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Comment Re:"They" is us (Score 1) 339

Time to put the cool-aid down. You are told that so you don't pick the pitchfork up.

You are NOT a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. You are working class and will always be working class.

Bzzzzzt. Wrong. Lots of people advised me to get into my company's stock savings plan when I started working in 1980. That turned into a 401K at some point. It's amazing what compound interest does to investments after 35 years. That and not pissing away what you earn on the latest shiny toys.

Cheers,
Dave

Comment "They" is us (Score 1, Insightful) 339

BBC had an interesting factoid on where "the 1%" live and what it takes to be in the 1%. It seems it takes a net worth of around $800K to be in the richest 1% of the world's population and a net worth of only $77K to be in the top 10%. The research was done by Credit Suisse and interpreted and reported by Oxfam with the Beeb boiling it down to the linked factoid.

Put your pitchforks and torches away mates unless you want to stab yourself with your own pitchfork and then burn down your own castle. "They" is us. Yep, there are a few people with more but a whole lot more people with a whole lot less. And I bet you didn't even know you were "rich."

Cheers,
Dave

Comment Re:Religions codify survival info ... (Score 2) 755

... the doctrines of the bible or koran or any other superstitious nonsense is laughable ...

Don't laugh too hard, you are proving yourself quite ignorant as well.

Those books actually have some rules that are drawn from the environment. Some of those rules essentially define a regional survival manual for a society at a certain technological level. Even today some of those rules apply. Want to know what is safe to eat in the Red Sea, those old books have a few rules that will provide quite useful information.

Religions sometimes codify social and physical survival strategies, don't mess with the neighbor's wife, don't eat that type of sea creature, etc. To get wrapped up in the "stories" used to deliver the "lessons" and to dismiss a lesson because you didn't like the associated story is quite superficial and ignorant. Those old books are more useful than you believe despite the lack of literal truth to various stories.

See, "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture" by Marvin Harris." Read it for a social anthropology class back in the mid-1970s. In a nutshell, Harris claimed and did a reasonable job of showing that many of the quirks of various religions/cultures actually were ways of adopting the culture to the environment it existed in.

Note that he didn't show that each culture's $DEITY therefore existed since they had handed down these wonderful rules. Only that various societies encoded their rules as religious beliefs. Much easier to get the ignorant to go along by saying $DEITY will smite thee if you don't obey the rules than going through the years of cultural evolution that led to the rues.

Cheers,
Dave

Comment Disagree (Score 1) 205

The large companies I have worked for tend to PURCHASE supported free software from Red Hat, SuSE, Oracle (even if it's a clone of Red Hat), IBM, etc. Indirectly this means that they end up paying for the development of free software since these open source companies all PAY their employees many of whom write code that gets licensed under the GPL and contributed as open source. All you need to do to verify this it look at the contributions to the kernel or many of the key Linux subsystems to see the bulk of the contributions are coming from RH, SuSE, IBM, etc. (Why do you think SCO sued IBM for copyright infringement for IBM's contributions to the Linux kernel?)

Most companies are not and don't want to be in the software business. Software development isn't even close to what they do. They are quite happy to pay for software that may or may not be open source. If it is open source, they want the same level of support (or better) as they get with their closed source vendors. While they may not be contributing code, they are paying the salaries of people who write open source software as their full time job by buying this support.

The person who claims that open source is failing due to "free riders" and "volunteer maintainers" hasn't looked at how open source development works. Hell, even back when classic programs like awk and grep were developed and circulated in the old Unix community it was through /usr/contrib the bulk of the developers were professional software developers. These programs (and many more) were developed by software professionals who chose to make them available to others rather than sell them (for a variety of reasons).

Yeah, there are a lot of pieces of open source that were developed and are maintained by volunteers. There's nothing wrong with that and, for quite a few years, open source has had fewer errors and has been far higher quality than the equivalent closed source programs. I'm not arguing that the OpenSSL flaw isn't serious. It is and it needs to be fixed but a certain closed source software vendor seems to patch a dozen equivalent flaws each month. I'd hardly call the OpenSSL flaw a reason to condemn the open source development model.

Cheers,
Daver

Comment Probably moot for a while (Score 4, Interesting) 574

I'm getting three to five e-mails and or phone calls a day from headhunters. I'm very senior (30+ years in the business) so I'm not cheap. 2007 through 2010 I couldn't buy a job. What changed is the labor market. It just got a lot tighter. It may not be the dot com days when if you could say computer you got hired but it's looking a lot better.

The last laugh is that a lot of hiring managers and HR dweebs haven't gotten the memo and are still pulling the same old bullshit. If you run into one of those, keep looking. There's someone out there who doesn't need a glass navel to see where they're going.

Cheers,
Dave

Comment Re:I wonder when (Score 1) 257

You (and possibly said law) use a definition of true that excludes quite a few people and their opinions. There are all sorts of "deniers" out there who dispute the truth of everything from the Holocaust to the moon landings to climate change to the shape of the earth. What is the "truth" of the subject concert review of the original article? What is the truth of the guy who started the whole right to be forgotten cause and his bankruptcy?

Hell, we have trouble getting information "erased" when it is found to be false (court case near here of a guy who was accused of rape, lost his job, was ostracized, etc. only to be able to prove he didn't do it). I somehow doubt that any and all uncomfortable data can be erased but high profile and well off people will be able to obfuscate their history even better under the "right to be forgotten."

Cheers,
Dave

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