Celebrating a wedding, but being bombed by US warplanes [independent.co.uk] - that's innocent. More than 30 innocents were killed in that single US action. When you can cite more than 30 innocent victims of the WL action, let me know.
Ah, I see. So it only matters if wikileaks is responsible for as many civilian deaths as the US? Until that point, they bear no responsibility for exposing the people who are killed?
Your moral compass. It seems skewed.
I'm also confused that you confer the term "innocent" on those who inform. Whether it's for one side or the other, once you "snitch" you lose the right to be an innocent in the war - you are a willing participant.
Yeah, go preach your gospel of "noninvolvement" to the people who are having their doors knocked on by American & Taliban soldiers armed to the teeth and "just asking for some help in making life peaceful again." Let me know how it works out for you. When you are - literally - in the crossfire between two opposing forces, neutrality is a luxury that most of these people probably can't afford.
Granted, the families of those people may also be targetted, but let those be the only figures that count towards the "innocent".
Okay, so... let's accept your definition of innocent. Are you saying that you're okay with any "innocents" dying as a result of Wikileaks' actions? Are you saying that their vetting policies are perfect and need no review or improvement? Are you saying that releasing names and locations of informants is okay, even if it puts them and their families, neighbors, and villages at risk?
Because if you're not willing to say that, you should seriously consider shutting the fuck up and thinking before you engage your mouth. Wikileaks' release of these documents does NOTHING to reduce or prevent civilians from dying to American or Taliban operations - all this does is INCREASE the level of violence by giving the Taliban a list of informants who they can go after to punish.
A charge of moral equivalence with absolutely no factual basis? On Slashdot? I'm stunned. Stunned, I say.
While your obvious allegiance to Slashdot groupthink is commendable, would you care to explain how more innocent people - and here I am specifically talking about the people who the Taliban will "punish" for cooperating with NATO forces, and the families who will be punished - dying because they've been exposed by Wikileaks furthers the goal of ending the war in Afghanistan? Connect the dots for me, please, I'm sure you have some overwhelmingly brilliant logic to explain this.
You'll have to excuse me if I don't assist Mr. Assange in killing Afghan civilians - I'm not going to reproduce names for you here because you're too lazy to read the links I've pointed out. Seriously - have you bothered reading a bit of the news coverage around this, other than what's on Slashdot, where WikiLeaks can do no wrong because it's "taking on the big evil nasty military"?
In just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, The Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with handing intelligence to US forces. Their villages are given for identification and, in many cases, their fathers' names.
Julian Assange has *acknowledged* that they did so. And said, "Well it's not my fault, I didn't mean to harm anybody, and if anybody is hurt, I'll regret it very much," while having the cojones to blame the government for not helping him vet thousands of classified documents which have no business being distributed in the first place. Once again, his regret will be cold comfort for the people who will be injured and killed as a result of his organization publishing the names of informants as a result of an incomplete & sloppy review process.
Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing website, told The Times that he would "deeply regret" any harm caused by the disclosures.
But in an extensive interview he defended his actions: he claimed that many informers in Afghanistan were "acting in a criminal way" by sharing false information with Nato authorities;
he said the White House knew that informants' names could be exposed before the release but did nothing to help WikiLeaks to vet the data;
he insisted that any risk to informants' lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information.
Mr Assange said: "No one has been harmed, but should anyone come to harm of course that would be a matter of deep regret - our goal is justice to innocents, not to harm them. That said, if we were forced into a position of publishing all of the archives or none of the archives we would publish all of the archives because it's extremely important to the history of this war."
Connect these two stories with the original story I linked, where a Taliban spokesman has already stated that they are looking through the documents in order to "punish" people who've collaborated with NATO forces. If you really think nobody will be substantially harmed by WikiLeaks' actions, you're living in a fantasy world.
To turn the oft repeated slogan on its head; "If you got nothing to hide, you should not fear Wikileaks".
And that oft-repeated slogan is also oft-derided here on Slashdot as a ridiculous notion that flies in the face of the very concept of privacy, and the fact that some things really should remain private.
I am sick of hearing "political analysts" and politicians saying Wikileaks is endangering American soldiers because they expose atrocities committed by American soldiers, and as the flawed logic goes, emboldens the enemy.
