I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. I was considering writing a long, thought out response to this, illuminating the points that I think contradict your statement. But somebody else has already done it. I highly recommend checking out Everything Great About The Last Jedi.
I also don't think the star wars franchise has been ruined. However, there's an incredibly loud, vocal minority that's doing their best to ruin it, at the moment. It's a story. It's not your story, it belongs to the authors, directors, actors, and studios that pour their time, money, blood, sweat and tears into making it. You're free to dislike what they do, and what they say, but nothing that happens now, or in the future, can change your love of the OT, unless you let it.
This appears to probably have been caused by FOSTA, which Congress recently passed. That's why it appears that many sites are coordinating these changes - the government is forcing them to by holding websites responsible for users undertaking illegal activities. More details can be found here: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/22/craigslist-personals-shut-down.html
with some additional links to the Reddit announcement, and an EFF announcement of how Congress is censoring the internet.
As I am not a democrat, and the views of Democrats weren't being reviewed, it's a proper attempt at derailing to act as if the issue raised is somehow nullified by your (possibly entirely valid) concerns about Democrats' viewpoints. I am not here to discuss those, and they would likely be a better fit for a different thread.
I really want to take this new article at face value, but the source is highly questionable. Add to that the perfectly reasonable academic refutation that you yourself cited, and the source loses all credibility, and we're back to square one.
If we've reached the point where you have to resort to personal attacks to try to convince others (you certainly can't convince the other side with personal attacks) that your viewpoints are valid, you're already in trouble. You raised a point. I refuted it with what should be very worrying data, as well as a reasoned argument for why your objections don't amount to a great deal, in the real world. You responded with flawed studies and personal attacks. I think we're done here.
It's a graver concern because a) a majority of one of the dominant political parties wants it to happen, which makes it far more likely than any possible change toward Sharia Law, b) because it demonstrates a significant lack of appreciation for the text, spirit, or values enshrined in the Constitution, and c) the survey you cited includes no evidence that American Muslims agree with Sharia Law - there's no evidence in the article, at all - which means you have reality (Americans want a state religion) against a completely made up story.
Mr Franklin, I know you're a Founding Father, but this is one of the worst examples of anecdotal evidence driving policy that I've seen. Where's your data?
I can assure you, from personal experience in both the UK, and the US, that there are lazy people everywhere. They make up a small portion of the populace, and are used as an argument to say that everybody who isn't working is like them.
Times are also different now, from when you were alive. The standard of living among the general populace doesn't hold a candle to what it is now. There were always jobs, or unexplored parts of America where people could make their fortunes. Most of them died destitute and miserable, but we don't need to get into that. In addition, America was poor. It wasn't a nation of power and wealth, nor was it a nation that accepted the idea of equality for all human beings. You'll forgive me for taking your words, which are backed by nothing, with a grain of salt.
Flexible work, high VAT, low income tax, basic income, unregulated free market.
Unregulated free markets always tend toward oligarchy or monopoly. A basic income won't change that tendency, or its pernicious effects. Government would still be required to step in and ensure that companies don't destroy things which belong to all of us (water supplies, national parks, cities, etc). They would also be required to build roads and other infrastructure, and undertake pure research.
Government's role is reduced with a universal basic income, but it is by no means gone. There is a lot of really important, valuable work that governments do, largely invisibly, which needs to continue, no matter how we jigger the capitalist side of the economy.
Governments and corporations have not be very good at exploring high risk/high payoff scenarios. We need those areas explored. (How rapidly?) What alternative structures will accomplish this? The alternatives wouldn't need to be very efficient to be better than the current approach. A change in the laws to encourage thinks like corporations creating entities like Bell Labs was might suffice, but they need to be able to accumulate stashes of cash that cannot be raided except for advanced projects.
Government research is actually the entire reason that companies look like they do good things. Private companies are horrible at pure research. Instead, they take the output of pure research that looks promising and work to develop products that can make money off of it.
Drugs? Research done by government, and universities funded by government grants
Space exploration? Pioneered by government
Internet? Pioneered by government
WWW? Written by someone funded by the government
The raw truth is that private companies are horrible at high risk situations, as shareholders and enterpreneurs either don't have the stomach, or the wallet for it. Only government can take the risk that a billion dollars in research will pay off with nothing to show for it. Anybody else would be lynched by their investors.
