This is actually amazing, the 'Do No Evil' principle upheld by Microsoft! What an exciting and interesting development this is. Yes, you heard me right, USA courts and government are the agents of evil and Microsoft is now on the side of the individual rights.

Wrong. Supreme Court cannot make an Unconstitutional law into a Constitutional one. They render an opinion, which in many cases is wrong and in most of those cases is also politically motivated, but their opinion does not make a law Constitutional at all.

There is no good solution to any of this, both governments will be pushing to the end. Ukrainian government doesn't want to lose a large chunk of territory and Russian government doesn't want to let go now, since the loss will be seen as weakness and there is a huge interest in controlling the gas supplying line to Europe. Putin's reaction to Ukraine attempts to become part of NATO was going to be met with this type of violent reaction from Putin, who doesn't want to see NATO missile launchers even closer to the western border. AFAIC the American hands are all over this one, trying hard to create yet another distraction from its failing economy. Putin was easy to manipulate to start the war, but how do you end this war? A war with Russia can turn nuclear, so that is why there are no Americans or British or German or Canadian or other visible troops there yet.

Putin has a war now that everybody understands Russia is leading, but at the same time it is not an openly declared war, you can say it is an open secret war. Putin cannot win against the West but West doesn't want to fight a real shooting war with Russia either.

Stalemate. The only losers are the people who are forced into it on all sides, be it death due to bombing or bullets or sickness or be it economic sanctions (which by the way are not declared against 'others', economic sanctions are declared against your own. So economic sanctions imposed by Putin 'against West' are actually economic sanctions by Putin against Russians, it is just that the propaganda is strong, economic education and understanding is low and there is a tribal thing going on there as well).

USA provoked another conflict that may not end and definitely will not end well, good job. Putin is throwing fresh meat into the meat grinder, good job. Ukrainians are stuck between these two, like so many others before it, too bad.

AFAIC the only quick way out of this is for Putin to be assassinated or for Ukraine to give up and for the West to fuck off. All of these are unfortunate, but the alternatives do include a possibility of a nuclear war.

Many are under the false impression that ability to drive a car without government interference is a privilege and not a human right. These people are wrong, owning a car is not a right (as in nobody owes you a car), however if you own a car and you drive the car on private property then ability to drive the vehicle is not a privilege that government should be able to revoke. Driving a car on private property is an agreement between you (the driver) and the private property owner/operator. Getting in between the private property owner/operator and car owner/driver is in violation of your human rights. It is a violation of private property right, violation of freedom of association, violation of freedom to attempt and make your living, by the way, without interference by the State.

The real problem is of-course existence of so called 'public roads'. First automotive roads were private and many are private now and there should be no public roads at all, but to the extent that they exist, the rules and licensing that happens on the State level should only be applicable to those roads.

Programmers are smart enough not to unionise, which allows newcomers into the field without these insane artificial barriers of entry.

Unions are barriers to entry into the field to any newcomers, unions are also horrific from point of view of price setting and prevent people who actually excel in the job from making significantly more than those who only coast by. Your complaint is a complaint of somebody who shouldn't have become a programmer in the first place, but also it is a complaint of a horrible person, who wants to prevent others from entering the field freely.

People shouldn't be licensed just to try and make a living, all professional government dictated licenses and participation in various organizations are a huge economic mistake but more importantly they are a huge impediment to individual freedoms.

My point is that an employee is an instrument in the hands of the people that own the company, like a screedriver but a more complex one, and the best 'respect' that an instrument can expect is his compensation for doing the job. An intelligent person would recognise this and turn it to his advantage by working as a contractor making the highest hourly wage he can master given his relative worth in the market. A person less intelligent would complain that in his role as a sophisticated screw driver he is not getting respect he believes he deserves.

An employer that is paying top dollar for his workforce can afford to treat his sophisticated tools with as much contempt as the law allows. If you are treated with more than simple master/tool interaction, you are exchanging top dollar for 'warmer' treatment, trust me on this, I worked as a permanent employee, as a contractor and I run my company now, I know all of this very intimately.

I don't know what exactly the point of this story is, however many people think they are not getting respect or their worth of whatever, not just engineers, and many people are of-course wrong.

An employee is part of a company, a company is a machine that makes the investor/owner money, and the way it makes investor/owner money is by implementing idea/solving a problem that the investor/owner is solving. The company makes work of the investor/owner more productive by allowing the investor/owner to execute the solution to the problem in a faster/more reliable/cheaper manner and thus providing the market with the best value for money solution to the problem that is being solved.

