I'm not suggesting we could prevent e.g. Cisco from finding enough people to build this stuff. More that Cisco would steer clear of such projects if working on them would put a black mark on their corporate reputation that would make it harder for them, as a company, to hire good people.
"good people" is a relative term. If we're talking the kind of ultra a level hackers you deal with at Y Combinator, even as it stands, would any of them work for a big slow company like Cisco now? It already to some extent has that problem just by not being a small sexy startup.
I'm not willing to flat out say all the best hackers only want to do startups, but even assuming so, there are still lots of really good career engineers who also probably have no interest in working in a small sexy start up who Cisco can hire. Convincing them all that a nice company job is bad is going to be very hard.
And then there's the fact it's too late and this tech's already been built in america with american talent. They already found the people.
And often these big company products aren't built by the best people. Big government contracts like this have so much bureaucracy to choke the love out of many people. They aren't well written, they are slowly and expensively and they are ugly and horrible but they work. Does this sound like the working conditions that anyone we know would want to work in? Probably not.
Big government projects don't need A* hackers to get out the door sadly and never have.
In my experience most organizations, however mediocre, have some smart people who ended up there by various accidents.
But even in the unlikely event that e.g. Cisco is able to operate without any smart people, it's even more unlikely the people running it see themselves that way. So they would be worried by something that would make it hard to recruit good people.
Good programmers are in such demand right now that it's hard to imagine any company not worrying about something that would make it harder to hire. I think they'd worry especially about the difficulty of hiring recent grads. To undergrads all big companies look pretty similar; it would be a disaster if there was something that made your company look distinctively worse. It's not too hard to imagine a situation in which there was some sort of blacklist of the worst SOPA collaborators, and undergrads knew and avoided them.
That may even be too late. The military has its own programmers and I presume it trains some of them in house, which means it gets then possibly at 18 out of high school and trains them itself. They can be put to any use they are ordered to.
The government in general is probably rarely thought of as sexy and it still gets grads.
I guess I'm decrying this idea because I just do not see it as enough from both sides. I don't see you ever getting 100% of people on board with you and I don't see 100% of sources of software caring. This plan only works if 100% of everyone buys in, as long as one lone group produces the code, SOPA will go into effect. And then theres the fact the tools are already built and at least 10 years old.
This is simply not the solution and any time spent on it is a waste of what little effort we do have that could be vastly better spent else where.
Exactly where? I don't know, I just feel strongly this is not the solution.
As for at least a direction? Look to Larwence Lessig. He's been fighting copy right reform for ages. He was doing it in the 90s and it was getting old. Then after Eldred was lost he kind vanished from that scene. He's now back and he's stepped up a level and is working on Government reform. He realized after they lost that you can't fight in a system that's so broken, so he's now working on System reform instead. If you can spare 10 minutes check out his talk on the Daily show from Dec 13, it does a decent job of summarizing what he's fighting now. Then tell me this is how we can best spend our time :(
I supremely believe we need to step it up at least one level and fight something bigger, this is just a symptom.
Also I believe the world is a sadder harsher and more depressing place and not everyone clings to our ideals like we do. We need a system to take that into account. To be a little more strong handed than "All the hippie flower power new talent won't work for you" because I'm pretty sure there is still more than enough talent to go around to get these jobs done. :(
I'm not saying that the military has never done any programming by itself, because that clearly would be wrong, but the Army doesn't even have an MOS(Job Field) for it. I sincerely doubt that there is a mindless legion of Army trained programmers out there.
Also, the Army does get some grads, but not that many. There are a lot of people who join because they did a year or so in College and didn't like it. There are also a lot of people who didn't even graduate from high school. Bottom line, not many people join the Army under ideal circumstances. I personally would consider having just graduated with a CS degree to be ideal. Unfortunately I am one of the ones who didn't graduate from high school.
I think you're only talking about the enlisted. It's different for officers. A lot of memebers of the military went through a service academy or ROTC scholarship, and the military has been known to pay for furthering education for its officers as well. I know for a fact you can get a CS degree from West Point because my brother has done exactly that.
There are buildings, filled with military research engineers, where the median rank is major and which are a lot like regular office buildings where all the engineers wear ACUs and salute each other in the halls.