Can we at least be honest about the role of government in capitalism? If we can, we can start to see that billionaires aren't the solution to the problem, they're beneficiaries of government policy. Share the wealth, guys. You've done very well, now make it available to the next person who wants to do something nobody's ever thought of before.
I like that you guys seem to have a sound plan for dealing with this, though I wonder why they use a hierarchy for disseminating information to smaller and small scale pharmacies. Wouldn't it make more sense that all pharmacies should be notified by one central body both for expediency and for reducing the margin of error that one of the links in the chain might goof?
I suspect the reason is actually fairly simple. In the case of a major recall, speed of confirmed communication is paramount. Hierarchy means that one organization isn't simply trying to contact everybody for personal handoff, but is instead multiplying its capacity by creating a cascade effect. If every pharmacy in the country was centrally registered with emergency contact details, this procedure could probably be done away with, but protocols take a long time to change, even when they're no longer valuable.
Another possibility is that due to devolution of powers, including medicine, the hospital pharmacies and PCTs are the authorities which are responsible for maintaining a list of practicing pharmacies in their area. If that's the case, it's a no-brainer to have them send out the notification, since they're the final arbiters of truth regarding registered pharmacies.
"So there is apparently some reason to be patient with your paper's critics — they will do you good in the end."
I have a different possible viewpoint. The papers that are most likely to be rejected are the ones that are controversial because they challenge the status quo. But once they're accepted, they're game changers. And since they're game changers, and the first publications with the new viewpoint, they're cited disproportionately frequently by follow up work.
"So there is apparently some reason to be patient with your paper's critics — they will do you good in the end."
I have a different possible viewpoint. The papers that are most likely to be rejected are the ones that are controversial because they challenge the status quo. But once they're accepted, they're game changers. And since they're game changers, and the first publications with the new viewpoint, they're cited disproportionately frequently by follow up work.
Developers are responsible for supporting production, which means they can release whenever they want, as long as they're willing to deal with the consequences. This has lead to a release frequency which ranges from 1-20 times per day, depending on how critical the application is, what is being added, and how complex the change is.
The most important thing to us is that people who are treated like adults act like adults. Trust your developers to release responsibly, and (with a little teaching/learning) they will.
Re:It really isn't sugar, that is just one avenue
on
The Mathematics of Obesity
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I am not declaring that working only forty hours or less is bad; but lets be honest those we know who do more tend to get further;
Science and reality both say you, and those whose viewpoints you represent are deluded.
Labor, experiments, and industry all agree that a 40-hour work week is better for everybody - individuals and companies. Productivity by people who regularly work more than 40 hours per week is lower than those who work 40 hours.
The only reason people get ahead for working longer hours is because a generation of managers appears to have been taught to think that bums in seats = productivity. So longer hours = increased likelihood of promotion. It's a vicious cycle that's fuelled by people like yourself who speak with no understanding of how the human mind and body work.
As a matter of fact,/. posted an article on this very subject 2 months ago today.
Carrot and Stick is a shitty way to manage people. You're much better off helping them tap their intrinsic motivation, rather than trying to extrinsically motivate them.
You get better work, more engaged employees, more intelligent decisions, and you don't have to be there all the time to ensure they're doing things correctly.
Carrot and Stick? Seriously? We have 50+ years of research showing that Command & Control is inferior to enabling and engagement. How come businesses can't make it work?
The power to tax is the power to destroy. The 14th Amendment specifically prevents laws from applying to different people in different ways. It was passed to prevent Jim Crow laws. This is just a 100% attack against a targeted business that is unconstitutional and bordering on the laws that prevented blacks from voting and serving on juries after the Civil War.
Amazon isn't protected by the 14th Amendment.
"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Amazon is not a citizen, or a person (despite Citizen's United).
Yeah! Stand them in the corner with a pointy hat with the word "Dunce" on it! That'll teach them!
Rewarding is far, far better.
It's not. It's just as bad, but more subtle. Read Drive by Daniel Pink, Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn, Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci for more (easily understood and digested) information. Or, just start reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem
In my daughter's school they offer reward cards; they're a bit like loyalty cards. Instead of the old gold stars, they are now given points that can be exchanged for material goods. A point for handing in homework, an extra point for handing it in early, points for winning competitions, be they sports or academic.