How about the Taliban saying they're going to target Afghan people named in the documents as providing intelligence to US forces? Are you okay with those people being killed? Are you okay with the chilling effect this will undoubtedly have on people's willingness to cooperate and provide intelligence to the military, when intelligence is one of the critical components to ending an insurgency? Let's be honest, the Taliban pretty much knows where the Americans are - they're the guys in the Hummvees. I don't think these documents are going to have much of an effect on the Taliban forces knowing "the locations of American soldiers." I think it's going to have a HUGE effect on the willignness of Afghan civilians to work with the military, which means: more people dead - Afghan & American.
I'm sick of hearing about how the American military is "committing atrocities" as if that's the only thing that's happening over there from mindless, knee-jerk "america is always evil" fuckwits who think that exposing sensitive documents with the equivalent of a MS Word "find and replace" command on a few "arabic-sounding names" constitutes "reasonable efforts at harm prevention." I'm also sick of hearing about Julian Assange's smug, twattish response that the military is to blame for putting those names in classified fucking documents, so it's not his fault that the names got leaked.
If there is evidence in those documents that "atrocities" have been committed, they absolutely should hold the military accountable. That doesn't justify the widespread dissemination of those documents to anybody who wants to take a look without a serious, legitimate attempt at vetting the documents to minimize harm to innocent people named in the reports by people who actually understand what the fuck they're reading.
(especially after taking all possible precautions to prevent harm before release)
It's already been shown that the WL people didn't take "all possible precautions to prevent harm" - their release included GPS coordinates & full names & locations of people involved. If there is evidence of misdeeds by the US military, that's fine, they should be held accountable - but a giant dump of information that's been "edited by volunteers" is NOT "taking all possible precautions to prevent harm before release."
And would that "bandwidth" just magically work, with no outside maintenance or infrastructure? What? You mean it requires servers, and salaried employees, and a host of properly implemented technology to provide bandwidth? And the company needs to actually make an operating profit in order to expand its offerings, replace old infrastructure, and develop new business? And you're also learning something new from a bunch of security experts?
Gee, maybe that's why it costs $395?
Your view is so reductionist it's ridiculous. What you are paying for is the knowledge & expertise of the people who are presenting, and the people who are running the video stream - the "bandwidth" is a fraction of that total cost. People pay thousands of dollars to take college classes - are they "just paying to rent the use of a desk" for a night or two a week? You aren't "just paying for the bandwidth" anymore than those people are simply renting a desk.
I'll explain to you why you pay $5 a cup for coffee at Starbucks as opposed to the pennies that the raw materials cost in my next class. It costs $395. I think that's a pretty remarkable deal.
Correction, because I apparently can't construct a proper list: "...relative costs of healthcare, groceries, utilities, transportation, and housing between two locations."
The cost of living calculator I linked to shows the relative costs of healthcare, groceries, utilities, transportation, and transportation between two locations. All of which are higher in NYC than in Boston - of course "housing" is the biggest discrepancy, but all of them are higher.
The GP said "it's really just real estate," and that's demonstrably false. If I'm paying 20% more for healthcare & transportation, and 15% more for groceries, it is still more expensive, and it has nothing to do with my housing costs. There's *LESS* of a discrepancy if you exclude the cost of housing, but it's still there.
And unless you plan to live in a cardboard box, or in a van down by the river, you can't just hand-wave away the costs of housing and say it doesn't matter.
These guys should just stop bitching and go back to work. They're not doing bad.
I agree, they're not doing bad at all. My point is that the people saying "Oh boo hoo, they can't afford the big yacht," are missing the point. Given the cost of living in NYC, 150k is not "a lot of money" - it's a comfortable middle class existence, maybe with an extra beer on Friday nights.
That said... I'd also take a fraction of the money I make today to live in Rio. Any jobs there for software engineers who speak at most half a dozen words of Portuguese? (Go ahead, dash my dreams.:)
People have this idea that things are so expensive in the big cities (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.)
Spoken like somebody who's never lived in NYC, or even the suburbs. It's not "just housing", it's "everything" that costs more. Transportation, groceries, housing, are all a fair bit higher in the NYC area than they are, well.. pretty much anywhere else.
150k in NYC (Manhattan) - according to various cost of living calculators I've looked at around the interwebz - is about:
90k in Boston 92k in San Diego 71k in Denver 95k in Arlington, VA (outside DC) 70k in Raleigh 63k in Dallas 78k in Chicago 112k in San Francisco
It's expensive to live in ANY city. But NYC is significantly more expensive than the rest. 150k in New York City is a "comfortable" existence, but it's not "upper class" by any stretch of the imagination. 150k in NYC sounds like a lot outside NYC *because it is a lot - outside NYC*. I live in Boston and make just about 100k as a software engineer - and I can assure you that there are a lot of towns and neighborhoods in/around Boston where I couldn't afford to live.
