"They're nice hypotheticals though. You can come to any conclusion you want if you start with the right assumptions - like $200/250k jobs being the typical case for H-1B's"
Oh stop making stuff up putting words into my mouth. I made no such claim that $200k was typical, I merely used it as an example of the fact that a $200k hire can actually increase the average paid to American workers by creating jobs and that hiring such a person doesn't inherently guarantee a decrease in average salaries.
"(perhaps he could look at the actual statistics showing that H-1B's on average are paid less than equally skilled Americans)."
I'd like to see these, I've been looking for a while for H1-B stats and haven't found much of genuine academic value. I'm not disputing that this may well be the case. I've found individual lists that show the big tech name companies certainly hire far more developers at above national rates than below and by a notable margin. I'm not arguing that there aren't other companies that pay less, I'm merely arguing that immigration isn't always bad whilst also making the point that the companies who are often accused of using H1-B to drag down salaries like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google are most certainly not the companies that are doing that - again, maybe others are, but they are not. Search for Google, Microsoft, or whatever here and you'll see what I mean:
"Lastly, for something like real AI gurus, there are the 'O' series visas, which nobody objects to."
Well, some people object to them, xenophobes, nationalists, that sort of person. The person I responded to was making the rather sweeping claim that all immigration inherently leads to a reduction in average salaries. You seem to be indirectly agreeing with me if you think there are some categories of immigration which should be allowed, so why the defensiveness? Perhaps there does need to be a better balance, but what's certain is that Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and a bunch of the others aren't abusing H1-B, to drag salaries down, so let's find out who is if that's the case and focus on them in future instead if it's a problem that must be dealt with. It seems silly to bitch at companies who are actually using immigration to increase average salaries and to defend people who claim all immigration is bad no?
So sure, maybe you do work at one of the companies that does bring in cheap overseas hires, but my point remains that all the big boys are not doing this. The big tech companies are all paying well above the average. I can't find the site I used last time I looked into this as it had more uptodate data, this one only goes to 2010, but if you find such a site with more recent data you'll see it's the exact same pattern.
But what is this job that used to pay $80k - $100k exactly and has now dropped to $40k? It's certainly not software development because wages there have not declined - on the contrary, they've been increasing. Why are you certain the H1-B hires are the reason the average salary has dropped? Another thing I've pointed out previously is that the number of H1-B hires isn't even large enough to have much of an impact on any particular field - they're still a vast minority relative to the numbers in most fields in general.
It's easy to blame immigrants, because of that innate tribalism that so plagues humanity, but the reality is if wages are dropping in a field it almost certainly has absolutely nothing to do with them. They're still a small drop in the ocean, especially compared to other factors.
I see the same debates and complaints day in day out in the UK about immigrants and immigration, but when actual scientifically sound studies are done on the topic it always comes out that immigrants are of net economic benefit and make society richer. Even in the worst case there's only a handful of professions that suffer, whilst most improve greatly. The reality is professions like IT support are seeing declining wages not because of immigration, not in the slightest, but simply because it's become a less skilled profession with greater training available. You could cut immigration to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't change this fact.
I don't know why this myth persists, it's such a pathetic populist simplification.
Consider this scenario. Your company has an idea for a new product, but it requires an AI expert. There are other AI experts with the required skillset in the country getting paid on average $200k a year. You can poach one by paying $250k a year and in doing so increase the average salary for that skillset but that then deprives another company of one which means they have to shut their project down, and people lose their jobs as the project cannot continue. The loss of jobs means instead average salaries decline because whilst one guy is getting paid $50k more, a bunch of others are going from $80k to $0k.
So instead you bring in someone from overseas for $200k, this lets the other company keep going, and sure it doesn't increase the average salary for that profession, but then you need to hire some additional devs to help your expert, you hire three more great programmers at $100k each - that's $30k above the average and so guess what? you just increased average salaries by hiring someone that enabled this.
Of course your next argument, the next argument used by populist immigrant haters will of course be "well train someone up in the country" - great, train them up how? if we're talking cutting edge or highly advanced stuff who is going to train them? Even if you can and do train them then this puts your project back years and when that happens what if another country develops your idea? They get the wealth and jobs from it instead.
So no, if you supply more labour that doesn't inherently mean that salaries will decrease. The problem is entirely about what types of labour you let in. Done right, it can increase average salaries.
I've pointed it out before, the list of H1-B hires by the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and so forth shows salaries far above the national average salaries and so you simply cannot accuse big tech companies of having an agenda to drag salaries down with immigrants - the very fact their immigrant hires are paid more on average by definition means that these companies are increasing average salaries by bringing in these people and paying them what they do.
The immigration issue isn't as simplistic as people like you seem to think, it can be a massively important tool in driving growth and increasing salaries, and certainly the major tech companies are using it in a way that they're increasing average salaries.
As an aside, FWIW, the reason salaries have stagnated in the first place is actually mostly because of the work of indigenous American bankers and has absolutely nothing to do with immigration - immigration was still happening even pre-recession and wages were still going up. It actually declined slightly when the recession hit and wages also declined, they certainly didn't go up when there were less immigrants arriving.
