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Instead of optical bugs in homes, where a resonable and constitutional expectation of privacy exists, we should take Keith Henson's suggestion and put cameras on those with _no_ expectation of privacy--the police and elected officials! Maybe that would slow down the corruption.

For details of this "little brother is watching" turnabout on 'domestic spying' see these links:

http://www.csoonline.com/read/090402/edge_badge.ht ml
http://www.outlander.com/badgecamera/social_effect s.htm
http://www.holysmoke.org/kh/kh620.htm

Tyranny, by whatever name it calls itself, ust be fought by those in it's grip.

Now, if you want an example of critically analyzing the effects of immigration, look at this piece I did a while back.

There is a fundamental question here: should small, powerful interests be able to shape policy against the will of the public? I don't think that is a good idea-but that is the case with immigration policy in the US.

I would suggest you read De Tocqueville on the issue of slavery. You may want to also look the differences between elite and public opinion on the topic.

The federal government already auctions off spectrum in some cases-it used to just give it away. I see no reason why my taxes or yours should be higher so some fatcat can get cheap spectrum. Likewise, I see no reason why companies shouldn't pay the fair market value for the guest worker visas they want(and assume whatever risks are associated with having those workers in the US).

Secondly, there are no subsidies involved.

I suggest you take that up with Nobel prize winner economist Milton Friedman. Who told you it wasn't a subsidy?

According to the Labor Department, a company hiring an H1B is required to 1) determine the prevailing wage for the position, based on collective bargaining agreeements, government statistics, independent audit, etc; 2) determine the actual wage for the position, based on what the company pays people in the same or similar capacities with similar qualifications and experience; and 3) pay the H1B the higher of the two rates.

If you believe those regulations are enforcable-and that H-1b presence hasn't affected labor markets in the US, you are an absolute fool.

These foreign workers are already putting more tax money into the system than they're taking out.

Actually, recent immigration is associated with long term
economic deterioration.

As for your last point, H1Bs are not immigrants -- they are temporary workers.

The big reason for obtaining the H-1b visa is that it confers a 50% chance at a green card. If it weren't for that, the pool of workers interested in these programs would be much different-and smaller-and they would require fundamentally different compensation.

Once here they can pursue immigration, but that is not a given. Even if they do immigrate, we are talking about people who are highly educated, highly skilled, gainfully employed, productive and law-abiding members of our society -- exactly what every country in the world would like its citizens to be.

When I was at HP, a coworker that was attempting to get funding for a project was told by someone purporting to represent upper management that he could get him funding for his project on the condition that he agree only to hire H-1b workers from India. That simply isn't an example of "law abiding" citizens with whom I want to share a country.

I don't think
that "dilutes the value" of anyone's citizenship. Quite the contrary, I think it enriches our culture and makes all of us a little better off.

If you highly value local diversity, you may be better off. However, over 82 percent of the American public opposed expansion of that program. It took hundreds of missions of corporate donations to buy congress and override popular will. You are welcome to identify with that kind of process if you wish-but you should be aware of what you are doing here. I _can_ believe that 18% of the American public do have a value system by which they benefited here-but I'm clearly not in the 18%.

Recent immigration to the US is statistically correlated with economic deterioration.

You might have an argument if the folks affected were _selling_ their citizenship rights to people that can more profitably using them. In this case though, the companies in question get to mint new immigration rights at no cost to the companies in question.

This BTW is part of the reason why recent immigration is associated with long term economic decline. What is your evidence that immigration "helps" the people that are in an area already? I can think of many counter examples-I don't see evidence that Native Americans were particularly helped by European immigration--that is just wishful thinking.

Actually the first monetary contribution ever sent to Linus for Linux was from a guy who now lives near Portland and /. carried an article he wrote recently: The Jobs Crunch.

I suggest you check out this piece. States with large levels of immigration in the US generally have deteriorating economic stability(as measured by their bond ratings).

The US needs to create an economy that works for its citizens _and_ to cease borrowing much needed capital in the world markets that should instead by used for global economic development.

There is a live Condorcet Presidential Poll. Source code is available too.

There is a live Condorcet Presidential Poll. Source code is available too.

What bother's me here is it seems like the Government is trying to pick technological winners using corporate welfare instead of fostering real competition among US companies. As far as national security goes, I think there is a lot bigger fish to fry than the loss of the supercomputer business. The entire US technological sector is a mess-and much sensitive data is now completely outside the regulation and protection of the US government(either outsourced or under control of guest workers).

I agree. Here is something I wrote on this topic a couple years ago.

I'm a SQL Server DBA and Python/Perl/Postgresql developer.

