Indian women today are better off because General Napier had the gall to impose his culture on Indian men who thought it was perfectly natural to burn a wife alive when her husband died. Today, Indian women don't have to worry about being lit up like a firecracker because their husband bought the farm. How many normal Indian women would seriously say, "damn that British fascist for not allowing our men to incinerate perfectly healthy Indian women like they were kindlin?"
Part of the Western tradition is a belief that there is a natural law, and that this law dictates many things that other cultures don't respect. It is a religious belief in many respects, but it is the idea that there is a universal order that mandates liberty, accountability and peace, rather than subordination of the individual to the herd.
The world would be better off if American soldiers in Iraq strung up the men involved in honor killings from the nearest object capable of lynching a man, if it castrated and otherwise humiliated those who engage in female circumcision and if it did similar acts of "cultural imperialism." Why? Because no one ever gave these victims a choice whether or not they wanted to be oppressed, tormented, mutilated and murdered.
That's what most businesses are run by. Craven cowards will crumble at the first sign of organized attack on them. It's ironic that they do things like that because it puts blood in the water for the other predators. In this case, that seems to be what Flickr did. They just folded and told their user to go to hell, until the outcry got big enough that they couldn't ignore it.
Personally, I think what we need is a push for a counter to this complaint culture by creating a culture where people who complain to get good things shut down without VERY good reason are subjected to no end of humiliation, emotional torment, destruction of their professional life, etc.
I can't play guitar by ear, so I am totally fucked if I want to learn to play a song that I can't get the tabs for legally. And the best part is?... I CANNOT BUY THE DAMN TABS EVEN THOUGH I'D PAY GOOD MONEY FOR THEM!!!
Part of the copyright law should be full sheet music and tablature for all music submitted to the library of Congress. That wouldn't hurt the songwriters, who'd probably be able to make even more money because all you'd have to do to get their work is go to the Library of Congress, download it and pay them their royalty. It'd only hurt the companies that selectively publish tablature.
And it would also benefit bands because it would encourage them to do cover songs, which would be yet another stream of revenue.
But no, a songwriter and band really benefits by shutting down the only way I could have gotten tabs for their music, without providing me any legal way to do it.
Morons. I hope the welfare office runs out of money for them and their families when they go bankrupt.
Because they're stripping out things like Wine. Yes, yes, I know the arguments about compatibility layers. The problem is that if you think they're not necessary, you haven't worked with people who are wedded to what they know. That happens to be most of the people who buy computers and don't modify them on their own.
Realistically, what Dell needs to offer is a copy of VMWare Player and a copy of Windows XP with the VMWare tools installed so that people can drag and drop their files between the two as they get comfortable. That way people can still use the software they want, albeit slower. They can then use Linux for everything else, and in time they may get used to it.
Have some people at IBM tally up publicly how many patents Windows and Microsoft Office violate. Then have them say, "what's the point, are you going to actually sue someone over this?"
Answering that many emails a day is a labor of love and decency. You often can't get people you work with to answer more than a few emails a day and they're paid to do that. Think about that...
Is how they plan on allowing sites to redeem themselves or explain why they had the software there in the first place. If some spammer embeds some malware in a comments section, and you later find it and clean it up, will you be able to get back into Google's good graces?
I've worked with many a sys admin who would have been laid off if they were a developer displaying that level of lack of knowledge in their field. In fact, many of the ones I've worked with have needed build guides that are so detailed that the average person off the street could take the same instructions and build up a system. I've known many bad developers, but the difference is that you could put them in front of a compiler with an assignment and they'd figure it out one way or another. It might not be great, but they'd get it done. Can't say the same thing for the admins; often as helpless as little kids when you put them in unfamiliar territory.
And yes, there are good admins out there. The problem is that admins are pulled in from all walks of life and often have little formal or informal education.
The unintended glitch was created in December, when the PUC moved to implement the law by requiring that solar users switch to the higher "time of use" rates for their supplemental electricity.
Why is the government forcing private citizens to enter into a relationship that is advantageous to the electrical companies and utilities? It's bad enough that they force people to do that with insurance companies, now it's with electricity too. Why not just follow up with food, water and medicine while we're at it?
If the United States did to China what China allows to happen to us WRT IP rights, I bet China's government would go nuts. If the federal government allowed piracy of every category of IP to flourish, and to flood the Chinese market with counterfeit goods ranging from clothes to cars, you'd hear an outcry about it.