Look guys, I wrote software that prints money whenever the market's open! I clearly deserve a bigger salary than my boss.
print "Welcome to Fatback Financial Systems Hi-Frequency Trader Premium. Sit back and watch as I make money for you, you lazy horrible greedy finance type!\n"; while (isMarketOpen()) { $profit++; print "You has a profit! It is $profit!\n"; sleep 60; } print "Market's closed for the day. Go beat up some more poor IT guys until tomorrow! And remember: greed is good!\n";
Yes, that's right. Because everybody is special and you can't assign a monetary value to people.
But people are paid exactly what the value of their effort is perceived to be worth by their employers.
Think your efforts are contributing more value than your boss? Time for a frank discussion, or time to find a new job. Lots of people complain about being underpaid. Few of them can quantify how much they're underpaid by, or what about their work justifies more than they're earning. If you want to earn more, you need to start being very clear about what your efforts are worth to your employer.
I suspect in this case, the guy earning 150k a year is probably underpaid by a bit (if his software is really earning $100k+ per day), but I think it's also realistic to acknowledge that his software was not designed & built in a vacuum. Other programmers employed by his boss no doubt helped him, and the requirements and algorithms were probably not designed by the programmer - at least all by himself. Given that creating the software was a team effort (and we don't know how big the team really is), it's entirely possible that 150k/yr is right in line with the value of his contribution to the effort.
The problem I see mostly now is the whole "Someone has commented on someone else's private photo, and now you can see it" - it's the weird interactions around those varying levels of security that I dislike.
If I make a photo visible to a group or two, I don't want anybody else seeing members of those groups commenting on it - from what I've seen, comments and other interactions don't honor (or at least, don't always honor) the privacy & security settings of the item they're in response to, and that seems problematic to me.
But this isn't about open source its about open standards. No one is saying that the future of social networking should be open source, just that it should be open standard.
The article under discussion literally asks if "Open Source" could render Facebook the next AOL. I'd say "this" is very specifically about open source.
Good luck explaining to various friends why they're not "tier 1" friends.:)
Really, I'd rather see support for simple named groups, and be able to set access to each item by those groups - essentially ACLs (1..n groups of people can see post X) instead of the three-layer Unix-like security they have today: ("Friends", "Friends of friends", "Everybody"). There are some things I'd say to my friends which I wouldn't necessarily say to my family, or simply things that maybe my friends wouldn't care about that my family would - and vice versa.
Make it so all comments and conversation about a particular item inherit the visibility characteristics of the item they're associated with, and you'd take care of a lot of the issues with grouping.
If you think about it, you can probably partition your friends into 5-10 easily named "groups", and if membership is non-exclusive (e.g., someone can be a member of more than one group), that would reflect "real life" a lot better than the current setup, or a tiering mechanism. If it's a general-purpose item, you can post it to "all", if it's not general purpose, mark the checkbox next to which groups you want to share the item with. If you don't want to share with groups, specify 1..n particular people by name, or mix group names with specific names.
There's no precise digital equivalent to the messy analog that is real life relationships. But, off the top of my head, I could probably break down my friend list into the following categories - there are some people who'd fit in multiple categories, and probably some outlier people who would all get lumped into "acquaintances", but you get the point.
-- Hockey Team -- Family -- Colleagues -- High School Classmates -- College Classmates -- Book Club -- Red Cross Volunteers -- Casual Acquaintances -- Business Contacts -- Friends
True, but your argument assumes that "qualified and talented programmers" are an infinite resource. Just because I don't like the developers "selling out" doesn't mean I'm qualified to understand and work on the code of the people who did. I could fork it, and try to continue on, but it's likely that the pace of bug fixes and new features would slow to a crawl in the meantime, giving Oracle & the talented devs they hired away the opportunity to open the gap in terms of functionality and stability, leaving you with OraGimp : Gimp:: MS Office : OpenOffice relationship.
Open Office is a "good enough" contender, but it doesn't have feature parity with MS Office, and that certainly has an effect on its rate of adoption.
Poor clarity in my initial post - I wasn't speaking of the European *continent*, and you're absolutely correct about the relative sizes of the continent of Europe vs. the US. What I was referring to was the collective size of the EU, which for the purposes of comparing internet penetration is probably more informative than "continental europe", which includes Russia and other Eastern European states which lag pretty significantly in internet penetration.
