It would merely substitute government agencies for corporations. To really deal with it you would have to overhaul the electoral system, but that is not going to happen any time soon.
Indeed, but you've fallen into the fallacy of believing the only two alternatives are a market based economy, or a government directed one.
The solution is not to change the boss, but to get rid of the concept of a boss altogether (or at least radically redfine it). Democratic workplaces would eliminate much of the kind of behaviour we are talking about here, because the people making the important decisions would be ordinary folk rather than super-greedy capitalists or idiotic government bureaucrats.
My code is compliant, tested on multiple browsers, and hardened against SQL Injection and cross-scripting attacks. All this while employed mostly by the technically inept who wouldn't know to ask for such things.
As for unwilling to commute, I don't have a car and wouldn't be able to afford one without a high paying job. Catch-22 there
Unwilling to contract? I've tried but its very competitive and I am not good at the business side of things, or 'networking' (in the human sense). It's more that I'm unable:(
From West Midlands, US company and crappy HR department you got Kalamazoo? I take it they are fairly notorious for this?
You are probably right about the NHS - I'm thinking of using my work with the police to find an IT position there to finance my studies. I'm still getting out of the IT industry in the long run though
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2002, and have had awful trouble finding a well paid job. Most of the jobs advertised were web development, which were always badly paid (my first job out of university paid barely above minimum wage). These jobs usually ended before 6 months, once I'd completed a couple of projects for them and before they would be legally required to give me redundancy pay.
There were a couple of good job openings (I was once approached by a recruitment agency to apply for a job with Google in Dublin) but of course seeing as I was not the only desperate compsci grad in the West Midlands competition for them was pretty fierce and I didn't get them.
I was trapped in web development, but I was pretty good at it. I constantly taught myself new technologies as I developed sites, worked on projects in my spare time to expand my skills, and had a good eye for front end design from a job I had in the print industry. Despite this I was never paid more than £12k a year for web development. My current job is pays £14k, doing office admin work for the police, and that is the most I've ever been paid for anything.
Then it seemed to be looking up. I'd gone for a support job at a large US company, and at the interview they had been so impressed with my aptitude scores and my general IT knowledge they recommended me for a better paying job (£20k) with their programming department. Sadly, I fell foul of their Gestapo-like HR department, who decided not to give me the job because, during one of the interviews over the phone to a woman in Texas, I didn't sound 'positive enough'. I'm not sure how positive a man from Yorkshire is supposed to sound to a Texan over a transatlantic phone line, but there you go.
This is why I'm now starting a Physics degree. Fuck the IT industry, it's not worth it. I slaved away for cockle-picking money, and when my talents were finally recognised I was rejected because of some idiotic HR impression of me, rather than the evidence of my aptitude tests. Hopefully, physics is a field where people are rewarded for their knowledge and intelligence rather than whatever smarmy 'people skills' HR are after. Perhaps I'm being Naive, but it can't be much worse than being in the IT industry.
As I mentioned above, I'm 26 and I am far from being a kid. Its not a matter of young being 'cool' its a matter of young people being the main users and the main workers in the IT industry. Drop the get-of-my-lawn attitude please.
Politicians are old. Tony Blair was considered to be a 'youthful' PM coming to power in his 40s. The technology that shapes our lives is young, and constantly evolving. I'm only 26, grew up nuts about computers, and already I feel as if I'm starting to slip behind the curve, its frightening to me so its probably terrifying to them.
The country is run by technically illiterate near-pensioners who are slapping e- and cyber- prefixes on everything in a fit of desperation. The result is idiotic initiatives such as this, which aside from being a waste of time and money, present an opportunity for the more savvy political players lurking in the shadows to invade peoples privacy and crush their civil liberties.
From a techie point of view, Gordon Brown might as well be Leonid Brezhnev. A relic of a past era making crappy decisions based on the principles of his own time, without regard for the reality of the present. Young people in the UK need to kick out the gerontocracy and start making informed technology policy.
Perhaps not, but do not completely discount the use of force. If there is a line in the sand that your enemies *know* you won't cross then they can always back you down for the price of some sanctions that will further oppress the people that they are already crushing under the heels of their boots while doing nothing to curb the luxuries that your enemies continue to enjoy.
All of which rests on a series of subjective definitions (enemies, oppress...) hence the need for international arbitration.
