Geeks On a Plane Proposed To Solve Global Tech Skills Crisis 303
judgecorp writes "British Airways' Ungrounded project proposes to shut 100 Silicon Valley 'gamechangers' in a trans-Atlantic plane and ask them to solve the world's tech skills crisis during a 12-hour flight to London. On arrival, the passengers will head into a conference where they will present their ideas to, among others, the UN. From the article: 'Ungrounded, as the project is called, will bring 100 “innovators” (Silicon Valley CEOs, thinkers and venture capitalists) on a private BA flight from San Francisco to London. During the flight, they will take part in a “global hack” run by Ideo, a design firm which has made mice for Microsoft and Apple.'"
Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:5, Informative)
it would put people that actually matter there, making it a high risk operation
only in the case of torvalds... the other two are just hacktivists
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few) as a hacker before making such an unfounded claim.
The fact that RMS also cares about people and not just about sating his own technological cravings is a positive point imho, whether I agree with him or not (and I often don't)
Re:no tech skills crisis (Score:3, Informative)
offer better conditions
Yes! We don't mean silly little perks like free snacks, we mean fair management. Something superficial like free snacks sours real fast when crony packed bad management chooses and guides projects poorly, falls for the bullshit artists' cons, hires incompetents instead of good job candidates over stupidly discriminatory reasons such as age, demands death marches in a desperate attempt to get back on the insane schedule they created and should have discussed more before committing to it, then successfully blames the mess on the super smart techies they wouldn't heed because, well, those guys are smart and should have known better.
If there was REALLY a serious shortage, they would...
Stop screwing over US college students with bad student loan deals? And actually offer free college education. Scholarships are something, but I think that college should be paid for in the same way high school is. Stop looking at college as some sort of privilege that students ought to pay for, when the truth is that we need all those educated people to run our democracies. Instead, we've seen the forces of anti-intellectualism and greed enjoy too much success at dismantling public spending on college, out of some moral notion that people should pay their way on this matter, and for the sake of balancing budgets that are not in crisis. We don't ask high school students to pay their way, why is college so different? We are amply repaid whenever we invest in education. Asking those who have nothing to pay their way, who can't be reasonably expected to have yet held a job that pays enough to afford college, is just plain greedy, and very unfair to those who come from poor families. I hear tuition has taken quite a jump in recent years.
Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:4, Informative)
Coast through Law School? The only people I've heard of coasting through Law School never made it all the way through or stopped coasting after the first quarter. You know how some movies show law students running on treadmills with their books in front of them so they can study at the same time? That actually happens in real life all the time.
Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:4, Informative)
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few) as a hacker before making such an unfounded claim.
The fact that RMS also cares about people and not just about sating his own technological cravings is a positive point imho, whether I agree with him or not (and I often don't)
RMS tends to undermine any "free software" argument by virtue of being a religious fundamentalist... Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of free software, but RMS seems to go to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion.
Example: he recommends using GPL instead of LGPL in situations where there is no reasonable competing library, in order to remove developers' freedom to use non-GPL licences for their software. Note - this isn't a consistent "everything should always be GPLed" view, he specifically says the choice of licence is down to whether or not you could use the GPL to remove other people's freedoms.
Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:4, Informative)
Like all "golden eras"... they never were.
I just got done reading a book on Edwin Land [wikipedia.org], and one of the things the book covered was how careful he was to get his stuff patented and protected as far back as the 1920's. One of the reasons why Polaroid had essentially a monopoly over instant cameras for so long (essentially from the late 40's to the late 80's) is that they patented the hell out of every detail. Or, one can go back even further - one of the reasons Electric Boat [wikipedia.org] took such an early and commanding lead in submarine construction is that back in the late 1800's-early 1900's they held several key patents on submarine design features. Even after the patents expired, the "grace period" they provided allowed EB to build up such a reservoir of capital and experience that by the 1920's they were virtually the last man standing.
The "golden era" of Silicon Valley wasn't so much about lack of patents, as it was the rapid growth of the electronics and computer industries during that time. They were very lucky in that there were several booms, mostly overlapping each other... but the boom times are gone now that industry is more-or-less mature. However, that hasn't stopped them or others from treating such boom times as $DIETY-given right.