it was a champagne supernova in the sky?
lol.

I'm loathe to admit that a trend-surfing PHB is right about something, but in this case, he's actually dead on the money.
You guys are thinking about software applications like eclipse, photoshop, or excel/word, etc.
That's probably not what he's talking about. What he's talking about is software you use to run your business.

I build this kind of thing for a living at a truly gigantic company. "Ticket systems" they used to call it back in the 90's but these days you'll hear "workflow management", etc. I'm continually amazed at how well facebook does a kind of massive collaboration platform that literally millions of people use all day every day, that is so simple to use, that there are literally no instructions and nearly everyone in the world who wants to, can use it just fine.

Sure they're "collaborating" by posting captioned cat pictures, arguing with their long lost high school buddies about politics, and playing dumbassed flash games with social hooks, instead of troubleshooting routers and customer equipment, but the principle is damn near IDENTICAL.

I'm amazed by this because I've been building this stuff for like 15 years and every off the shelf product gets it wrong. Nearly all of the industry standards get it wrong. Every purpose-built in-house project gets it wrong. But these spiky hair'd startup kids got it right without even knowing what they were building.

Kind of amazing really. Those of us in this field DO have a lot to learn from facebook.
now I guess I've gotta turn in my "krusty old guy" card or get back to telling 'em to get off my lawn

everyone I work with is a telecommuter.
everyone. for the past 7 years or so.
some of them are in Europe, some of them are in America, some of them are in Australia, and some of them are in India.
they are all in their homes, which may or may not be in a city, I don't really know because it doesn't matter in the slightest.

and no, I don't work for some spiky hair'd startup hipster magnet.
I work at one of the biggest companies in the world.

this is how the future will be.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of you who will read this are in more or less the same boat as me, which is to say, stealing the odd 10 minutes from "the man" from the comfort of your cube farm to opine on the intarnetz about stuff. You would be somewhere between 25 and 45 and you will be making slightly above average yearly salary wherever you live, which is probably in the United States.

If this describes you, you need to understand one thing: THIS WILL NEVER BE A PROBLEM FOR YOU.

no matter what drugs are discovered, no matter what new surgical techniques are developed, no matter what technologies come along. You are about to get massively fucked when it comes to healthcare, and the sole reason is BECAUSE it's privatized. Right now you can get decent medical care because you are riding on the wake of one of the most massive population booms in the history of mankind ... and guess what ... those people are going to be dying, but the medical-industrial complex is doing what EVERY business does when there's a boom ... act like it's going to continue forever.

There is a medical industry bubble, just like there was a savings & loan bubble, and a tech bubble, and a housing bubble, and a mortgage backed securities bubble, and it WILL bust, right when you and I are about to start needing it the most.

marinate on that.

This is short term thinking at it's worst. This is a symptom of an unlevel playing field. The solution is to level the playing field, not to try and figure out a short term strategy to cash in on the fouled up situation.

What if one day, Burger King decided to drastically undercut McDonalds by doing something shady. Let's say they found a way to make hamburgers and french fries out of dog food, and they bought enough politicians to make that legal. Burger King doesn't make McNuggets, so McDonald's decided to completely abandon every other thing on their menu. McDonalds now ONLY makes McNuggets. They are lauded as geniuses of the new post-BurgerKing era. This is the future. If you're not in McNuggets you're a dumbass.

Except they forgot one thing. Burger King could make McNuggets if they wanted to. It's not really all that hard.

So it is with software. Everyone here knows it ... it really *isn't* all that hard. I mean sure, there's some geniuses out there making really groudbreaking shit, but that's not MOST software jobs. Most software jobs involve cramming strings into and getting them back out of databases, and making it look pretty (or some slight variation thereof). It's not that hard, and China could put you out in a heartbeat if they decided that's what they were gonna focus on.

I've heard this line a few times. I remember when Bill Clinton was running for office and he gave up that famous "I feel your pain" line ... He was there to talk about how manufacturing was old and busted and how the "knowledge economy" was the new hotness and all these assembly line workers needed to start over and go to community college.

The future is in leveling the playing field.
Not in exploiting the imbalance.

Size and weight are minor annoyances.
I'd have given my left nut for e-books of all my text books last time I was in college for two simple reasons:

A) CTRL-F
let me search it ... please

B) Juarez is not *just* the name of a town in Mexico.
and college kids be broke as hell, ya dig?