My sense is that it would be possible to extend Postgres to have a mode fully compatible with Oracle and/or Microsoft SQL Server. What this might mean is having SQL interpreters fully compatible with the quirks of Oracle and SQL Server-identical system tables available and identical libraries. I think Oracle will be the first target here because Oracle licensing fees are much higher than SQL Server--and parts of SQL Server are harder to re-engineer(i.e. DTS and some of the scheduling stuff).

Databases are a great Open Source target because scripts are open _and_ customers frequently control their data file format.

Ultimately, I think we'll need smarter spam filters. That isn't too different than what we were doing at HNC. IF the letter is from someone you don't know and talks about Human growth hormone or altering of bodily parts, it is a pretty good bet it is spam. It is really just a matter of good pattern recognition.

Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award

I hereby, and until notice to the contrary, endow the Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award. This prize will consist of 3 ounces of gold or the monetary equivalent going to the next amateur team launching a vehicle to a height in excess of 200 kilometers, which in my opinion qualifies as an open source entry. These funds will be disbursed at my sole discretion.

For a an entry to qualify as "Open Source", for purposes of this prize, the team launching a rocket must make available sufficient information in machine readable form via the web to create and launch a rocket the same as the entry which travelled to 200 kilometers. The entry description should also include a description of safety procedures used to launch the rocket in question. The entry description considered must be public domain or available under a license that qualifies as Open Source according to the Open Source Consortium. The manufacture of the rocketry entry should be accomplished by tools and materials that are readily available to the general public from multiple sources or are themselves Open Source.

My primary intent here is to create an award that encourages free distribution of detailed rocketry designs that can be refined by a number of individuals similar to the way Linux kernel development has harness the energies of a large team throughout the world. It is not my intent to encourage entrants to relinquish their rights to patent protection by publishing their inventions (though the act of publishing may have legal ramifications). Candidates for the Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award may be relinquishing substantial rights to maintain intellectual property via trade secrets (and may be relinquishing foreign patent rights if they haven't filed by the date they publish on the web). Entry descriptions may be "dual licensed" (i.e. the entry description may be available on the web via the GPL, but the entrant might still charge corporations for whom the GPL is not an acceptable license a fee to get this same material under some other license which might not be an Open Source license). I will be loose in my interpretation of what "Open Source" means for purposes of this prize (though I may endow a future prize with a tighter definition).

There are real difficulties in applying the Open Source model to amateur rocketry. I would expect that entries to this contest might be using rather different sets of tools and materials--many of which will have proprietary components. It is my hope here to provide some basic designs that will be ready when techniques like those described in Marshall Burns's "Automated Fabrication" or Eric Drexler's "Nanosystems", make creation of small runs of complex machines relatively inexpensive. Still, gcc didn't need the linux kernel and BSD kernels to be ready and useful. Nor did linux need availability of an Open Source design for a microprocesser to be manufactured in quantity to be useful. I expect that over time, we'll see standards emerge for Open Source rocketry designs. I intend to revise this award description to reflect these standards as they emerge (for example, I can imagine that we might eventually want to specify that some specific Open Source tool describe the design and assembly of a rocket when we can assume that the lion's share of rocketry amateurs have access to tools compliant with specific standards). I will give folks advance warning of any such changes so that this minimally affects work that is in progress.

Background

My real goal in supporting space development is recreating the pos

The first key to decent security is building a community in which people have at least a degree of trust and respect for their leadership. If you have that, good security practices can go a long way. If management is playing a negative sum game with their staff and the larger community, sooner or later someone more devious and less honest is going to show up and take over that game. Those that live by the sword die by the arrow.

It is one thing to outsource unskilled work-it is quite another to outsource the "command and control" infrastructure of a company-companies that do that have effectively reliquished their autonomy.

Sun has lost over 95% of its shareholders' non-cash equity the last 3 years. More importantly, McNealy has lost serious credibility. I worked at Sun as a contractor for 2 years 10 years ago. Sun had a collection of really bright people, but the decision making process was flawed even then. McNealy had aspect of a class act. Unlike many Silicon Valley execs, he actually worked to be visible. The basic problem here though: the old guard that made these guys has largely been booted or is horribly demoralized(at least the Sun employees/alumni I've kept in touch with). Furthermore, Sun has no process for spotting the folks that are right even when it means being unpopular-which in a highly competitive business is just plain deadly. McNealy just hasn't been able to resist surrounding himself with a bunch of yes-men.

Agreed. That is the cheaper (and probably more sensible in the first place) alternative. I was saying that if we have to have e-voting, then they must provide a paper backup. But you're right, it would be easier and cheaper to just have scantron-able paper in the first place. You can use them like paper ballots for manual recounts, or you can run them through the machine to get done faster.