When comparing the EU to the US, the EU is about 45% of the size of the US, and has a population density ~3.6 times greater than population density in the US. In addition, the countries of the EU typically have higher percentages of their population living in urban areas.
The point still stands. When you have more people living in a smaller area, and a higher percentage of those people living in densely populated urban areas, the infrastructure is going to be far more cost-effective to build, unless you know of some way where - to pick arbitrary, but scale-appropriate numbers - 1000 miles of cabling is cheaper and easier to maintain than 450 miles of the same cable.
Are you referring to Sweden, where ~85% of the population lives in urban areas?
Your snarky choice of an outlier country that has most of its population concentrated in it's southern urban areas does not disprove the fact that the US has a far greater area to cover, as well as a much more distributed population.
What I offered is called an "explanation" for why service is better and cheaper in Europe, too, btw, not an "excuse" - nowhere did I say "It's okay for them to provide awful service, because..."
For your next trick, perhaps you'd like to argue that Canada also disproves my statement because of their low population density while disregarding the fact that most of the population of Canada lives in urban areas within ~50 miles of the US border?
I understand this, and that's why I'm saying that the problem isn't a "partisan" issue - at least not in the sense of Democrats vs. Republicans.
A politician interested in getting broad-based support wouldn't *immediately* alienate 50% of his potential supporters by slamming them as "the other guys" who just want to make "people like us" suffer.
I'm sure Rush Limbaugh is doing it too, and he's just as wrong as Sen. Franken in doing it. Net neutrality has nothing to do with "Republicans shutting down DKos" or "Democrats killing Fox News." It has everything to do with "Big cable companies wanting to squeeze every last penny they can out of us, and they're willing to spend big money to buy the senators and representatives to make sure it happens."
If I'm Comcast, I'm looking at sites like Google, Apple (Itunes), Amazon, Microsoft, and other big companies, and telling them "If you want people to rent movies from itunes, you better pay us a lot of money to ensure optimum performance."
So... if I'm watching NBC coverage of something over something like FiOS... do I get to see the wardrobe malfunction because I'm watching it on the internet, rather than a broadcast medium?
As I said in response to the guy below you - it's not a slippery slope if the FCC has specifically stated its belief that things like cable & satellite should be subject to increased FCC regulation. If that's what they *want*, it's only a matter of time until they find a good justification paired with a favorable political climate. "Think of the children!" will be the rallying cry: Boobies and the F-bomb are good motivators when you have a million parents screaming for blood.
It is not a slippery slope to expect the FCC to attempt to expand its charter after being granted regulatory authority.
It has tried to do this in Cable and satellite radio already, though it has lost its court battles in most cases.
Assuming that "the guy in charge" will always be "the guy in charge" is foolish - today's head of the FCC may be reasonable; tomorrow's might not be. Why is it unreasonable or ineffective for Congress to simply write and pass a law that is about 1 page long, that reads like this:
"No internet service provider may discriminate against any traffic of any sort transmitted to subscribers. The FCC will investigate and prosecute complaints against ISP's regarding this law, and any ISP found to be providing discriminatory service to customers will be subject to civil penalties of up to 50 million dollars; this money will be placed in a fund aimed at subsidizing broadband service to low-income markets."
Boom, net neutrality, done. Why do we need 500 pages of regulations for this very specific, relatively straightforward issue?
And, it's obvious they obey them because cable (not using some pretty scarce resources) doesn't have the same limitations.
They obey them for now. And past FCC heads (Powell, specifically, and I'm sure we could find others if we looked) have specifically opined that regulating indecency on cable and satellite radio are well within the scope of their authority. There's also the 70/70 clause in the 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act which allows the FCC to broadly increase its powers over Cable providers at such time as 70% of homes have access to cable, and 70% of those homes with access subscribe. So far as I'm aware, this has not been rescinded or allowed to expire.
As I said, I would prefer that the FCC be strictly, and specifically, limited in its role in this space. I have no illusion that there will be plenty of lobbying firms and other "concerned citizens'" groups who will continue to press for an increased role for the FCC to regulate "indecency" in formats other than broadcast.
Likely because they have doners or other special interests that would be negatively affected by it, just like any other politician working for themselves and not the people.
