It just might work. Money is more important than laws these days.

Car dealership, you're so cute. The CIA was heavily involved in drug and weapons dealing. I'm not certain if they still are, but that they were is in public records. And not in a small way, either.

My salary has been steadily increasing and I certainly haven't found that there are skilled developers sitting idle at home. I can collect a small fortune in placement fees, if only I know some out-of-work developers I wouldn't be ashamed to recommend.

The simple fact from where I am standing is: There is a lot of work and there are not enough skilled people to do it yet we are only using 50% of the population.

But the sector has a massive negative image. Not even so much anti-women as anti-human. If you don't fight for yourself you won't get raises by just doing a good job and managers will happily have you do 80 hours with no compensation if they can get away with it. So a LOT of good developers I know have started their own businesses to get out of the rat race. You really got to love coding to stay with it when you can make money in consulting.

But part of the problem is the gigantic hatred you see on this site and sites like tweakers any time a story of this kind comes up. "The girls are getting some money, UNFAIR!". Crybabies. There are tons of initiatives to promote coding in general, plenty of competitions if you so wish, plenty of events to visit often with booth babes. No booth boys.

Let it go! Or at least accept that if this news story makes your blood boil, you got issues. And your issues are poisoning your work place or are even the reason you can't find a job despite your leet skills.

Nobody with real skills fears competition. If you see a new employee as anything but "FINALLY, some HELP, here is ticket 1000-9999, I take the remaining 1 million until you are up to speed", you are not a developer, real developers don't have enough spare time to worry about their jobs.

The real world is not that simple.

There are some psychopaths, especially in politics, who are not driven by money but by power and control. They've intentionally moved into politics because of that. Merkel is actually a good example of that, she spends considerable amounts of her efforts on getting rid of every potential rival around her, and she's quite good at it. She's the most popular politician in Germany largely because she's made sure all the others woke up to a knife in the back one day.

These kinds of people are not looking for big money, and are not easily bought, because they're looking for a different drug.

Sorry, I think the RAF people are largely fanatical assholes. Doesn't mean everything they thought was bullshit, but there's enough bullshit in it that I'd rather make up my own mind.

No, I mean 2 decades. Adenauer was before my time, what I know about him is from history books and I don't trust them on the details.

But we also had Brand and Schmidt, for example. We had Kohl who, even though I massively disliked him, cannot be said to have been anyones pet. And SchrÃder was... not exactly great, but he did have the guts to stand up to Bush and tell him that his war in Iraq is stupid and we will have no part in it.

Since they are at least allegedly on my side, I'd rather have them be competent.

Even if they were my enemies, I'd rather have that. I've been in competitive environments professional, and I don't mean trying to look better than your co-workers, I mean negotiations and court cases. I would choose a competent, professional enemy over a bumbling idiot every day. Maybe I can't fool him as easily, but I will get more, faster and better results. The idiot is only good when you want a quick win. If you're shooting for the long term, take a competent enemy, it'll be less trouble and you can focus more on your actual goals.

No, if I want to say I don't like her, I will say I don't like her.

I don't like her.

She is an american lapdog in many ways. In her entire time as chancellor, I cannot remember one time where she stood up for the interest of her country (that she swore an oath to protect) when it was in opposition to american interests. When it was discovered that the NSA had tapped her phone, which quite frankly should be a major diplomatic incident, her reaction was a stern phone call with Obama. She has brought the IWF into inner-european issues (I hope I don't have to explain that the IWF is about as pro-american as it gets). She is either incredibly incompetent or willingly accepted CIA activities such as abductions and what the media calls "torture transports". When a german national was caught in that net, and released after 3 years of Gitmo with no charges, her government did everything it could to obstruct justice.

Do I need to go on or is that enough?

Again, I think you are mixing different levels of abstraction here.

Let's, for simplicity sake, take an extremely simple algorithm as an example: 1+1=2

Person A writes it down as a purely mathematical description, finds out he can draw nice conclusions from it and generally enjoys it in the sphere of pure math. It was created, no doubt.

Person B does not ever spot "1+1=2" anywhere in nature. What person A spots is that if he has one stone in his hand, and he adds a second one, he now has two stones in his hand. That is the natural process. "1+1=2" is not that process, but an abstract description of the process. If person B were to abstract (that is the creative part) and write it down, he would still be creating the 1+1=2 formula.

The difference between these two persons is not that one created and the other discovered. The difference is how their creative process got started.

You discover a new species of snake on your jungle trip. You create a name for it. Same thing with math, really.

I hate /. videos. They're totally pointless because they convey no information that you couldn't push faster and more efficiently with a few screenshots and a transcript. They're just lazy journalism - a real journalist would take this, sit down with it and make a proper article out of it.

Here's a video where you can actually see the thing drive, as well as a bit of its interior workings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's more on Youtube and probably elsewhere. It's a pretty cool concept actually, the stupid video doesn't do it justice.

It's kind of the purpose of the whole corporate system that companies can keel over and the people behind it can continue living their lives.

If you don't like it, tough luck, it's the world we live in, we wanted it this way.

Sadly, this kind of stuff has been modus operandi for Germany for two decades now. You see, there's a whole generation that was raised on the concept of "our american friends". And that generation is in power now.

You see it in Merkel, who is basically a lapdog to America.

You see it in our financial industry, which was basically sold bridges by "our american friends" - guess who sent 400 million to Lehman Brothers literally (not metaphorically, literally) the day before they collapsed? Correct, a german bank.

And you see it in your secret services, which are basically a laughing stock the world over, but try to pretend they can play with the big boys. When in fact they can't even convince our own government members to actually use the cryptophones that they developed for them. *facepalm*

We are doing some really cool stuff over here, but our people in charge are idiots.

Suus a simplex verbum. Troglodytarum, sub alio pontis.

That, exactly, was the question. The research paper is the answer.

It is incredibly difficult to get a proper representative sample online, so some self-selection effects will usually be there. This is a better selection than using a topic-specific website.