to *take over*!
(b) There is a computer security problem related to unverifiability (Bobby just stopped reading here, guys) in voting kiosks produced by a certain company. Flash drives could be used to...
There are a *lot* more Bobbys than Slashdotters in the US. That means Bobby's vote matters a lot more.
Now, given that a political party is basically a marketing machine to acquire and sell influence, you'd have to be a pretty damn incompetent party to target Slashdotters when you could target Bobby.
And there we have one of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, all in one. Our democracy is pretty stable because the majority more-or-less support what is happening, but it's also limited to the understanding of the general public. It's hard to get complicated, specialized issues addressed. If you can get a one- or maybe two-sentence summary that produces a strong emotional reaction, your issue has a chance.
Take, say, Social Security. Social Security went through because the general public understood it to be some sort of savings system rather than an unmaintainable subsidy for the elderly. Given that economic systems are often hard to understand and that they involve, well, money, they're a good place to exploit a lack of understanding.
Larry Lessig, on the other hand, is not going to start a mass movement for the reduction of copyright terms, because aside from "free music", there's no general draw to do so. One has to have a reasonable understanding of what the point of copyright is and what the drawbacks are to have an issue with over-extended copyright, and most people just don't care enough to find out.
On the other hand, something like the Elian Gonzalez issue produces emotional response, and though it has little impact on the country as a whole, is what gets attention.
The only reason you even KNOW about these problems is because the government is far more open and accountable than any corporation, who would have had a much easier time covering it up.
Err..no. The reason I know about these problems is because I work with people who pull in said government contracts. And were you to look back, with Google, over my long-term posting history on Slashdot, you'd find that I not infrequently bash the LP as being far too extremist and impractical.
Do I dislike wasting money? Sure, the same is true for everyone. I don't have a great *fix* for the problem -- and I think the LP's approach of "basically, cut off half the government" causes more harm than benefit.
Diebold can make a box that handles your money with no issues.
Well, not exactly. Diebold ATMs have been featured rather prominently on Slashdot before...
They make a voting machine that is atrocious and faulty.
To be fair, even if it were someone else, voting machines that submit the vote in electronic form simply have fundamental problems with accountability. Yes, Diebold has had some atrocious engineering problems, but even if you took the best group of engineers on the planet and asked them to replace the pencil or hole punch machine with a fully electronic form, they'd still have a vastly more exploitable system than the traditional system.
I view Diebold as representative of a lot of companies that get government contracts -- obtaining unneeded pork, doing a fairly half-assed job. However, while some things (like the criminal records of people presiding over the project) were a little disturbing, I'm more willing to say that Diebold probably has nothing more malicious in mind than getting as much money as possible and not caring much as to how useful (or dangerous) their work is.
The real problem is that no voting administrator wants to be in the shoes of the Florida people, where questionable ballots exceeded the margin by which Bush won. An electronic form throws away all data other than a simple vote -- it may not be more accurate, but it covers the asses of voting administrators.
The fact that the whole system is much less accountable and more open to abuse and attacks than a physical system is more an issue that not of the involved people (voting officials and Diebold) just don't care about than one that I expect that they intend to personally exploit.
Better yet, why doesn't every country get together and decide what a child is? Or how about every U.S. state?
For the same reason that having other laws differ across nations is a good idea -- it provides a number of different approaches being tried out that everyone can learn from, and means that people who dislike the laws of one country can move to somewhere that they prefer. Like drugs? The Netherlands! Like guns? The US!
I think that having a single set of laws imposed across the whole world is likely to cause a bit of friction...
All right, fair enough -- but to achieve that, MLton requires whole-program compilation, which is probably going to be too expensive for large projects.
So what exactly is the problem?
:-) Plus, it's even more concise than C (which is saying quite a bit), is safe and garbage-collected, has very strict typing (I've heard one ML fan say "If your code compiles, it's correct" in only half-jest)...ah.