Re:Wake me they fix namespaces
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The New PHP
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This is true, but does that somehow change the rarity of them though? I've found C/C++ jobs tend to be highly regional - there are plenty in places like London and Cambridge, but barely any in much of the rest of the UK for example.
"And yet employers seem to discriminate heavily against people who have not been working with the latest version of.Net, and expect us to pass tests on the most obscure and arcane features of.Net 4.5, many of which as far as I can tell, will probably never be required in basic web solutions anyway."
Personally I learn all the new features of new versions of.NET even if they will actually never be useful. Why? So that I do know whether they'll be useful or not rather than complaining I didn't get a job for not knowing about something with a throwaway comment such as "It's probably not useful anyway" - how could you know? you don't even know what it is.
Interview questions like that are there to check for one thing - whether you're one of those best of best developers that does know the language inside out. If you can't answer it you're telling the employer "I don't actually give a shit about programming enough to care about that thing".
Most programming can do pretty much everything you want at a very basic level with only the most simple constructs. 90% of new features in languages nowadays are there to help you write faster code, more secure code, or more concise and readable code or some combination of those sorts of traits - if you're not learning these features then of course you can program most things with the language, but you're not making the most of the language and so your code will take you longer to write, be less secure, or be less performant or similar. This is true not just of.NET but many other languages like Java, and C++.
It's not as though language release notes and feature lists are particularly long. You could get a firm idea of what's in a version update like.NET 4.5 in about 30 minutes. Asking someone a question on the most recent language features simply just helps employers select those who want an easy ride and aren't interested in self-learning from those who know the technology inside out and understand the direction it's heading in..NET 4.5 adds in some pretty decent features for automating parallelisation of many tasks. It's possible they were simply probing to see whether you'd just use the classic programming constructs to write a single threaded solution to something that could be handled in a more parallel manner automatically, and with less code. This is pretty common in interviews by employers who know their shit and want people who also know their shit - it weeds out the people who want to do things the way they've always done them, even if that way no longer holds any real advantages.
Don't assume that because you didn't get a job that you didn't need what they were asking for and that they're stupid. Yes this is true sometimes, but often just be humble and accept that maybe you didn't actually know the things they needed you to know for the job or for the level of ability they're seeking.
"If you can program in C you can write a program that runs on pretty much everything that you'll come across that you might want to program."
Right, but more slowly, less maintainably, and inherently less securely by default than many alternatives.
Which is really the point isn't it? Different languages have different benefits, your argument is premised on the fact that being able to write for more different platforms (except those you can't) is the ultimate trait in a language one should gun for.
But many people wont ever write anything other than for say, Windows, or for the web for example, in which case writing C code is a really really bad option and you should probably learn something else.
(FWIW I was also born and bred on C, I love it, and agree it's worth learning even if only out of academic interest, but I also think people should learn more than just C, and perhaps not even C at all if they're web focussed and have limited time to dedicate to learning).
Well Fox News and the Daily Mail have a track record of lying about Snowden, The Daily Mail still makes claims that he's a Russian agent even though even the NSA themselves accept that he is not.
As such, better to play itself and not waste time with those with a track record of lying about this particular topic no? especially when there's an alternative with a slightly better track record mentioned in the summary itself (and more interesting detail FWIW).
So it may be up for grabs for you, but for myself and I suspect many other's it's far more preferable to have sources that don't have track records of actually outright lying about shit all the time, especially on the subject in question.
You're right, but the fine is entirely down to the ICO. Remember the ACS: Law guy who was chasing file sharers over porn on bittorrent and left a list of his accused on his website for all to download stating personal information and associating their names width different flavours of porn?
He was fined a pathetic £1000 because the ICO didn't want him to endure the hardship of potentially losing his $1million house simply because the guy provided a "sworn statement" that he couldn't pay a higher fine even though he blatantly could.
There also seems to be a lot of picking and choosing about holding individuals liable - i.e. it seems to never happen even though the Data Protection Act explicitly allows for that.
A better solution would have been to not fine the organisation but to use the clause of the data protection act that allows individuals to be held responsible and fine the contractor for being so negligent as to store personal data insecurely and anyone at the organisation who allowed it.
Why the assumption that our current economic methodology of building our future on the premise of ever growing population is the only option? It seems a little unfair to say to women - tough shit, you all need to have at least two kids, so that our fucked up pension system continues to work, but we'll make things nice for you and give you advantages over men to make up for it.
World population growth is slowing and reaching equilibrium, it's inevitable that we're going to have to make some kind of change to more sustainable living rather than relying on the next generation to pay for the last generation. It's not a bad thing either, because the earth only has finite resources to go around so the premise of perpetual population growth forever is an unsustainable fallacy regardless.
So given that we're absolutely going to have to change, because it's not our choice anyway then why not focus policy towards that rather than continue to prop up a broken unsustainable system which acts against genuine equality and also sustainability?
Yeah if that was his role, but it's not, his role is the legislation surrounding the filter, he's not building anything, all he needs to know is that child porn is bad and that he's been briefed to legislate for a filter against it. He has absolutely no need to go looking for it.