Looks like they're being taught to love bribes and extrinsic motivation, not learning. An easy mistake to make, for people who don't know how to teach, but as parents, teachers, and (ostensibly) people who can think, we owe our children better.
You are doing your daughter no favors in the long run by backing this system. In fact, you are likely to do long term damage to her love of learning for its own sake, and her intrinsic motivation. By rewarding students for doing their homework, the school is creating a system where students work hard to get the rewards, not the thing the rewards are supposed to encourage.
It's breeding short-term memory, and gamification of the system. Congratulations, you're creating an 1800s style factory employee out of a child who taught herself to walk without any sort of reward, who taught herself to talk without any bribes, and who taught herself to roll-over before you even knew she was paying attention to you.
I'm not sure I can take anybody who calls an attempt to make IT and Development more aware of each other a cult, seriously.
The traditional way of doing things didn't work for 30 years. Why is it that when people are trying to make (and apparently making) a difference to how companies work, they're regularly denigrated by a large subset of the very people whose working lives they're trying to improve.
Haters gonna hate, I guess.
In the same way that capitalism has been tried and failed because you can't remove greed from the human condition.
No, that's totally wrong. Capitalism (free markets in their most-free form) actually recognizes and utilizes greed to promote the system. It's greed and profit motive that drives and motivates the producers in the system. The winners are the ones that can satisfy the needs of consumers expending the least resources to do so.
You leave one thing out. Capitalism, in its most free form, is an absolute disaster. You have competitive behavior at the beginning, but once someone establishes a dominant position, they slowly crush their competition, erect false barriers to entry, and use their monopoly in one industry to allow them to unfairly compete in others. My starting assumptions are no different than yours -- greed and profit motive drive the producers in the system. There's no reason to think that these two motives will stop being factors once a company is successful. History and evidence teach us that once a company is successful in one area, they continually try to branch out into others, preferrably into areas with strong potential and weak competition.
Capitalism very quickly fails to do what it is meant to do -- promote competition where the best product has the most customers.
In a way, you're right. In a free Capitalist society, greed does drive the market... into the ground. Capitalism must be strictly regulated in order to function over the long term.
Nothing makes admins less likely to err than devs. What makes them special? Empowerment, education, and personal responsibility do most of the work. Hiring the best and making them better does the rest.
I work in an environment where the devs fix bugs before adding features, so the code is stable almost all the time. I have less than 1 callout a week that's caused by something a dev has done to the code. We hire the best devs, and work in an environment where fixing bugs is more important than adding features. The result is that our devs get full access to production, and even offer to provide support in order to ensure that they're the ones that are woken up if something they've broken falls over OOH. I've been at my current company long enough that I'd forgotten there were places where devs and ops didn't trust each other.
Our devs find that the best ways to test skills is to have people sit down with them and work on whatever problem they're currently facing. It allows us to see adaptability, thought processes, keenness and experience.
And when a woman takes off for 2 to 3 months, PAID, it does hurt the perception of her in the workplace. I know, I've seen it. The guys bitch because of it, and since most of the employees are guys to begin with, it puts the woman on the outside looking in. And if a woman is 3 months pregnant, the boss doesn't want to put her in charge of a long term project because she will be gone for a few months and maybe not come back ever. I see that happen all the time, where the woman works until birth is close just to get the 3 months extra pay, knowing she is going to not come back. I can't blame her, even if it causes problems for work. Even when a boss is perfectly fair, he would be negligent if he didn't consider these facts.
The fact that men react negatively to a woman taking time off to have children is, in itself, a sign that there's something wrong with the culture you work in.
I work in the UK and have never seen that at any company I have worked for. No resentment, no difficulties, no problems. It has always been understood where I work that people grow up and sometimes want children. Women are biologically equipped to carry children, and so it benefits society to make allowances for women so they can have children.
Any culture which doesn't respect simple biological functions and make allowances for it is simply broken.
Software developers are going to have to figure out a new approach to licensing many of their products. VMware, for example, allows you to use a single license for every processor of 6 or fewer cores... how many people are going to pay for another license for the 2 extra cores? I see per core licenses coming in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. I was considering writing a long, thought out response to this, illuminating the points that I think contradict your statement. But somebody else has already done it. I highly recommend checking out Everything Great About The Last Jedi.
