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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Is there a shortage of bright minds flocking to work for the "financial services industry" now that they've got a distinctly bad reputation?

Psychopaths, sociopaths, and hackers.

I could draw you a venn diagram if you like.

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.

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