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(2) How people expected a movie to be like a collection of short stories is beyond me. :-)

Get a copy of Harlan Ellison's screenplay.

And weep that it will never be made.

If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It documents and humanizes the effort at Data General, with one team working to soup up the existing architecture, and another team working to redefine the market with a revolutionary new design.

I'm sorry, but it's simply a truth that the current administration is far more secretive than most.

Try reading this book if you want reams and reams of proof.

And look up Executive Order 13233, to start. Whether or not these specific classification/declassification statistics are accurate, Bush's presidency is one of the most secretive, stonewalling, etc. etc. to date.

Do whatever you will to or for your body, your appearance, but do so at your own risk. Since tattoos are essentially permanent, think about long term goals, ramifications, etc., and what some "permanent" might mean for those goals.

The OP talks about some places being "cool" with tattoos, piercings, etc. That may be true, but that is only a snapshot of today's standards. During the dotcom heyday, with IT "specialists" (most really weren't, n'est-ce pas?) the standard for acceptable appearance was "anything goes". We need you, and we still love you even though your hair is filthy and goes to your waist, and you have tattoos.

But, I worked for a large corporation for 21 years... when I started, the dress code was un-stated, but tacitly enforced... you had to wear dress pants (absolutely no jeans), dress shirt, and at least a sports coat (yes, the tie was optional). Over time, as IT became the place to work and demand for workers was high I saw this dress code disappear and the office soon looked like the stretch pants, khaki cutoff shorts, flip-flops and sandals capital of the United States!

Fast forward to the dotcom crash... new management, and new dress codes, this time actually formally enforced. Yeah, things change.

So, think about it... tattoos go a long way... and regardless of right or wrong, some people react negatively to them, and regardless of whether you like that or not, it's there! (I know of a very close friend who lost out to a med-school... she found out later it was influenced by her tattoos.) (Also, I think this has even passed muster in court of law -- I think Starbucks actually has a dress code and appearance code that was challenged by someone who had a pierced something, and Starbucks prevailed.)

For those who need further prodding and convincing, read John Malloy's Dress for Success. Whether personally you like or don't like people's reactions to how you look at least Malloy will give you some empirical perspective to work with...

...

Now do you want to tell me that this picture is all rosy? Or are you willing to open your eyes and note that there may be issues here?

No, of course there are issues here. For example, effective indentured servitude is indeed an abuse of the H-1B system. I personally can't imagine how you think American visas are "designed for international co-operation"; anyone who's spent hours in the "non-US Citizens" line at a US airport (even pre-2001) knows better, but never mind this.

What I am trying to do is cast a different light on the issues. Let's step back, for a moment, from this tricky question of who's projecting onto whom, and consider some history.

In 1870, the Irish labor union "The Secret Order of the Knights of St Crispin" went on strike in a shoe factory in North Adams, MA. The factory owner, Calvin Sampson, responded by using the railroad to bring in a contingent of 75 Chinese strikebreakers from San Francisco. This was an amazingly effective tactic. The Knights made an abortive attempt to bring the Chinese into their union, but it failed, and Sampson's tactic became a model for other East coast entrepreneurs.

The history of race relations in the US can be viewed in these terms: exploitative bosses using race as a divide-and-conquer tactic. The writings of Ronald Takaki on this subject make a good read, and he's a Berkeley local :-)

Now, to me, the fundamental problem here is not that the Chinese were prepared to work for less than the Irish, but that the Irish labor union failed to build an effective dialogue with the Chinese. Indeed, they lacked a clear ideological underpinning for such a dialogue. Presumably (and now I freely admit I may be projecting) it was quite hard for them to separate the issue of "the Chinese should have the same rights as us" with the issue of "the Chinese shouldn't be taking our jobs".

I see the same confusion in the present dialogue. To use two examples from your post: The fact that local, qualified workers exist is not a huge issue to me. The fact that the foreign workers aren't getting the same rights as the local workers (such as free movement from employer to employer) is an issue.

I'm not accusing you of hating immigrants (honest), nor am I looking through rose-colored glasses and saying no problem exists. I'm simply suggesting that we need to disentangle these two issues, and reduce the emphasis on "American jobs". Otherwise, we'll end up like the Irish shoemakers of St Crispin, unable to talk to the Chinese.

Perhaps you feel exactly the same way. If so, I apologise for the redundancy.

As for your discussion of outsourcing, I'm unable to comment on the quality of coders from Bangalore. Otherwise, it just seems to me like the same thing on a global scale. Good question: how can we build a dialogue with these workers, to create global standards and rights? Bad question: how can we stop low-skilled hacks stealing our jobs? (And no, I'm not claiming you said either one of these; they're just illustrative.)

Viewed from this perspective of workers' rights, I think the idea that H-1Bs are "bad for the economy" is a bit of a distraction, though yes, you could probably phrase it in these terms. Oh, and by the way, regarding your opinion of higher ed: sounds pretty bad down your neck of the woods. Please, encourage your kids to come to Berkeley. I for one try not to turn out "degreed idiots". HTH

Sounds like the first step towards Peter F. Hamilton's "Neural Nanonics". http://www.twbookmark.com/books/48/0446610275/chap ter_excerpt14614.html

This, of course, is why most SF stories in space use a naval system when discussing the military. Star Trek does it that way, for example. And in most cases, when the ship is out of communication range then what the captain generally says is the law. Particularly in stories like Midshipman's Hope and its sequels.