Doesn't really matter, the law is pretty clear, you have to get written permission from the police to research this sort of thing and if he had that they wouldn't have gone after him. The only people who ever really get permission are those working at CEOP and a mere handful of researchers. If they've found it on his computer and he doesn't have permission "I was just researching!" doesn't cut it. On the contrary, this guy should full well have known the law given that forming legislation for child abuse is his job so has less excuse than anyone.
Most likely if he is innocent of being an actual paedophile he probably just figured he was above the law being in government and all that. Unfortunately for him though, he isn't.
But it's a chicken and egg scenario isn't it? are women doing limited hours because they're not getting offered exciting projects, or are they not getting offered exciting projects because they're doing limited hours as they've made a choice with their partner to be the one that goes home early to collect the kids from school?
I suspect you're right, but the underlying cause of that discrepancy is still not so clear cut.
"I haven't even heard of a study that says there is a significant wage gap for at least a decade. When accounting for career, hours worked, experience, etc. the worst I have heard is a 3% wage gap."
Hours worked is where I've seen the numbers most distorted. Most studies I've seen talking about pay gap don't account for hours and are based on the premise that most women in opposite sex relationships still opt to take on the role of picking up kids from school and such instead of their partner and so do less hours, but as this is omitted from the study the claim is made that they're paid less. Certainly in the UK few studies seem to take in hours worked, most just take the sex, the profession, and the annual salary and do nothing more than that.
So the issue of disparity in most cases is that in most couples it's still the female that is taking on the role of housewife but this is entirely a choice between couples and not a workplace problem in the slightest beyond the fact that this also impacts womens career progression because statistically you're more likely to know the company better the more hours you spend there, and hence be a more suitable candidate for promotion, hence why women are less likely to be promoted - because they're also more likely to be less committed to work and more committed to home.
The fact is some feminists want women to be able to take the housewife option, do less hours, AND still get paid as much as their male colleagues working longer hours and it's this that distorts the argument and makes the whole discussion nonsensical most of the time.
I don't pretend sexism doesn't exist and isn't a problem, I've certainly witnessed women suffer sexism in the workplace and have called it out when I've seen it, though I've also witnessed women abuse their sexual attractiveness to gain promotion with stupid sexually desperate male bosses too so I'm not overly convinced those two things don't balance out and I believe both need to be eliminated as far as possible.
The real key issue is getting a better balance between males and females that act as home makers vs. breadwinners if we want to see things balance out. Heeding calls for quotas based on statistically fraudulent studies that omit things that make it like for like such as hours worked though simply build resentment and have the opposite effect of making members of each sex view each other equally in the workplace.
"But illegally removed from office. Ukraine's constitution requires a 2/3 vote to impeach a president, but a 3/4 vote to remove him from office. 328 votes is well short of that 3/4 majority."
Well short? did you actually fail maths as well as politics or something? 73.3% is about as far from well short as you can get, especially given the law was put in place by him in the first place. It's also a firm democratic mandate, but again, you apparently don't get what democracy is either because you seem to think it's a thing where only your personal opinion matters in spite of the view of the majority of the Ukranian population.
"Oh, and installed the founder of a neo-nazi party as head of the country's security."
Oh I see, so instead it's better they all just submit to the neo-nazi Russian leadership, yes, neo-nazi, or did you miss all that stuff about using homosexuals and foreigners as scapegoats in Russia. In case you missed it it was kind of a big thing in the run up to Sochi. There are nazis on both sides of the equation.
"By supporting this coup, you are opposing democracy."
You really really need to learn how democracy works, again, I'll make it clear to you, it's not a thing where a minority gets to dictate to the majority. What you're asking for is dictatorship. It simply doesn't matter how you try and spin, whilst yes, there are some ethnic minorities in the Ukraine who support Russia, Putin and Yanukovych, the vast manjority are against them. What is it you find so utterly hard to understand about this?
"Like the right wing in Venezuela, they are trying to do by force what they failed to do at the ballot box."
Unlike the Ukraine, Venezuela can't even claim it's elections were free and fair, they were deemed not to be. I guess you're just one of those fools who loves to support dictatorships, the sort of person that was the reason the likes of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin could get away with what they did. You must be very proud of yourself and your support for dictatorship.
I'll make it abundantly clear to you that you're completely wrong if you think there is anything whatsoever undemocratic going on in the Ukraine (apart from Russia's occupation of Crimea):
Not a single area, including the Russian majority Crimea support reunification with Russia with a total of only 13% supporting the Russian cause overall: http://www.ukrinform.ua/rus/ne...
51% of Ukrainians support democracy, post protest 58% now support a union with the EU instead of Russia: http://www.kyivpost.com/opinio...
The facts are there, this whole situation has the support of the majority, again, if you do not like this that's fine, but you're saying you do not like democracy. You can't pretend you're for democracy and against what's happened in the Ukraine because the two viewpoints are diametrically opposed - you must accept you're either for Russian dictatorship and against democracy, or for democracy and against Russian dictatorship. The numbers, the facts, just do not back any kind of assertion that what's occurred in the Ukraine is not a popular uprising by a majority against Russian interests.
