I'd say that if this is true, and given the bandwidth-intensive nature of pr0n, it may well be, then the DOJ shouldn't have a problem, either.
The voters have decided, with their dollars, and with their observed behavior, that pr0n is A Good Thing.
Of course, given that in John Ashcroft's last personal experience with the political process, he got beaten by a corpse, democracy and the will of the people may not mean a whole lot to him.
provide an opportunity to educate Congress by showing them that the needs of both professions with respect the DMCA (and other horrors) are basically very similar at heart.
You are completely full of shit.
Congress doesn't want to be educated, it wants to be paid off.
Didn't you see that list of billion dollar companies above that lobbied Congress? Without serious campaign contributions, Congress would have paid no more attention to them than they will to you. Or in your case, should, you're an idiot.
The geek community has been putting up dog and pony shows about various issues for the last generation. In this case, I'll even add the consumer electronics industry to the community, because while they're willing to use their lobbying force to get what matters to them, unlimited H1B/L1 , R&D tax credit, capital gains taxes, and now, no outsourcing monitoring or restrictions... with respect to laws which might restrict the use of their products to the point where consumers simply won't buy them, they send witnesses to Congressional hearings.
So the aftermarket auto parts industry gets law that will get us access to "proprietary" auto industry code, and we get the DMCA and worse.
The "geek community" should have gotten a serious PAC run by professional lobbyists (not that bullshit "geekPAC" joke) to represent us years ago and we should have been willing to contribute or to vote.
Unfortunately, nobody who has made enough money out of our scene to provide the up-front money required to get such a thing going (estimate - $1-2M) thought it was worth it in time for the 2004 election cycle. So when they discover that the electronic hardware designs or software suddenly has to be approved by some Federal committee full of representatives of the entertainment cartel, feel free to laugh at them.
Instead of organizing effectively, we've been lost in Libertarian fantasy about ignoring the political process or the even more dangerous delusions taught in civics classes about the process as it ought to be and that if we could only talk to Congressmen, we could convince them of the logic of our positions and get them to vote our way.
Even redneck gun owners were smarter about this than we were, and they got the NRA, and got to keep their guns. Those senior citizens who "aren't smart enough to use the computers and software we make for them"? They have the AARP.
Both gun owners and senior citizens get respect on Capitol Hill.
We are getting what we deserve. When we are willing to raise real money to affect the political process, we will deserve better and we will get it.
A few days ago, a feature was run Renewable Energy From Algae?describing an algae-based biomass production technology easily scalable to provide a replacement for imported oil.
To replace imported oil:
$183B capital investment
$50B/year operating cost
$2.12/gallon diesel at the pumps.
This is based on DOE work in the field successfully completed in the 1990s.
I was rather astounded to find that nobody remembered that a large part of the answer to replacing fossil fuel in a CO2-neutral way (the CO2 coming from burning biofuel was captured from the atmosphere) has already been found, and was even posted here. I mean, how much easier does it get?
There was another article here about a launch system that should be capable of getting stuff to LEO for $250 a ton. At that price, solar power satellites look very, very reasonable in cost.
Biomass can buy us time to get solar power satellites up.
We don't need nuclear to solve the problem. The alternatives look easier, cheaper, and faster to implement. What's not to like?
Bottom lines from the report - replace imported oil will require:
$183B capital investment
$50B/year operating cost
$2.12/gallon diesel at the pumps.
about 10K square miles
I'm just starting to get into the DOE report, but I've already gotten far enough to know that the technology demo project was mothballed because at the time, nobody saw a market for $2/gallon diesel oil and there didn't appear to be a substantial possibility of real disruption in the Middle East oil flow.
CO2-neutral, the CO2 burned as oil will have been previously extracted from the atmosphere.
Algae is about as efficient a way to convert CO2, sunlight, and nutrients to something which can be processed to oil fuel as is imaginable.
It appears to be "good enough", though I prefer powersats for central station power as a coal replacement. The basic problem with that kind of project has been cost of transport to orbit.