All they can do is provide a forum for pacifists to wring their hats in their hands, purse their lips, and beg the Sudanese government to please stop the Janjaweed militias...pretty please?
Again, that's not the fault of the organisation itself - such actions would be possible IF the the idea of international law itself wasn't bitterly contested by the US and its vassals.
Yes, let's remove an organization whose competence is questioned and replace it with one whose corruption and incompetence is beyond question.
Refusing to rubber-stamp US wars of aggression doesn't make them corrupt or incompetent. Sure, they are impotent to stop these imperialistic rampages - but that is the the fault of their members, not the organisation itself
Or is this going to really screw small-scale windows developers?
Seems to me to be a blatant attempt by the big boys to lock users into their software (or software from companies they have an arrangement with. Since the majority of users probably won't know how to disable this 'feature', they will have less choice, and therefore higher costs.
My girlfriend, a technically uninterested primary school teacher, has expressed the exact same sentiments. You don't have to be Linux obsessed to think MS have really buggared up the user interface.
The crappy value is there purely to distract you from the even more menacing facet of this:
Meanwhile, label profit margins for the format are considered slim. The majors are gambling that the ringle can instill in consumers the mind-set to connect to the Internet via the CD.
So, for Joe Consumer to redeem his ringtone, he pops this CD in his windows computer, and it RUNS A PROGRAM THAT CONNECTS TO THE INTERNET to obtain the ringtone. It does nothing else, honestly. It doesn't scan your computer or talk to the RIAA or anything like that. They wouldn't use this technology to locate teenage music pirates so it can sue them for $5000 a track, would it? You can trust them.
Something that bugs me is using the words 'people' and 'Americans' interchangably.
The cult of wealth is mostly an American thing. It only exists outside America in those who are very wealthy themselves, who are bafflingly pro-American, or who are sociopathic entrepreneurs. Thankfully I don't meet many such people in my travels.
Seriously, I think someone needs to remind old Ratzinger what century he is living in. Being the head of the inquisition obviously confused him a bit. He can't bend kings to his will by threatening excommunication anymore.
That sounds like a US cultural thing, I've not heard such sentiments expressed in Britain. I think most people here feel that the entire system is corrupt and wrong but nobody seems to have any better ideas, and I think this is contributing to our epidemic of binge-drinking.
Both examples I think are covered by apathy though, which is what I hear coming out of 99% of the music I hear.
Popular music is informed by youth culture, and thus reflects the hopes and fears of the youth of any particular era. The 60s was about Vietnam (not because of any real concern about the war, but because teenagers faced the possibility of being drafted). The 80s was about overt avarice and consumerism.
But what about the 90s and the 2000s? What were they about? I, and most people I've talked to about this, draw a blank. Some people think modern emo bands were influenced by the Columbine massacre and its aftermath, but that is at best a minor facet of popular music.
The thing that characterised our societies after 1989 was a sense of triumphalism. The cold war was over, the world had unanimously chosen the best way of running things (sic), and it was the end of history. Essentially, we were told all the battles had been won and there were no more challenges left for our generation to take up. People say 9/11 'changed everything' but in reality it changed very little, for the most part western society still smugly grinds away as it did before. The daily life of young people is largely unaffected.
So the prevailing feeling is apathy. You go to school, go to college, have kids and die. There's nothing else to do. The music reflects this.
Because parentage is a very poor indicator of someone's worth, and suggesting otherwise can lead to some fairly ugly, and unscientific, ideas (especially if you compare how many people born into wealth are white, and how many people born into poverty are non-white).
As well as being morally abhorrent, this waste of life is also stupid. I have an IQ of 152, which I'm told puts me in the top 2% of the population, i.e. roughly 2% are smarter than me. I'm a compsci graduate and, even if I say so myself, a pretty decent web developer. Of those 25,000 people a day who never got a proper shot at life because they weren't considered worthy of receiving food, 500 of them can achieve what I did or more. From a purely materialistic standpoint that is an incredible waste of talent.
Perhaps it is a knee jerk reaction, but understand we Europeans have had much experience with social darwinists. My grandmother used to tell me what their bombs sounded like.
"I do not take a "position", either. I just make observations, and reason from those observations, and leave as open what can be done based on the reasoning and observations."