Right, my point is that painting it as some sort of partisan issue is kind of misleading when elements of both parties are actively fighting it. Franken is doing this, and your commentary on the "republicans say..." does this too. It distracts from the real issue at hand, which is that the telcos are throwing money at everybody they can to make sure this goes away.
Once again, I like the notion of net neutrality, but am reluctant to believe that the FCC won't abuse its regulatory power down the line as soon as some well-intentioned PAC says "but think of the children, there's boobies on the internet!" And suddenly, rather than shaped traffic, we have websites being fined out of existence for "harming innocent children." I would prefer that - if FCC gets control of this - that Congress explicitly limit the FCC's charter in this space to simply be "imposing net neutrality, with no extra authority to impose future regulations or restrictions not authorized by Congress."
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see. So it only matters if wikileaks is responsible for as many civilian deaths as the US? Until that point, they bear no responsibility for exposing the people who are killed?
Your moral compass. It seems skewed.
Yeah, go preach your gospel of "noninvolvement" to the people who are having their doors knocked on by American & Taliban soldiers armed to the teeth and "just asking for some help in making life peaceful again." Let me know how it works out for you. When you are - literally - in the crossfire between two opposing forces, neutrality is a luxury that most of these people probably can't afford.
Okay, so... let's accept your definition of innocent. Are you saying that you're okay with any "innocents" dying as a result of Wikileaks' actions? Are you saying that their vetting policies are perfect and need no review or improvement? Are you saying that releasing names and locations of informants is okay, even if it puts them and their families, neighbors, and villages at risk?
Because if you're not willing to say that, you should seriously consider shutting the fuck up and thinking before you engage your mouth. Wikileaks' release of these documents does NOTHING to reduce or prevent civilians from dying to American or Taliban operations - all this does is INCREASE the level of violence by giving the Taliban a list of informants who they can go after to punish.
A charge of moral equivalence with absolutely no factual basis? On Slashdot? I'm stunned. Stunned, I say.
While your obvious allegiance to Slashdot groupthink is commendable, would you care to explain how more innocent people - and here I am specifically talking about the people who the Taliban will "punish" for cooperating with NATO forces, and the families who will be punished - dying because they've been exposed by Wikileaks furthers the goal of ending the war in Afghanistan? Connect the dots for me, please, I'm sure you have some overwhelmingly brilliant logic to explain this.
You'll have to excuse me if I don't assist Mr. Assange in killing Afghan civilians - I'm not going to reproduce names for you here because you're too lazy to read the links I've pointed out. Seriously - have you bothered reading a bit of the news coverage around this, other than what's on Slashdot, where WikiLeaks can do no wrong because it's "taking on the big evil nasty military"?
(from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/leaked-details-put-informant-lives-in-danger/story-e6frg6so-1225898206990):
Julian Assange has *acknowledged* that they did so. And said, "Well it's not my fault, I didn't mean to harm anybody, and if anybody is hurt, I'll regret it very much," while having the cojones to blame the government for not helping him vet thousands of classified documents which have no business being distributed in the first place. Once again, his regret will be cold comfort for the people who will be injured and killed as a result of his organization publishing the names of informants as a result of an incomplete & sloppy review process.
(from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/publication-of-afghan-informant-details-worth-the-risk-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange/story-e6frg6so-1225898273552):
Connect these two stories with the original story I linked, where a Taliban spokesman has already stated that they are looking through the documents in order to "punish" people who've collaborated with NATO forces. If you really think nobody will be substantially harmed by WikiLeaks' actions, you're living in a fantasy world.
And that oft-repeated slogan is also oft-derided here on Slashdot as a ridiculous notion that flies in the face of the very concept of privacy, and the fact that some things really should remain private.
How about the Taliban saying they're going to target Afghan people named in the documents as providing intelligence to US forces? Are you okay with those people being killed? Are you okay with the chilling effect this will undoubtedly have on people's willingness to cooperate and provide intelligence to the military, when intelligence is one of the critical components to ending an insurgency? Let's be honest, the Taliban pretty much knows where the Americans are - they're the guys in the Hummvees. I don't think these documents are going to have much of an effect on the Taliban forces knowing "the locations of American soldiers." I think it's going to have a HUGE effect on the willignness of Afghan civilians to work with the military, which means: more people dead - Afghan & American.