The economy is global.

If your your job function does not absolutely require your physical presence in a specific location, then your job is worth exactly what the cheapest person *in the entire world* will do it for. You can make quality arguments, but let's face it ... there are incredibly cheap competent people living in the third-world as well.

Unless something changes, we in the first world are *all* on our way to the 3rd world (at least the most of us who hang out on this website).

A lot of recent events make a strange sort of sense if you look at it from this point of view:

What if our leaders actually know this, and are making "rats on a sinking ship" decisions ... ones with a conscience benevolently trying to engineer a soft landing for America & Europe on a leveled out playing field with the third world, and the ones without a conscience are basically just money and power grabbing what they can get to solidify their positions of privilege before the whole thing goes kablooey.

Marinate on that, as the hip young kids say.

That's a bit of a false dichotomy isn't it?

Taking it back to my basketball analogy ... which are we supposed to hate? the players or the game?

You're supposed to hate both. That was the point of my comment.
My point does not seem to fit within your binary left/right system of understanding. Sorry.

Bravo!
That's one of the most concise examples of what I've been seeing happen over the course of my lifetime: economic winners writing the rules so that there can be fewer and fewer new winners.

America is now like a basketball game where every time someone makes a basket, their team gets to replace a referee.

This is what pisses me off the most when older folks give my generation the "well if you don't like the way things are, why don't you start your OWN company, Apple started in a garage for chrissakes" ... why? Because we're not even remotely playing the same game that Apple was playing in their garage days .. or Wal-mart ... or hell ... Amazon for that matter.

The winners write the rules so that it's impossible for you to follow the same ... hell ... even a similar ... path to success.

if I could I'd mod the parent up.
I was hoping someone would link that. Here's another shocking analysis: http://goo.gl/VKx8m

So if I understand this correctly, this is not a true popular selection. This is an internet poll, where the slots on the ballot are predetermined, and regardless of who "teh intarnetz" choose, the Candidate Certification Committee makes the actual choice ... all three of who are present members of the Council on Foreign Relations, two of which are recent executives of the RAND corporation, one former director of both CIA and FBI.

I know it sounds tin-foil hatty, but ahh ... damn ... this kinda tastes a little funny.
like the intelligence community executing a very long con, perhaps.

I'm sure this has been mentioned, but one presumes that there are two primary tests:

A) does the vaccine have side effects & what are they
B) does the vaccine work.

In order to answer B, doesn't this mean you have to find someone without HIV, administer the vaccine, and then expose them to HIV?

Being a volunteer ... for this ... damn. That takes nuts.

I'm kind of surprised nobody's mentioned this aspect, because it seems sort of obvious to me.

HP can make a *lot* of money selling for lack of a better term "open" tablets.
What I mean is: no walled garden & a completely, utterly open OS.

You cannot build your own tablet, the way you can build your own PC, and frankly given the form factor, I'm not sure how that could ever become the case.

So do it, HP. Sell open platform tablets that the entire freakin' world can hack on until they're blue in the face.
Once you've got a real good, stable OS that's easy to develop on, some basic office applications, and hardware cheaper than Apple, you stand to have businesses buying the hell out of your hardware.

No, it isn't. Otherwise, it'd be a lot easier to cure.
Correlated to the presence of MAP bacteria, yes. Symptoms the result of a bacterial infection: absolutely not.

You wouldn't be in this situation if your employer gave a crap. It's plain and simple: you report to someone. They know the extent of the problem and that there is only one of you. If they cared, there would be more than one of you. But there isn't. So turnabout is fair play.

This is the true American solution to your problem: find other people to exploit and skim off the top ...

Step 1: tell them you're going to become a telecommuter so that you can work 100% of the time
Step 2: get on elance or some other such site: hire gobs of cheap (dubious) overseas help at $1/hour
Step 3: instruct them all to send emails from your address and answer the phone with your name.
Step 4: find a different job and just let your sub-contractors handle that one until the house of cards falls apart

If your current employer calls you out on the fact that you have 15 different accents and sometimes answer the phone in a female voice, ask them why they're so racist.

bonus if you used a pseudonym when hiring for your present job.

THAT is seriously cool.
Awesome. Thank you!