It wasn't as hard to track down as I had thought and apparently my time sense just plain sucks. It was published in Asimov's pulp mag in the late 80's. Here's a link I,Robot :The illustrated Screenplay.

At times I experience depression, mania, visual hallucinations and paranoia. Less commonly I've heard voices and experienced dissociation, which is a sort of disconnection between reality and one's experience. Life seemed to be like a movie I was watching but not participating in. I also get anxiety at times - so bad I want to climb out of my own skin. I've had disturbed sleep for my entire life. One time I slept for twenty-nine hours, on another occasion I was awake for about a week, which made me hallucinate so heavily I could hardly see where I was going.

I've been in psychiatric hospitals five times, for periods ranging from overnight to six weeks.

I was first inspired to discuss my experiences with mental illnesses online when I read Lori Schiller's book The Quiet Room. Schiller was also diagnosed schizoaffective. She had it much worse than me, but managed to recover and had the courage to write a book about it.

Schizoaffective disorder is a spectrum of conditions. It's not completely clear whether it's a unique disorder or that one is unfortunate enough to have gotten both illnesses at once. I'm much more manic depressive than I am schizophrenic, with depression being my most prevalent symptom. Lori Schiller is much more towards the schizophrenic end, having hallucinated so badly at times she was hardly connected to the real world. I'm the bipolar type of schizoaffective, there is also a depressive type, where one does not experience mania.

Lori Schiller spent years in a number of mental hospitals. Hers was a very difficult case, and I think she, her family and her doctors had despaired of ever finding a treatment. What saved her was a new kind of medicine, the atypical antipsychotic clozapine.

The "classic antipsychotics" like haldol and thorazine work by reducing the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. The atypical antipsychotics do that too but also act on one of the variants of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

The classic antipsychotics were troublesome in that they didn't work all that well and had a lot of bad side affects like deep sedation, hand tremors, muscle cramps and a motion disorder called tardive dyskinesia that is a form of incurable brain damage, that causes repetetive, involuntary movements and can even put you in a wheelchair. If you see a mentally ill person who appears to be in a stupour, it's quite likely that it's caused by his medication rather than his illness.

One time I was in the hospital, profoundly manic and hallucinating, and was being given enough haldol to stun a horse. It caused a sort of seizure, where my jaws locked up so I couldn't speak, and all of my limbs curled up so I couldn't walk. I was carried to my room and injected in the butt with a large dose of cogentin, which is usually prescribed in a lower-dose tablet form to treat the motion disorder side effects of antipsychotics.

(As I lay on my bed slowly uncurling, with the cogentin causing this odd thing with the focus of my eyes, the nurse who injected me said: "You worry too much. You should go to Hawaii and get laid.")

Classic antipsychotics didn't help Schiller much, which is why she was entered in the drug trials for clozapine. Besides haldol, I've also taken prolixin and stellazine, and never found any of them particularly helpful.

Clozapine is more effective, but it has its own problems with side affects. It can kill you by damaging your blood, so you have to have regular blood tests. It is also very expensive, with treatment

I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay

Yet another Hollywood travesty. I know a lot of folks out there must be Asimov fans, so I thought you might want to know, a film called "I, Robot" is being made. But according to the news, it's NOT the Ellison treatment, and it's not the Asimov story, even adapted. The studio just bought the rights to the name.

The film, then called "Hardwired", apparently started out as yet another ho-hum robots-trying-to-take-over-the-world film. No big deal there. One more piece of screenplay-by-committee out of Hollywood isn't news.

In the last year, though, someone at Fox came up with a really great marketing idea. Buy the rights to just the name from a famous work of classic science fiction, use that, then make a series of crappy robots-try-to-take-over-the-world movies, but they would almost be guaranteed money-makers because fans would be expecting something good (to wit, the story attached to that title for the last few decades).

As other people have pointed out, Ellison's screenplay of the real I, Robot is worth reading. There's a free chapter at twbookmark.

Almost makes you want to stop the interview after you've shaken hands and say, "Now that you've already made your decision, how about handing me off to the next person?" and cite the quoted study. Though it would save everybody's time, maybe that shows too much creativity, .

Nope...still gotta go through the motions.

DT

What should you do with your life?

Go barefoot.
Get tipsy with friends.
Have lazy Sunday morning sex.
Enjoy your coffee.
Endulge yourself every once in awhile.
Realize you don't have to be rich.
Read Barbara Holland's Endangered Pleasures .

Enjoy it. That's what you should do with your life.