I'm sick of hearing about how the American military is "committing atrocities" as if that's the only thing that's happening over there from mindless, knee-jerk "america is always evil" fuckwits who think that exposing sensitive documents with the equivalent of a MS Word "find and replace" command on a few "arabic-sounding names" constitutes "reasonable efforts at harm prevention." I'm also sick of hearing about Julian Assange's smug, twattish response that the military is to blame for putting those names in classified fucking documents, so it's not his fault that the names got leaked.
If there is evidence in those documents that "atrocities" have been committed, they absolutely should hold the military accountable. That doesn't justify the widespread dissemination of those documents to anybody who wants to take a look without a serious, legitimate attempt at vetting the documents to minimize harm to innocent people named in the reports by people who actually understand what the fuck they're reading.
That will be cold comfort to the Afghani people who have worked with US forces when somebody tosses a grenade, or a molotov cocktail through their window.
It's already been shown that the WL people didn't take "all possible precautions to prevent harm" - their release included GPS coordinates & full names & locations of people involved. If there is evidence of misdeeds by the US military, that's fine, they should be held accountable - but a giant dump of information that's been "edited by volunteers" is NOT "taking all possible precautions to prevent harm before release."
And would that "bandwidth" just magically work, with no outside maintenance or infrastructure? What? You mean it requires servers, and salaried employees, and a host of properly implemented technology to provide bandwidth? And the company needs to actually make an operating profit in order to expand its offerings, replace old infrastructure, and develop new business? And you're also learning something new from a bunch of security experts?
Gee, maybe that's why it costs $395?
Your view is so reductionist it's ridiculous. What you are paying for is the knowledge & expertise of the people who are presenting, and the people who are running the video stream - the "bandwidth" is a fraction of that total cost. People pay thousands of dollars to take college classes - are they "just paying to rent the use of a desk" for a night or two a week? You aren't "just paying for the bandwidth" anymore than those people are simply renting a desk.
I'll explain to you why you pay $5 a cup for coffee at Starbucks as opposed to the pennies that the raw materials cost in my next class. It costs $395. I think that's a pretty remarkable deal.
Well... it is "insight" of a sort, isn't it?
Correction, because I apparently can't construct a proper list: "...relative costs of healthcare, groceries, utilities, transportation, and housing between two locations."
The cost of living calculator I linked to shows the relative costs of healthcare, groceries, utilities, transportation, and transportation between two locations. All of which are higher in NYC than in Boston - of course "housing" is the biggest discrepancy, but all of them are higher.
The GP said "it's really just real estate," and that's demonstrably false. If I'm paying 20% more for healthcare & transportation, and 15% more for groceries, it is still more expensive, and it has nothing to do with my housing costs. There's *LESS* of a discrepancy if you exclude the cost of housing, but it's still there.
And unless you plan to live in a cardboard box, or in a van down by the river, you can't just hand-wave away the costs of housing and say it doesn't matter.
I agree, they're not doing bad at all. My point is that the people saying "Oh boo hoo, they can't afford the big yacht," are missing the point. Given the cost of living in NYC, 150k is not "a lot of money" - it's a comfortable middle class existence, maybe with an extra beer on Friday nights.
That said... I'd also take a fraction of the money I make today to live in Rio. Any jobs there for software engineers who speak at most half a dozen words of Portuguese? (Go ahead, dash my dreams. :)
Spoken like somebody who's never lived in NYC, or even the suburbs. It's not "just housing", it's "everything" that costs more. Transportation, groceries, housing, are all a fair bit higher in the NYC area than they are, well.. pretty much anywhere else.
150k in NYC (Manhattan) - according to various cost of living calculators I've looked at around the interwebz - is about:
90k in Boston
92k in San Diego
71k in Denver
95k in Arlington, VA (outside DC)
70k in Raleigh
63k in Dallas
78k in Chicago
112k in San Francisco
Try it yourself here: http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html This COLA calculator compares housing, groceries, utilities, healthcare, and transportation.
It's expensive to live in ANY city. But NYC is significantly more expensive than the rest. 150k in New York City is a "comfortable" existence, but it's not "upper class" by any stretch of the imagination. 150k in NYC sounds like a lot outside NYC *because it is a lot - outside NYC*. I live in Boston and make just about 100k as a software engineer - and I can assure you that there are a lot of towns and neighborhoods in/around Boston where I couldn't afford to live.
Look guys, I wrote software that prints money whenever the market's open! I clearly deserve a bigger salary than my boss.
print "Welcome to Fatback Financial Systems Hi-Frequency Trader Premium. Sit back and watch as I make money for you, you lazy horrible greedy finance type!\n";
while (isMarketOpen()) {
$profit++;
print "You has a profit! It is $profit!\n";
sleep 60;
}
print "Market's closed for the day. Go beat up some more poor IT guys until tomorrow! And remember: greed is good!\n";
Yes, that's right. Because everybody is special and you can't assign a monetary value to people.