But your analysis of the situation is wrong, because as I said people aren't dying based on fitness, they are dying based on accidents of birth. With an incorrect analysis, you are never going to find a correct solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, but you've fallen into the fallacy of believing the only two alternatives are a market based economy, or a government directed one.
The solution is not to change the boss, but to get rid of the concept of a boss altogether (or at least radically redfine it). Democratic workplaces would eliminate much of the kind of behaviour we are talking about here, because the people making the important decisions would be ordinary folk rather than super-greedy capitalists or idiotic government bureaucrats.
My code is compliant, tested on multiple browsers, and hardened against SQL Injection and cross-scripting attacks. All this while employed mostly by the technically inept who wouldn't know to ask for such things.
As for unwilling to commute, I don't have a car and wouldn't be able to afford one without a high paying job. Catch-22 there
Unwilling to contract? I've tried but its very competitive and I am not good at the business side of things, or 'networking' (in the human sense). It's more that I'm unable :(
Mod Parent +1 Psychic
From West Midlands, US company and crappy HR department you got Kalamazoo? I take it they are fairly notorious for this?
You are probably right about the NHS - I'm thinking of using my work with the police to find an IT position there to finance my studies. I'm still getting out of the IT industry in the long run though
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2002, and have had awful trouble finding a well paid job. Most of the jobs advertised were web development, which were always badly paid (my first job out of university paid barely above minimum wage). These jobs usually ended before 6 months, once I'd completed a couple of projects for them and before they would be legally required to give me redundancy pay.
There were a couple of good job openings (I was once approached by a recruitment agency to apply for a job with Google in Dublin) but of course seeing as I was not the only desperate compsci grad in the West Midlands competition for them was pretty fierce and I didn't get them.
I was trapped in web development, but I was pretty good at it. I constantly taught myself new technologies as I developed sites, worked on projects in my spare time to expand my skills, and had a good eye for front end design from a job I had in the print industry. Despite this I was never paid more than £12k a year for web development. My current job is pays £14k, doing office admin work for the police, and that is the most I've ever been paid for anything.
Then it seemed to be looking up. I'd gone for a support job at a large US company, and at the interview they had been so impressed with my aptitude scores and my general IT knowledge they recommended me for a better paying job (£20k) with their programming department. Sadly, I fell foul of their Gestapo-like HR department, who decided not to give me the job because, during one of the interviews over the phone to a woman in Texas, I didn't sound 'positive enough'. I'm not sure how positive a man from Yorkshire is supposed to sound to a Texan over a transatlantic phone line, but there you go.
This is why I'm now starting a Physics degree. Fuck the IT industry, it's not worth it. I slaved away for cockle-picking money, and when my talents were finally recognised I was rejected because of some idiotic HR impression of me, rather than the evidence of my aptitude tests. Hopefully, physics is a field where people are rewarded for their knowledge and intelligence rather than whatever smarmy 'people skills' HR are after. Perhaps I'm being Naive, but it can't be much worse than being in the IT industry.
As I mentioned above, I'm 26 and I am far from being a kid. Its not a matter of young being 'cool' its a matter of young people being the main users and the main workers in the IT industry. Drop the get-of-my-lawn attitude please.
Politicians are old. Tony Blair was considered to be a 'youthful' PM coming to power in his 40s. The technology that shapes our lives is young, and constantly evolving. I'm only 26, grew up nuts about computers, and already I feel as if I'm starting to slip behind the curve, its frightening to me so its probably terrifying to them.
The country is run by technically illiterate near-pensioners who are slapping e- and cyber- prefixes on everything in a fit of desperation. The result is idiotic initiatives such as this, which aside from being a waste of time and money, present an opportunity for the more savvy political players lurking in the shadows to invade peoples privacy and crush their civil liberties.
From a techie point of view, Gordon Brown might as well be Leonid Brezhnev. A relic of a past era making crappy decisions based on the principles of his own time, without regard for the reality of the present. Young people in the UK need to kick out the gerontocracy and start making informed technology policy.
Refusing to rubber-stamp US wars of aggression doesn't make them corrupt or incompetent. Sure, they are impotent to stop these imperialistic rampages - but that is the the fault of their members, not the organisation itself
In Soviet Union, ICANN snub TLD Owners!
Or is this going to really screw small-scale windows developers?
