And I thought Lucas was on the cutting edge. He's just talking about today's news. Not to mention my opinon of Slashdot. At least you could reference a more respectable institution, like CNN instead of George Lucas. At least CNN doesn't do reports by Jar Jar.
Someone had to research this? I mean, everyone in my office seems pretty aware of this, even the upper management. That's the main reason that when someone really has something pressing we encourage them to work from home.
I have several "jobs" at my job. I'm a manager, I'm system architect, and I'm a developer. There are days, primarily on the development side, when I have to work from home. When you get distracted by questions and other issues, trying to figure out exactly what you were doing, and what your whole direction was, takes time. That's wasted time.
Oh well, just seems obvious to me. I'm suprised to see it as "news."
Warning: Rant: The biggest problem with open source is user interface. I see plenty of programmers involved, but few UI experts, let alone serious usability testing. Until this happens, I'm sorry, but open source doesn't have a chance. Done mark me as a "traitor". I'm a big fan of the open source movement, but I'm also a programmer with 22 years in the field. The fact that most open source software is difficult for me to use is proof enough. Sorry, but that's the cold hard facts.
I find your assessment to be a little too biased, sorry. And I say that with having a few years of living in Mexico under my belt. I find that the corruption situation has been improving significatly over the past 5 years.
That said, I don't know exactly where you live, and conditions are different from area to area. As I said in my previous post though, I think it has more to do with a lack of people trained in Linux than with lining a politician's pocket with $$$.
Also, as a democrat, I found your remarks in that area a little offensive. We won't go into the literacy of some of the "great" republicans of recent history cough-cough-Quayle-cough-cough.
As for the installation of Linux on Mexican computers, a great deal of that was probably education. Not many Mexican school teachers would be up to the task of installing Linux. Honestly, they have enough trouble finding teachers qualified to teach anything there. I'll probably get slammed by any Mexican nationals that come to the site, but my impression of Mexican education from when I lived there was that it was well, third world.
I certainly don't blame the teachers. It's, to a large degree, a matter of finance. It's a poor country and they can't afford to hire good teachers and they can't afford to educate good teachers. It's a viscious circle.
I never really had any confidence in the ability of Mexico to deploy Linux in their schools. Just didn't seem likely.
Which brings me to a point of internationalization. How well does Linux internationalize to other languages, like Spanish?
All (or I should say, a great majority) of the computers in Mexico use "Spanish (Traditional)" keyboards (the Windows definition of the keyboards) where the enyay (the n with the squigly line on top) is where our semicolon/colon key is on English keyboards, and most of the non-letter keys are relocated. As well as having the ability to place accent marks above the vowels.
Changing them without my permission (such as adjusting my home page, or whatnot) should constitute assault or trespass.
Actually, this may constitute breaking the law. After all, if you hack into someone's computer and change any data on their computer, then you've broken the law. If you write a virus that goes in and changes data on someone's computer without their knowledge, again, you've broken the law. Seems to me that this qualifies. You don't have to do any damage, per se, but changing the data on their computer is enough.
IANAL, but I don't see a real distinction between a virus and what these ads are doing. Just MHO.
Computers are only objective if they're programmed to be objective. I can program a computer to be biased however I want.
Not really. You're just making an objective machine as subjective as yourself. It's still objective. The computer doesn't care, hence its subjectivity.
Boy, that's sad and disturbing. I don't think I'll sleep better at night. While easily intimidated, I never hesitate to talk to the "higher-ups." I'd like to think there are more like me, but I haven't been through boot camp, so I can't say. Maybe that would have changed my behavior.
Why isn't there a well spoken geek that could run for either congressman / senator and address these issues as the voice of our demographic?
We could have a geek get out the vote.
I would like to hear what the/. populous thinks. Can we send one of our own to the seat of power where real change can be effected?
I think there are several reasons for this, and I'm sure most people will agree with me on at least some of these.
1: Public officials tend to have an outgoing personality and a lot of charisma. Most geeks, unfortunately (and this inclues me), don't.
2: Most public officials have political science or law backgrounds. Few geeks do.
I'd love to see a geek in office, and hey, I'm not a fan of Dubya, but he's about as close as we have come. He's a big computer game fan. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I don't care for him either way.
I don't think it'll be long before a geek does take office, but it will be only one. Remember, as much as we like to think to the contrary, WE ARE THE MINORITY. The general public is stupid. I don't mean that as an insult, but it's just the fact. If you're on this web site, it's unlikely you're part of the "majority" in a lot of ways, and it's unlikely that the "majority" will relate to you.