The Space Elevator may already be obsolete (follow the links)... estimated $250/ton to LEO. No, $250 is NOT a typo, the solution is astounding, and the relevant experts appear to agree that this isn't snake oil. The rest we know how to do. Solar cells at current efficiency levels are "good enough". Microwave transmission is "good enough".
If we as a society have the will (aka willingness to spend money), the solutions to the energy and a few related problems just got dumped into our laps.
You're well behind the times. You've been looking so deeply into legal theory that you haven't been looking at reality around you.
Look up Christian Reconstructionism. Look up Rushdoony. Google is your friend. Christian Reconstrutionism is the core of the mass movement you couldn't find. The exoteric term for this is "the Religious Right". I presume you've heard of them? How far have they gotten in the past 20 years?
"All these atrocities continue in spite of the fact that we now have the 'right' people in places of power. Indeed, the occupant of the White House is a professing Christian. The U.S. Attorney General is believed to be a devout Christian. 'Conservatives' control both Houses of Congress, and Republican presidents appointed seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. Christian activists placed the right party in power, but are we now witnessing the return to moral and constitutional government that we have demanded for so long?"
This is from Christian Exodus explaining why they want to take over a state because they've effectively taken over the national government and the New Millenium hasn't started yet, i.e. the nation hasn't converted to an Old Testament legal regime comparable to sharia law quite yet. Their problem of their political leadership is that little things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been standing in their way, though the work of dismantling is in progress. In the above, "conservative" and Christian mean "Religious Right"... those are the only people the Christian Reconstructionists recognize as real fellow Christians. Every one of the last several Presidents, Democratic and Republican have been "professing Christians". But except for George W Bush, not their kind of Christian.
For more information:
Here are some interesting quotes that explain why some people are very concerned. You wouldn't think that responsible citizens would seriously discuss the return of slavery, would you? Don't bother with the TOC at the top, just scroll down the page.
This is the most stupid post I've read in weeks, and I have to reply.
Do you really think posting something orders of magnitudes dumber is good for your public reputation?
First, I don't know where you have found your statistics,
Probably a UK government site. Your crime stats are easily available even to those on this side of the pond. Embarrassing, aren't they?
but if you ask anyone in the streets (take someone in Sweden or Italy if you want them to be neutral), they will tell you that they are much more afraid of violence in countries that allow people to carry weapons around (e.g. the USA) than in countries where it is not allowed, no matter what the Official Crime Rate is.
In other words, you're telling me that EU citizens prefer to feel safe than to be safe and that they are under the delusion that feeling safe is more important. Well, a similar rationale applies to the US PATRIOT Act, which is also a stupid idea.
But don't come and tell us that deadly weapons such as guns make for a more secure, less violent city !
What do you have against the facts? The rational person changes his opinion to fit them.
In the US, where concealed firearm permits are freely issued to citizen, our "Official Crime Rate" drops consistently. This information isn't secret, if you're bright enough, google is your friend. Of course, you could rationalize this by telling us the Alien Grays in Area 51 cooked the numbers, but I'm sure you can come up with a more creative tinfoil hat explanation to avoid the common-sense way to account for these numbers.
Verifiable facts tell us that more deadly weapons in the hands of honest citizens results in safer streets. Are you telling us that there are no honest citizens in the whole of Europe? Since I know some, I would differ with you.
Personally, I think your perceptions are based on your hanging out at the bottom of the intellectual food chain whereever you go.
No argument from here, but the first place where biodiesel can make a big difference is replacing what our trucking fleet burns. This doesn't require replacing anything at all, and buys time for private individuals to replace their gasoline burners with diesels.
How much to replace all our gasoline internal combustion vehicles with diesel?
However, I don't know that the oil produced by algae can't be turned into gasoline in any case, with some loss in efficiency which would be reflected in higher energy cost at the pump.
If this stuff can be turned into gasoline cost-effectively, it's time to start building these energy farms NOW.
The $200B that's gone into the War on Iraq could have been spent instead on biomass projects, and we could stop dealing with the Middle East.
Given 1% of NASA's budget, I think their timeframe to orbit could be compressed a hell of a lot.
