> Are you a country, or are you a federation of states?

If you have to ask then you don't have enough of a clue to be a meaningful part of the conversation.

. I mean, you can prove that it works, but some people "see" how to separate a function and some don't.

You don't ever "see" how to seperate the function into udv to get uv-vdu. Even in the case of the most "obvious" examples like xe^x, you still need to decide which part should be u or dv.

After a few dozen (hundred?) times of doing this, you get a feel for which should be chosen. More recently, this knowledge has been codified in a LIATE mnemonic/algorithm for choosing the two parts, which works for most elementary integrals students are likely to encounter.

Nobody can "just integrate". Nobody. Not even Euler was able to integrate everything. With experience -- extensive expeirience -- you may garner enough tricks and techniques to be able to integrate something like x^m(a+bx^n)^p -- but you would need to be very well read to know that you could only do so if one of p, (m+1)/n, or (m+1)/n +p is an integer -- (see Chebyshev's Integral). I didn't "see" or know this fact -- I learned it from reading works of others who came before me. No gene can replicate that.

H1Bs are an underclass. That's the real problem with H1Bs.

If someone is important enough and their skills important enough that you want to drag them half way across the planet then treat them like a real person and give them a green card or even instant citizenship.

No republic should tolerate the creation of an underclass. It's a threat to the liberties of everyone. It's also ultimately bad for business since the bottom line is entangled with individual liberty.

Also, the idea that corporations can poach talent from across the planet is also unequal. If they can do that then we should likewise be able to do the same (work where the cost of living is cheap).

> Are you sure you are a software engineer, and not some programmer with delusions of grandeur?

Perhaps he understands what all of those fancy sounding words means and is wondering how exactly they add up to "defects". I could certainly see how a lay jury might get bamboozled.

Just "razzle dazzle" them.

You've not even done as much.

> These are all skilled professions that require a lot of training and experience.

Mostly, it requires practice. It's something that you can get competent at by merely repeating a physical process that doesn't require much thought (if any).

That's why a skilled trade is nothing like a profession.

Anyone that conflates programmers with bricklayers clearly hasn't done both of them.

The likely problem with the tools available to the finance department is the modern notion of ease of use. It's reduced to the ease of a total idiot to do something simple for the first time. This usually doesn't work well for the an experienced user working with a large data set or a task they do frequently.

"Ease of use" versus "automation".

Also, the relevant Unix tools have probably persisted while generations of other shinier and happier tools have come and gone.

If you understand coding at the most abstract level, then you understand how a computer works. You don't need to be able to "paint the Mona Lisa" or "build an engine", but you should at least have some grasp of how a key piece of technology works.

More than anything, it will give you some understanding of what a computer is not. That's as generally socially useful as any other "purely academic" subject we force students to learn about.

> Ubuntu does it with a minor

So Canonical is completely in the black now? Otherwise your blithering is completely pointless. Shuttleworth has sold out without really actually gaining anything.

Meanwhile, all of the real work is still being done by someone else and whatever money Canonical happens to be making isn't contributing to the overall bottom line.

That ignores the fact that RMS produced his license as a practical matter to quiet the cries of his contributors. Detractors like to paint RMS as some sort of communist/anarchist crusader but his license was really about preventing abuse and keeping order.

The CC licenses are just an extension of that.

Not everyone will play nice and you need a mechanism to deal with those people.

Anyone trying to tell you that Upstart is easier is simply lying to you.

Upstart is more complex by design.

...except that upstart doesn't meet that description.

It's more complex, therefore more subtle, therefore less repeatable and more difficult to debug. If I had a large number of machines of ANY sort, upstart is the LAST thing I would want to have to deal with.

Upstart is barely tolerable for desktop purposes.

You throw around "million" like its going to impress anyone. Many of the people around here already manage a volume of machines large enough to boggle the average human numeracy.

It's far too easy to shoot yourself in the foot with upstart. It is much more complicated. In it's efforts to solve a non-problem (namely making a machine boot faster) it tries to do things in parallel and creates a web of dependencies that can render your system unbootable.

It adds extra complexity for dubious gain.

It's the perfect example of why we shouldn't necessarily accept the advice of "helpful types" that think that things should be done the way that Microsoft does it or the way Apple does it.

Ah, but you can no longer even contemplate refusing a business card once it has been proferred. Think of all you have lost.

"Liberal" means lose, freely, without limitation, etc....

Yeah, given the way politics has gone over the last 30 years, that sounds about right.

(I Am Aware That This Was a Typo)

Money laudering in US politics hit the big time during the Watergate scandal. Details are never quite clear, but basically CREEP -- the Committee to Re-electe the President -- funnelled a then extraordinary $60 million or so through mexico to help fund Nixon's relelection campaign. Some of this money was used to finance dirity election tricks, rat-fucking, a famous letter which caused a governors campaign to implode I believe, and of course the watergate bugging itself and related operations.

Nixon won the 1972 election campaign.