Interesting, my first experience with, really being part of the minority was when I moved to Mexico. It gives you a great perspective of what blacks and other minorities go through when you move to a country like that. All of a sudden, you're the minority, and people look down on you because of it. I think everyone should have to experience it. It could go a long way to fixing race problems in this country. Sorry, I'm digressing about 180 degrees from the topic, aren't I? Oh well, I hate hitting the backspace key. Live with it.
Again, I say: Show me evidence to the contrary, or show me something that discounts my evidence. You say it's a bunch of FUD, but that's it. If you want to argue with someone, you need to learn to back up your points. You clearly haven't learned that.
Are we watching a little too much T.V.? Do you think:
A: Voice activation is what gets you into a military installation
B: If voice activation were useful to get you into an installation that a recording of someones voice, in the traditional manner, wouldn't be sufficient?
C: If voice activation were useful to get you into an installation that recordings or impersonations would get past algorithms that search for exactly this thing?
Remember one thing: Voice is pretty much useless for security. Fingerprints are much more useful. Why? Ever get a bad cold? What happens to your voice? I went to a wedding recently where I drank and smoked too much. I came back and pretty much lost my voice. My friends didn't recognize me over the phone. Do you think a computer can do better than a human being at voice recognition? If so, you're living in the Star Trek universe. Doesn't happen.
The major news outlets are all owned by the big media companies. CNN is time/warner, ABC is disney, yada yada yada. The big media companies all have their fingers in the news outlets in one way or another and they'll gladly sacrifice their news divisions freedom a little if they can force you to shell over an extra $20.00 to listen to what they're calling music these days.
That's why most of the useful news I get these days comes from Slashdot and not CNN.
Not my experience at all. My father is an editor for a major newpaper owned by a major media company. Does that mean they avoid stories that put their parent companies in a bad light? Nope. Check out CNN's web site. I've seen plenty of negative coverage of AOL/Time-Warner. They always have the disclaimer at the bottom saying that CNN's parent company is AOL/Time-Warner, but they are happy to report anything negative about it.
Are they objective? No, nobody is objective. Computers are objective. Humans, by definition, are subjective, regardless of what some may say. Still reporters go to where the news is. They're salesmen/saleswomen. They report on what gets read. Remember, it's still a business, and if it's not getting them readership, then it's not worth printing. It has nothing to do with the ties of the parent company.
What does the average American know or care about the DMCA. Pracically none. We are in the minority. A very, very small minority. Unfortunately, people these days are more concerned with who the President is boffing, or who Condit is having an affair with, or misinterpreting the results of studies on children and the media. These are things that sell. Some Russian gets thrown in jail for breaking an American law? Not really big news. There's still a lot of cold-war anger. Russians are still seen as the "bad guys". One of them gets thrown in jail? Who cares? I do, you do, but honestly, are we part of the majority? Nope. That's why we come to Slashdot. When Slashdot becomes the voice of the majority (Warning: About 1 million years of evolution of the human species required), then maybe some of this will change.
actually it's very rare that someone gets fucked in the ass in prison. Well except for the gay dudes who like it and do it by choice. Most prisoners are very homophobic and would never do it. Most likely Dmitri is playing cards, lifting weights, or watching cable tv right now...
Really? Do you have experience in this area? I do. My company does a lot of work with prisons, and I guarantee that this does actually happen a great deal. I also have a family member who has a pretty checkered past and has done quite a few years in prison, and though he won't speak about it directly, he made it pretty clear that that stuff still happens. So, I'd like to see your evidence to support your case.
I have evidence. Check here and here if you want a lot of references. Or, try this on Google.
Why don't people here do what people have been doing for years. Something that, in the information age, is easier than ever. Write your representatives. Your congressman, your senators. They all have web sites and e-mail. E-mail them and tell them what you think about the arrest. Tell them what you think of the DMCA. That's how you influence the laws they make.
Despite what many people think, your representatives aren't just there to serve the interests of lobbyists, though they make a lot of progress because they're persistant. They WANT to get re-elected, and you're the ones that elect them. They know that, and if enough people complain, they're going to do what you want because if enough of us complain, they're going to know their job is in jeapordy.
Remember, we live in a Republic (not a Democracy as everyone is fond of saying, read about the difference). You representatives are elected by YOU. That means that YOU can tell them they suck and if they don't straighten up and fly right, you won't vote for them the next time they're up for re-election.