This suggests that it's time for NASA to get out of most of the space transportation business and fund this instead.
Given that money spent on a transportation and platform system that is almost a slam-dunk (a big-D sort of R&D project), NASA should then refocus its priorities onto getting the "proof of concept" demo for the Space Power Satellite system together and the lunar industrial facilities which will make a SPS network financially possible. (though the blimps may change the financial basis for the project enough that a moon factory for solar cells might be unnecessary)
From what I've seen here, what's left to do on the project is development, the proof of concept is already done.
If enough money is put into the project, we can start space industrialization in a year or three, we don't have to wait until we find out if the space elevator is actually possible, we don't have to build giant rail guns for cheap space launches if the Elevator is unworkable.
It's time to start work on actually building Space Power Satellites at the "proof of concept" level. For more info, click here
for more info on peak oil and what to do about it
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Remember how goods and food get to wherever you go via public transit to buy it? If fossil fuel gets more expensive, this will be reflected in the price of everything you buy.
It was a good idea back in the 1980s, too, when a team I'd put together was using a private conference on a BBS for project management issues as well. Though we didn't have call it a *log.
The main difference having the Net makes is that we can log onto local ISPs instead of having to dial up.
Who's going to pay for innovation in the future in the USA?
Yes, a single individual or small group can do remarkable things with respect to software with only an investment in labor. Innovation implemented in hardware, electronic or otherwise takes capital investment.
DARPA's funding remarkable things as usual, but they are increasingly defense-oriented, not basic technology research. You know any civilian-sector apps for a gun that'll spit out 1M rounds/min?
The VC community basically is a herd which will only fund whatever matches the new, hot buzzwords.
The private sector is in general only funding short-term applications-oriented research, and even the projects they're helping fund in academia are increasingly the same kind of research.
The answer I keep coming up with respect to "who" is, nobody. I'm not expecting to see a whole lot of real invention in the US (inventions, yes... but we all know what's wrong with the patent system) in the next generation. Perhaps other countries will be smarter about this.
IMHO, this guy is whistling in the dark. His axe to grind is obvious, he wants people to continue to pay tuition for engineering degrees.
But what good does it have to add new, innovative engineers to the labor pool if there are no jobs for them and VCs aren't interested in funding *real* innovation that doesn't match the latest set of new/hot buzzwords?
The other point is that yes, we have real creative artists in the engineering field. However, to develop them to the point where their skills can produce new inventions of the sort which will benefit us all, these people need starting points for their career paths, i.e. entry level programming, electrical engineering, etc.
These are exactly the jobs that are going overseas.
What do you wish to invest your money in:
+ A quality, knowledgable IT staff who tailor solutions for your company and receive a decent salary and benefits in return
or...
+ Bill Gates bank account
The problem is with the growth of worms and patches and other measures to deal with them, it's getting to the point where even running Windoze requires a competent IT staff AND one gets to put money into Bill Gates's bank account.
Again, the already-debunked "sampling" argument. This anecdote, raised by all piracy apologists, begins with "In my experience" and then outlines some instance in which someone actually went and bought the CD after hearing a copy of it.
The argument has been completely substantiated in repeated studies, the ones the RIAA didn't pay for. The only studies that contradict this are the ones the content cartel bought, the same way MS buys FUD studies.
P2P promotes sales. It does NOT displace them unless the product is such crap that the normal fan base for a musician won't buy it. That's why the industry uses Big Champagne for marketing purposes. Google is your friend, look up the studies yourself. You've wasted enough of our time.
But if you post AC, how can you prove you wrote those words for the benefit of whoever paid you to write them? Yes, you goofed. Posting astroturf is one thing. Posting RIAA propaganda and not getting paid for it is fucking stupid.
OK, we know which side you're on. Whether you actually believe the crap you're speaking or you've got a sponsor that makes your words astroturf is known only to you and your sponsor. All I can say is that if you're getting paid, the PR firm should demand its money back. You're whining, not arguing.