The United States is really the only country in the world that people expect to respect IP rights. Imagine what would happen if the Department of Health and Human Services seized the patents on drugs made in Brazil because it didn't want to pay the price the Brazilians wanted.
Is it because we're "too rich?" Whatever happened to the Golden Rule and Categorical Imperative?
There is nothing unconstitutional about getting people to spy on their neighbors or turn over information as private citizens or companies. They are not part of the government, which means the BoR doesn't apply to them. However, if you could prove that the federal government did some intelligence community equivalent of legally deputizing them, that would be different. Right now, if they've violated any legal thing, it's a statute, not part of the US Constitution.
What this means is we need a constitutional amendment that says, "the United States shall not contract or solicit any individual or organization to perform functions or carry out actions which it is statutorally or constitutionally prohibited from performing."
Few people can pull that off. If it's understood that once you pass the trial by fire, the boss respects you and your work, I can see that becoming the sort of thing that would make people feel like they'd earned their place and work harder. Like passing the crucible and becoming a marine. However, I can also see that becoming just an excuse to abuse people. In fact, I have not personally met a manager that treated their employees so harshly that was a good one.
Then there is also the fact that if you underestimate someone, you might end up backing someone into the corner who can make you look like a total moron. I can imagine that would be great for a boss who already struggles for respect...
This is what bureaucrats do. They cover their posteriors and foist the blame onto others. Bureaucrats take many forms ranging from government minions at schools, to many of the people who will decisively outrank you in the private sector. They will do two things to you, that you just have to learn to deal with, unless you can make your own way in life independent of them:
1) They will set up the hierarchy to obfuscate the chain of authority to make it hard to hold any one of them individually accountable.
2) They will, as a group, foist the blame onto the nearest target that looks helpless.
You, as a student who knows how to do basic things in Unix, are scary to many adults today. You are probably also scary to many young people because the truth is, many young people are no more comfortable with "real technology" than their parents are. This makes you a good target. "Look! He's up to no good!" They don't have to prove that you were doing anything wrong, and most people are a combination of too stupid and too uneducated to understand the ins and outs of what you are doing. It's all voodoo to them.
I am also increasingly convinced that there is a segment of the human race that is sheep-like in its quickness to assume danger, its irrational hysteria and inability to gauge danger appropriately. You will also see these types of people in every walk of life, especially in "safe" environments like schools, corporations and government agencies where they can be protected from the realities of life. These are the sort of people who are so stupid that they would call a teen who makes a quake map of his school a "terroristic threat," but would lead their student body onto a football field that is surrounded by barbed-wire and fence and about twenty good sniper nests the day they get a bomb threat. Yes, that happened to me, in HS. I scared the tar out of some of my teachers by pointing out the irony of them trying to "make us safe" from a possible psycho who'd blow up half the school, but surrounding us in an enclosed point where a sniper could pick us off, and reload with impunity.
No longer is the common image one of a dirty geek coding away with some beer in their home after work. It's now a corporate sponsored coder in many cases. The populism has been defeated, which is a good thing. Populism usually fails to amount to anything because it expects the world to change for it, rather than for it to compromise with the world.
Does anyone think that GNOME, KDE, Mozilla (all of their major apps), OpenOffice and the kernel would be where they are today without the help thrown in from companies that have a vested interest in seeing these products get built and mature? MySQL, Mono, Mozilla and OpenOffice wouldn't even exist without commercialization. So yes, no. Far from killing OSS, commercialization has been the biggest help OSS has had because it's made people want to invest time and money into it.
We'd do it because poooo widdle junior got his feelings by the purple colored (god forbid we use red, that looks... stern!) F on the Math test. What's ironic is that the grade inflation and self-esteem fanaticism are creating overly confident students. They're built up on their own self-worth and esteem, and low and behold, we're having a problem with people with malignant narcissistic personalities...
At least with the GPL, anyway. You have a company like MySQL which actually makes a product, rather than bundling and providing services as the majority of the business. However because they can't exclusively control the app, they can't make a large amount of money except on other services and such. Then a company like Google comes in, with tons of resources, and makes great modifications to your code. The only problem is that you can't merge them into the commercial distribution without their permission. What's ironic about this is that being dual-licensed, the code would remain free for everyone to use under the GPL.
MySQL chose this approach, but I could see how this might make others less inclined to dual-license under the GPL.
