Do not base your opinion on someone by the subject of their degree.

You can be an engineer without ever attending university.
You can get a Masters in computer science and still know fuck all about technology, information or otherwise.

I'd far rather have someone with in-depth hands-on industry experience making decisions than some academic with no real-world understanding, whatever their underlying academic discipline was.

It does matter, as it's not the same thing.
One is open, honest, easy to understand and fair.
The other is impossible for the customer to interpret or manage and is thus extremely unfair.

The price and total data transferred may be identical, but the propositions very much are not.

UPS aren't charging you for the weight of the trolley they used to load your package onto the delivery van though are they.

If I download a web page, I expect to pay for the bytes leaving my router and arriving back at it.
If I download an encrypted web page, I expect those bytes to include that encryption overhead.

On neither occasion do I know or care about the encapsulation. That's the ISP's issue, not mine.

Just like the fuel in the van is UPS's issue, not mine.

Actually the statistics do suggest that most US citizens are religious fuckwits. e.g. http://www.gallup.com/poll/170...

I'll accept that doesn't make them bigots if you accept that European kids may also be paedophiles.

Bullshit.

Hypothesis: Bill Gates is poor and lives in a shack
Null-hypothesis: Bill Gates lives in a massive house near Seattle

Well, you failed to disprove the null hypothesis there. This casts considerable doubt on your hypothesis.

Threatening a misandrist social injustice warrior is not misogyny.

Shit, I've been threatened online. It wasn't misandry. So stop making this a fucking gender thing and treat it as the simple stupid criminal behaviour that it is.

No, I'm definitely part of the reason too.

It's ok, there's plenty of blame to share. Maybe you'd like some too, or did you use the power of your mind to add your reply to the Slashdot database?

The hardware is built from raw materials. They come from somewhere else, and who can say we aren't internally recharging a reasonable market rate for their purchase.

The hardware is built to a design. How much should we charge for that design? Which company and which country should we make that charge from?

The hardware is built for a cost. Why should we sell it for anything more than that cost? We could even sell it for a loss. Which of our subsidiaries should buy it ready for resale?

The hardware only exists because there is a market demand for it. We have tremendous expenses building up that market demand. We'd better transfer the cost of marketing too.

Profit? What profit?

Sure. Four companies that work explicitly in the IT space take people on.

The four hundred thousand non-IT companies have a very fucking different approach.

I see a fuck of a lot more millionaires in the movie industry than I do at my local garage.

It could be coincidence, or it could be because they're still charging fifteen quid for a film released three decades ago and demanding jail time for anybody that thinks its earned them enough money already and they should be incentivised into producing something worth watching now, not Fast and Furious fucking 6.

Yeah, you understand completely. That's exactly why the Infosys staff I worked with didn't want to move to the UK.

Or maybe it's because in the UK they wouldn't be able to afford multiple houses earning them a second income, a household staff so that the wife doesn't have to work, the early retirement they're planning to enjoy.

Indian salaries may be low compared to the UK or the US but Indian IT salaries are way off the scale when you factor in the cost of living.

The big problem is that the pipeline's been cut off.

You used to be able to interview 20 local people and get a choice of great candidates because the local people had come through the ranks and had to learn their shit.

These days you don't take on junior people and train them up. For the same money you can get the already experienced person over from India, or Malaysia, or China, or Bulgaria. Or if you're a multinational, don't even get them over: Open the office there, it's even cheaper.

So there aren't the junior learning roles, the apprenticeships, the low paid jobs in which people can learn the skills and become the great IT people we need.

It's a fucking tragedy and it's taken a failure of the outsourcing model to reveal the sudden disconnect and gap that's been created, and it's going to be another decade before that gap starts to be filled.

So right now it's actually true: there is a shortage of great people. Not because the locals aren't capable, or couldn't become great, but because there just haven't been the openings to let them develop those skills.

Articulating algorithms in your programming language of choice isn't rocket science, but neither is welding a fuel tank. The analysis, mathematics and design that occurs before you do either of those things is more comparable than you think.

Yes, of course.

Sadly being British, human and/or alive is also considered a terrorist offense here too. The law really is that badly written.

Agreed. My company provides a warm secure well equipped environment in which I can do my job. If I choose to work in a warmer more secure even better equipped environment of my own choosing then they're very graciously not stopping me; why would I expect them to pay me extra?!