I also don't think the star wars franchise has been ruined. However, there's an incredibly loud, vocal minority that's doing their best to ruin it, at the moment. It's a story. It's not your story, it belongs to the authors, directors, actors, and studios that pour their time, money, blood, sweat and tears into making it. You're free to dislike what they do, and what they say, but nothing that happens now, or in the future, can change your love of the OT, unless you let it.
And when you kill a man, you're a murderer
Kill many, and you're a conqueror
Kill them all, oh you're a god
-Megadeth, Captive Honour
This appears to probably have been caused by FOSTA, which Congress recently passed. That's why it appears that many sites are coordinating these changes - the government is forcing them to by holding websites responsible for users undertaking illegal activities. More details can be found here:
https://boingboing.net/2018/03/22/craigslist-personals-shut-down.html
with some additional links to the Reddit announcement, and an EFF announcement of how Congress is censoring the internet.
As I am not a democrat, and the views of Democrats weren't being reviewed, it's a proper attempt at derailing to act as if the issue raised is somehow nullified by your (possibly entirely valid) concerns about Democrats' viewpoints. I am not here to discuss those, and they would likely be a better fit for a different thread.
I really want to take this new article at face value, but the source is highly questionable. Add to that the perfectly reasonable academic refutation that you yourself cited, and the source loses all credibility, and we're back to square one.
If we've reached the point where you have to resort to personal attacks to try to convince others (you certainly can't convince the other side with personal attacks) that your viewpoints are valid, you're already in trouble. You raised a point. I refuted it with what should be very worrying data, as well as a reasoned argument for why your objections don't amount to a great deal, in the real world. You responded with flawed studies and personal attacks. I think we're done here.
It's a graver concern because a) a majority of one of the dominant political parties wants it to happen, which makes it far more likely than any possible change toward Sharia Law, b) because it demonstrates a significant lack of appreciation for the text, spirit, or values enshrined in the Constitution, and c) the survey you cited includes no evidence that American Muslims agree with Sharia Law - there's no evidence in the article, at all - which means you have reality (Americans want a state religion) against a completely made up story.
I'm far more concerned about the number of Americans who want to make Christianity the official religion of the US.
Mr Franklin, I know you're a Founding Father, but this is one of the worst examples of anecdotal evidence driving policy that I've seen. Where's your data?
I can assure you, from personal experience in both the UK, and the US, that there are lazy people everywhere. They make up a small portion of the populace, and are used as an argument to say that everybody who isn't working is like them.
Times are also different now, from when you were alive. The standard of living among the general populace doesn't hold a candle to what it is now. There were always jobs, or unexplored parts of America where people could make their fortunes. Most of them died destitute and miserable, but we don't need to get into that. In addition, America was poor. It wasn't a nation of power and wealth, nor was it a nation that accepted the idea of equality for all human beings. You'll forgive me for taking your words, which are backed by nothing, with a grain of salt.
Flexible work, high VAT, low income tax, basic income, unregulated free market.
Unregulated free markets always tend toward oligarchy or monopoly. A basic income won't change that tendency, or its pernicious effects. Government would still be required to step in and ensure that companies don't destroy things which belong to all of us (water supplies, national parks, cities, etc). They would also be required to build roads and other infrastructure, and undertake pure research.
Government's role is reduced with a universal basic income, but it is by no means gone. There is a lot of really important, valuable work that governments do, largely invisibly, which needs to continue, no matter how we jigger the capitalist side of the economy.
Governments and corporations have not be very good at exploring high risk/high payoff scenarios. We need those areas explored. (How rapidly?) What alternative structures will accomplish this? The alternatives wouldn't need to be very efficient to be better than the current approach. A change in the laws to encourage thinks like corporations creating entities like Bell Labs was might suffice, but they need to be able to accumulate stashes of cash that cannot be raided except for advanced projects.
Government research is actually the entire reason that companies look like they do good things. Private companies are horrible at pure research. Instead, they take the output of pure research that looks promising and work to develop products that can make money off of it.
Drugs? Research done by government, and universities funded by government grants
Space exploration? Pioneered by government
Internet? Pioneered by government
WWW? Written by someone funded by the government
The raw truth is that private companies are horrible at high risk situations, as shareholders and enterpreneurs either don't have the stomach, or the wallet for it. Only government can take the risk that a billion dollars in research will pay off with nothing to show for it. Anybody else would be lynched by their investors.
