I hesitated a while deciding whether to moderate or post, but I obviously decided to post.

It is very frustrating for us not in or from the USA to hear things disparaging things about socialism becasue we keep saying to ourselves: "why don't they get?"

This "debate?" in the US about health care and the scaremongering on socialism is further proof to outsiders of how backward a lot of people are in the USA. They seem to think that socialism is synonymous with Stalinist Russia. They have no concept that most of Democratic Western world has had what would be termed socialist policies for decades, and it has been a great benefit to our societies, and never limited our "choice".
I am from Australia, and like many countries in Europe, we have a lot of "socialist" policies. Unfortunately, our conservative government over the last decade has weakened a few of them.

Our health system is universal. In other words I pay a portion of my taxes to cover health care. I think it is 3.5%. This means I can go to ANY "bulk billing" doctor and not pay anything (I can even go to a non-Bulk Billing doctor and the government will pay me back the difference). I can go to a hospital and not pay anything. If I spend a certain amount (I think it is $1000) for medication in any calendar year, the rest of my medication is free (or significantly subsidised, I'm not too sure because I've never reached the safety net levels before). Of course, I can go to a non-bulk billing doctor if I so chose, but it means I have to pay for the visit. The system does not discourage this.

I also have private health insurance at about $1500 pa. This covers me for "private hospitals" if I so choose, which typically has faster admission and less waiting lists, and also for things like dental and other non-essential stuff.

So, for someone earning, say $50K pa, the total health "insurance" coverage is $3000-$4000.

Why is it so hard for people in USA to follow a certain system? Why is this kind of "socialism" bad?

This is the attraction I have for books, not just because I love reading. It's very rewarding going to a living room and browsing people's bookshelves. I have two 2m tall bookshelves; both are overflowing. Whenever my friends (or strangers) come over, it is an instant conversation starter and also it reveals some of the personality of the owner.

Unfortunately, ebooks are just too utilitarian and purely functional. No character is my response.

You can guess my response to the poll!

I was going to moderate, but decided to respond to this instead.

You got your apology to a dead man from a man who did not wrong him. I hope you (the petitioners) feel better, because it certainly accomplishes nothing else.

An apology never "changes" anything. Harm done is not undone by saying "I am sorry". But an apology is an admission that "I" if I'm the one who did the wrong, or "We" if it is an entity that still exists (such as a company, country etc) recognise the action committed by people like us is wrong and shameful.
An apology is always humbling, and one is humbled they end to listen better.

We recently had an, admittedly symbolic, apology to the "Stolen Generation" (http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2162035.htm) A lot of people in the previous Government scoffed at it as symbolic and will not change the plight of the indigenous peoples, but they completely missed the point. The point to the Indigenous Peoples is a "recognition of wrongs done".
The apology itself was didn't wind back time or give, now adults, the time they lost with their parents!

I was not born (I was not even a twinkle in my parents' eyes!) when these "legal" actions were taken, but I felt proud that we acknowledge wrong done to others by my country.

A previous post mentioned: Justice delayed is justice denied. This, imho, is BS. Justice should always be sought and welcomed when it is offered.

Fact remains that doing honest and hard work brings you NOTHING. You must be a quack, a liar and just basically leech everything out of the company that you possibly can. Then you go to the next and rinse and repeat. It's what the managers do and it's what is expected of you. Being a carpenter is starting to sound bloody perfect just about now.

I've learned that on my first year in this profession (also IT).

The belief that many of us gifted "techies" have that technical excellence, skill and hard-working will make us stand out from the mediocre crowds, be noticed and promoted is one big fat illusion more often than not kept alive by manipulative managers wanting to get extra free hours from us (so that THEY get fat bonuses).

Well, I don't know where you work, but I am on my 3rd IT job in the last 10 years. Currently I am the only one in the IT department, but in my previous two jobs I was selected (promoted) based on my skills and work ethic. You see, I worked for a manager who valued that, and this in a group consisting of over 70 people.
Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't mean it's the norm for everyone.

Even in the technical areas, the professional world out there is never a pure meritocracy based on one's technical excellence.