We also know that by and large, "piracy" translates to end users redistributing reduced quality versions of the real products on their own dimes to the profit of the record and film industries. There are a long list of reasons why the Hollywood content cartel do not like letting the free market determine how they get marketed instead of giving them sole discretion as to what the public finds out about a product before release, the main one is that it can make crap movies or records DOA befcre they hit the street as well as take good ones to number 1. However, "protecing businesses from incompetence" is not a proper use of taxpayer funds.
However, the real question here is WHY should the Feds spend our money to assist copyright holders take legal action against end users. Traditionally, that is the copyright holder's problem, which the copyright owner asserts in exchange for the ability to derive income from the copyright.
If you wish to donate YOUR money to the RIAA and MPAA for attacking end users, your privilege. Don't bring the rest of us in to this.
People are arguing about the best way to explore space in the interests of increasing scientific knowledge. Pure exploration is a high investment for an unknown payoff.
The Solar System contains virtually unlimited resources in terms of energy materials with respect to the human population.
Why aren't people arguing about the best way to exploit these resources?
If America is going to be a dominant technological power with jobs for science and technology graduates, we have to make new science and new technology. This means somebody has to pay for it... and that's us. This is where our public sector R&D needs to be going.
If we have a human industrial presence in space, the science will follow, and far more of it than anyone is discussing doing today, either robotically or using human explorers. If a university can get a research project done by sending a grad student to a space station or moonbase lab via commercial space flight, its going to be a lot cheaper to do this than to build a satellite payload and find a launch platform. Plus, if something unexpected happens, whether it's a design error or something interesting, it's a lot easier for a human to reconfigure his planning than to reconfigure the hardware configuration of a satellite already in orbit.
Low hanging fruit: A profitable space power satellite network is probably achievable using more or less current technology based on Russian satellite launch prices. However, the time to profit would be a lot shorter with a Space Elevator or earth-to-orbit railgun as a launch platform.
I've never owned a computer with an Intel processor. Even my first 286 boxes were AMD. It's the only thing that makes me feel better about reading this.
As for Barrett... the obvious question is... if he wants to export every professional-level job in his organization to the Third World, why would the quality of US education matter to him? Another obvious point is... if the quality of education in the US is so bad, why are so many foriegners sending their kids TO the USA for a college education? Not to say that our public schools don't suck, but our college grads seem to be as well educated as everyone else's. Our college system might be more efficient if we didn't have so many kids requiring bonehead English as freshmen, but I don't see a lot of urgency with respect to improving primary and secondary education unless we have some idea as to where these kids will be working when they get out of college.
Of course, his real goal here is to persuade kids to stay in school, run up tens of thousands of dollars in debt so Intel and other US companies can cherry-pick the top 5% and the rest can go to work at Walmart or McDonald's starting their adult lives tens of thousands of dollars in debt, even worse off than the people around them who didn't "try to make it through the system".
What he is whining about is:
1) Barrett isn't complaining about the lack of trained professionals, he is complaining about the lack of professionals willing to work for minimum wage.
2) It is unlikely that he actually believes what he's saying. The cognitive dissonance between his saying "get all the education you can" and "I don't have a solution to that" is a bit too obvious. What he's trying to protect is not Intel, but his ability to pick up a few more quarters worth of vested stock options and their market price before he retires and sells out. If America is no longer a fit place to live even for the wealthy by the time he's done, there are other countries. If Intel is screwed long-term due to Barrett's use of Intel resources to train foriegn competitors, he will have no reason to care, he'll have made his pile. If regulation hits the outshoring marketplace, even if the regulation only eliminates US subsidies to outsourcing, investment analysts will be looking a lot harder at Intel's financials, and using offshoring as an excuse to cook the books to show higher quarterly profit won't work anymore. This would interfere with his pursuit of wealth at the expense of everybody else.
With respect to competitive marketplaces, Intel has been #1 for so long despite generally inferior products (see also Microsloth) that Barrett won't know a competitive marketplace until it bites him in the ass.
As for comparing him with Benedict Arnold. . . it isn't fair, he and his generation of CEOs appear to be trying to do even more damage to America long-term than Benedict ever dreamed of. If Benedict Arnold's treason had worked out, a few thousand Americans might have wound up "up against the wall". But people would still have been able to farm land and make things, they would merely have been paying taxes to England without representation for a couple or three more generations.