Can we at least be honest about the role of government in capitalism? If we can, we can start to see that billionaires aren't the solution to the problem, they're beneficiaries of government policy. Share the wealth, guys. You've done very well, now make it available to the next person who wants to do something nobody's ever thought of before.
I like that you guys seem to have a sound plan for dealing with this, though I wonder why they use a hierarchy for disseminating information to smaller and small scale pharmacies. Wouldn't it make more sense that all pharmacies should be notified by one central body both for expediency and for reducing the margin of error that one of the links in the chain might goof?
I suspect the reason is actually fairly simple. In the case of a major recall, speed of confirmed communication is paramount. Hierarchy means that one organization isn't simply trying to contact everybody for personal handoff, but is instead multiplying its capacity by creating a cascade effect. If every pharmacy in the country was centrally registered with emergency contact details, this procedure could probably be done away with, but protocols take a long time to change, even when they're no longer valuable.
Another possibility is that due to devolution of powers, including medicine, the hospital pharmacies and PCTs are the authorities which are responsible for maintaining a list of practicing pharmacies in their area. If that's the case, it's a no-brainer to have them send out the notification, since they're the final arbiters of truth regarding registered pharmacies.
Either option seems plausible to me.
"So there is apparently some reason to be patient with your paper's critics — they will do you good in the end."
I have a different possible viewpoint. The papers that are most likely to be rejected are the ones that are controversial because they challenge the status quo. But once they're accepted, they're game changers. And since they're game changers, and the first publications with the new viewpoint, they're cited disproportionately frequently by follow up work.
(formatted correctly this time)
"So there is apparently some reason to be patient with your paper's critics — they will do you good in the end." I have a different possible viewpoint. The papers that are most likely to be rejected are the ones that are controversial because they challenge the status quo. But once they're accepted, they're game changers. And since they're game changers, and the first publications with the new viewpoint, they're cited disproportionately frequently by follow up work.
Developers are responsible for supporting production, which means they can release whenever they want, as long as they're willing to deal with the consequences. This has lead to a release frequency which ranges from 1-20 times per day, depending on how critical the application is, what is being added, and how complex the change is.
The most important thing to us is that people who are treated like adults act like adults. Trust your developers to release responsibly, and (with a little teaching/learning) they will.
I am not declaring that working only forty hours or less is bad; but lets be honest those we know who do more tend to get further;
Science and reality both say you, and those whose viewpoints you represent are deluded. /. posted an article on this very subject 2 months ago today.
Labor, experiments, and industry all agree that a 40-hour work week is better for everybody - individuals and companies. Productivity by people who regularly work more than 40 hours per week is lower than those who work 40 hours.
The only reason people get ahead for working longer hours is because a generation of managers appears to have been taught to think that bums in seats = productivity. So longer hours = increased likelihood of promotion. It's a vicious cycle that's fuelled by people like yourself who speak with no understanding of how the human mind and body work. As a matter of fact,
Mod parent up.
Carrot and Stick is a shitty way to manage people. You're much better off helping them tap their intrinsic motivation, rather than trying to extrinsically motivate them.
You get better work, more engaged employees, more intelligent decisions, and you don't have to be there all the time to ensure they're doing things correctly.
Carrot and Stick? Seriously? We have 50+ years of research showing that Command & Control is inferior to enabling and engagement. How come businesses can't make it work?
The power to tax is the power to destroy. The 14th Amendment specifically prevents laws from applying to different people in different ways. It was passed to prevent Jim Crow laws. This is just a 100% attack against a targeted business that is unconstitutional and bordering on the laws that prevented blacks from voting and serving on juries after the Civil War.
Amazon isn't protected by the 14th Amendment.
"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Amazon is not a citizen, or a person (despite Citizen's United).
Yeah! Stand them in the corner with a pointy hat with the word "Dunce" on it! That'll teach them! Rewarding is far, far better.
It's not. It's just as bad, but more subtle. Read Drive by Daniel Pink, Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn, Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci for more (easily understood and digested) information. Or, just start reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem
In my daughter's school they offer reward cards; they're a bit like loyalty cards. Instead of the old gold stars, they are now given points that can be exchanged for material goods. A point for handing in homework, an extra point for handing it in early, points for winning competitions, be they sports or academic.