I don't have the Sun JDK on my Fedora system by default because of the Sun license.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been adopting ocaml as the next big language. For once, Microsoft is technically ahead of its competitors -- ocaml (which Microsoft did not produce) is very fast and safe, and from a technical standpoint is much more impressive than C# and Java.
Plus, ocaml can be used as a pure functional language -- such languages eliminate almost all the reason to use (error-prone, difficult to guarantee correctness with) threads. Pure functional code is inherently parallelizable any time the compiler can say "hey, no data dependency here".
Ocaml is picking up quite a bit of steam -- there are a slew of open-source libraries for it out there, it's the only safe language that I'm aware of that provides performance comparable to C and C++, yadda yadda yadda. The INRIA ocaml compiler is open source (though, annoyingly, QPL instead of GPL). The runtimes and the stuff that you stuff into your code is LGPL. I didn't realize that Microsoft was backing it and integrating ocaml support into Visual Studio until quite recently, though. There have been gtk+ bindings for ocaml for a while, but MS may actually be ahead of the OSS world in providing complete ocaml bindings.
If you've never used ocaml before, wait until the first time you break in the debugger at a problem...and then step *backwards* to watch the problem occurring. It's simply delightful.
What's particularly satisfying is that C was well-designed -- for a specific set of systems and circumstances that don't apply to most application software development today. Ocaml is the first language in a long time that I've seen where I can say not just that the language has good ideas, but that it is really well-designed. It's also a lot better-suited to application development than C is.
Gah...sorry. Ocaml gives me the warm fuzzies.
I'm no longer entirely convinced that open source has a huge benefit for video card drivers.
Okay, yes, it's probably not a bad idea, but I read an article from some guy at Precision Insight about this.
The argument was that video card drivers are among the most complex of drivers. It's kind of like Mozilla -- there is a significant barrier to just dropping in and hacking away -- so you don't accrue programmers left and right.
Granted, I'd still buy any card that has good open-source driver support and is more modern than my Radeon 9250, but I'm part of a limited set of people.
Open source works very well for a number of things, but there are definitely systems that it's less effective at:
* Systems that require a significant understanding of a large deal of code before commits can be made. People get scared away from Open Office and Mozilla. Emacs has done very well, but even though it's a sizeable codebase, it's also extremely modular on a by-feature basis. You don't need to learn much to be able to write a new useful feature or understand how a particular feature works.
Anything that requires non-general knowledge has a significant cost in an open-source package. Custom code that replaces standard code (string classes, replacement data structure code), knowledge of the software package's threading model, strange conventions, you name it. Having a codebase that is easy to drop into and start working is always nice, but it is especially important for open source projects.
* Systems that cannot be used by the developer. Okay, this probably isn't an issue for graphics card drivers. Really, really esoteric stuff or things that few programmers have interest in (like simplified interfaces for existing software) don't tend to attract many volunteer developers.
Games with limited replay value are another example. Successful open-source games, almost without exception, have very high replayability and make relatively little use of elements like plot twists, eye candy, or anything else where the enjoyment only comes through once or a few times. Such games tend to either be multiplayer or involve a significant random element. If games can't be played over and over by the developers, the developer doesn't get much enjoyment out of playing them and drifts away.
Because the university made all the students sign some form saying (among other things) that the university could monitor their network usage and so forth.
You're right that the RIAA can't install this themselves, and cannot *force* the schools to install this (well, unless they get additional laws passed). However, if they convince the school to voluntarily install sniffing tools, the school can do whatever it wants with the data, including sending it to the RIAA.
Of course, college students are educated, vocal, often hard-up for money, and the prospect of a lot of them with incentive to hack on P2P clients that encrypt or hide their traffic has a certain degree of risk for the RIAA...
Our copy-right and patent laws were orginaly set up to protect the small people.
I don't know about that. They were set up with the intent of funding content creation. Copyright laws may still do that -- abused and stretched as they may be -- but software patents are actively harming the ability of engineers to function in the United States.