Seems to me to be a blatant attempt by the big boys to lock users into their software (or software from companies they have an arrangement with. Since the majority of users probably won't know how to disable this 'feature', they will have less choice, and therefore higher costs.
My girlfriend, a technically uninterested primary school teacher, has expressed the exact same sentiments. You don't have to be Linux obsessed to think MS have really buggared up the user interface.
Sure, until somebody thinks to form the PIAA, then itll be $3 per titty, and the phrase 'money shot' will take on a whole new meaning.
If every 4mb of music you buy have costs $2, then your 16 Terrabyte Ipod would cost $4 million to fill up.
Extra capacity is useless if the cost of data is artificially inflated
The crappy value is there purely to distract you from the even more menacing facet of this:
So, for Joe Consumer to redeem his ringtone, he pops this CD in his windows computer, and it RUNS A PROGRAM THAT CONNECTS TO THE INTERNET to obtain the ringtone. It does nothing else, honestly. It doesn't scan your computer or talk to the RIAA or anything like that. They wouldn't use this technology to locate teenage music pirates so it can sue them for $5000 a track, would it? You can trust them.
Its been shown that social mobility is higher in 'welfare state' European countries than it is in the US
Screw the American Dream, you've more chance with the Danish Dream
Something that bugs me is using the words 'people' and 'Americans' interchangably.
The cult of wealth is mostly an American thing. It only exists outside America in those who are very wealthy themselves, who are bafflingly pro-American, or who are sociopathic entrepreneurs. Thankfully I don't meet many such people in my travels.
Punctuation can make stories so much more fun.
I'm english, and I can safely say nobody I know whats to be an American. Your society is largely viewed with contempt, not jealousy, but Europeans
Seriously, I think someone needs to remind old Ratzinger what century he is living in. Being the head of the inquisition obviously confused him a bit. He can't bend kings to his will by threatening excommunication anymore.
That sounds like a US cultural thing, I've not heard such sentiments expressed in Britain. I think most people here feel that the entire system is corrupt and wrong but nobody seems to have any better ideas, and I think this is contributing to our epidemic of binge-drinking. Both examples I think are covered by apathy though, which is what I hear coming out of 99% of the music I hear.
Popular music is informed by youth culture, and thus reflects the hopes and fears of the youth of any particular era. The 60s was about Vietnam (not because of any real concern about the war, but because teenagers faced the possibility of being drafted). The 80s was about overt avarice and consumerism.
But what about the 90s and the 2000s? What were they about? I, and most people I've talked to about this, draw a blank. Some people think modern emo bands were influenced by the Columbine massacre and its aftermath, but that is at best a minor facet of popular music.
The thing that characterised our societies after 1989 was a sense of triumphalism. The cold war was over, the world had unanimously chosen the best way of running things (sic), and it was the end of history. Essentially, we were told all the battles had been won and there were no more challenges left for our generation to take up. People say 9/11 'changed everything' but in reality it changed very little, for the most part western society still smugly grinds away as it did before. The daily life of young people is largely unaffected.
So the prevailing feeling is apathy. You go to school, go to college, have kids and die. There's nothing else to do. The music reflects this.
Because parentage is a very poor indicator of someone's worth, and suggesting otherwise can lead to some fairly ugly, and unscientific, ideas (especially if you compare how many people born into wealth are white, and how many people born into poverty are non-white).
As well as being morally abhorrent, this waste of life is also stupid. I have an IQ of 152, which I'm told puts me in the top 2% of the population, i.e. roughly 2% are smarter than me. I'm a compsci graduate and, even if I say so myself, a pretty decent web developer. Of those 25,000 people a day who never got a proper shot at life because they weren't considered worthy of receiving food, 500 of them can achieve what I did or more. From a purely materialistic standpoint that is an incredible waste of talent.
Yeah, except its a pity that my views don't affect how the world is run.
Perhaps it is a knee jerk reaction, but understand we Europeans have had much experience with social darwinists. My grandmother used to tell me what their bombs sounded like.
"I do not take a "position", either. I just make observations, and reason from those observations, and leave as open what can be done based on the reasoning and observations."
But your analysis of the situation is wrong, because as I said people aren't dying based on fitness, they are dying based on accidents of birth. With an incorrect analysis, you are never going to find a correct solution.