In truth, non-technical skills are often also important (guess who's more useful: the guy that gets the requirements right from the client and implements them in a competent way or the guy that gets the wrong requirements and implements the wrong thing but with an exceptionally good design and code?) and those that evaluate one's abilities during the selection/bonus-evaluation/promotion-evaluation process are often not technically skilled enough to evaluate technical skills above a certain level (they're management, usually not technical, not-good enough techies or simply too far out from their technical days) or will simply outwit the less negotiation-experience techies into taking a lower pay.

Consider the simple example of two equally good programmers:
- One is quiet and reserved: the kind of guy that finds a critical bug, fixes it and checks it in source control without telling anybody
- The other one is loud and outgoing: he'll tell to whomever is willing to listen that he found a critical bug, proceed to fix it and check the fix in source control and then let everybody know that the issue is fixed.

Guess who will get the next promotion!!!?

Ummm. How can one respond to this example? Maybe I should give you another example, but that'll start a tit-for-tat thread. I will tell you that this is a specific manager's problem. I have worked for both kinds of managers: the ones that listen to the loudest, and the ones that looked at results. you can always tell the difference by looking at how the general employees respond to their managers. One manager I worked for at one of the top global IT firms was so out of it that in a space of 2 months a third of his team resigned (including myself) because he was inconsiderate of our needs (not pay wise, because he offered me a pay increase). A few months after I left I heard that he's been shuffled to another group, and those who stayed in the team became happier.

Another example would be two equally good programmers, both known in their company for the quality of their work. They both feel that they are being underpaid in their company:
- One starts looking at other opportunities, maybe gets one or two good proposals, goes to management and asks for a salary raise saying that he "likes to work there but feels that he's not being fairly rewarded for the work he's doing there versus other professionals in the same area".
- The other one just accepts its and wallows in the misery of being underpaid.

Guess who will get the (biggest) raise!!!?

So, who's fault is this? The manager or the employee?

In the end, the secret to success in IT is still down to soft-skills such as self-promotion, image management, networking, pro-activeness, a willingness to take risks and others. Just look up the definition of EQ (Emotional Quotient, similar to IQ but measuring something else) - it's much correlated with success than IQ, and you will find that the characteristics that are evaluated to determine EQ are very much the kind of thing that make it easier for one to follow the path to success.

I can't argue with this. These are all signs of someone motivated, and motivated people are usually excellent employees willing to make progress.

I voted for other, being Australian, we use AS/NZS 3112 wall sockets, but I never knew what the other options are (except the BS546).

I typed the terms into yahoo search, and I didn't have to go past the result page: it quickly showed me images of the items.

Well, actually, this is the most likely result of this kind of action. When the general population sees you as partial to one side of the equation (usually the bully side) then they will hate you.

This has only ever happened once, and only because NATO's Europeans were involved: The Balkans wars in the early 90s. None of the African genocides were addressed while in progress.

Unfortunately, since WWII this hypothesis has never been tested; however, contrasting the relations that most European countries (with the exception of the UK and France) have with the rest of the world, you can see that a country can be quite open, involved and very non-isolationist and still have good relations with most of the rest of the world.

The reason why most people "hate America" has nothing to do with culture but more to do with the way "America" (ie, the government and it's supporters) trample on these people's choices by supporting "pro-western" dictators.

When I was at uni studying, I used to borrow quite a lot of book from the library. Things changed somehow after I finished. At HP, where I worked for a few years, I also borrowed some books from the internal library.
But overall, I am only reading books I want to keep, so I buy them. It's mainly fiction/non-fiction paperbacks.

I do, however, when I am babysitting my nieces read some of the books they borrow from the library (but this doesn't count).

I think Libraries are great for people who are not keen on collecting books (like I like to do) and for research. Neither of which applies to me!

This is a practice that is probably still going on to these days.
My mum, who is from the Middle East and in her early 70s has had self-applied tattoos made out of soot since she was a teenager.
They're not like the tattoos one would be used to, but are just simple and crude symbols, one of them a cross. I am sure this is a practice still in many countries, especially 3rd world countries.

Amen to that.

Damn you Corel for destroying a perfectly good and lean product.