I, Robot was a collection of 9 short stories, not a novel. So which one, precisely, is getting the movie treatment? It'd also be interesting to know which character Smith will be playing. A robot? (ho hum... Robin Williams did it so-so in another Asimov adaptation) One of Donovan or Powell? (actually, this might be kinda fun. These two never really did get a fair shake living in Susan Calvin's shadow) Susan Calvin herself? (err... maybe not)

I should note that I, Robot was actually adapted into a screenplay by Asimov himself in collaboration with Harlan Ellison (and with all the teasing between these two you thought they'd never work together). Hopefully their script is being used for the film, otherwise I shudder to think how it might turn out.

The only situation in which book value means anything is when a company is going to be taken over and sold off in pieces, as happened a lot in the 80's. Even so it is not worth what you might want, for instance if AMD was in trouble there are very few possible buyers for their factories, and those buyers won't buy assets at book value, they will wait for AMD to get into worse trouble and try to get a bargain. Many investors have been burned when their holdings liquidated below book, and creditors were first in line for the proceedings.

When liquidation is not a current risk, how should you value a company? The economists answer is that the value of a company is the estimated current value of the future returns from owning it. Those returns come out of profits made. You shouldn't strongly care whether those profits are reinvested in the company (for bigger profits later), paid out in dividends (immediate cash) or spent in stock buybacks (raise the stock price to pay you back indirectly).

Given that the present is the best guide we have for the future, the best estimate of future profits are current profits (also called earnings). So the ratio between current earnings (aka profits) and the price of the stock is a pretty good guide to how over or under priced a company that you expect to continue along is. The importance of this ratio is justified by basic economics, whether or not the company is one which has huge fixed investments it needs that show up as a large book value (eg Intel) or whether it has low inventories and depends on rapid turnover with many small profits (eg Dell).

This ratio will, of course, mean less if you expect to see the company sold off in pieces, or if the company is growing and you expect larger future profits. But overall in the long term you tend to see most companies with P/E ratios in the range 15-20. Now let us look at the P/Es of the companies you listed:

AMD: N/A (no earnings!)
Dell: 38.33
Intel: 18.45

Which means that unless you expect AMD to turn around, it isn't worth much. Dell is historically overpriced, but by a much smaller factor than book value lead you to think, and Intel is at a historically reasonable price. Of course the current market is historically way overvalued - still. (You may wonder at how stocks could be overvalued after several years of being hammered. Well that was the size of the bubble preceeding.)

An excellent introdution to how this all works is How to Buy Stocks by Louis Engel.

Of course the wise technology investor will focus on 2 questions when it comes to chip companies. The first is who will survive to see the standard consumer PC face the 32-bit barrier. The second is whose 64-bit strategy is more likely to win in the market.

I don't know if AMD will survive. If they do, then their 64-bit strategy is much better. Intel will definitely survive but breaking backwards compatibility is a darned big iceberg for the Itanic. Transmeta is in serious trouble, but they have the best 64-bit strategy. (It is, "We can ship whatever wins!" They literally implemented AMD's instruction set before AMD could.)

This story suddenly reminded me of Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. In that, many people (especially starship crews) have 'neural nanonics' implanted. They act as kind of an onboard computer system for an individual, allowing them control over their nervous system, letting them run programs to enhance their vision and affect their state of mind (like drug-programs), and even leave 'to do' notes to themselves (how many times have you made a mental note about something, but forgot about it?). At first, I thought 'wow... that's really cyberpunk. Yawn'. But after reading through the whole trilogy, I was amazed at how well Hamilton integrated this potentially overused technology into the story, making it quite seamless and natural.

Plus, I think it would be totally awesome to be able to choose what kind of window manager I'd want overlayed on my eye's input.

Here is some more information on technology in the Night's Dawn trilogy, and a good description of nanonics are near the top.

This started long before George 'W' and represents a larger than Enron class failure of auditing and business ethics. The point of accounting is to report the accurate state of affairs of the organization, not some CEO/CFO's wishful thinking.

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are created and maintained by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (which interestingly doesn't come up with a Google search -- at least when I looked for it). Much of the current round of problems can be laid clearly in their lap.

The consensus in the auditing community is that the lesson was not learned with Enron and hence an even larger disaster will have to happen before this increasingly corrupt set of practices, auditors, and corporations is revised.

I'll also note that I am about as pro-business as it is possible to be, but when all of business stands on quicksand because of bogus financials there is the opportunity for just a little shaking causing the whole thing to liquify and slide into the morass.

-- Multics

I was never involved in the dot-com bust (except via the stock market) so I really "missed out" on an important lesson here. And I'm not convienced that this book would help me out.

• Don't accept a reduced salary in exchange for more stock options. You need to be able to pay your bills and you don't want to end up in the hole if/when the company goes under.
• When the shit hits the fan don't get stressed out. It's not your fault that the company is going down the tubes.
• Don't rock the boat too much. I've worked for a few companies that have a really bad idea for a product. Like the company that had a toolkit so you could easily create WAP enabled web sites. Problem was the sample "hello world" included with the kit was over 1000 lines of code. I tried numerous times to point out to management that a toolkit is supposed to make things simpler not more complex but they just didn't get it. Anyway, when you see management making a mistake a good employee will bring it to their attention but ultimately management has the right to screw things up.