Just my personal opinion, but I've written my representatives. I've e-mailed the president. They know my view. If enough people do the same, I guarantee you that this stuff, while not responded to personally, goes into a statistics sheet that tells them, at the end of the day, where their supporters stand.
I don't say this unknowing. I have an uncle who was a U.S. senator up untila couple of years ago, and e-mail was used heavily to gauge the opinions of the people in his office, and I'm pretty sure that he was the rule, not the exception. They all have software that makes this stuff (e-mailed opinions) pretty easy to quantify without having to read each and every e-mail in detail.
It's not as if managers don't get watched too. I have to report to upper management, and the ultimate responsibility of the success or failure of the product lays with me. That's a hell of a lot of responsibility, especially in a small company where in my case, my success or failure meant the success or failure of the company as a whole, the jobs of 15 people, and my bosses home, were all on the line. (My boss financed the project with his home, in a last ditch effort to save the company, which fortunately succeeded).
I agree, there are plenty of bad managers out there, and I've had my share of them. I've also had some damn good managers, most of which, had been developers before. Maybe it's just the case that developers make better managers for developers. There are certainly managerial skills that you don't learn in programming, and some of those are hard to learn.
Management, in many ways, means you're on "the other side," which can be a difficult role to play. I'm part of the team, but at the same time, my loyalty is to the company, and no individual in my team. If someone is screwing up, I'm responsible for making sure they stop screwing up, and if need be, let them go. I'm not a very confrontational person, and that's something I've had to work on, as a manager.
What it comes down to, I think, is that management IS a skilled job. Different than programming, but still a skilled job. The skills take work to develop. They don't come naturally to everyone. Programming is no different. You have good and bad programmers. For some, it comes naturally. To say management is unskilled though, is a very naive thing to say.
Actually, the only people we hired are the only people that made it as far as discussing salaries. If someone is good enough, salary usually isn't an issue. As for money/ego, I'll grant you the second part of that, I have a good sized ego. That aside, I've been writing software for 22 years. I still write software. I'm the architect and I wrote a fair portion (more than 25%) of our last product. I get paid more, but I do more than just write the software. I also manage the programmers. It really is two jobs, and I've worked the hours to prove it.
If you think management is unskilled work, try it some day. Managing developers is certainly more difficult than I ever thought it would be. Maybe your managers aren't very good at their job. It's easy to sit back and tell everyone "Do this, do that, blah blah blah." That's just management in title. When you've managed, and been on the hiring side of the coin, you come back and tell me that this is BS. In the meantime, I suggest you keep your comments to topics you actually have some knowledge of.
As a manager of developers, I can tell you that there absolutely IS an shortage of IT people. At least a shortage of good ones. I mean, I get tons of resumes from people who don't know anything about software development, but they're not useful to me. I have had 4 developers in my group. 3 of them are here on H1B work visas. I didn't hire them because they were foreigners. I hired them because they were the best I could find.
I have one other person that I'm probably going to hire in the next few weeks. He's was born and raised American.
I've interviewed at least a 50 developers over the past year. I'd say that 80-90% of them have been foreigners looking to get work visas. So, if you ask me, it looks like there's a serious shortage of IT workers in this country, or at least in my area, which is a high-tech center (the Dulles Corridor of Northern Virginia).
Unfortunately, if you mark the web sites as "porn" or "not porn", then the porn webmasters will start adding keywords to their meta tags: "Not porn" in addition to your standard "liv tyler, britney spears, chrstina aguilera, in a big orgy" keywords.
Web searches will never be worth much until it's the viewers that rate the content and not the content deliverers rating themselves.
Okay, look, I grew up with my father and my uncle's porno mags around. Now, I'm not saying I'm an absolutely normal person. No geek really considers themselves "normal." But, did porn ruin my life? No, of course not. Porn is something that most sexually active men find "appealing."
I had a really interesting conversation with my aunt tonight. We were talking about what was wrong with children today. Funny, but porn didn't figure into that conversation. What did is that parents these days seem to refuse to take responsability for the actions of their children. That, really, is the main problem. It's not T.V., it's not the music, and it's not porn. It's that parents seem to think that they aren't responsible for their children shooting people or even for the simple things such as going to school.