Looks like they're being taught to love bribes and extrinsic motivation, not learning. An easy mistake to make, for people who don't know how to teach, but as parents, teachers, and (ostensibly) people who can think, we owe our children better.
You are doing your daughter no favors in the long run by backing this system. In fact, you are likely to do long term damage to her love of learning for its own sake, and her intrinsic motivation. By rewarding students for doing their homework, the school is creating a system where students work hard to get the rewards, not the thing the rewards are supposed to encourage.
It's breeding short-term memory, and gamification of the system. Congratulations, you're creating an 1800s style factory employee out of a child who taught herself to walk without any sort of reward, who taught herself to talk without any bribes, and who taught herself to roll-over before you even knew she was paying attention to you.
I'm not sure I can take anybody who calls an attempt to make IT and Development more aware of each other a cult, seriously.
The traditional way of doing things didn't work for 30 years. Why is it that when people are trying to make (and apparently making) a difference to how companies work, they're regularly denigrated by a large subset of the very people whose working lives they're trying to improve.
Haters gonna hate, I guess.
In the same way that capitalism has been tried and failed because you can't remove greed from the human condition.
No, that's totally wrong. Capitalism (free markets in their most-free form) actually recognizes and utilizes greed to promote the system. It's greed and profit motive that drives and motivates the producers in the system. The winners are the ones that can satisfy the needs of consumers expending the least resources to do so.
You leave one thing out. Capitalism, in its most free form, is an absolute disaster. You have competitive behavior at the beginning, but once someone establishes a dominant position, they slowly crush their competition, erect false barriers to entry, and use their monopoly in one industry to allow them to unfairly compete in others. My starting assumptions are no different than yours -- greed and profit motive drive the producers in the system. There's no reason to think that these two motives will stop being factors once a company is successful. History and evidence teach us that once a company is successful in one area, they continually try to branch out into others, preferrably into areas with strong potential and weak competition.
Capitalism very quickly fails to do what it is meant to do -- promote competition where the best product has the most customers.
In a way, you're right. In a free Capitalist society, greed does drive the market... into the ground. Capitalism must be strictly regulated in order to function over the long term.
Nothing makes admins less likely to err than devs. What makes them special?
Empowerment, education, and personal responsibility do most of the work. Hiring the best and making them better does the rest.
Do annual trips to Vegas count? Because we've got those.
I work in an environment where the devs fix bugs before adding features, so the code is stable almost all the time. I have less than 1 callout a week that's caused by something a dev has done to the code.
We hire the best devs, and work in an environment where fixing bugs is more important than adding features. The result is that our devs get full access to production, and even offer to provide support in order to ensure that they're the ones that are woken up if something they've broken falls over OOH.
I've been at my current company long enough that I'd forgotten there were places where devs and ops didn't trust each other.
Our devs find that the best ways to test skills is to have people sit down with them and work on whatever problem they're currently facing. It allows us to see adaptability, thought processes, keenness and experience.
And when a woman takes off for 2 to 3 months, PAID, it does hurt the perception of her in the workplace. I know, I've seen it. The guys bitch because of it, and since most of the employees are guys to begin with, it puts the woman on the outside looking in. And if a woman is 3 months pregnant, the boss doesn't want to put her in charge of a long term project because she will be gone for a few months and maybe not come back ever. I see that happen all the time, where the woman works until birth is close just to get the 3 months extra pay, knowing she is going to not come back. I can't blame her, even if it causes problems for work. Even when a boss is perfectly fair, he would be negligent if he didn't consider these facts.
The fact that men react negatively to a woman taking time off to have children is, in itself, a sign that there's something wrong with the culture you work in.
I work in the UK and have never seen that at any company I have worked for. No resentment, no difficulties, no problems. It has always been understood where I work that people grow up and sometimes want children. Women are biologically equipped to carry children, and so it benefits society to make allowances for women so they can have children.
Any culture which doesn't respect simple biological functions and make allowances for it is simply broken.
Software developers are going to have to figure out a new approach to licensing many of their products. VMware, for example, allows you to use a single license for every processor of 6 or fewer cores... how many people are going to pay for another license for the 2 extra cores? I see per core licenses coming in the near future.