The employees are part of the system that is set up by the investor/owner to be productive. To talk about respect in this sense is meaningless, does the watchmaker have special respect for a spring loader or for a chisel or for a hammer or for a cutting tool? Is the cutting tool more important than a welding tool? Is a welding tool deserving of more respect than a screwdriver?

Employees are screwdrivers, cutting tools, welding tools, spring loaders, etc.etc., they are part of the machine that the owner/investor has created to make himself more productive in the market, to offer his solution to the market.

Your worth to the employer can be fairly easily measured by comparing you to any other employee. A developer's worth can be measured comparing him to another developer. An employer that cannot measure relative value of his employees is probably running a suboptimal machine (company), but at the end it doesn't really matter that much, whether the solution is fully optimal or is somewhat less than optimal, the employee will only see the market discovered salary (part of the salary discovery includes the government rules and regulations, nonsensical stuff like mandatory vacation pay or wage controls or insurance controls or whatever).

I do not have a more special respect for a keyboard than a monitor for example, for a harddrive or a DVD drive, etc.etc. I know they are there to perform specific functions. I have employees, they are respected in a very specific way: they are paid what they are due and the treatment is normal, they are people and that is all there is to it.

Eh, which stuff? The head in the sand tactic only gets you so far even ostriches do not actually do that but some humans apparently rely on that not to lose footing in their narrow perception of reality.

- first of all what is 'special' is that for the first time more companies shut down in a year than were started.

Secondly, you are right, existing companies are 'filling voids', as in they consolidate because the unproductive American workers can no longer earn enough by producing something to trade with. You are saying that consumption is the bottleneck, it's never the bottleneck, the problem is lack of productivity on behalf of the American worker. All these so called 'productivity gains' in the last 40 years in America are actually inflation and not gains of productivity. Productivity in USA has been completely annihilated with the laws, taxes, inflation. If American worker was productive, American worker would be able to earn to consume. American worker cannot earn to consume because he is not productive enough to pay for productivity of others with his own productivity, thus USA has been running 500Billion USD/year trade deficits, for this exact reason.

Capital is completely dried out in the USA, you don't have capital, you have inflation - printing of the money by the Fed and borrowing by all levels of government and by the private sector, but there are no savings, which is why there are no net new companies that replace the old companies that shut down and too many old companies shut down, and all of it is because there are no savings. There is no capital, printing money does not provide capital it only steals savings from the savers, savings are punished in the USA. The low interest rates artificially forced by the Fed are not true cost of capital. The pensioners in USA can no longer afford to live on savings, so they are coming back into the work force, while the younger who should be working are getting laid off and shift from permanent jobs to one or two or more than two part time jobs, all thanks to the government unauthorised nonsense, including Obamacare. As to ideas, ideas without capital behind them are nothing at all.

Of-course humans need not apply, the mob votes in politicians that routinely increase cost of buying labour and of-course this is what happens as a response. Governments made humans extremely unproductive, I am explaining this in my comments, of-course getting moderated to nothing, but hey, probably the messenger needs to be shot in the economy where this message is unacceptable because the only acceptable messages are those, that put the blame for the complete failures of centrally governed economies on the free market capitalism.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5534639&cid=47669939

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5519455&cid=47652683

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5534639&cid=47671781

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635121

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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635363

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635403

The automation is not a problem, the problem is that there are not enough new businesses that are created. In 2014 in USA more businesses shutdown than were created for the first time probably since the foundation of the Republic. The reasons are of-course politically incorrect and have to do with the destruction of the US dollar by the government and the Federal reserve and the growth of government (all the spending, all the welfare state nonsense, the business regulations, the taxes, and of-course all the wars).

Many of the jobs need to be automated away to allow human resources to be allocated more efficiently. However many of the jobs cannot be automated practically and their automation only becomes a possibility when the cost of labour exceeds the cost of automation in the long run by a wide margin, which is what is actually happening with all the government rules, laws, taxes, welfare, wars.

You want to solve the problem? YOU DO NOT STEAL MORE with nonsense like 'basic income', you allow people to be free from the mob to create new ideas and start new businesses and there will be no shortage of jobs.

Singapore has less than 1% unemployment, there is no minimum wage but the per-capita wages are highest in the world.

- wrong and wrong, libertarian and laissez-fair capitalist ideas do not require anybody to be altruistic at all, in fact the entire point is only to think about yourself and in the free market economy to think about yourself means to provide the market with solutions it pays for, thus helping the society not by being altruistic but by chasing profits, which is why free market capitalism is the most moral system - it relies on self interest and the invisible hand of the market rewards self-interest that helps the market.

Your definitions are off-base, no wonder you don't understand what is going on and your conclusions are all screwed up.