I remember watching a thing on T.V. about how in L.A., they were putting parents on "trial" for their children being delinquent in school. One woman was told she had to go to school for 2 weeks with her child. Her response: "I wasn't the one skipping school. I don't see how this is my fault."
The fact is, none of this stuff that people make a big deal about is important. What is important is that people aren't taking responsibility for their children. Why isn't anyone making a big deal about this. This is a major problem and nobody seems to be addressing it, and really, honestly, I don't know how one goes about fixing something that is so ingrained in our sociology and psychology.
You see, I grew up in a really close family. The people who "care" for me include my mother, my step-mother, my father, my cousins, my uncles, my aunts. That's a community. Many of my friends don't know who their first cousins are. There's something wrong with that, in my opinion.
I also had the advantage of living for a few years in Mexico, where raising a child isn't a single person's responsibility, but a community responsibility. Everyone was involved.
Let's fix this problem, and stop wasting our time with stupid crap like porn and heavy metal music, rap, movies, and all this other shit that doesn't make a difference. Let's concentrate on what really matters: Taking responsibility for the children we raise.
If I sound like a Republican or a conservative, sorry. I'm neither. I just recognize where the problem is. I don't know the answer. There isn't an easy one, I'm sure, otherwise, someone would have implemented it.
But I could be wrong. Maybe porn is the devil's work.
Everyone keeps saying "He's Russian. What he does in Russia isn't our business." Now, I'm not saying I'm pro-DMCA, but the guy did sell the software through a U.S. company. If you're in another country, and you hire someone in this country to murder someone in the U.S., you're guilty of murder in the U.S.
I'm not saying the guy should be in jail, I'm not saying that the law is just. I'm just saying that the FBI and the U.S. government do have authority in this case.
That's, of course, if my facts are correct, but according to the story I read, the software was sold, or more correctly said, the money was collected in the U.S.
I've been apart of software projects that produced "Good" software. Really good software, in my opinion. Really good, large systems that were reliable and the users loved them. One took roughly 3 years to be ready for market and had another 2 years of additional development.
Another is one that we're nearing completion on. It has taken 1 year for four developers, and it's a large distributed system. It's very stable and it's good software. We've also taken on the idea of "plugins" and exposed a great deal of our system's internal data and functionality so that we can add almost all of our new features via the "plugins" and not have to worry about mucking with the base system and messing it up.
Now, as my old boss used to say: "We're not sending rockets to Pluto," but these are fairly large complex system.
The first was a multi-user engineering system for developping cell phone networks (base station locations, traffic analysis, propagation prediction, interference prediction, etc...) The second is an enterprise wide tracking system, used to track everything from bugs in the software itself, to evidence in police stations, to prisoners in prisons, to assets for a company.
So, I don't really buy into the 10 year thing. Not to mention the speed of technology changes, hell, you can't design for what's going to be there 10 years from now. Who knows what's going to be on your desktop?
You would think that this would give publishers and book sellers an easy open for a lawsuit against Adobe for being so incompetent... I would find that as good justice right there.
That's like finding out my bank left the front door and the safe unlocked and someone came in and stole my money. You bet I'd be suing the bank.
Galaxies collide all the time. It's not a real destructive process. Look at the distance between stars. A "collision" of galaxies is like the collision of dust particles in a wind. There are very few stars that actually come into contact with each other, it simply increases the mass of the galaxy as a whole. We add a lot more stars to the galaxy and that's pretty much it.
Never mind the fact that, unless we start to migrate to other star systems in the next few hundred years, there's little chance that any of our descendants will be around to see it.
We're at a very delicate time in the history of our race. If we don't begin to migrate to other planets and other star systems soon, we'll be doomed. Overpopulation, biological warfare, mutating viri. All these things can lead to the destruction of all life on this planet. Then there are the less likely scenarios: Asteroid collisions, comet collisions. These too will happen, it's just a matter of when.
But the actual collision of the galaxies, as I see it, is just another opportunity for us to have more planets to colonize.
It also raises the possibility of us finding other life out there.
Scientific American ran a great article here about how the chances are, we're the most advanced species in our galaxy and why. It makes a great deal of sense. A collision with Andromeda could change that, and that I find interesting. Especially given the time frame. If we're to migrate through the galaxy, we could be in very good shape if Andromeda itself is already populated.
But I'm just wandering off into all kinds of stuff completely unrelated. Sorry... I love this stuff, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, I read the story on CNN today: here
And I thought Lucas was on the cutting edge. He's just talking about today's news. Not to mention my opinon of Slashdot. At least you could reference a more respectable institution, like CNN instead of George Lucas. At least CNN doesn't do reports by Jar Jar.