You obviously hate cold fjord, christ, I do, I think he's wrong on almost everything, but everyone's right sometimes. This is one of those rare times, you're letting your personal hatred for someone put you on completely the wrong side of the argument. You may hate US imperialism, but in the Ukraine they've been victim of the equal and opposite Russian imperialism for a long time. Since 2004 we've seen events like this
"What's going on in Ukraine isn't a revolution, it's a fascist coup overthrowing the democratically elected government because they couldn't stand losing the last election."
Um, no. The president was impeached by the democratically elected parliament due to the fact he was no longer representing the interests of the democratic majority. This is a case of democracy in action I'm afraid, not some kind of subversion of democracy.
If you don't support what the protesters achieved in the Ukraine then you don't support democracy, it's as simple as that.
Yes he won democratically, but that doesn't give him a right to stay in power indefinitely, or even for his whole term if the other elected house decide to support the will of the majority who have now changed their minds about him.
Ethnic Russians are a minority in the Ukraine, he won by getting the support of all the ethnic Russians and some ethnic Ukrainians. He lost the support of the ethnic Ukrainians plunging him into minority support by reneging on previous promises that he got elected on, and he lost his position as a result.
Just because he screams and cries and calls it a coup doesn't make it so, parliament voted to impeach him by 328 votes to 0 through standard due process. I'm sorry if that's inconvenient to your pre-determined bias. The whole point in impeachment is that it's for getting rid of elected representatives who the population no longer have any faith in, but who wont step down of his own accord, so exactly the right thing was done here, this was a 100% legitimate ousting of him:
It may have simply been easier for you to point to Russia's current assault on homosexuals as an example of the Nazism that is rife in Russia.
There's a strong parallel between Hitler's persecution of minorities in the 1930s as a populist blame target and Putins use of them nowadays. Putin is using them in the exact same manner - a scapegoat for his own failings as a leader, a target to focus hatred onto to distract from the real problems Russia has.
At the end of the day, minorities in Russia face far greater persecution than Russian minorities in the Ukraine which is really I suppose the point you're making and the point the GP seems utterly oblivious and ignorant to no?
It's not always the case though, it depends what the "thing" is. I've encountered plenty of situations where there's an existing library or selection of libraries for a problem but that frankly the options available have all been terrible such that I knew without question I could create my own better.
For something like a DNS or SSH server you're absolutely right though! Some problems are common enough to have been solved near perfectly a thousand times over, others however are still not common or advanced/solid enough that there is always a better option than writing your own.
In the UK almost every plan seems to come with an unusuablly high or unlimited amount of SMS anyway which is still cheaper than the $1 a year Whatsapp costs.
I use it because I have that one friend who also insists on using it and nothing else. Maybe I should just stop speaking to him and save myself $1 a year.
The only actual benefit I can see to it is for images which are cheaper and seem to work more reliably than MMS.
"And yet, Slashdot in general lauds the takeover of medicine by government."
Yes, because what he describes has nothing to do with private/public so what exactly is your point?
As a counter point, in the UK we have had major scandals with private sector care homes for the elderly where people have been abused physically and mentally and generally treated like shit left to sit in their own urine and faeces for days.
Or were you under some deluded impression that private sector is some magical saviour, with a ward against all things that could possibly be bad or go wrong?
Just because someone describes a problem with a particular public sector service doesn't mean the whole concept is faulty and flawed, nor does it mean that it could never possibly happen in private sector as well. The amount of mental gymnastics you must have had to perform to reach that conclusion based on the comment you referred to is astonishing and takes a special kind of stupid to achieve.
"What I do for the other 8 hours awake is up to me"
Lucky you, some of us don't get to live in our mothers basement for all eternity though and have to deal with everything from doing house choirs, to cooking food, to looking after kids, to spending time with our partners, to doing DIY jobs, to doing food shopping, to reading about new things to stay relevant and employable, to paying bills to getting the car fixed, and so on.
Now don't get me wrong, I did 35hrs a week study whilst also working 40hrs a week to get a second degree, and still had time to do some hobbies and spend time with my girlfriend so I know as well as anyone about time management. But if you think most people just work 8 hours and then have 8 hours of freedom to spend doing whatever they want then you really need to grow up and understand that not everyone has the luxury of zero responsibilities.
For most people it's nothing to do with being lazy or unmotivated, it's genuinely about lack of time.
I'm fortunate that I have a mile walk each way to/from the train station to my office and dogs to walk when I get home such that I get my exercise doing things I'd need to do anyway, but that's not the norm for most people.
Besides, I don't think it's even really fair to judge how people live their lives regardless - some people may feel that dying young but living smart by constantly learning is better than living long and living stupid. Others will be happy trying to maintain a reasonable balance.
Slashdot Mirror
"They're nice hypotheticals though. You can come to any conclusion you want if you start with the right assumptions - like $200/250k jobs being the typical case for H-1B's"
Oh stop making stuff up putting words into my mouth. I made no such claim that $200k was typical, I merely used it as an example of the fact that a $200k hire can actually increase the average paid to American workers by creating jobs and that hiring such a person doesn't inherently guarantee a decrease in average salaries.
