I get 5TB of storage with my Office 365 accounts which is way more than I really need. There's just no point in paying for another service like Dropbox anymore.

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.

Don't see why not. My current Win8.1 machine boots in under 4 seconds.

Sure, just sweep under the rug all the complaints made by so many of the people who actually tried to use the system.

Windows Mojave was also better received than Vista and it *was* Vista.
Once perception sets in it's hard for people to change even if they don't even try it.

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

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635141

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635157

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635195

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635223

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5509921&cid=47635305

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.

I award you 9.5 out of 10 troll points for that post -- brilliantly subtle, and almost guaranteed to draw people into your semantic argument.

Bravo.

- 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.