I said that if you are talking about formal education, the ones that are really, really bad tend to come from the CIS/IS/BIS/MIS/etc. These are usually the people who can't cut it in SWE or CS, in the major classes, where a self-taught person would generally be able to do well. Even I did well because I was self-taught and I can't take standardized tests. I'd get a 95 on the project, and a 70 on the exam. Personally, I would hire someone based exclusively on their work history, and by work everything they've worked on, not just what they've been paid to do.
As an extravagantly paid consultant. Who in their right mind thinks that they're going to let him go, unless the law puts a total barrier between Apple and Jobs?
1) The only two pretty reliable technical degrees on the software development side are Computer Science and Software Engineering; IS/CIS/MIS/BIS/IT are dumbed down, and they pay a lot less on average for the same position because they're assumed to be bringing a weaker knowledge with them.
2) Non-software development positions are better filled by people with real experience of any kind that people with real technical degrees. There are very few schools that will teach you how to be an admin type.
3) You may have to move. To get a good job, I had to leave rural Virginia for Northern Virginia.
4) A lot of people who go into these degree programs are horrible at practical work. Not just lazy, but they genuinely suck at it. I'm not being elitist here, but just because you have a degree, doesn't mean you are capable of performing a job. GPA doesn't necessarily mean much either. Brilliant people often get 3.0 GPAs in Computer Science for a variety of reasons. I've known people who are mediocre at best who had 3.8-4.0 GPAs in the subject, all because of hard work and memorizing the textbook and lectures.
How about they practice a little Marxism first
on
China's New Internet Plan
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
And have the party cadres live like the proletarians? I am a hardline libertarian myself, but I think even Marx would be quite disturbed to see how these revolutions have gone. At least the old regimes had honesty. The ruling class was not part of the rest of society. Funny thing is that at least in Europe, you were probably in real terms freer in the 18th or 19th centuries than you are today by a pretty wide margin. "Advanced socialist society" is a nice way of saying "we think the cost of scientific advancement is that we must regulate you from cradle to grave."
An amendment to the Civil Service Act that makes willfull negligence an automatic firing offense. Stop, don't pass go. If you take thousands of tax records or veterans' data home with you without strong encryption, you're fired, lose your pension, everything. It'll never happen because the government doesn't want to admit that if we took the government out of the equation, that the system would look a whole lot less broken than it really is.
Slashdot Mirror
Indian women today are better off because General Napier had the gall to impose his culture on Indian men who thought it was perfectly natural to burn a wife alive when her husband died. Today, Indian women don't have to worry about being lit up like a firecracker because their husband bought the farm. How many normal Indian women would seriously say, "damn that British fascist for not allowing our men to incinerate perfectly healthy Indian women like they were kindlin?"
Part of the Western tradition is a belief that there is a natural law, and that this law dictates many things that other cultures don't respect. It is a religious belief in many respects, but it is the idea that there is a universal order that mandates liberty, accountability and peace, rather than subordination of the individual to the herd.
The world would be better off if American soldiers in Iraq strung up the men involved in honor killings from the nearest object capable of lynching a man, if it castrated and otherwise humiliated those who engage in female circumcision and if it did similar acts of "cultural imperialism." Why? Because no one ever gave these victims a choice whether or not they wanted to be oppressed, tormented, mutilated and murdered.
That's what most businesses are run by. Craven cowards will crumble at the first sign of organized attack on them. It's ironic that they do things like that because it puts blood in the water for the other predators. In this case, that seems to be what Flickr did. They just folded and told their user to go to hell, until the outcry got big enough that they couldn't ignore it.
Personally, I think what we need is a push for a counter to this complaint culture by creating a culture where people who complain to get good things shut down without VERY good reason are subjected to no end of humiliation, emotional torment, destruction of their professional life, etc.
I can't play guitar by ear, so I am totally fucked if I want to learn to play a song that I can't get the tabs for legally. And the best part is?... I CANNOT BUY THE DAMN TABS EVEN THOUGH I'D PAY GOOD MONEY FOR THEM!!!
Part of the copyright law should be full sheet music and tablature for all music submitted to the library of Congress. That wouldn't hurt the songwriters, who'd probably be able to make even more money because all you'd have to do to get their work is go to the Library of Congress, download it and pay them their royalty. It'd only hurt the companies that selectively publish tablature.
And it would also benefit bands because it would encourage them to do cover songs, which would be yet another stream of revenue.
But no, a songwriter and band really benefits by shutting down the only way I could have gotten tabs for their music, without providing me any legal way to do it.
Morons. I hope the welfare office runs out of money for them and their families when they go bankrupt.