"(perhaps he could look at the actual statistics showing that H-1B's on average are paid less than equally skilled Americans)."
I'd like to see these, I've been looking for a while for H1-B stats and haven't found much of genuine academic value. I'm not disputing that this may well be the case. I've found individual lists that show the big tech name companies certainly hire far more developers at above national rates than below and by a notable margin. I'm not arguing that there aren't other companies that pay less, I'm merely arguing that immigration isn't always bad whilst also making the point that the companies who are often accused of using H1-B to drag down salaries like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google are most certainly not the companies that are doing that - again, maybe others are, but they are not. Search for Google, Microsoft, or whatever here and you'll see what I mean:
http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sp...
"Lastly, for something like real AI gurus, there are the 'O' series visas, which nobody objects to."
Well, some people object to them, xenophobes, nationalists, that sort of person. The person I responded to was making the rather sweeping claim that all immigration inherently leads to a reduction in average salaries. You seem to be indirectly agreeing with me if you think there are some categories of immigration which should be allowed, so why the defensiveness? Perhaps there does need to be a better balance, but what's certain is that Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and a bunch of the others aren't abusing H1-B, to drag salaries down, so let's find out who is if that's the case and focus on them in future instead if it's a problem that must be dealt with. It seems silly to bitch at companies who are actually using immigration to increase average salaries and to defend people who claim all immigration is bad no?
All I can go on is the lists of H1-B hires and so forth that are about on the internet e.g.:
http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sp...
So sure, maybe you do work at one of the companies that does bring in cheap overseas hires, but my point remains that all the big boys are not doing this. The big tech companies are all paying well above the average. I can't find the site I used last time I looked into this as it had more uptodate data, this one only goes to 2010, but if you find such a site with more recent data you'll see it's the exact same pattern.
But what is this job that used to pay $80k - $100k exactly and has now dropped to $40k? It's certainly not software development because wages there have not declined - on the contrary, they've been increasing. Why are you certain the H1-B hires are the reason the average salary has dropped? Another thing I've pointed out previously is that the number of H1-B hires isn't even large enough to have much of an impact on any particular field - they're still a vast minority relative to the numbers in most fields in general.
It's easy to blame immigrants, because of that innate tribalism that so plagues humanity, but the reality is if wages are dropping in a field it almost certainly has absolutely nothing to do with them. They're still a small drop in the ocean, especially compared to other factors.
I see the same debates and complaints day in day out in the UK about immigrants and immigration, but when actual scientifically sound studies are done on the topic it always comes out that immigrants are of net economic benefit and make society richer. Even in the worst case there's only a handful of professions that suffer, whilst most improve greatly. The reality is professions like IT support are seeing declining wages not because of immigration, not in the slightest, but simply because it's become a less skilled profession with greater training available. You could cut immigration to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't change this fact.
I don't know why this myth persists, it's such a pathetic populist simplification.
Consider this scenario. Your company has an idea for a new product, but it requires an AI expert. There are other AI experts with the required skillset in the country getting paid on average $200k a year. You can poach one by paying $250k a year and in doing so increase the average salary for that skillset but that then deprives another company of one which means they have to shut their project down, and people lose their jobs as the project cannot continue. The loss of jobs means instead average salaries decline because whilst one guy is getting paid $50k more, a bunch of others are going from $80k to $0k.
So instead you bring in someone from overseas for $200k, this lets the other company keep going, and sure it doesn't increase the average salary for that profession, but then you need to hire some additional devs to help your expert, you hire three more great programmers at $100k each - that's $30k above the average and so guess what? you just increased average salaries by hiring someone that enabled this.
Of course your next argument, the next argument used by populist immigrant haters will of course be "well train someone up in the country" - great, train them up how? if we're talking cutting edge or highly advanced stuff who is going to train them? Even if you can and do train them then this puts your project back years and when that happens what if another country develops your idea? They get the wealth and jobs from it instead.
So no, if you supply more labour that doesn't inherently mean that salaries will decrease. The problem is entirely about what types of labour you let in. Done right, it can increase average salaries.
I've pointed it out before, the list of H1-B hires by the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and so forth shows salaries far above the national average salaries and so you simply cannot accuse big tech companies of having an agenda to drag salaries down with immigrants - the very fact their immigrant hires are paid more on average by definition means that these companies are increasing average salaries by bringing in these people and paying them what they do.
The immigration issue isn't as simplistic as people like you seem to think, it can be a massively important tool in driving growth and increasing salaries, and certainly the major tech companies are using it in a way that they're increasing average salaries.
As an aside, FWIW, the reason salaries have stagnated in the first place is actually mostly because of the work of indigenous American bankers and has absolutely nothing to do with immigration - immigration was still happening even pre-recession and wages were still going up. It actually declined slightly when the recession hit and wages also declined, they certainly didn't go up when there were less immigrants arriving.
PHP developers.
"C/C++ is where you make the big bucks."
This is true, but does that somehow change the rarity of them though? I've found C/C++ jobs tend to be highly regional - there are plenty in places like London and Cambridge, but barely any in much of the rest of the UK for example.