The long-term result of offshoring as it's being practiced now will inevitably result in Americans as a group moving way down the economic ladder. Want to see hunger and poverty in America and a generation of college educated kids with no jobs available above the warm body level? Just wait.
What's the alternative? Other than changing law and regulations that favor offshoring, massive public sector investment in basic science and technology R&D to create the products and services of tomorrow.
"Free" should NOT mean "this piece of shit sucks so badly that nobody in his right mind would pay for it". Is that what non-programmers who want to go Open Source on the desktop are supposed to be eagerly waiting for?
The GIMP project needs to get some actual graphics specialists involved with the project, by which I mean people who do this for a living.
It sucks that there is nothing in Open Source or even that will run on Linux that is comparable with Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, or Corel Draw for vector graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
The voters have decided, with their dollars, and with their observed behavior, that pr0n is A Good Thing.
Of course, given that in John Ashcroft's last personal experience with the political process, he got beaten by a corpse, democracy and the will of the people may not mean a whole lot to him.
You are completely full of shit.
Congress doesn't want to be educated, it wants to be paid off.
Didn't you see that list of billion dollar companies above that lobbied Congress? Without serious campaign contributions, Congress would have paid no more attention to them than they will to you. Or in your case, should, you're an idiot.
The geek community has been putting up dog and pony shows about various issues for the last generation. In this case, I'll even add the consumer electronics industry to the community, because while they're willing to use their lobbying force to get what matters to them, unlimited H1B/L1 , R&D tax credit, capital gains taxes, and now, no outsourcing monitoring or restrictions... with respect to laws which might restrict the use of their products to the point where consumers simply won't buy them, they send witnesses to Congressional hearings.
So the aftermarket auto parts industry gets law that will get us access to "proprietary" auto industry code, and we get the DMCA and worse.
The "geek community" should have gotten a serious PAC run by professional lobbyists (not that bullshit "geekPAC" joke) to represent us years ago and we should have been willing to contribute or to vote.
Unfortunately, nobody who has made enough money out of our scene to provide the up-front money required to get such a thing going (estimate - $1-2M) thought it was worth it in time for the 2004 election cycle. So when they discover that the electronic hardware designs or software suddenly has to be approved by some Federal committee full of representatives of the entertainment cartel, feel free to laugh at them.
Instead of organizing effectively, we've been lost in Libertarian fantasy about ignoring the political process or the even more dangerous delusions taught in civics classes about the process as it ought to be and that if we could only talk to Congressmen, we could convince them of the logic of our positions and get them to vote our way.
Even redneck gun owners were smarter about this than we were, and they got the NRA, and got to keep their guns. Those senior citizens who "aren't smart enough to use the computers and software we make for them"? They have the AARP.
Both gun owners and senior citizens get respect on Capitol Hill.
We are getting what we deserve. When we are willing to raise real money to affect the political process, we will deserve better and we will get it.
To replace imported oil:
$183B capital investment
$50B/year operating cost
$2.12/gallon diesel at the pumps.
This is based on DOE work in the field successfully completed in the 1990s.
I was rather astounded to find that nobody remembered that a large part of the answer to replacing fossil fuel in a CO2-neutral way (the CO2 coming from burning biofuel was captured from the atmosphere) has already been found, and was even posted here. I mean, how much easier does it get?
There was another article here about a launch system that should be capable of getting stuff to LEO for $250 a ton. At that price, solar power satellites look very, very reasonable in cost.
Biomass can buy us time to get solar power satellites up.
We don't need nuclear to solve the problem. The alternatives look easier, cheaper, and faster to implement. What's not to like?
A DOE biomass algae > oil project mothballed after successful completion in the mid-1990s has been revived by the U of New Hampshire.
Bottom lines from the report - replace imported oil will require:
I'm just starting to get into the DOE report, but I've already gotten far enough to know that the technology demo project was mothballed because at the time, nobody saw a market for $2/gallon diesel oil and there didn't appear to be a substantial possibility of real disruption in the Middle East oil flow.
