ylabidi

Especially their SMP model. Shame they didn't pick traction.

And on the heels of the Sokal affair, came the Bogdanov Scandal, which at the time, some physicist thought was an elaborate pay-back prank and as it turned out, 2 Phd theses, one in Mathematics and the other in Physics made it through the system even if with the lowest grades (University of Nancy, France), where the content of both theses is utter nonsense, and yet peer pressure, and complascency made it so that something that fails even the lowest standards of consideration for a graduate research (in the context of Sokal's affair it would have been a masterful pay-back) was actually legitimate. Kind of a sobering story in these strange times.

The context from the Palestinian side is quite different and comparing the two is flawed for many reasons:

There was never a consensus on the Oslo accords from both sides. While the Israeli Labor pushed for the process, the Likud and the rest of right wingers worked thoroughly to undermine it. And on the Palestinian side, the OLP, essentially Fatah, went on to accept terms every other Palestinian faction refused to adhere to (demilitarized state, practically land-locked on a mozaic of patches that amounts to a fraction of the country's total area and surrounded everywhere with ever-increasing Israeli settlement projects.

That effectively weakened Fatah's position which essentially morphed into a caretaker on behalf of the Israelis for the day-to-day. And the resistance weight shifted from secular factions to the Hamas.

I don't think there's an issue with negotiating per se. The question here is what would you negotiate about, and what are your arguments for that negotiation? If you have demonstrated abilities that warrants a salary raise, I think in some places where employee performance is valued, you won't even have to ask about it. Otherwise, you better work out your line of reasoning before attempting such negotiation.

You can't learn advanced features in tutorials. Advanced features are usually solutions to complex problems in software design and development. And unless you're already an accomplished software developer, you'll have to start working on real-purpose programs to fully grasp, what an advanced is about and why it might be useful for you to make use of it in the task at hand.

1- Gregory Benford's "Galactic Center" series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center_Saga

2- Dan Simmons' "Hyperion Cantos" series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos