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Businesses

The Tech Industry's Legacy: Creating Disposable Employees 271

An anonymous reader writes: VentureBeat is running an indictment of the tech industry's penchant for laying off huge numbers of people, which they say is responsible for creating a culture of "disposable employees." According to recent reports, layoffs in the tech sector reached over 100,000 last year, the highest total since 2009. Of course, there are always reasons for layoffs: "Companies buy other companies and need to rationalize headcount. And there's all that disruption. Big companies, in particular, are seeing their business models challenged by startups, so they need to shed employees with skills they no longer need, and hire people with the right skills."

But the article argues that this is often just a smokescreen. "The notion here is that somehow these companies are backed into a corner, with no other option than to fire people. And that's just not true. These companies are making a choice. They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it's a more complex calculation than most people believe. ... Many of these companies are churning through employees, laying off hundreds on one hand, while trying to hire hundreds more."

Comment Re:Domestic war (Score 2) 148

There are guerilla wars, insurgencies, or even open warfare, going on across the world by Islamic extremists to impose their view of society, including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Phillippines and many other places. What makes you think Europe is immune to this?

16% of French Citizens Support ISIS, Poll Finds

One in six French citizens sympathises with the Islamist militant group ISIS, also known as Islamic State, a poll released this week found.

The poll of European attitudes towards the group, carried out by ICM for Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya, revealed that 16% of French citizens have a positive opinion of ISIS. This percentage increases among younger respondents, spiking at 27% for those aged 18-24.

Poll reveals 40pc of Muslims want sharia law in UK

Ignorance and denial are a poor basis for public policy, although they are often the fodder for moderation.

Comment Re:Domestic war (Score 0, Troll) 148

Although it is commonly attempted, the use of traffic deaths is a poor metric to determine if a conflict exists. (Fewer Americans died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor than died in traffic that year, and yet that led the country to war.) There is a portion of Europe's population that rejects integration and aims to replace Europe's civilization even if it takes hundreds of years. This is probably as easy as they will be to contain. Since Europe is heading towards a demographic free fall and it keeps brining in the populations hostile towards European values something is going to change. Either a way will be found to pacify them or remove them, native Europeans will start having larger families, or eventually they will comprise a large enough element of the population that they will be accommodated in some fashion - probably one that grows over time.

Comment Re:Bad idea (Score 1) 385

What makes you think that Airbus will be involved in a criminal investigation by the FBI? Do you have some inside information there?

As I previously documented, Boeing has already been the subject of European espionage. Does the method matter that much to you?

I find it amusing that you don't seem to understand that Airbus, like every other important part of European technical and defense industries, is already a target of Chinese espionage, never mind Russia or Iran. The Chinese have proven very successful and stealing and commercializing secrets from many nations, and may ultimately use them against your country if they haven't already.

Perhaps your experience is different than mine, but I doubt that relying upon hyperbole when evaluating arguments is going to produce a sound outcome. Your fancy is resulting in rubbish.

Comment Re:Sounds about reasonable for once... (Score 0, Troll) 148

The US military isn't "too high strung," isn't "trained to kill everything that moves," and has been used on many occasions to aid the civil authorities in the restoration and maintenance of law and order. A few examples include the use of elements of the US Army 7th Infantry Division, 1st Marine Division in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and the use of elements of the 327th Airborne Battle Group of the 101st Airborne Division in Little Rock to enforce a federal court desegregation order.

The US military seems to be another area in which your comments are highly subject to error. Your exit from the United States will prove more successful if you avoid commenting on it. Perhaps you could take up commenting on the mlitary of the nation in which you now reside?

Comment Re:Domestic war (Score 3, Informative) 148

The Maginot Line was largely successful in repelling direct assault. German forces were forced to go around it in the interests of time.
The meaningful difference between Dien Bien Phu and the nuclear plants is the possibility of rapid response by external forces to assist the garrison, and this time la Légion étrangère would be available for intervention rather than invested, as would the la Gendarmerie nationale.

Multiple zones are needed, including zone de sécurité, zone d'exclusion.

Comment Re:Bad idea (Score 2) 385

I'm sure Airbus cared when the GCHQ snooped on the details of a bidding process and handed over the details to Boeing.

Probably not, since that doesn't appear to be what happened.

Boeing Called A Target Of French Spy Effort

The Boeing Co. was among the targets of a French government plan for a massive spying effort to learn U.S. technological secrets and trade strategies, according to classified documents.

The plan targeted 49 high-tech companies, 24 financial institutions and six U.S. government agencies with important roles in international trade, the French documents show.

The plan focused on research breakthroughs and marketing strategies of leading-edge U.S. aerospace and defense contractors that compete directly with French firms.

The French also sought advance knowledge of the bargaining positions of American negotiators in trade talks involving France. . . .

Among the most coveted U.S. secrets:

-- Research, test results, production engineering and sales strategies for Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. Both compete against the French-led European conglomerate Airbus Industrie.
 

Why We Spy on Our Allies - By R. James Woolsey, ... former Director of Central Intelligence

The European Parliament's recent report on Echelon, written by British journalist Duncan Campbell, has sparked angry accusations from continental Europe that U.S. intelligence is stealing advanced technology from European companies so that we can -- get this -- give it to American companies and help them compete. My European friends, get real. True, in a handful of areas European technology surpasses American, but, to say this as gently as I can, the number of such areas is very, very, very small. Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing.

Why, then, have we spied on you? The answer is quite apparent from the Campbell report -- in the discussion of the only two cases in which European companies have allegedly been targets of American secret intelligence collection. Of Thomson-CSF, the report says: "The company was alleged to have bribed members of the Brazilian government selection panel." Of Airbus, it says that we found that "Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official." These facts are inevitably left out of European press reports.