Someone had to research this? I mean, everyone in my office seems pretty aware of this, even the upper management. That's the main reason that when someone really has something pressing we encourage them to work from home.
I have several "jobs" at my job. I'm a manager, I'm system architect, and I'm a developer. There are days, primarily on the development side, when I have to work from home. When you get distracted by questions and other issues, trying to figure out exactly what you were doing, and what your whole direction was, takes time. That's wasted time.
Oh well, just seems obvious to me. I'm suprised to see it as "news."
Warning: Rant: The biggest problem with open source is user interface. I see plenty of programmers involved, but few UI experts, let alone serious usability testing. Until this happens, I'm sorry, but open source doesn't have a chance. Done mark me as a "traitor". I'm a big fan of the open source movement, but I'm also a programmer with 22 years in the field. The fact that most open source software is difficult for me to use is proof enough. Sorry, but that's the cold hard facts.
I find your assessment to be a little too biased, sorry. And I say that with having a few years of living in Mexico under my belt. I find that the corruption situation has been improving significatly over the past 5 years.
That said, I don't know exactly where you live, and conditions are different from area to area. As I said in my previous post though, I think it has more to do with a lack of people trained in Linux than with lining a politician's pocket with $$$.
Also, as a democrat, I found your remarks in that area a little offensive. We won't go into the literacy of some of the "great" republicans of recent history cough-cough-Quayle-cough-cough.
As for the installation of Linux on Mexican computers, a great deal of that was probably education. Not many Mexican school teachers would be up to the task of installing Linux. Honestly, they have enough trouble finding teachers qualified to teach anything there. I'll probably get slammed by any Mexican nationals that come to the site, but my impression of Mexican education from when I lived there was that it was well, third world.
I certainly don't blame the teachers. It's, to a large degree, a matter of finance. It's a poor country and they can't afford to hire good teachers and they can't afford to educate good teachers. It's a viscious circle.
I never really had any confidence in the ability of Mexico to deploy Linux in their schools. Just didn't seem likely.
Which brings me to a point of internationalization. How well does Linux internationalize to other languages, like Spanish?
All (or I should say, a great majority) of the computers in Mexico use "Spanish (Traditional)" keyboards (the Windows definition of the keyboards) where the enyay (the n with the squigly line on top) is where our semicolon/colon key is on English keyboards, and most of the non-letter keys are relocated. As well as having the ability to place accent marks above the vowels.
Changing them without my permission (such as adjusting my home page, or whatnot) should constitute assault or trespass.
Actually, this may constitute breaking the law. After all, if you hack into someone's computer and change any data on their computer, then you've broken the law. If you write a virus that goes in and changes data on someone's computer without their knowledge, again, you've broken the law. Seems to me that this qualifies. You don't have to do any damage, per se, but changing the data on their computer is enough.
IANAL, but I don't see a real distinction between a virus and what these ads are doing. Just MHO.
Computers are only objective if they're programmed to be objective. I can program a computer to be biased however I want.
Not really. You're just making an objective machine as subjective as yourself. It's still objective. The computer doesn't care, hence its subjectivity.
Boy, that's sad and disturbing. I don't think I'll sleep better at night. While easily intimidated, I never hesitate to talk to the "higher-ups." I'd like to think there are more like me, but I haven't been through boot camp, so I can't say. Maybe that would have changed my behavior.
Pedrito, Pedrito, te pica el culito?
;-)
Claro que si
Why isn't there a well spoken geek that could run for either congressman / senator and address these issues as the voice of our demographic?
/. populous thinks. Can we send one of our own to the seat of power where real change can be effected?
We could have a geek get out the vote.
I would like to hear what the
I think there are several reasons for this, and I'm sure most people will agree with me on at least some of these.
1: Public officials tend to have an outgoing personality and a lot of charisma. Most geeks, unfortunately (and this inclues me), don't.
2: Most public officials have political science or law backgrounds. Few geeks do.
I'd love to see a geek in office, and hey, I'm not a fan of Dubya, but he's about as close as we have come. He's a big computer game fan. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I don't care for him either way.
I don't think it'll be long before a geek does take office, but it will be only one. Remember, as much as we like to think to the contrary, WE ARE THE MINORITY. The general public is stupid. I don't mean that as an insult, but it's just the fact. If you're on this web site, it's unlikely you're part of the "majority" in a lot of ways, and it's unlikely that the "majority" will relate to you.