I've used Vista for a short while and also some users (bought new PCs preloaded).
I, as the support person, hated it because it took me longer to find my way around it. It is not intuitive for people used to where MS used to place things. I'd say it was similar to going from OS9 to OSX in Mac userland. After a handful to users buying into Vista and then coming to lots of problems in terms of figuring out how to use it, I started recommending downgrades for their and mine sanity's sake.
Then I landed a corporate job, and our policy (I set my own, with advice from HQ in the UK) is to stick with XP. My primary reason is that my users are mostly set in their ways, and Vista from UI perspective will be a disaster. The other reason in that some legacy apps will probably cause problems to run. They even cause problems in XP.
So, when I order a PC from Dell, I always specify XP as the OS. It comes pre-installed.
On a side note, I also downgrade Office 2007 to 2003 Pro, again for usability reasons. I have Select Licenses, so I am "legally" entitled to.
Long live XP.

A lot of my family and friends complain about the compulsory voting in Australia, but I tend to agree with the notion. I think everyone needs to take a stand on how things are run; yes, like in Canada, the options are not always compelling, but there is still an option.

Also, I find it strange that in Canada you can't vote for an "individual" but have to vote for a party. In Australian (even local council) election, each ballot paper has two options: above the line=vote for one party only and below the line=vote for an individual by preference.
For lower house I usually vote for party even though the candidate options are quite small, but for Senate voting, I usually vote below the line (out of a choice of about 50+). I usually start with the least wanted candidates and then move up.

Now, back on topic: Electronic voting without a paper trail is wrong, but paper voting in australia (a country of 20 million people) is quite efficient. We know the results of an election by midnight usually (except for close seats) which is only a 6 hour gap. I can't see Canada being so different, so why the rush to electronic voting?

Granted, I haven't coded since Uni days, but the best way, on my many projects, to progress was to get some of my colleagues to comment on my progress so far. It works wonders. They always pick on something or find a bug that I've passed over many times without noticing. Once the minor niggly bits get discovered, the project usually progressed very well.
I am a strong believer that shared projects are much better than "single handed" projects.

We're an old engineering company, and our products last decades, so we need to keep lots of records.
Recently, we started scanning old documents (a warehouse full of them) to make room for expansion.
It is a very tedious process, because we can't risk shredding the old files unless we know for sure that the scans are correct. Amyway, for storage, we decided to go for an in house web-based system (some one developed it for us) that is quite basic, and does two important things for us:
1- it references the file in it's location, rather than store the file in a database and copy it to the webserver
2- gives us the ability to change meta data (the document indexes) as we find errors in them

By referencing a file in it's "physical" location gives us two layers of access control: 1- through the database permissions, and the other one through file system permissions. this is important for restricted files...

Obviously, searching is the important part. and indexing is absolutely critical and the most time consuming process.

Someone suggested to us Google appliance, but non of the scanned documents can be searched. they are all images.

The actual application is pretty basic concept (nice interface features, but the concept is simple)
1- A database to hold the info
2- a table per document type containing teh meta data and the filename and filepath
3- a web interface to search and re-search to narrow down the list.

It looks like quite a few people are making the assumption that Boeing does include manual over ride but Airbus does not.
Having worked in the Aerospace industry for a while, I can tell you two things:
1- Aircraft have to adhere to certain rules which are almost (but not quite 100%) identical across the world. So much so, that since the late 80s or early 90s, everyone seems to have renamed and restructured their regulations to be inline:
for example, FAR 23 is the same as JAR 23 (even up to the same sub paragraph). In general as well, if an aircraft is certified under FAR23 it is usually a formality to re-certify under JAR23 and vica versa.
2- Safety, redundancy and overrides are some of the most stringent requirements that can't be bypassed, so those putting forward the argument don't know jack.

Only voted other so I can say this. This is what I studied at uni, even though I now work in IT as a system admin. I loved this course, and the few years I spent in the industry. There is no much variety in it especially when one works on small aircraft and small regional jets.
It has a drawback (from when I was at uni, since apparently it's changed now). It is a very specialised and small field, with the number of graduates always exceeding the number of available positions for new grads.

I can say, the highlight of my career in the field is spending a week in remote Australia (the company director wanted some privacy) while we were rolling out and flight testing the first prototype of a new aircraft. Unfortunately it was later sold to a consortium in the US.