No. It's Corporate and Government collusion. It's the quid pro quo. The Corporations only print stuff that keeps in power the Government that they pay to pass the laws that keep them in power. It would be a waste of money to get the politicians they're paying off thrown out of office.

Anyone who thinks voting really matters in this country needs to wake up and start paying attention to what's happening. When the Executive branch rules by fiat (both Republican and Democrat) and government officials are not so much as questioned about blatantly and admittedly perjuring themselves it's clear rule of law is pretty much gone. Democracy and voting only works when the rules are followed. Anyone who tries to change the current unworkable system would be labeled a subversive and discredited. Just look at what has happened to everyone who has revealed Government wrong doing over the last 8 or 10 years.

That's just plain bullshit. Obama has done more to penalize and intimate anyone who dares to disclose what he doesn't want disclosed than any past administration.

That's because anyone who has leaked information that Obama doesn't want leaked, even illegal government activities, has been at best harassed to the point they have no way to make a living and at worse and in most cases prosecuted and thrown in jail. And the officials that actually committed the illegal activities exposed are not even investigated much less prosecuted. So that there have been less prosecutions has nothing to do with less illegal activity.

I would guess only by virtue of the technology available rather than any moral dichotomies. If Nixon had the tools available today he likely would have been right up there with Obama.

This is just plain wrong. Those same technologies that you mention (and more) allow governments to collect and maintain orders of magnitude more information on individuals then in the past. There are more leaks because the amount of secrets has increased orders of magnitude. And the ratio is severely skewed towards the secrets rather than the leaks.

Just 20 years ago it took a large number of man hours and money to monitor one individual to the level they can monitor whole populations now. You would have a dozen or more people just to follow them around determining their location. You would have to bug every phone they used. The conversations recorded and each one manually listened to for pertinent information. And even with all that effort you still wouldn't have the level of information they collect now.

And yet when those businesses fail it's the government that perpetuates those failed businesses. Strange that. You are truly a fool if you believe we live in a capitalist democracy. In the US we live in the imploding hell that Ayn Rand predicted. Capitalism has given way to who can buy the most politicians to pass laws perpetuating obsolete and/or failing business models and businesses. Democracy has given way to who will pay the most to get their business perpetuated.

Collecting all and storing all communications between everyone including US citizens who happen to communicate with someone overseas has absolute nothing to do with "foreign policy aimed at defending these interest" or using "spies as a tool of their foreign policy". If anything it's a detriment to that since resources are being wasted on on irrelevancies rather than being focused on schwerpunkt. It's exclusively a means to control the people. The whole point of the government in the US is that the people are supposed to control the government. What the NSA is doing isn't in their charter. You're argument is what is called a straw man. You're defended a premise that wasn't at issue. At issue is the NSA's actions that have nothing to do with the foreign policy interests of the US.

And ignores them when they're not convenient. Amazing how that works.

You do realize this is both the internet and /. so apologies are considered uncouth (and yes that's sarcasm). And unnecessary.

And that's a good thing. More managers like that and maybe the industry will stop turning out nothing but crap. Your response seemed to come across that way though probably through the lack of context you provided here. I'm just constantly amazed by management who seem to somehow expect something for nothing in the tech industry.

I would agree that the types that focus exclusively on money aren't usually the best type to work with and often end up being the blowhards you referenced in your earlier post.

Worse if you're trying to manage the project but I make a good part of my living cleaning up after crap like that. And it is definitely much more enjoyable if you can do it right from scratch rather than trying to fix something that's already all screwed up.

Out of C and C++ to long I guess. It's been a good 10 years since I did any serious work with either. But to make my original point it only took a quick read to grasp those new concepts. When the schooling runs from Nand gates and K-maps on up grasping new things is much easier.

Wow. You latch on to one statement I made, completely alter the context and then go on a tirade about me being whiny and unhappy. I can only guess you're projecting?

Nothing I said was about me. It was about what I've seen and experienced in my 20+ year career. Personally I choose where I work on more than just the basis of money (although admittedly it's one factor). And the vast majority of people at my level think the same way. A good working environment with good people is worth a goodly chunk of pay. That being said though the long and short of it is you get what you pay for. You pay cheap you're going to get crap. And no, highly skilled individuals aren't going to work for junior pay no matter how much you want to whine about it. It's a pretty simple concept and is applicable to pretty much every field. Higher skill and experience equals higher pay. Why do people expect it to be different in tech?