CO2-neutral, the CO2 burned as oil will have been previously extracted from the atmosphere.
Algae is about as efficient a way to convert CO2, sunlight, and nutrients to something which can be processed to oil fuel as is imaginable.
It appears to be "good enough", though I prefer powersats for central station power as a coal replacement. The basic problem with that kind of project has been cost of transport to orbit.
The Space Elevator may already be obsolete (follow the links) ... estimated $250/ton to LEO. No, $250 is NOT a typo, the solution is astounding, and the relevant experts appear to agree that this isn't snake oil. The rest we know how to do. Solar cells at current efficiency levels are "good enough". Microwave transmission is "good enough".
If we as a society have the will (aka willingness to spend money), the solutions to the energy and a few related problems just got dumped into our laps.
Look up Christian Reconstructionism. Look up Rushdoony. Google is your friend. Christian Reconstrutionism is the core of the mass movement you couldn't find. The exoteric term for this is "the Religious Right". I presume you've heard of them? How far have they gotten in the past 20 years?
"All these atrocities continue in spite of the fact that we now have the 'right' people in places of power. Indeed, the occupant of the White House is a professing Christian. The U.S. Attorney General is believed to be a devout Christian. 'Conservatives' control both Houses of Congress, and Republican presidents appointed seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. Christian activists placed the right party in power, but are we now witnessing the return to moral and constitutional government that we have demanded for so long?"
This is from Christian Exodus explaining why they want to take over a state because they've effectively taken over the national government and the New Millenium hasn't started yet, i.e. the nation hasn't converted to an Old Testament legal regime comparable to sharia law quite yet. Their problem of their political leadership is that little things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been standing in their way, though the work of dismantling is in progress. In the above, "conservative" and Christian mean "Religious Right"... those are the only people the Christian Reconstructionists recognize as real fellow Christians. Every one of the last several Presidents, Democratic and Republican have been "professing Christians". But except for George W Bush, not their kind of Christian.
For more information:
Do you really think posting something orders of magnitudes dumber is good for your public reputation?
First, I don't know where you have found your statistics,
Probably a UK government site. Your crime stats are easily available even to those on this side of the pond. Embarrassing, aren't they?
but if you ask anyone in the streets (take someone in Sweden or Italy if you want them to be neutral), they will tell you that they are much more afraid of violence in countries that allow people to carry weapons around (e.g. the USA) than in countries where it is not allowed, no matter what the Official Crime Rate is.
In other words, you're telling me that EU citizens prefer to feel safe than to be safe and that they are under the delusion that feeling safe is more important. Well, a similar rationale applies to the US PATRIOT Act, which is also a stupid idea.
But don't come and tell us that deadly weapons such as guns make for a more secure, less violent city !
What do you have against the facts? The rational person changes his opinion to fit them.
In the US, where concealed firearm permits are freely issued to citizen, our "Official Crime Rate" drops consistently. This information isn't secret, if you're bright enough, google is your friend. Of course, you could rationalize this by telling us the Alien Grays in Area 51 cooked the numbers, but I'm sure you can come up with a more creative tinfoil hat explanation to avoid the common-sense way to account for these numbers.
Verifiable facts tell us that more deadly weapons in the hands of honest citizens results in safer streets. Are you telling us that there are no honest citizens in the whole of Europe? Since I know some, I would differ with you.
Personally, I think your perceptions are based on your hanging out at the bottom of the intellectual food chain whereever you go.
Get smarter friends.
The activities of a spammer has a negative economic value for those of us who have to bear the burden of his lifestyle.
A spammer has no value as a human being.
No argument from here, but the first place where biodiesel can make a big difference is replacing what our trucking fleet burns. This doesn't require replacing anything at all, and buys time for private individuals to replace their gasoline burners with diesels.
However, I don't know that the oil produced by algae can't be turned into gasoline in any case, with some loss in efficiency which would be reflected in higher energy cost at the pump.
If this stuff can be turned into gasoline cost-effectively, it's time to start building these energy farms NOW.