That's right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies' products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors'. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible.

When we have caught you at it, you might be interested, we haven't said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and the other country's bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal. ...

Comment Re:Bad idea (Score 1) 385

If the FBI starts to attack Tor and VPN users, those users are going to fight back. If they are not in the US the FBI might not be able to stop them doing it either.

All this kind of thing does is make the US a more legitimate target for cyber attacks. The NSA and GCHQ are already fair game for hacking because they try to illegally hack you, so it's just self defence.

There isn't any part of you that thought that trying to "hack" or otherwise attack the FBI, NSA, or GCHQ for engaging in law enforcement activity might be a bad idea, is there? And I would also guess you pay no attention to the people that go to jail for overseas hacking?

Do you harbor similar venom towards Russia or China, since they engage in similar actions? Or is all the venom directed at the US/UK/West?

Submission + - Interior of burnt Herculaneum scroll read for first time 1

Solandri writes: When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it destroyed a library of classical works in Herculaneum. The papyrus scrolls weren't incinerated, but were instead carbonized by the hot gases. The resulting black carbon cylinders have mostly withstood attempts to read their contents since their discovery. Earlier attempts to unfurl the scrolls yielded some readable material, but were judged too destructive. Researchers decided to wait for newer technology to be invented that could read the scrolls without unrolling them.

Now, a team led by Dr Vito Mocella from the National Research Council's Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (CNR-IMM) in Naples, Italy has managed to read individual letters inside one of the scrolls. Using a form of x-ray phase contrast tomography, they were able to ascertain the height difference (about 0.1mm) between the ink of the letters and the papyrus fibers which they sat upon. Due to the fibrous nature of the papyrus and the carbon-based ink, regular spectral and chemical analysis had thus far been unable to distinguish the ink from the paper. Further complicating the work, the scrolls are not in neat cylinders, but squashed and ruffled as the hot gases vaporized water in the papyrus and distorted the paper.

Full paper in Nature Communications (paywalled).

Comment Re:Limited power to change working situation... (Score 4, Informative) 348

Take a 5 minute walk every hour if you can.

If you have standard cubes you could see about having the desk surfaces mounted at standing desk height. Then all you need is an adjustable chair/stool. You might be able to either arrange that outright, or for a future (and probably inevitable) move as companies are fond of swapping people around.

If you have any health issues or concerns you might talk to your doctor to see if a standing desk would help, and if so get a note. A company that wouldn't do it based on preference might be more inclined to accommodate it to address a health issue. (Of course it is better to avoid the issue to begin with.)

Communications

Obama: Gov't Shouldn't Be Hampered By Encrypted Communications 562

According to an article at The Wall Street Journal, President Obama has sided with British Prime Minister David Cameron in saying that police and government agencies should not be blocked by encryption from viewing the content of cellphone or online communications, making the pro-spying arguments everyone has come to expect: “If we find evidence of a terrorist plot and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can’t penetrate that, that’s a problem,” Obama said. He said he believes Silicon Valley companies also want to solve the problem. “They’re patriots.” ... The president on Friday argued there must be a technical way to keep information private, but ensure that police and spies can listen in when a court approves. The Clinton administration fought and lost a similar battle during the 1990s when it pushed for a “clipper chip” that would allow only the government to decrypt scrambled messages.

Comment Re:Why are they punishing the law abiding citizens (Score 1, Insightful) 219

Freedom is *far* more at risk from our own governments than it ever was from terrorists.

Really? How many newspapers feel free to publish cartoons featuring Mohammed as a character? Is it the government that causes that fear? There has been a recent terrorist attack over this resulting in a dozen deaths, with more threatened. And that isn't the only problem from this vector.

Oxford University Press bans use of pig, sausage or pork-related words to avoid offending Muslims
Salafist Muslim Group Forms 'Sharia Police' Patrol in Germany
Anti-gay, anti-alcohol: London's "Sharia patrol"
Swedish Police Release Extensive Report Detailing Control Of 55 ‘No-Go Zones’ By Muslim Criminal Gangs

Like most problems I'm sure this one will get better by simply ignoring it, or even better, pretending that measures to solve it are the cause of it.

Because terrorism is a red herring, and this looks like a shiny new power they can grab without much hassle from the rabble. Fear is a great vehicle for stripping away liberties.

Fear is a great vehicle? You mean like fear of government, the same governments that provide universal health care in Europe that everyone claims is the very height of civilization? So you can't trust government when it comes to stopping people with a demonstrated and announced desire to poison, shoot, or blow you up, but you can trust them to pump your body full of chemicals, with the power of life or death over you, to decide if you get food or water when you are too sick or weak to take care of yourself? Given the persistent confusion on these points this will probably not end well.

And your .sig? Pay attention to the bold: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Those that pay no heed to their security are unlikely to remain free.

Programming

Linus On Diversity and Niceness In Open Source 361

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds has sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica responding to statements he made in a conference in New Zealand. One of his classic comments in NZ was: "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that's what's important to me." On diversity, he said that "the most important part of open source is that people are allowed to do what they are good at" and "all that stuff is just details and not really important." Now he writes: "What I wanted to say — and clearly must have done very badly — is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different", and that "I don't know where you happen to be based, but this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US," calling the concept of being nice an "ideology"."

Comment Re: Beats using bullets (Score 0) 206

Saddam was a local bully boy member of the socialist Baath party that worked his way up to seize power through cunning and ruthlessness.

Almost all of Iraq's arms came from the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China, a little from France, and very little from anywhere else.

I assume you didn't know that and were looking to blame the US for him?

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