But people are paid exactly what the value of their effort is perceived to be worth by their employers.
Think your efforts are contributing more value than your boss? Time for a frank discussion, or time to find a new job. Lots of people complain about being underpaid. Few of them can quantify how much they're underpaid by, or what about their work justifies more than they're earning. If you want to earn more, you need to start being very clear about what your efforts are worth to your employer.
I suspect in this case, the guy earning 150k a year is probably underpaid by a bit (if his software is really earning $100k+ per day), but I think it's also realistic to acknowledge that his software was not designed & built in a vacuum. Other programmers employed by his boss no doubt helped him, and the requirements and algorithms were probably not designed by the programmer - at least all by himself. Given that creating the software was a team effort (and we don't know how big the team really is), it's entirely possible that 150k/yr is right in line with the value of his contribution to the effort.
If he's in New York City - which is very likely - 150k a year isn't exactly champagne wishes and caviar dreams.
The problem I see mostly now is the whole "Someone has commented on someone else's private photo, and now you can see it" - it's the weird interactions around those varying levels of security that I dislike.
If I make a photo visible to a group or two, I don't want anybody else seeing members of those groups commenting on it - from what I've seen, comments and other interactions don't honor (or at least, don't always honor) the privacy & security settings of the item they're in response to, and that seems problematic to me.
The article under discussion literally asks if "Open Source" could render Facebook the next AOL. I'd say "this" is very specifically about open source.
Good luck explaining to various friends why they're not "tier 1" friends. :)
Really, I'd rather see support for simple named groups, and be able to set access to each item by those groups - essentially ACLs (1..n groups of people can see post X) instead of the three-layer Unix-like security they have today: ("Friends", "Friends of friends", "Everybody"). There are some things I'd say to my friends which I wouldn't necessarily say to my family, or simply things that maybe my friends wouldn't care about that my family would - and vice versa.
Make it so all comments and conversation about a particular item inherit the visibility characteristics of the item they're associated with, and you'd take care of a lot of the issues with grouping.
If you think about it, you can probably partition your friends into 5-10 easily named "groups", and if membership is non-exclusive (e.g., someone can be a member of more than one group), that would reflect "real life" a lot better than the current setup, or a tiering mechanism. If it's a general-purpose item, you can post it to "all", if it's not general purpose, mark the checkbox next to which groups you want to share the item with. If you don't want to share with groups, specify 1..n particular people by name, or mix group names with specific names.
There's no precise digital equivalent to the messy analog that is real life relationships. But, off the top of my head, I could probably break down my friend list into the following categories - there are some people who'd fit in multiple categories, and probably some outlier people who would all get lumped into "acquaintances", but you get the point.
-- Hockey Team
-- Family
-- Colleagues
-- High School Classmates
-- College Classmates
-- Book Club
-- Red Cross Volunteers
-- Casual Acquaintances
-- Business Contacts
-- Friends
True, but your argument assumes that "qualified and talented programmers" are an infinite resource. Just because I don't like the developers "selling out" doesn't mean I'm qualified to understand and work on the code of the people who did. I could fork it, and try to continue on, but it's likely that the pace of bug fixes and new features would slow to a crawl in the meantime, giving Oracle & the talented devs they hired away the opportunity to open the gap in terms of functionality and stability, leaving you with OraGimp : Gimp :: MS Office : OpenOffice relationship.
Open Office is a "good enough" contender, but it doesn't have feature parity with MS Office, and that certainly has an effect on its rate of adoption.
Poor clarity in my initial post - I wasn't speaking of the European *continent*, and you're absolutely correct about the relative sizes of the continent of Europe vs. the US. What I was referring to was the collective size of the EU, which for the purposes of comparing internet penetration is probably more informative than "continental europe", which includes Russia and other Eastern European states which lag pretty significantly in internet penetration.
When comparing the EU to the US, the EU is about 45% of the size of the US, and has a population density ~3.6 times greater than population density in the US. In addition, the countries of the EU typically have higher percentages of their population living in urban areas.
