Why are you so insistant at maintaining property rights in things like land that are relatively concentrated while diluting the widely held "asset" of US citizenship via and open borders policy? How can you say citizenship/permanent residency isn't a valuable asset when the moment a H-1b holder gets his visa, he can expect extra money if his family is in the dowry system? How can you imagine that the property rights of existing US citizens you hold so dear would be maintained under an open borders policy? Immigrants played a major role in the new deal and typically vote democratic. Why don't you expect that would repeat itself?
He're the thing: There was a time when there was a _big_ performance advantage in using Sybase/SQL server over Oracle for certain applications. As a result a bit base of code got built up in organizations with deep pockets. IMHO what is _really_ needed for Postgresql: An api that emulates the Sybase SQL Server dblib api(this is the higher priority) an SQL interpreter that closely emulates transact SQL
At that point, a bunch of code can be moved fairly easily. The other thing that would be helpful is getting an interface to SQL Server from Postgresql(similar to the one that Microsoft did for Oracle). That would be useful for stuff like data migration.
Is creating a _really_ secure equivalent of the internet chess club. I see this as a serious opportunity for an open source team to demonstrate how they can do security _right_.
I can imagine that it _would_ be possible to do some really intersting things that would make remote matches _much_ harder to cheat at(i.e. do things like authenticate who is observing each of the remote players).
Microsoft's fundamental power comes from monopoly influence. One of the basic things that monopolies _have_ to do to maximize revenue is to differentiate pricing for various market niches-that is simply Econ 101.
Does Microsoft need China? Not in the short term. Can Microsoft retain its present position if China goes the Open Source route? I doubt very much it can--once the Chinese and the Open Source community are attack Microsoft from different directions, Microsoft will be toast.
At present, most power in the US is generated by large, publicly regulated power plants. It would be straightforward to have the operators of these plants to disclose what technologies they use and how they relate to their overall operations. A government committee could assess these disclosures and apportion a pool of funds based on these dislosures. The problem with prizes of that nature is the process is more "political" but it might provide incentives for technologies that are unexpected.
Is a more generic form of prize devoted to energy sources. It would be worthwhile to have a prize that would simply related to non-patented technological changes that make their way into energy sources-particularly power plants.
Planning and _doing_ are different. I'd personally put the odds of these 30 plants actually going live at 50-50.
What also needs to be mentioned here: China, like France has a rather centrally controlled government that is assuming substantial risks as part of this nuclear program. I suspect that getting private insurance for plants like these would be _very_ expensive-if such insurance could be obtained at all.
There is more to Open Source and game development than just writing games and open sourcing them:
Games can take advantage of the infrastructure that open Source makes possible.
Personally, I think we need a substantial annual prize for: 1) the best game that currently open source 2) the best game that runs on Linux _and_ has
source code in escrow so it will go open source
sometime in the near future.
This is the type of thing that would make it more sensible to use and support Open Source Software with games.
The US economy is not in recovery. Quite simply the US economy is not growing as fast as the new entrants to the workforce. A _best_ the rate of decline has slowed down a bit.
Computer professionals have been near the epicenter of recent manifestations of these problems-but many of the problems go back a long time.
Well, they _do_ have the money to fund something similar to the X-prize. Now, I tend to agree, they would do _much_ more good putting together some decent prizes of that type than some of the alternatives. They might in time develop skills outside their "core skills". The problem is that they have so much money at this point that they much may get an illusion of success by simply going into an area that other folks with similar fortunes have ignored.
They are basically a lot of the same names as the folks that are major shareholders in the companies that paid congress critters to write bad trade deals and bad immigration policies that made this whole mess possible. The IIE is basically an intellectual infomercial posing as a legitimate scholarly institution.
The use of statistics in http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&p a=showpage&pid=179 was one of the most intellectually dishonest pieces I've seen in a long time.
First off, both of the major categories cited are part of an overall pool that is decreasing according to the BLS There were 2.933 Million workers in "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" according the BLS in 2000 2.827 Million workers in "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" in 2003
Secondly, this job category has been affect massively by immigration polices that IT companies paid congressmen handsomely to get:
In this period, we had 300K new H-1b visas issued inside the cap to folks that went to work in IT. Probably about - 80K visa holder went home at the end of their visas(about 50% get permanet residency) 80K The US pool of IT workers expanded by about 80K (natural increase--this is probably way too low because the retiree pool is small and the academic programs expanded dramatically) 20K visa holders "went illegal"(Which they can do now that they have friends in the USA). This proportion is a guess. This number may be quite a bit larger due to the tendency of folks to use business visas this way. 100K IT workers that came in outside the cap to folks in IT (this is an estimate) 100K IT workers that came in under L-1 (this was lower then and is just now getting ramped up(this is an estimate) 100K IT workers that came by other means(married a US citizen or chain migration)
The estimates are necessary because the figures the government keeps are so bad.
If we had the above up, we get around 640K. So we are looking at about a 21% displacement rate of US tech workers overall during this period-and this is probably much higher in some categories like DBA's and programmers-and much less among statisticians and actuaries from looking at the BLS category.
The issue here is that in many cases there is an active bias towards hiring foreigners for these jobs. Businesses like Enron like having a workforce that they can control (due to the illegal nature of their business). Managers at places like Hewlett Packard see as part of their personal "bottom line" the ability to get friend and family "green cards"(which would be worth upwards of $100,000 if they could be purchased on the open market). It is quite simply worth considerable investment and organization to obtain those immigration rights. Acting like simple "education" of US workers will solve the problem is sadistic in this context.