Interesting, my first experience with, really being part of the minority was when I moved to Mexico. It gives you a great perspective of what blacks and other minorities go through when you move to a country like that. All of a sudden, you're the minority, and people look down on you because of it. I think everyone should have to experience it. It could go a long way to fixing race problems in this country. Sorry, I'm digressing about 180 degrees from the topic, aren't I? Oh well, I hate hitting the backspace key. Live with it.
Oh please that's a bunch of FUD.
Again, I say: Show me evidence to the contrary, or show me something that discounts my evidence. You say it's a bunch of FUD, but that's it. If you want to argue with someone, you need to learn to back up your points. You clearly haven't learned that.
Are we watching a little too much T.V.? Do you think:
A: Voice activation is what gets you into a military installation
B: If voice activation were useful to get you into an installation that a recording of someones voice, in the traditional manner, wouldn't be sufficient?
C: If voice activation were useful to get you into an installation that recordings or impersonations would get past algorithms that search for exactly this thing?
Remember one thing: Voice is pretty much useless for security. Fingerprints are much more useful. Why? Ever get a bad cold? What happens to your voice? I went to a wedding recently where I drank and smoked too much. I came back and pretty much lost my voice. My friends didn't recognize me over the phone. Do you think a computer can do better than a human being at voice recognition? If so, you're living in the Star Trek universe. Doesn't happen.
The major news outlets are all owned by the big media companies. CNN is time/warner, ABC is disney, yada yada yada. The big media companies all have their fingers in the news outlets in one way or another and they'll gladly sacrifice their news divisions freedom a little if they can force you to shell over an extra $20.00 to listen to what they're calling music these days.
That's why most of the useful news I get these days comes from Slashdot and not CNN.
Not my experience at all. My father is an editor for a major newpaper owned by a major media company. Does that mean they avoid stories that put their parent companies in a bad light? Nope. Check out CNN's web site. I've seen plenty of negative coverage of AOL/Time-Warner. They always have the disclaimer at the bottom saying that CNN's parent company is AOL/Time-Warner, but they are happy to report anything negative about it.
Are they objective? No, nobody is objective. Computers are objective. Humans, by definition, are subjective, regardless of what some may say. Still reporters go to where the news is. They're salesmen/saleswomen. They report on what gets read. Remember, it's still a business, and if it's not getting them readership, then it's not worth printing. It has nothing to do with the ties of the parent company.
What does the average American know or care about the DMCA. Pracically none. We are in the minority. A very, very small minority. Unfortunately, people these days are more concerned with who the President is boffing, or who Condit is having an affair with, or misinterpreting the results of studies on children and the media. These are things that sell. Some Russian gets thrown in jail for breaking an American law? Not really big news. There's still a lot of cold-war anger. Russians are still seen as the "bad guys". One of them gets thrown in jail? Who cares? I do, you do, but honestly, are we part of the majority? Nope. That's why we come to Slashdot. When Slashdot becomes the voice of the majority (Warning: About 1 million years of evolution of the human species required), then maybe some of this will change.
actually it's very rare that someone gets fucked in the ass in prison. Well except for the gay dudes who like it and do it by choice. Most prisoners are very homophobic and would never do it. Most likely Dmitri is playing cards, lifting weights, or watching cable tv right now...
Really? Do you have experience in this area? I do. My company does a lot of work with prisons, and I guarantee that this does actually happen a great deal. I also have a family member who has a pretty checkered past and has done quite a few years in prison, and though he won't speak about it directly, he made it pretty clear that that stuff still happens. So, I'd like to see your evidence to support your case.
I have evidence. Check here and here if you want a lot of references. Or, try this on Google.
Then tell me that this is a thing of the past.
Why don't people here do what people have been doing for years. Something that, in the information age, is easier than ever. Write your representatives. Your congressman, your senators. They all have web sites and e-mail. E-mail them and tell them what you think about the arrest. Tell them what you think of the DMCA. That's how you influence the laws they make.
Despite what many people think, your representatives aren't just there to serve the interests of lobbyists, though they make a lot of progress because they're persistant. They WANT to get re-elected, and you're the ones that elect them. They know that, and if enough people complain, they're going to do what you want because if enough of us complain, they're going to know their job is in jeapordy.