The problem is this assumes we keep the current single vote plurality system. I'm an advocate of voting reform (Condorcet's method, baby!) and I don't know if "fill in the bubble" would work there. Needing X bubbles besides each of the X candidates' names so that you can rank them all would be a little tedious. But if handwriting recognition is good enough to get most checks read correctly, it ought to be good enough here.

Agreed. That is the cheaper (and probably more sensible in the first place) alternative. I was saying that if we have to have e-voting, then they must provide a paper backup. But you're right, it would be easier and cheaper to just have scantron-able paper in the first place. You can use them like paper ballots for manual recounts, or you can run them through the machine to get done faster.

The problem is this assumes we keep the current single vote plurality system. I'm an advocate of voting reform (Condorcet's method, baby!) and I don't know if "fill in the bubble" would work there. Needing X bubbles besides each of the X candidates' names so that you can rank them all would be a little tedious. But if handwriting recognition is good enough to get most checks read correctly, it ought to be good enough here.

The problem that Sun has aways had is the "reality distortion field". The Sun marketing department seriously thought that they were going to eat Microsoft's lunch early on--even though the Sun management just didn't get what GUI intensive systems(i.e. Macintosh and Windows) were about. I wrote one of the early reports for the directors to explain what stuff like Hypercard and Visual Basic were going to do--they just didn't get it. Another big problem Sun had was when Linux started to get developed. The Sun management just didn't get how Linux would impact the market.

Sun was in serious trouble years ago. The H-1b exansion at Sun was largely a means of covering up the problems that Sun management had created for themselves over time. The poor track record of Sun management had created a situation where Sun just couldn't hire the best younger American talent--Sun management rolled the dice bringing in the H-1b's and guess what, they rolled snake-eyes. The H-1b experiment at Sun has gone on 5 years--it just didn't help the company. Now what it _may_ have done is enabled the large shareholders from 5 years ago to sell their stock and leave someone else holding the bag.

I see no particular reason why folks like Scott McNealy, Vinod Kholsa and John Doehr(the CEO, co-cofounder and venture capitalist the funded Sun) should have any serious credibility with anyone. What is the real track record of these guys? What really happened to the folks that listened to these folks(investing their money and/or careers)? The real lasting legacy that I can see from this whole period is that Vinod Kholsa helped get a lot of his co-nationals green cards.

The Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award (3 oz of gold for reaching 200km.)

and

John Carmack's High Performance Propulsion Award, $1000 for designing a rocket motor better than a certain performance level
(Seems to be down, at the moment, try the Wayback Machine)

/August.

Why is this all significant? Well, major portions of the world have religious sentiments that date after these cities existed. Islam tends to discourage too much emphasis on history before Islam arose. Similarly, the mindset of Christianity has largely been that nothing important happened until about 6000 years ago.

These findings are very graphic evidence that humanity has a history much older than either Islam or Christianity. Even the academic orthodoxy today tends to be that everything of value came of of the middle east-this now appears to be that everything important came out of the middle east. This appears to be far from true.

Randall Burns

I tend to see the current power elites as more determined position to protect their interests from encroachment than were the earlier elites, although I have over-estimated the effectiveness of that determination before, so Randy's prediction may end up proving correct.

Interesting times...

The case is air-tight:

JavaScript is the fastest growing programming language (see table below).

The product of JavaScript's market share times its growth rate is the highest of any language. (see table below).

JavaScript source code is inherently "open" for "Everyone" browsing the web. "Everyone" can learn by example at will.

JavaScript is the most widely deployed interpreter. "Everyone" has a web browser.

JavaScript's dynamic features, including functions as first class objects with slots, put it in the same level of power as systems like CLOS. CLOS is, arguably, at least as powerful and general as Python. The fact that an appropriate, CLOS-like framework has not yet been widely deployed for JavaScript merely indicates developers are too distracted by immediate profit opportunities to think straight about JavaScript. This is a temporary stupor.

Back sometime in June, Randall J. Burns took Ted Shieh's figures, later reported by Larry Wall and computed growth rate in demand. We get an interesting picture:

C++.....Java......VB....Cobol....Perl...JavaScript ...Smalltalk...Python
-14%....+17%......-4%...-43%.....+18....+51%...... ...+1%.........+23%

When multiplied by the approximate market share:
C++.....Java......VB....Cobol....Perl...JavaScript ...Smalltalk...Python
40%.....25%.......10%...3 1/2%...+10....+10%.........1%..........1/2%

We get an interesting future dominance metric:
C++.....Java......VB....Cobol....Perl...JavaScript ...Smalltalk...Python
-560....340.......-40...-111.....180....510....... ...1...........12