(And engineers who want to make a product that can be sold in the United States, which is damn near everyone.)
And for people who don't sympathize, remember -- if you work at a successful tech company that makes unusual products, you're liable to be put in this guy's shoes any day.
I've decided that Google-bashing comes down to largely two areas:
* SEO people and website proprietors bitter that they don't have a higher ranking.
* People who are alarmed by the growing influence and power of Google and want to cap it.
The "China thing" was possibly the most absurd slam I've ever seen, where people were complaining that Google was horrible because it followed a country's laws within that country. Good lord. Google doesn't finance private armies to overthrow China's leadership, either. Darn them for not forcibly spreading democracy and promoting revolution. [rolls eyes] I'll take Google's approach over Bush's approach any day, and let the mass of the Chinese people decide whether to revolt or not on their own.
Google is making an incredibly useful set of products in a highly competitive market and still stomping the competition. While doing so, they are not using underhanded business tactics, they are providing funding to a number of highly-cost-effective open source efforts, and so forth. They have generally done a better job of advocating the privacy of their users than their competitors. They promote interesting CS development. They helped reverse the slide into unusable "media-rich" flashy, slow websites.
As you said -- they may not be perfect, but they're one of the best things you're going to run into. Maybe someday, when the growth slows and they hit a (real) scandal or two, there will be good reasons to dislike them. Until them, I'm going to sit back and enjoy.
If there was a way to filter out used and third-party products from the Amazon search results, I might be more interested in using their service. As it is, I have to dig through many results from "partners".
Either this is an intentional troll, or you have no clue about financial matters.
:-)
Well, there are non-capitalist economic systems. But, yeah.
Not only that -- even more impressive, look at the date on the top of the news article.
What the US is lacking is individuals who are sincerely interested in developing their technical skills and solving interesting problems for their own sake, rather than people who are trying to find the easiest way into a high paying position that they care very little about -- having worked with both, I'd choose a British Literature major who does programming on her own, just for fun, over a Computer Science major who hates computers, but just wants a high paying job.
Good conclusion, but I can summarize it more briefly:
Hackers are wonderful. They're also rare.
I graduated in 2000 when life was sweet for Computer Science majors. When the bubble burst, there was a false impression that computer related fields were doomed. I always found that amusing because our whole society is based on technology and will always need people to run it. Media reports and articles on websites like this didn't help either. They gave the impression that Computer Science wasgoing the way of the dinosaur when it truly was healthy.
Think about it.
"Computer science job prospects are good, but in less less ridiculous overdemand than they were two years ago"
"Tech industry collapsing! Anecdotal evidence from college students switching majors here!"
Which makes a better headline?
If we truly* have such a shortage of computer scientists, then let's recruit the foreigners and bring them in as immigrants.
This is one of my favorite statements to make to Southerners.
There are lots of low-skill workers in southern states who are heavily opposed to allowing Mexicans into the country. They claim to be opposed to "illegal immigration". They claim that it takes money out of their pocket, as they subsidize, with their taxes, Mexican workers.
They say that they aren't in favor of protectionist laws, that they aren't trying to just be subsidized by higher-skill workers.
Yet the moment you propose eliminating the immigration quota, which should make them incredibly happy -- it would essentially eliminate any tax subsidization that they are upset about -- they continue being upset. They *really* want that troublesome competition to just vanish...
-I won't even mention the USPTO and american fair justice system ("the one with the more money always win") that would make us european laugth if it wasn't hype for our politicians to copy your mistakes.
This IMHO the largest threat, actually. This may irrepairably damage our tech industry. It is becoming increasingly risky for a company with money to produce new systems, because of the sheer number of infringements this involves and how much someone would like to sue that company. I've seen this from both the open source developer side and the huge company side, and what is going on is appalling -- mass siphoning of resources from developers and engineers to lawyers and "patent entrepreneurs".
I can think of a number of reasons why the US does well.
* Europe generally has heavily protectionist labor laws. In the US, if a programmer sucks, he's generally fireable at-will. If a company sucks, a programmer can walk out tomorrow. In Europe, you tend to be looking at mandated long warning periods on each side, mandated severance pay, and so forth. The benefit of the European approach is more stable employment. This doesn't come for free though -- it's harder to establish a meritocracy and connect with the best workers. The recent protests over French employment law were incomprehensible to me, as an American (where laws guaranteeing that employees could not be fired without "just cause" for a a certain number of years after they started working were possibly going to be rolled back). If you're worthwhile, your employer isn't going to fire you, and your employee isn't going to leave you. Forcing the employer to do otherwise is not economically free.
I work with some Germans -- they take their eight-hour workday *very* seriously. My understanding is that a German manager that requires an employee to work beyond a certain amount of time becomes personally liable if, say, that employee gets into a car crash on the way home because he is tired. This may be great if you want stable employment; it's not so great if you're trying to get a company going, especially in a market where time-to-market is crucial.
* Venture capital. I remember reading an analysis that dated back before the dot-com boom, and remember reading that it is much easier to get startup funding in the United States than it is in many European countries.
* A large market is easily accessable. The US is well-to-do, and just about everyone speaks English (though Spanish is upcoming). It's easy to write a software product and sell it to everyone in the US. I was debating this subject with a gentleman who runs a German software development firm the other day -- he commented that a US software developer doesn't need to be able to sell to Europe, but that a European software developer generally does need to be able to sell to the US.
* Good education. Expensive, granted. I still see lots of grad students studying in the US from overseas.
* Savings are more liquid. In the US, you tend to have more money going to the employee and staying with him, due to lower tax rates. That means that after a few years, it's easier for someone to take his savings and make a (possibly risky) gamble and start a company. Of course, he might wind up fairly poor in his old age as a result of this; Europe would tend to subsidize that old age more heavily.
* Paul Graham has his own take on this, which seems to be some sort of fuzzy claim that Europeans culturally focus on long-term planning and polishing products, and Americans culturally focus on quick-and-dirty and a rapidly changing market. His arguments seem to be mostly anecdotal, but they are at least fun to read.
* You mentioned deficit financing as a drawback. Deficit financing is bad only *in the future*. It's great in the short term. The faster the national debt grows, the faster resources flow to the US in the short term.
* My understanding (though I'm not aware of the specific
Most retail sales people are simply not going to possess the necessary knowledge to correctly recommend or explain every nuance of a piece of hardware.
Yup, and this isn't just true of computers.
Circuit City sells audio equipment, for example. How many salesmen there know the first thing about any of it? My experience has been zero.
Try asking someone in a Wal-Mart a question about their bicycles.
The replacement of speciality stores with larger, general-purpose stores has, in my opinion, vastly reduced the amount of domain knowledge that the salesmen offer. Of course, it costs more to have salesmen with domain knowledge, and general-purpose stores pass on much of those savings to you, so it's a tradeoff...
Catalonia is already an autonomous region within Spain and there is some sentiment for independence.
And I am certain that after Catalonia decides to go independent, people there will cease being described as Spaniards. Until then, it is hardly reasonable to criticize people for doing so.
In the case of software, at least, this is more significant.
I also have less of a problem with long copyright than, say, patents. They don't prevent other people from creating new works, at least.
However, the point of copyright is completely to create an economic construct to fund the creation of useful new works and move them into the public domain. The drawbacks of a limited-time monopoly are seen as a worthwhile tradeoff for the content that gets created.
However, in the case of software, the stuff will *never* move into the public domain during its useful lifetime. Places like The Home of the Underdogs (currently having some DNS trouble) are not legal, though the service they provide is desireable.
Even in the case of other works, while the damage caused by extremely long copyright is more limited, it certainly goes against the grain of what copyright was intended to do.