The $200B that's gone into the War on Iraq could have been spent instead on biomass projects, and we could stop dealing with the Middle East.
Too dumb to be funny.
This suggests that it's time for NASA to get out of most of the space transportation business and fund this instead.
Given that money spent on a transportation and platform system that is almost a slam-dunk (a big-D sort of R&D project), NASA should then refocus its priorities onto getting the "proof of concept" demo for the Space Power Satellite system together and the lunar industrial facilities which will make a SPS network financially possible. (though the blimps may change the financial basis for the project enough that a moon factory for solar cells might be unnecessary)
If enough money is put into the project, we can start space industrialization in a year or three, we don't have to wait until we find out if the space elevator is actually possible, we don't have to build giant rail guns for cheap space launches if the Elevator is unworkable.
It's time to start work on actually building Space Power Satellites at the "proof of concept" level. For more info, click here
Check this page.
Note: it's a Word doc.
Mouse around the parent site for more info.
This includes bus/train fares.
The main difference having the Net makes is that we can log onto local ISPs instead of having to dial up.
Yes, a single individual or small group can do remarkable things with respect to software with only an investment in labor. Innovation implemented in hardware, electronic or otherwise takes capital investment.
DARPA's funding remarkable things as usual, but they are increasingly defense-oriented, not basic technology research. You know any civilian-sector apps for a gun that'll spit out 1M rounds/min?
The VC community basically is a herd which will only fund whatever matches the new, hot buzzwords.
The private sector is in general only funding short-term applications-oriented research, and even the projects they're helping fund in academia are increasingly the same kind of research.
The answer I keep coming up with respect to "who" is, nobody. I'm not expecting to see a whole lot of real invention in the US (inventions, yes... but we all know what's wrong with the patent system) in the next generation. Perhaps other countries will be smarter about this.
BTW, I metamodded your post "interesting".
But what good does it have to add new, innovative engineers to the labor pool if there are no jobs for them and VCs aren't interested in funding *real* innovation that doesn't match the latest set of new/hot buzzwords?
The other point is that yes, we have real creative artists in the engineering field. However, to develop them to the point where their skills can produce new inventions of the sort which will benefit us all, these people need starting points for their career paths, i.e. entry level programming, electrical engineering, etc.
These are exactly the jobs that are going overseas.
+ A quality, knowledgable IT staff who tailor solutions for your company and receive a decent salary and benefits in return
or...
+ Bill Gates bank account
The problem is with the growth of worms and patches and other measures to deal with them, it's getting to the point where even running Windoze requires a competent IT staff AND one gets to put money into Bill Gates's bank account.
The argument has been completely substantiated in repeated studies, the ones the RIAA didn't pay for. The only studies that contradict this are the ones the content cartel bought, the same way MS buys FUD studies.
P2P promotes sales. It does NOT displace them unless the product is such crap that the normal fan base for a musician won't buy it. That's why the industry uses Big Champagne for marketing purposes. Google is your friend, look up the studies yourself. You've wasted enough of our time.
But if you post AC, how can you prove you wrote those words for the benefit of whoever paid you to write them? Yes, you goofed. Posting astroturf is one thing. Posting RIAA propaganda and not getting paid for it is fucking stupid.
We also know that by and large, "piracy" translates to end users redistributing reduced quality versions of the real products on their own dimes to the profit of the record and film industries. There are a long list of reasons why the Hollywood content cartel do not like letting the free market determine how they get marketed instead of giving them sole discretion as to what the public finds out about a product before release, the main one is that it can make crap movies or records DOA befcre they hit the street as well as take good ones to number 1. However, "protecing businesses from incompetence" is not a proper use of taxpayer funds.
However, the real question here is WHY should the Feds spend our money to assist copyright holders take legal action against end users. Traditionally, that is the copyright holder's problem, which the copyright owner asserts in exchange for the ability to derive income from the copyright.
If you wish to donate YOUR money to the RIAA and MPAA for attacking end users, your privilege. Don't bring the rest of us in to this.
The Solar System contains virtually unlimited resources in terms of energy materials with respect to the human population.