The point still stands. When you have more people living in a smaller area, and a higher percentage of those people living in densely populated urban areas, the infrastructure is going to be far more cost-effective to build, unless you know of some way where - to pick arbitrary, but scale-appropriate numbers - 1000 miles of cabling is cheaper and easier to maintain than 450 miles of the same cable.
Are you referring to Sweden, where ~85% of the population lives in urban areas?
Your snarky choice of an outlier country that has most of its population concentrated in it's southern urban areas does not disprove the fact that the US has a far greater area to cover, as well as a much more distributed population.
What I offered is called an "explanation" for why service is better and cheaper in Europe, too, btw, not an "excuse" - nowhere did I say "It's okay for them to provide awful service, because..."
For your next trick, perhaps you'd like to argue that Canada also disproves my statement because of their low population density while disregarding the fact that most of the population of Canada lives in urban areas within ~50 miles of the US border?
Yeah, do that one next!
I understand this, and that's why I'm saying that the problem isn't a "partisan" issue - at least not in the sense of Democrats vs. Republicans.
A politician interested in getting broad-based support wouldn't *immediately* alienate 50% of his potential supporters by slamming them as "the other guys" who just want to make "people like us" suffer.
I'm sure Rush Limbaugh is doing it too, and he's just as wrong as Sen. Franken in doing it. Net neutrality has nothing to do with "Republicans shutting down DKos" or "Democrats killing Fox News." It has everything to do with "Big cable companies wanting to squeeze every last penny they can out of us, and they're willing to spend big money to buy the senators and representatives to make sure it happens."
If I'm Comcast, I'm looking at sites like Google, Apple (Itunes), Amazon, Microsoft, and other big companies, and telling them "If you want people to rent movies from itunes, you better pay us a lot of money to ensure optimum performance."
So... if I'm watching NBC coverage of something over something like FiOS... do I get to see the wardrobe malfunction because I'm watching it on the internet, rather than a broadcast medium?
As I said in response to the guy below you - it's not a slippery slope if the FCC has specifically stated its belief that things like cable & satellite should be subject to increased FCC regulation. If that's what they *want*, it's only a matter of time until they find a good justification paired with a favorable political climate. "Think of the children!" will be the rallying cry: Boobies and the F-bomb are good motivators when you have a million parents screaming for blood.
It is not a slippery slope to expect the FCC to attempt to expand its charter after being granted regulatory authority.
It has tried to do this in Cable and satellite radio already, though it has lost its court battles in most cases.
Assuming that "the guy in charge" will always be "the guy in charge" is foolish - today's head of the FCC may be reasonable; tomorrow's might not be. Why is it unreasonable or ineffective for Congress to simply write and pass a law that is about 1 page long, that reads like this:
"No internet service provider may discriminate against any traffic of any sort transmitted to subscribers. The FCC will investigate and prosecute complaints against ISP's regarding this law, and any ISP found to be providing discriminatory service to customers will be subject to civil penalties of up to 50 million dollars; this money will be placed in a fund aimed at subsidizing broadband service to low-income markets."
Boom, net neutrality, done. Why do we need 500 pages of regulations for this very specific, relatively straightforward issue?
They obey them for now. And past FCC heads (Powell, specifically, and I'm sure we could find others if we looked) have specifically opined that regulating indecency on cable and satellite radio are well within the scope of their authority. There's also the 70/70 clause in the 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act which allows the FCC to broadly increase its powers over Cable providers at such time as 70% of homes have access to cable, and 70% of those homes with access subscribe. So far as I'm aware, this has not been rescinded or allowed to expire.
As I said, I would prefer that the FCC be strictly, and specifically, limited in its role in this space. I have no illusion that there will be plenty of lobbying firms and other "concerned citizens'" groups who will continue to press for an increased role for the FCC to regulate "indecency" in formats other than broadcast.
Right, my point is that painting it as some sort of partisan issue is kind of misleading when elements of both parties are actively fighting it. Franken is doing this, and your commentary on the "republicans say..." does this too. It distracts from the real issue at hand, which is that the telcos are throwing money at everybody they can to make sure this goes away.
Once again, I like the notion of net neutrality, but am reluctant to believe that the FCC won't abuse its regulatory power down the line as soon as some well-intentioned PAC says "but think of the children, there's boobies on the internet!" And suddenly, rather than shaped traffic, we have websites being fined out of existence for "harming innocent children." I would prefer that - if FCC gets control of this - that Congress explicitly limit the FCC's charter in this space to simply be "imposing net neutrality, with no extra authority to impose future regulations or restrictions not authorized by Congress."