This is a stupid idea, but not just because it's going to hit people who can't afford it hardest.

Already the government is beginning to notice that people are moving to more fuel-efficient cars - and tax revenues are down! To compensate, do you think they'd raise taxes? That would be unpopular with everyone, so they want to put GPS in everyone's car to tax your mileage. Now, let's think about this - why wouldn't they just use odometer readings? Now, the government can point to people and say "these few people are *stealing* from you!" and nobody notices that they can track anyone, anywhere, anytime they use a car. It's kulaks all over again, except for people who don't want to live in urban areas.

Noob. You forgot the Open Source Caveman. Lame.

If you have so little confidence in your crew, why are they still working for you?

Generally speaking, most professional men above the age of 20 that are managed properly will behave properly. The fact that you feel your crew will not behave properly speaks volumes about your management.

This little set of "exercises" you have planned seems like a witch hunt - something you do when you need a scapegoat. I'm glad I don't work with you.

I work for a company that just did a round of hiring for Support Engineers in the Valley. For this job, we require a decent working knowledge of Linux (or relevant *nix), basic scripting, and case handling skills. There were other, more specialized skills we also looked for, but competent Unix driver would suffice. We don't need hardened sysadmin, just people who aren't helpless when they see #. Sounds easy, right?

This was the first time I interviewed candidates. We went through piles of resumes to weed out candidates that weren't a good fit (no Unix/scripting/etc) and then started interviews.

I was honestly stunned at by the sheer number of lies on resumes. Candidates would advertise "5+ years of Linux experience" when in fact they had zero Unix skills. They couldn't name 10 Unix commands, let alone how they were used. Out of 300 candidates for 8 positions, we got 3 usable hires - out of Silicon Valley! The talent shortage wasn't due to salaries - we were offering decent money, even considering west coast cost-of-living. The candidates we got weren't even as talented as I would have preferred, but they were usable, and trainable.

I can't excuse the tactics immigration attorneys are using to stuff cheap H1B visas down our throats - we've seen too much of that already. I see the job postings with "Requires 20+ years of Linux experience," "15+ years of Java experience" - for 40K. H1B visas need to pay actual, prevailing wages, and they certainly don't now. That garbage needs to be stopped, now.

The talent shortage might be due to any number of external causes, but it certainly does exist.

Also: way to change the article summary without an "Edit" notation, guys. That's awesome work, /. The summary is still incoherent.

Atlassian makes code tracking and corporate-friendly wiki products. They're pretty nice, actually. It's pretty easy to write plugins that add flexible functionality to their products. I was and am a pretty big fan of Jira and Confluence, and they're pretty responsive to their customers. Their products are (last I checked) pretty reasonably priced, and integrate into Subversion, CVS, and other source control products pretty easily - including Git.

Last I checked, Git didn't really lend itself to project issue tracking - which is what Jira does. So if you must bitch about non-free Jira, you could at least make an *intelligent* article comparison to a open-source issue-tracker like Trac (another excellent product).

Alas, we're unlikely to see any intelligent comparisons from kdawson. The "lazy-shrug" dept is all too relevant here, but not for the reasons kdawson used it.

This isn't about money so much as it is about the government dipping a toe into the "regulate blogging" pool.

If you have to have a license to blog, what happens when you "lose" your license?

When I joined this site, all you could read was "First Post!", posts about some petrified chick with grits, and rants by open-source cavemen.