"And yet employers seem to discriminate heavily against people who have not been working with the latest version of .Net, and expect us to pass tests on the most obscure and arcane features of .Net 4.5, many of which as far as I can tell, will probably never be required in basic web solutions anyway."
Personally I learn all the new features of new versions of .NET even if they will actually never be useful. Why? So that I do know whether they'll be useful or not rather than complaining I didn't get a job for not knowing about something with a throwaway comment such as "It's probably not useful anyway" - how could you know? you don't even know what it is.
Interview questions like that are there to check for one thing - whether you're one of those best of best developers that does know the language inside out. If you can't answer it you're telling the employer "I don't actually give a shit about programming enough to care about that thing".
Most programming can do pretty much everything you want at a very basic level with only the most simple constructs. 90% of new features in languages nowadays are there to help you write faster code, more secure code, or more concise and readable code or some combination of those sorts of traits - if you're not learning these features then of course you can program most things with the language, but you're not making the most of the language and so your code will take you longer to write, be less secure, or be less performant or similar. This is true not just of .NET but many other languages like Java, and C++.
It's not as though language release notes and feature lists are particularly long. You could get a firm idea of what's in a version update like .NET 4.5 in about 30 minutes. Asking someone a question on the most recent language features simply just helps employers select those who want an easy ride and aren't interested in self-learning from those who know the technology inside out and understand the direction it's heading in. .NET 4.5 adds in some pretty decent features for automating parallelisation of many tasks. It's possible they were simply probing to see whether you'd just use the classic programming constructs to write a single threaded solution to something that could be handled in a more parallel manner automatically, and with less code. This is pretty common in interviews by employers who know their shit and want people who also know their shit - it weeds out the people who want to do things the way they've always done them, even if that way no longer holds any real advantages.
Don't assume that because you didn't get a job that you didn't need what they were asking for and that they're stupid. Yes this is true sometimes, but often just be humble and accept that maybe you didn't actually know the things they needed you to know for the job or for the level of ability they're seeking.
"If you can program in C you can write a program that runs on pretty much everything that you'll come across that you might want to program."
Right, but more slowly, less maintainably, and inherently less securely by default than many alternatives.
Which is really the point isn't it? Different languages have different benefits, your argument is premised on the fact that being able to write for more different platforms (except those you can't) is the ultimate trait in a language one should gun for.
But many people wont ever write anything other than for say, Windows, or for the web for example, in which case writing C code is a really really bad option and you should probably learn something else.
(FWIW I was also born and bred on C, I love it, and agree it's worth learning even if only out of academic interest, but I also think people should learn more than just C, and perhaps not even C at all if they're web focussed and have limited time to dedicate to learning).
Well Fox News and the Daily Mail have a track record of lying about Snowden, The Daily Mail still makes claims that he's a Russian agent even though even the NSA themselves accept that he is not.
As such, better to play itself and not waste time with those with a track record of lying about this particular topic no? especially when there's an alternative with a slightly better track record mentioned in the summary itself (and more interesting detail FWIW).
So it may be up for grabs for you, but for myself and I suspect many other's it's far more preferable to have sources that don't have track records of actually outright lying about shit all the time, especially on the subject in question.
You're right, but the fine is entirely down to the ICO. Remember the ACS: Law guy who was chasing file sharers over porn on bittorrent and left a list of his accused on his website for all to download stating personal information and associating their names width different flavours of porn?
He was fined a pathetic £1000 because the ICO didn't want him to endure the hardship of potentially losing his $1million house simply because the guy provided a "sworn statement" that he couldn't pay a higher fine even though he blatantly could.
There also seems to be a lot of picking and choosing about holding individuals liable - i.e. it seems to never happen even though the Data Protection Act explicitly allows for that.
A better solution would have been to not fine the organisation but to use the clause of the data protection act that allows individuals to be held responsible and fine the contractor for being so negligent as to store personal data insecurely and anyone at the organisation who allowed it.
Why the assumption that our current economic methodology of building our future on the premise of ever growing population is the only option? It seems a little unfair to say to women - tough shit, you all need to have at least two kids, so that our fucked up pension system continues to work, but we'll make things nice for you and give you advantages over men to make up for it.
World population growth is slowing and reaching equilibrium, it's inevitable that we're going to have to make some kind of change to more sustainable living rather than relying on the next generation to pay for the last generation. It's not a bad thing either, because the earth only has finite resources to go around so the premise of perpetual population growth forever is an unsustainable fallacy regardless.
So given that we're absolutely going to have to change, because it's not our choice anyway then why not focus policy towards that rather than continue to prop up a broken unsustainable system which acts against genuine equality and also sustainability?
Yeah if that was his role, but it's not, his role is the legislation surrounding the filter, he's not building anything, all he needs to know is that child porn is bad and that he's been briefed to legislate for a filter against it. He has absolutely no need to go looking for it.
Doesn't really matter, the law is pretty clear, you have to get written permission from the police to research this sort of thing and if he had that they wouldn't have gone after him. The only people who ever really get permission are those working at CEOP and a mere handful of researchers. If they've found it on his computer and he doesn't have permission "I was just researching!" doesn't cut it. On the contrary, this guy should full well have known the law given that forming legislation for child abuse is his job so has less excuse than anyone.