Because they're stripping out things like Wine. Yes, yes, I know the arguments about compatibility layers. The problem is that if you think they're not necessary, you haven't worked with people who are wedded to what they know. That happens to be most of the people who buy computers and don't modify them on their own.
Realistically, what Dell needs to offer is a copy of VMWare Player and a copy of Windows XP with the VMWare tools installed so that people can drag and drop their files between the two as they get comfortable. That way people can still use the software they want, albeit slower. They can then use Linux for everything else, and in time they may get used to it.
Have some people at IBM tally up publicly how many patents Windows and Microsoft Office violate. Then have them say, "what's the point, are you going to actually sue someone over this?"
The most efficient mechanism for allocating resources is the free market, not collectives or the government!
Answering that many emails a day is a labor of love and decency. You often can't get people you work with to answer more than a few emails a day and they're paid to do that. Think about that...
Is how they plan on allowing sites to redeem themselves or explain why they had the software there in the first place. If some spammer embeds some malware in a comments section, and you later find it and clean it up, will you be able to get back into Google's good graces?
I've worked with many a sys admin who would have been laid off if they were a developer displaying that level of lack of knowledge in their field. In fact, many of the ones I've worked with have needed build guides that are so detailed that the average person off the street could take the same instructions and build up a system. I've known many bad developers, but the difference is that you could put them in front of a compiler with an assignment and they'd figure it out one way or another. It might not be great, but they'd get it done. Can't say the same thing for the admins; often as helpless as little kids when you put them in unfamiliar territory.
And yes, there are good admins out there. The problem is that admins are pulled in from all walks of life and often have little formal or informal education.
You mean like when he produced good movies and chose actors properly?
Why is the government forcing private citizens to enter into a relationship that is advantageous to the electrical companies and utilities? It's bad enough that they force people to do that with insurance companies, now it's with electricity too. Why not just follow up with food, water and medicine while we're at it?
If the United States did to China what China allows to happen to us WRT IP rights, I bet China's government would go nuts. If the federal government allowed piracy of every category of IP to flourish, and to flood the Chinese market with counterfeit goods ranging from clothes to cars, you'd hear an outcry about it.
The United States is really the only country in the world that people expect to respect IP rights. Imagine what would happen if the Department of Health and Human Services seized the patents on drugs made in Brazil because it didn't want to pay the price the Brazilians wanted.
Is it because we're "too rich?" Whatever happened to the Golden Rule and Categorical Imperative?
There is nothing unconstitutional about getting people to spy on their neighbors or turn over information as private citizens or companies. They are not part of the government, which means the BoR doesn't apply to them. However, if you could prove that the federal government did some intelligence community equivalent of legally deputizing them, that would be different. Right now, if they've violated any legal thing, it's a statute, not part of the US Constitution.
What this means is we need a constitutional amendment that says, "the United States shall not contract or solicit any individual or organization to perform functions or carry out actions which it is statutorally or constitutionally prohibited from performing."
Few people can pull that off. If it's understood that once you pass the trial by fire, the boss respects you and your work, I can see that becoming the sort of thing that would make people feel like they'd earned their place and work harder. Like passing the crucible and becoming a marine. However, I can also see that becoming just an excuse to abuse people. In fact, I have not personally met a manager that treated their employees so harshly that was a good one.
Then there is also the fact that if you underestimate someone, you might end up backing someone into the corner who can make you look like a total moron. I can imagine that would be great for a boss who already struggles for respect...
This is what bureaucrats do. They cover their posteriors and foist the blame onto others. Bureaucrats take many forms ranging from government minions at schools, to many of the people who will decisively outrank you in the private sector. They will do two things to you, that you just have to learn to deal with, unless you can make your own way in life independent of them:
1) They will set up the hierarchy to obfuscate the chain of authority to make it hard to hold any one of them individually accountable.
2) They will, as a group, foist the blame onto the nearest target that looks helpless.
You, as a student who knows how to do basic things in Unix, are scary to many adults today. You are probably also scary to many young people because the truth is, many young people are no more comfortable with "real technology" than their parents are. This makes you a good target. "Look! He's up to no good!" They don't have to prove that you were doing anything wrong, and most people are a combination of too stupid and too uneducated to understand the ins and outs of what you are doing. It's all voodoo to them.