Remember, we live in a Republic (not a Democracy as everyone is fond of saying, read about the difference). You representatives are elected by YOU. That means that YOU can tell them they suck and if they don't straighten up and fly right, you won't vote for them the next time they're up for re-election.
Just my personal opinion, but I've written my representatives. I've e-mailed the president. They know my view. If enough people do the same, I guarantee you that this stuff, while not responded to personally, goes into a statistics sheet that tells them, at the end of the day, where their supporters stand.
I don't say this unknowing. I have an uncle who was a U.S. senator up untila couple of years ago, and e-mail was used heavily to gauge the opinions of the people in his office, and I'm pretty sure that he was the rule, not the exception. They all have software that makes this stuff (e-mailed opinions) pretty easy to quantify without having to read each and every e-mail in detail.
It's not as if managers don't get watched too. I have to report to upper management, and the ultimate responsibility of the success or failure of the product lays with me. That's a hell of a lot of responsibility, especially in a small company where in my case, my success or failure meant the success or failure of the company as a whole, the jobs of 15 people, and my bosses home, were all on the line. (My boss financed the project with his home, in a last ditch effort to save the company, which fortunately succeeded).
I agree, there are plenty of bad managers out there, and I've had my share of them. I've also had some damn good managers, most of which, had been developers before. Maybe it's just the case that developers make better managers for developers. There are certainly managerial skills that you don't learn in programming, and some of those are hard to learn.
Management, in many ways, means you're on "the other side," which can be a difficult role to play. I'm part of the team, but at the same time, my loyalty is to the company, and no individual in my team. If someone is screwing up, I'm responsible for making sure they stop screwing up, and if need be, let them go. I'm not a very confrontational person, and that's something I've had to work on, as a manager.
What it comes down to, I think, is that management IS a skilled job. Different than programming, but still a skilled job. The skills take work to develop. They don't come naturally to everyone. Programming is no different. You have good and bad programmers. For some, it comes naturally. To say management is unskilled though, is a very naive thing to say.
Actually, the only people we hired are the only people that made it as far as discussing salaries. If someone is good enough, salary usually isn't an issue. As for money/ego, I'll grant you the second part of that, I have a good sized ego. That aside, I've been writing software for 22 years. I still write software. I'm the architect and I wrote a fair portion (more than 25%) of our last product. I get paid more, but I do more than just write the software. I also manage the programmers. It really is two jobs, and I've worked the hours to prove it.
If you think management is unskilled work, try it some day. Managing developers is certainly more difficult than I ever thought it would be. Maybe your managers aren't very good at their job. It's easy to sit back and tell everyone "Do this, do that, blah blah blah." That's just management in title. When you've managed, and been on the hiring side of the coin, you come back and tell me that this is BS. In the meantime, I suggest you keep your comments to topics you actually have some knowledge of.
As a manager of developers, I can tell you that there absolutely IS an shortage of IT people. At least a shortage of good ones. I mean, I get tons of resumes from people who don't know anything about software development, but they're not useful to me. I have had 4 developers in my group. 3 of them are here on H1B work visas. I didn't hire them because they were foreigners. I hired them because they were the best I could find.
I have one other person that I'm probably going to hire in the next few weeks. He's was born and raised American.
I've interviewed at least a 50 developers over the past year. I'd say that 80-90% of them have been foreigners looking to get work visas. So, if you ask me, it looks like there's a serious shortage of IT workers in this country, or at least in my area, which is a high-tech center (the Dulles Corridor of Northern Virginia).
Unfortunately, if you mark the web sites as "porn" or "not porn", then the porn webmasters will start adding keywords to their meta tags: "Not porn" in addition to your standard "liv tyler, britney spears, chrstina aguilera, in a big orgy" keywords.
Web searches will never be worth much until it's the viewers that rate the content and not the content deliverers rating themselves.
Okay, look, I grew up with my father and my uncle's porno mags around. Now, I'm not saying I'm an absolutely normal person. No geek really considers themselves "normal." But, did porn ruin my life? No, of course not. Porn is something that most sexually active men find "appealing."
I had a really interesting conversation with my aunt tonight. We were talking about what was wrong with children today. Funny, but porn didn't figure into that conversation. What did is that parents these days seem to refuse to take responsability for the actions of their children. That, really, is the main problem. It's not T.V., it's not the music, and it's not porn. It's that parents seem to think that they aren't responsible for their children shooting people or even for the simple things such as going to school.