Most likely if he is innocent of being an actual paedophile he probably just figured he was above the law being in government and all that. Unfortunately for him though, he isn't.
But it's a chicken and egg scenario isn't it? are women doing limited hours because they're not getting offered exciting projects, or are they not getting offered exciting projects because they're doing limited hours as they've made a choice with their partner to be the one that goes home early to collect the kids from school?
I suspect you're right, but the underlying cause of that discrepancy is still not so clear cut.
"I haven't even heard of a study that says there is a significant wage gap for at least a decade. When accounting for career, hours worked, experience, etc. the worst I have heard is a 3% wage gap."
Hours worked is where I've seen the numbers most distorted. Most studies I've seen talking about pay gap don't account for hours and are based on the premise that most women in opposite sex relationships still opt to take on the role of picking up kids from school and such instead of their partner and so do less hours, but as this is omitted from the study the claim is made that they're paid less. Certainly in the UK few studies seem to take in hours worked, most just take the sex, the profession, and the annual salary and do nothing more than that.
So the issue of disparity in most cases is that in most couples it's still the female that is taking on the role of housewife but this is entirely a choice between couples and not a workplace problem in the slightest beyond the fact that this also impacts womens career progression because statistically you're more likely to know the company better the more hours you spend there, and hence be a more suitable candidate for promotion, hence why women are less likely to be promoted - because they're also more likely to be less committed to work and more committed to home.
The fact is some feminists want women to be able to take the housewife option, do less hours, AND still get paid as much as their male colleagues working longer hours and it's this that distorts the argument and makes the whole discussion nonsensical most of the time.
I don't pretend sexism doesn't exist and isn't a problem, I've certainly witnessed women suffer sexism in the workplace and have called it out when I've seen it, though I've also witnessed women abuse their sexual attractiveness to gain promotion with stupid sexually desperate male bosses too so I'm not overly convinced those two things don't balance out and I believe both need to be eliminated as far as possible.
The real key issue is getting a better balance between males and females that act as home makers vs. breadwinners if we want to see things balance out. Heeding calls for quotas based on statistically fraudulent studies that omit things that make it like for like such as hours worked though simply build resentment and have the opposite effect of making members of each sex view each other equally in the workplace.
"But illegally removed from office. Ukraine's constitution requires a 2/3 vote to impeach a president, but a 3/4 vote to remove him from office. 328 votes is well short of that 3/4 majority."
Well short? did you actually fail maths as well as politics or something? 73.3% is about as far from well short as you can get, especially given the law was put in place by him in the first place. It's also a firm democratic mandate, but again, you apparently don't get what democracy is either because you seem to think it's a thing where only your personal opinion matters in spite of the view of the majority of the Ukranian population.
"Oh, and installed the founder of a neo-nazi party as head of the country's security."
Oh I see, so instead it's better they all just submit to the neo-nazi Russian leadership, yes, neo-nazi, or did you miss all that stuff about using homosexuals and foreigners as scapegoats in Russia. In case you missed it it was kind of a big thing in the run up to Sochi. There are nazis on both sides of the equation.
"By supporting this coup, you are opposing democracy."
You really really need to learn how democracy works, again, I'll make it clear to you, it's not a thing where a minority gets to dictate to the majority. What you're asking for is dictatorship. It simply doesn't matter how you try and spin, whilst yes, there are some ethnic minorities in the Ukraine who support Russia, Putin and Yanukovych, the vast manjority are against them. What is it you find so utterly hard to understand about this?
"Like the right wing in Venezuela, they are trying to do by force what they failed to do at the ballot box."
Unlike the Ukraine, Venezuela can't even claim it's elections were free and fair, they were deemed not to be. I guess you're just one of those fools who loves to support dictatorships, the sort of person that was the reason the likes of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin could get away with what they did. You must be very proud of yourself and your support for dictatorship.
I'll make it abundantly clear to you that you're completely wrong if you think there is anything whatsoever undemocratic going on in the Ukraine (apart from Russia's occupation of Crimea):
Pre protests, support for EU is by far the biggest block vote, 45% vs. 14%:
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Not a single area, including the Russian majority Crimea support reunification with Russia with a total of only 13% supporting the Russian cause overall:
http://www.ukrinform.ua/rus/ne...
51% of Ukrainians support democracy, post protest 58% now support a union with the EU instead of Russia:
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinio...
The facts are there, this whole situation has the support of the majority, again, if you do not like this that's fine, but you're saying you do not like democracy. You can't pretend you're for democracy and against what's happened in the Ukraine because the two viewpoints are diametrically opposed - you must accept you're either for Russian dictatorship and against democracy, or for democracy and against Russian dictatorship. The numbers, the facts, just do not back any kind of assertion that what's occurred in the Ukraine is not a popular uprising by a majority against Russian interests.