Bullshit. No school of any kind is going to teach you how things work in industry. First off in almost every case the instructors have little if any industry experience. Teaching and working in industry are 2 completely different skill sets. Second a college's job should be teaching fundamentals: language theory, programming theory (e.g. L-Values vs R-Values), data structures, algorithms and the like. Those are the types of things that can be taught in a structured graded environment. Because thirdly there is no way possible for any school to set up a program that would represent what you are going to face once you start working in industry: Working on a team of 10 individuals where the work has to get done no matter that 3 of them are incompetent idiots, requirements changing on a daily bases without changes to resources or schedule, balancing supportability vs reliability vs speed of completion, being to do risk assessments on the fly as conditions change radically throughout a project. Because these types of things are radically different for each project you work on these are things that can't be taught in a classroom environment and are only learned through experience.

As someone said further up these are also intangible skills that are almost always overlooked by HR types and managers who haven't worked in the trenches. And as GP said these are the types of skills that when missing cause software projects to fail or to turn out the kind of crap we typically see when they do manage to "succeed".

There is no "metric". As has been discovered using "metrics" like these ends in tossing out the good candidates while hiring the idiots.

Again bullshit. Did you see the recent diversity numbers put out by the big name tech companies? These "metrics" you claim are supposed to be saving them from diversity issues has resulted in an overwhelmingly white/Asian male majority.

You sound like HR or a clueless hiring manager. Throwing money at the highly skilled personnel who will get the job done is exactly how to get the job done and make money. Paying a lot for three highly experience highly skilled people will payoff far more than hiring 10 much cheaper inexperienced college grads who don't have a clue about risk evaluation, supportability, performance, etc... And the people are on the contact list because they are the types that have a history of getting things done and bailed out projects that started with those college grads working on them who cocked them all up.

Again that's just plain wrong. Good schools are doing a fantastic job at teaching what they are supposed to. My school gave me a fantastic basis for developing industry development skills. I could look at a piece of code and evaluate the consequences from the lowest level to the highest level. But then I was placed with a team of people that were all more experienced than I was. Some barely more some at the level I'm at now. They mentored me and guided me in learning the skills that aren't teachable in a classroom environment but are essential to developing good industry software.

Yeah, things like weather, traffic, political information, pricing information for goods and services, job information, all that does nothing but make people miserable.

You just have no idea how much access to information enriches your life. I dare you to live a year without any access to any news or information source.

WTF are you demanding a citation about?

Our understanding of pretty much everything is utterly theoretical. For all we know this whole thing is just an illusion and we're in the matrix. We can experimentally in a controlled environment show cause and effect of gravity to a very small margin of error. We can't experimentally show the effect of releasing certain amounts of carbon into the atmosphere on global climate. There is no way to isolate any effects of the carbon verses a million other interactions.

Bullshit. Such a study would have to somehow isolate the human effects from all other interaction and effects and we don't even know and/or understand what the vast majority of the interactions are. Otherwise all the study is showing is correlation not causation.

Yes it is. And the level of trust in those assumptions should be based on how well our theories explain those assumptions.

No but what I have a problem with (and didn't express very well in my post) is people claiming the current theories on climate science are as well understood as the theory of gravity. And our understanding of gravity isn't particularly solid either. Our understanding of the complex interactions involved in the climate of this entire planet are miniscule when compared to our understanding of gravity.

I don't disagree with most of what you say. For the most part you're saying what saying what I was trying to elucidate but in a much more loquacious and elegant manner. When I wrote my reply I was focus more on climate science specifically although I didn't express that very well. I chalk it up to not having finished my morning caffeine yet. From my knowledge most scientific advance aren't from someone saying "That's wrong. I'm setting out to prove it's wrong." As you stated it's usually more a result of discrepancies in a related experiment or observed phenomenon that don't fit the assumed theory and can't be explained by problems with the method.

That being said here's the part where we differ.

Given the complexity of the system, the scale of the system and our extremely limited knowledge of system's interactions there is no way any theory of how the climate of this entire planet works should in any way be considered settled or part of a "hard core". The problem being that even though they may be right to at least some degree regarding AGW they are most likely largely wrong about the details of how and why and subsequently the consequences and causes of any consequences. These are important because they dictate what mitigating actions may be taken. History shows mitigating actions taken without sufficient understanding of a system usually results in less then desirable if not outright negative result. This has happened over and over in mankind's intervention in nature. We often take a bad situation and make it worse trying to fix it.

Now I'm not saying no action should be taken to try to limit man's contribution to carbon production. I am saying what actions we do take need to based on more solid ground rather than alarmist theories based on insufficient knowledge.