Why aren't people arguing about the best way to exploit these resources?
If America is going to be a dominant technological power with jobs for science and technology graduates, we have to make new science and new technology. This means somebody has to pay for it... and that's us. This is where our public sector R&D needs to be going.
If we have a human industrial presence in space, the science will follow, and far more of it than anyone is discussing doing today, either robotically or using human explorers. If a university can get a research project done by sending a grad student to a space station or moonbase lab via commercial space flight, its going to be a lot cheaper to do this than to build a satellite payload and find a launch platform. Plus, if something unexpected happens, whether it's a design error or something interesting, it's a lot easier for a human to reconfigure his planning than to reconfigure the hardware configuration of a satellite already in orbit.
Low hanging fruit: A profitable space power satellite network is probably achievable using more or less current technology based on Russian satellite launch prices. However, the time to profit would be a lot shorter with a Space Elevator or earth-to-orbit railgun as a launch platform.
For more information, check the link in my sig.
As for Barrett... the obvious question is... if he wants to export every professional-level job in his organization to the Third World, why would the quality of US education matter to him? Another obvious point is... if the quality of education in the US is so bad, why are so many foriegners sending their kids TO the USA for a college education? Not to say that our public schools don't suck, but our college grads seem to be as well educated as everyone else's. Our college system might be more efficient if we didn't have so many kids requiring bonehead English as freshmen, but I don't see a lot of urgency with respect to improving primary and secondary education unless we have some idea as to where these kids will be working when they get out of college.
Of course, his real goal here is to persuade kids to stay in school, run up tens of thousands of dollars in debt so Intel and other US companies can cherry-pick the top 5% and the rest can go to work at Walmart or McDonald's starting their adult lives tens of thousands of dollars in debt, even worse off than the people around them who didn't "try to make it through the system".
What he is whining about is:
1) Barrett isn't complaining about the lack of trained professionals, he is complaining about the lack of professionals willing to work for minimum wage.
2) It is unlikely that he actually believes what he's saying. The cognitive dissonance between his saying "get all the education you can" and "I don't have a solution to that" is a bit too obvious. What he's trying to protect is not Intel, but his ability to pick up a few more quarters worth of vested stock options and their market price before he retires and sells out. If America is no longer a fit place to live even for the wealthy by the time he's done, there are other countries. If Intel is screwed long-term due to Barrett's use of Intel resources to train foriegn competitors, he will have no reason to care, he'll have made his pile. If regulation hits the outshoring marketplace, even if the regulation only eliminates US subsidies to outsourcing, investment analysts will be looking a lot harder at Intel's financials, and using offshoring as an excuse to cook the books to show higher quarterly profit won't work anymore. This would interfere with his pursuit of wealth at the expense of everybody else.
With respect to competitive marketplaces, Intel has been #1 for so long despite generally inferior products (see also Microsloth) that Barrett won't know a competitive marketplace until it bites him in the ass.
As for comparing him with Benedict Arnold. . . it isn't fair, he and his generation of CEOs appear to be trying to do even more damage to America long-term than Benedict ever dreamed of. If Benedict Arnold's treason had worked out, a few thousand Americans might have wound up "up against the wall". But people would still have been able to farm land and make things, they would merely have been paying taxes to England without representation for a couple or three more generations.
The long-term result of offshoring as it's being practiced now will inevitably result in Americans as a group moving way down the economic ladder. Want to see hunger and poverty in America and a generation of college educated kids with no jobs available above the warm body level? Just wait.
What's the alternative? Other than changing law and regulations that favor offshoring, massive public sector investment in basic science and technology R&D to create the products and services of tomorrow.
Blech.
"Free" should NOT mean "this piece of shit sucks so badly that nobody in his right mind would pay for it". Is that what non-programmers who want to go Open Source on the desktop are supposed to be eagerly waiting for?
The GIMP project needs to get some actual graphics specialists involved with the project, by which I mean people who do this for a living.
It sucks that there is nothing in Open Source or even that will run on Linux that is comparable with Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, or Corel Draw for vector graphics.