Socialist approach doesn't work and for those of you, who are mistaken about it, here is an article that shows what your socialist approach can do even to the minimum wage jobs. This is coming to all low cost restaurants near you.

Socialist approach is anti-humanist, anti-freedom, anti-human rights approach, it is an approach of theft and destruction and violence. Capitalist approach within free market environment is the only approach that relies on voluntary exchange of goods and services that are built by free people, people who do not have their rights violated by the mob.

It has to be an all or nothing free market capitalist approach because once anything remotely socialist does not stop there, it wants more and more socialism, which in turn destroys free market capitalism, destroys free markets (markets free of government intervention, thus markets based on equal rights between people, where 'right' means protection against government abuse) and destruction of free markets does not improve capitalism in any way, it diminishes capitalism and without capitalism (private ownership and operation of property) there is no capital and without capital there is no economy and without economy there is no society.

Capitalism in a free market environment means profit based economy, which is the only economy that both is good economics and it is the only moral way to run a society, the only way that allows society to function without mob based violence destroying individual rights.

Cisco is having sales problems in this depressed economy just like so many other companies due to the inflation (money printing), taxes, regulations, basic lack of freedoms that is preventing new businesses from starting and is causing existing businesses to shrink, outsource or just shut down. In 2014 more businesses shutdown than were started first time probably in history of USA.

There is no recovery, the economy is in a depression being held afloat artificially with all this money counterfeiting by the Fed. The so called recovery is based on bubbles in asset and bond markets, due to all this inflation (money printing). The companies are borrowing huge sums in the USA based on their foreign earnings ( money that was made offshore and remains there due to insane taxes in the US) that are used as the collateral to borrow in the US, so that companies can buy their stock back, pushing up the stock prices and consolidating ownership. Warren Buffet talks US policies of the welfare state and inflation up, while getting rid of the US dollars and buying up assets, like the rail roads and the mines and lands. The US dollar is on its last legs, the population feels worse financially in the so called 'recovery' in 2014 than it felt in 2008, during the peak of the financial crisis. There is no recovery, but there is a huge bubble inflated by the Fed in this depression, hiding the necessary deflation with all this inflation and preventing the real and extremely needed restructuring ( writing off of debts, shutting down most of the government and many of the zombie companies that only exist due to inflation). USA job market is horrible, the new net jobs are part time jobs. Manufacturing is gone, very little is produced and where people are still producing, the government is regulating them to death.

Cisco will probably outsource to China or India if they hire at all. Not like it is easier for them now, afted all the NSA bullshit came out.

Patents and copyrights must be abolished.

Let the people compete in the market based on the trade secrets.
Of-course government institutions like FDA need to be abolished as well.

- some sort of flamebait right there, in TFA. If you have something checking your code and raising flags before the code goes into testing (which may or may not catch the errors) and production, you may be spared very unpleasant production issues. When do you feel more like a 'slave', when you are asked to fix the bugs during your normal work hours or when you are woken up at night, and you have to figure out what the hell happened in production, while new transactions are coming through and you have to fix live data?

...

- let's hope that you don't have to write everything from scratch, you are much more productive as a developer if you don't have to write everything you need but can use libraries written and tested by others. As to frameworks, nobody from the outside world really forces you into any framework, it's a decision internal to the project, don't have to follow anything you don't like.

- not that much different from header files in C, except XML is a dumb way to move data between components in the same application.

- Geocities? How is this a new development?

- yeah, the browser used to be a dumb terminal and now it is getting more and more 'intelligent'. The browser of today is just a computer, it is the VM itself running your code in it. The browser is the computer and the code you write in it is now as complex as full clients of the past.

- many apps are just written for VMs (like JVM) that's not a new development, WAR files allowed this for over a decade now.

- seriously? That's a concern?

- yeah, yeah, Javascript. I'll be using Node.js in 5 years maybe, when it is already used by a ton of real world services that act as a proof that this wondrous tech can actually pull this off. As to MongoDB and CouchDB, I guess when I lose my mind I'll switch from a relational database to these...

- sure, unless you actually want to develop or design something of your own.

- language to language translation, what a concept.... it's only as old as the compilers.

- or you actually end up building something that people want to use and not yet another photo wall.

- the amazing world of timesharing.... where have I heard of that one before? Oh yeah, mainframes and supercomputers.

- sure. I suppose the media is the message, but people used to list their source in computer magazines in the older times. The difference of-course exists, it's your ability to modify the code and the modifications becoming public immediate, so this is a great way of sharing.

- the computer is the network, now the network is the computer, distributed logging is useful, no doubt.

My point is, the more things change the longer the articles, the more the things stay the same or almost the same.