I remember watching a thing on T.V. about how in L.A., they were putting parents on "trial" for their children being delinquent in school. One woman was told she had to go to school for 2 weeks with her child. Her response: "I wasn't the one skipping school. I don't see how this is my fault."
The fact is, none of this stuff that people make a big deal about is important. What is important is that people aren't taking responsibility for their children. Why isn't anyone making a big deal about this. This is a major problem and nobody seems to be addressing it, and really, honestly, I don't know how one goes about fixing something that is so ingrained in our sociology and psychology.
You see, I grew up in a really close family. The people who "care" for me include my mother, my step-mother, my father, my cousins, my uncles, my aunts. That's a community. Many of my friends don't know who their first cousins are. There's something wrong with that, in my opinion.
I also had the advantage of living for a few years in Mexico, where raising a child isn't a single person's responsibility, but a community responsibility. Everyone was involved.
Let's fix this problem, and stop wasting our time with stupid crap like porn and heavy metal music, rap, movies, and all this other shit that doesn't make a difference. Let's concentrate on what really matters: Taking responsibility for the children we raise.
If I sound like a Republican or a conservative, sorry. I'm neither. I just recognize where the problem is. I don't know the answer. There isn't an easy one, I'm sure, otherwise, someone would have implemented it.
But I could be wrong. Maybe porn is the devil's work.
Everyone keeps saying "He's Russian. What he does in Russia isn't our business." Now, I'm not saying I'm pro-DMCA, but the guy did sell the software through a U.S. company. If you're in another country, and you hire someone in this country to murder someone in the U.S., you're guilty of murder in the U.S.
I'm not saying the guy should be in jail, I'm not saying that the law is just. I'm just saying that the FBI and the U.S. government do have authority in this case.
That's, of course, if my facts are correct, but according to the story I read, the software was sold, or more correctly said, the money was collected in the U.S.
No kidding...
Actually, we may make a pitch to them.
I've been apart of software projects that produced "Good" software. Really good software, in my opinion. Really good, large systems that were reliable and the users loved them. One took roughly 3 years to be ready for market and had another 2 years of additional development.
Another is one that we're nearing completion on. It has taken 1 year for four developers, and it's a large distributed system. It's very stable and it's good software. We've also taken on the idea of "plugins" and exposed a great deal of our system's internal data and functionality so that we can add almost all of our new features via the "plugins" and not have to worry about mucking with the base system and messing it up.
Now, as my old boss used to say: "We're not sending rockets to Pluto," but these are fairly large complex system.
The first was a multi-user engineering system for developping cell phone networks (base station locations, traffic analysis, propagation prediction, interference prediction, etc...) The second is an enterprise wide tracking system, used to track everything from bugs in the software itself, to evidence in police stations, to prisoners in prisons, to assets for a company.
So, I don't really buy into the 10 year thing. Not to mention the speed of technology changes, hell, you can't design for what's going to be there 10 years from now. Who knows what's going to be on your desktop?
You would think that this would give publishers and book sellers an easy open for a lawsuit against Adobe for being so incompetent... I would find that as good justice right there.
That's like finding out my bank left the front door and the safe unlocked and someone came in and stole my money. You bet I'd be suing the bank.
Galaxies collide all the time. It's not a real destructive process. Look at the distance between stars. A "collision" of galaxies is like the collision of dust particles in a wind. There are very few stars that actually come into contact with each other, it simply increases the mass of the galaxy as a whole. We add a lot more stars to the galaxy and that's pretty much it.
Never mind the fact that, unless we start to migrate to other star systems in the next few hundred years, there's little chance that any of our descendants will be around to see it.
We're at a very delicate time in the history of our race. If we don't begin to migrate to other planets and other star systems soon, we'll be doomed. Overpopulation, biological warfare, mutating viri. All these things can lead to the destruction of all life on this planet. Then there are the less likely scenarios: Asteroid collisions, comet collisions. These too will happen, it's just a matter of when.
But the actual collision of the galaxies, as I see it, is just another opportunity for us to have more planets to colonize.
It also raises the possibility of us finding other life out there.
Scientific American ran a great article here about how the chances are, we're the most advanced species in our galaxy and why. It makes a great deal of sense. A collision with Andromeda could change that, and that I find interesting. Especially given the time frame. If we're to migrate through the galaxy, we could be in very good shape if Andromeda itself is already populated.
But I'm just wandering off into all kinds of stuff completely unrelated. Sorry... I love this stuff, though.