I am also increasingly convinced that there is a segment of the human race that is sheep-like in its quickness to assume danger, its irrational hysteria and inability to gauge danger appropriately. You will also see these types of people in every walk of life, especially in "safe" environments like schools, corporations and government agencies where they can be protected from the realities of life. These are the sort of people who are so stupid that they would call a teen who makes a quake map of his school a "terroristic threat," but would lead their student body onto a football field that is surrounded by barbed-wire and fence and about twenty good sniper nests the day they get a bomb threat. Yes, that happened to me, in HS. I scared the tar out of some of my teachers by pointing out the irony of them trying to "make us safe" from a possible psycho who'd blow up half the school, but surrounding us in an enclosed point where a sniper could pick us off, and reload with impunity.
No longer is the common image one of a dirty geek coding away with some beer in their home after work. It's now a corporate sponsored coder in many cases. The populism has been defeated, which is a good thing. Populism usually fails to amount to anything because it expects the world to change for it, rather than for it to compromise with the world.
Does anyone think that GNOME, KDE, Mozilla (all of their major apps), OpenOffice and the kernel would be where they are today without the help thrown in from companies that have a vested interest in seeing these products get built and mature? MySQL, Mono, Mozilla and OpenOffice wouldn't even exist without commercialization. So yes, no. Far from killing OSS, commercialization has been the biggest help OSS has had because it's made people want to invest time and money into it.
We'd do it because poooo widdle junior got his feelings by the purple colored (god forbid we use red, that looks... stern!) F on the Math test. What's ironic is that the grade inflation and self-esteem fanaticism are creating overly confident students. They're built up on their own self-worth and esteem, and low and behold, we're having a problem with people with malignant narcissistic personalities...
At least with the GPL, anyway. You have a company like MySQL which actually makes a product, rather than bundling and providing services as the majority of the business. However because they can't exclusively control the app, they can't make a large amount of money except on other services and such. Then a company like Google comes in, with tons of resources, and makes great modifications to your code. The only problem is that you can't merge them into the commercial distribution without their permission. What's ironic about this is that being dual-licensed, the code would remain free for everyone to use under the GPL.
MySQL chose this approach, but I could see how this might make others less inclined to dual-license under the GPL.
I said that if you are talking about formal education, the ones that are really, really bad tend to come from the CIS/IS/BIS/MIS/etc. These are usually the people who can't cut it in SWE or CS, in the major classes, where a self-taught person would generally be able to do well. Even I did well because I was self-taught and I can't take standardized tests. I'd get a 95 on the project, and a 70 on the exam. Personally, I would hire someone based exclusively on their work history, and by work everything they've worked on, not just what they've been paid to do.
As an extravagantly paid consultant. Who in their right mind thinks that they're going to let him go, unless the law puts a total barrier between Apple and Jobs?
A few things you're not considering:
1) The only two pretty reliable technical degrees on the software development side are Computer Science and Software Engineering; IS/CIS/MIS/BIS/IT are dumbed down, and they pay a lot less on average for the same position because they're assumed to be bringing a weaker knowledge with them.
2) Non-software development positions are better filled by people with real experience of any kind that people with real technical degrees. There are very few schools that will teach you how to be an admin type.
3) You may have to move. To get a good job, I had to leave rural Virginia for Northern Virginia.
4) A lot of people who go into these degree programs are horrible at practical work. Not just lazy, but they genuinely suck at it. I'm not being elitist here, but just because you have a degree, doesn't mean you are capable of performing a job. GPA doesn't necessarily mean much either. Brilliant people often get 3.0 GPAs in Computer Science for a variety of reasons. I've known people who are mediocre at best who had 3.8-4.0 GPAs in the subject, all because of hard work and memorizing the textbook and lectures.
And have the party cadres live like the proletarians? I am a hardline libertarian myself, but I think even Marx would be quite disturbed to see how these revolutions have gone. At least the old regimes had honesty. The ruling class was not part of the rest of society. Funny thing is that at least in Europe, you were probably in real terms freer in the 18th or 19th centuries than you are today by a pretty wide margin. "Advanced socialist society" is a nice way of saying "we think the cost of scientific advancement is that we must regulate you from cradle to grave."
An amendment to the Civil Service Act that makes willfull negligence an automatic firing offense. Stop, don't pass go. If you take thousands of tax records or veterans' data home with you without strong encryption, you're fired, lose your pension, everything. It'll never happen because the government doesn't want to admit that if we took the government out of the equation, that the system would look a whole lot less broken than it really is.
Do you suffer from a memory-damaging illness or injury? If not, then how could you not already know what it is you are generally interested in?