EDIT:
Just ot be clear, these folks mostly aren't mindless, but I doubt that they would, on the whole, have any moral objections to implementing something like SOPA. A lot of them would see this as a reasonable way to deal with the Wikileaks of the world.
You didn't graduate from high school and are in the US Army? It's my understanding that the US military today does not (or almost never) takes high school dropouts as enlistees. Even those with a GED or home-schooling would have a very difficult time unless they had college credits as well. So I would doubt your claim that there are "a lot" of people in the military who did not graduate from high school.
In 2002 you could get in with a GED. From my 9 years' experience, there is a disproportionate amount of people with a GED in the Army. It also helps when you test in the top 1% on the ASVAB.
Also, the military has been increasing their requirements lately. As the war draws to a close, and the economy remains in shambles, more people start thinking about joining the military. This means that the Army can be more selective about who they accept.
I can't believe in all your experience, you haven't met extremely smart hackers who are also utterly immoral. A situation like this just means they will be worth more money.
I'm sorry, but this post is riddled with so much nonsense it's silly. To think that the hackers of the work, the YCombinator hackers, are somehow the cream of the crop when compared to people at a company like Cisco is incredibly shied sighted.
> If we're talking the kind of ultra a level hackers you deal with at Y Combinator, even as it stands, would any of them work for a big slow company like Cisco now?
You do a huge disservice to the many excellent hackers that work at Cisco. (Even if you have issues with the company's management, they still have some impressive tech.) You don't need to be all over Hacker News to be brilliant.
Comments like these really highlight the myopic perspective that pervades the valley/startup scene. There is a much bigger world out there than you realize.
Yes sorry, I did go a bit far there, but it does seem pg may feel this way and I was trying to prove even within his belief framework this plan was flawed. I didn't mean to endorse such beliefs and I don't hold them. I've seen enough organizations to know that even big lumbering ones with questionable management can have some incredibly talented people, which just furthers the point :)
What is the stuff that needs building for SOPA to be effective? All the rights holders need to know is the name of the domain they want seized, and it gets removed from DNS. Pretty simple and sadly effective.
Edit: For people that think this is difficult - ICE is already doing it quite easily. They contact the company that controls the root domain. For .com, it is VeriSign.
DNS could be circumvented or supplanted. The real horror scenario is language mandating dropping addresses from routing tables making it into a treaty.
So they know the name that they want removed. Who do they tell? How do they tell them? Do they call on the phone? Do they enter it in a web form? Who wrote that web app? Who maintains the server that runs it? Who edits the DNS record to remove the name or writes the software that does so?
There are a number of intermediate steps between "knowing the name" and "the DNS record gets removed". DNS servers are not yet controlled telepathically, to my knowledge.
Have you seen all the ICE FBI domain seizures over the last year? That part is already done and has been running along taking hundreds of domains in its first year of operations
Yes, they seized 150 domains. I would not be surprised if they printed the list out and handed it over, and someone had a very boring afternoon of banning them. What happens when a counterfeiter registers 1000 domains? or 10000? or 100000? That's all besides the point. The point is that somebody who knows this is a bad idea had to be involved in making it happen. I want that person to stand up and refuse to do it. There are thousands of engineers working at the companies that are advocating this law. How long would Sony stay in business if its engineering staff up and quit?
and yet the likes of the nsa, fbi, etc have never lacked for good (in the technical sense) people to write surveillance software. heck, there are some pretty sophisticated spammers out there, and the spam industry is almost universally regarded as the cesspool of the tech world. if sopa does need to get implemented, i'm sure questionable small companies across the nation would flock to bid for the job.
We might be able to enlist the technical help of spammers like that. They may not like SOPA either? I wouldn't be surprised if all technical people, regardless of what they do as their job, are against SOPA and other things like it.
i'm pretty sure that the spammers are personally against spam too, as in they would not like to receive it. my point is that people are more than willing to implement something they would not like personally applied to them, for money, the challenge, job security or whatever.
The companies that are likely to a build a lot of this (large government contractors) already have trouble hiring quality developers, any engineering boycott is likely to get lost in the noise.