You obviously hate cold fjord, christ, I do, I think he's wrong on almost everything, but everyone's right sometimes. This is one of those rare times, you're letting your personal hatred for someone put you on completely the wrong side of the argument. You may hate US imperialism, but in the Ukraine they've been victim of the equal and opposite Russian imperialism for a long time. Since 2004 we've seen events like this
"What's going on in Ukraine isn't a revolution, it's a fascist coup overthrowing the democratically elected government because they couldn't stand losing the last election."
Um, no. The president was impeached by the democratically elected parliament due to the fact he was no longer representing the interests of the democratic majority. This is a case of democracy in action I'm afraid, not some kind of subversion of democracy.
If you don't support what the protesters achieved in the Ukraine then you don't support democracy, it's as simple as that.
Yes he won democratically, but that doesn't give him a right to stay in power indefinitely, or even for his whole term if the other elected house decide to support the will of the majority who have now changed their minds about him.
Ethnic Russians are a minority in the Ukraine, he won by getting the support of all the ethnic Russians and some ethnic Ukrainians. He lost the support of the ethnic Ukrainians plunging him into minority support by reneging on previous promises that he got elected on, and he lost his position as a result.
Just because he screams and cries and calls it a coup doesn't make it so, parliament voted to impeach him by 328 votes to 0 through standard due process. I'm sorry if that's inconvenient to your pre-determined bias. The whole point in impeachment is that it's for getting rid of elected representatives who the population no longer have any faith in, but who wont step down of his own accord, so exactly the right thing was done here, this was a 100% legitimate ousting of him:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
Ah yes, Ron Paul, the guy who refuses to condemn massacres. What a lovely piece of shit he is.
Ukraine was part of the USSR prior to the 90s, so:
"What happened to those 1080 Ukraniean warheads?"
They were sent back to Russia in return for a guarantee that Russia would respect their independence.
Turns out only one of them kept their end of the bargain, I guess the Ukraine should've kept hold of those nukes.
It may have simply been easier for you to point to Russia's current assault on homosexuals as an example of the Nazism that is rife in Russia.
There's a strong parallel between Hitler's persecution of minorities in the 1930s as a populist blame target and Putins use of them nowadays. Putin is using them in the exact same manner - a scapegoat for his own failings as a leader, a target to focus hatred onto to distract from the real problems Russia has.
At the end of the day, minorities in Russia face far greater persecution than Russian minorities in the Ukraine which is really I suppose the point you're making and the point the GP seems utterly oblivious and ignorant to no?
It's not always the case though, it depends what the "thing" is. I've encountered plenty of situations where there's an existing library or selection of libraries for a problem but that frankly the options available have all been terrible such that I knew without question I could create my own better.
For something like a DNS or SSH server you're absolutely right though! Some problems are common enough to have been solved near perfectly a thousand times over, others however are still not common or advanced/solid enough that there is always a better option than writing your own.
In the UK almost every plan seems to come with an unusuablly high or unlimited amount of SMS anyway which is still cheaper than the $1 a year Whatsapp costs.
I use it because I have that one friend who also insists on using it and nothing else. Maybe I should just stop speaking to him and save myself $1 a year.
The only actual benefit I can see to it is for images which are cheaper and seem to work more reliably than MMS.
"And yet, Slashdot in general lauds the takeover of medicine by government."
Yes, because what he describes has nothing to do with private/public so what exactly is your point?
As a counter point, in the UK we have had major scandals with private sector care homes for the elderly where people have been abused physically and mentally and generally treated like shit left to sit in their own urine and faeces for days.
Or were you under some deluded impression that private sector is some magical saviour, with a ward against all things that could possibly be bad or go wrong?
Just because someone describes a problem with a particular public sector service doesn't mean the whole concept is faulty and flawed, nor does it mean that it could never possibly happen in private sector as well. The amount of mental gymnastics you must have had to perform to reach that conclusion based on the comment you referred to is astonishing and takes a special kind of stupid to achieve.
How is the video game market not the same game?
Why do you think Sony made a big fuss about their wands and casual players and Microsoft the same with Kinect?
"What I do for the other 8 hours awake is up to me"
Lucky you, some of us don't get to live in our mothers basement for all eternity though and have to deal with everything from doing house choirs, to cooking food, to looking after kids, to spending time with our partners, to doing DIY jobs, to doing food shopping, to reading about new things to stay relevant and employable, to paying bills to getting the car fixed, and so on.
Now don't get me wrong, I did 35hrs a week study whilst also working 40hrs a week to get a second degree, and still had time to do some hobbies and spend time with my girlfriend so I know as well as anyone about time management. But if you think most people just work 8 hours and then have 8 hours of freedom to spend doing whatever they want then you really need to grow up and understand that not everyone has the luxury of zero responsibilities.
For most people it's nothing to do with being lazy or unmotivated, it's genuinely about lack of time.
I'm fortunate that I have a mile walk each way to/from the train station to my office and dogs to walk when I get home such that I get my exercise doing things I'd need to do anyway, but that's not the norm for most people.
Besides, I don't think it's even really fair to judge how people live their lives regardless - some people may feel that dying young but living smart by constantly learning is better than living long and living stupid. Others will be happy trying to maintain a reasonable balance.