It isn't reasonable to expect someone to be able to predict attacks with 100% accuracy.
IMHO what _is_ reasonable, that they can come up with reasonable odds over time. Maybe there _was_ an increased chance of an e-attack today and we just got lucky. Personally, I would think a guy that could name 10 days with a 10% chance of terrorism and get a resonable number right was doing _very_ good.
Yes, and my understand is that the accident involved 1 of the four reactors-and wasn't quite the worse accident theoretically possible for that reactor. Personally, I think nuclear power isn't a very good idea--and building reactors without safeguards is even worse. Still, that doesn't detract from the heroism shown by the men that kept a bad situation from getting worse. You didn't loose your entire community in this disaster-some folks did.
Regardless of how you feel about nuclear power politically, the heroism demonstrated by the crew at Chernobyl was incredible-and deserves commendation. If not for them, things could have gotten much worse. Many of these brave men knowingly gave their lives.
The current attempt to save social security is mass immigration of younger folks. One problem is that social security is skewed to be a transfer program so this doesn't really work very well. The solutions that I think need to be seriously looked at are massive improvements of automation/robotics(which Japan is trying) and serious expansion of life extension technologies that can prolong folks working lives.
What I'm struck by: both of the geographic decisions discussed in this article are the sort of thing one or a few folks inside Microsoft might get through QA cycle without a lot of work. I've seen some things in some of the fonts that some groups would find offensive.
Now, when I worked in the area of fraud detection, it was clear that there were organized gangs that were working inside banks to defraud them. It doesn't seem like a big stretch to me that someone might not work in corporatations for purely political, not monetary ends(i.e. slip a few thousand to someone in the right position is all it might take).
is the current technology to enabling something like this to be somewhat self-powered via solar cells?
IMHO there would be quite a few uses for something like this if it could run 10-15 minutes _and_ be self-charging--even if the payload went down a bit.
My favorite current forcasting site is Ideosphere.com. The problem with science fiction is that they've generally got out of dealing with plausible future scenarios at all. Personally, I think we need more good "what if" type fiction. Also, we need to look at the future more as a probabilistic thing-which Ideosphere encourages.
Here's the thing, as I understand it if I'm a consultant working at the CIA and have been hired by the CIA fix a bug in a piece of GPL code, if I have signed a non-disclosure agreement, I _can_ be sued if I choose to redistribute my changes to that code. The RPL gets around that.
IMHO the most likely immediate source of a serious problem is ecoterrorists and biological weapons. There is a strain in the radical environmental movement that feels "people are the problem". Now, traditionally, those folks haven't had the technical capability to do anything about their perceived problem-but that could change. Overpopulation could be eliminated by something as simple as a beefed up version of the 1918 flu pandemic.
The other option of course is to adopt licenses like the RPL which are even more viral and objectionable to corporate interests than the GPL. The GPL permits organizations like the CIA and major corporate interests to fix bugs in code and not share those fixes with the rest of the community(so long as they don't distribute outside their organization)-the RPL _requires_ than all changes and products be shared.
Given the way corporate interests are acting these days, I think there will be a strong demands for licenses that push the envelope in terms of modifying corporate behavior.
My own perspective is that Open Source can play a major role in reducing major concentration of power (both financial and political). I tend to see both communists and capitalists(even anarcho libertarians) as largely favoring concentration of power-despite much rhetoric to the contrary. Overall, I tend to see decentralization of power as a very good thing.
However, there are some issues that concern me: will decentralization have negative side effects like getting advanced weapons technology into the hands of folks that seriously misuse that technology?
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Why are you so insistant at maintaining property rights in things like land that are relatively concentrated while diluting the widely held "asset" of US citizenship via and open borders policy? How can you say citizenship/permanent residency isn't a valuable asset when the moment a H-1b holder gets his visa, he can expect extra money if his family is in the dowry system? How can you imagine that the property rights of existing US citizens you hold so dear would be maintained under an open borders policy? Immigrants played a major role in the new deal and typically vote democratic. Why don't you expect that would repeat itself?
He're the thing:
There was a time when there was a _big_ performance advantage in using Sybase/SQL server over Oracle for certain applications. As a result a bit base of code got built up in organizations with deep pockets. IMHO what is _really_ needed for Postgresql:
An api that emulates the Sybase SQL Server dblib api(this is the higher priority)
an SQL interpreter that closely emulates transact SQL
At that point, a bunch of code can be moved fairly easily. The other thing that would be helpful is
getting an interface to SQL Server from Postgresql(similar to the one that Microsoft did for Oracle). That would be useful for stuff like data migration.
Is creating a _really_ secure equivalent of the internet chess club. I see this as a serious opportunity for an open source team to demonstrate how they can do security _right_.
I can imagine that it _would_ be possible to do some really intersting things that would make remote matches _much_ harder to cheat at(i.e. do things like authenticate who is observing each of the remote players).
Microsoft's fundamental power comes from monopoly influence. One of the basic things that monopolies _have_ to do to maximize revenue is to differentiate pricing for various market niches-that is simply Econ 101.
Does Microsoft need China? Not in the short term. Can Microsoft retain its present position if China goes the Open Source route? I doubt very much it can--once the Chinese and the Open Source community are attack Microsoft from different directions, Microsoft will be toast.
At present, most power in the US is generated by large, publicly regulated power plants. It would be straightforward to have the operators of these plants to disclose what technologies they use and how they relate to their overall operations. A government committee could assess these disclosures and apportion a pool of funds based on these dislosures. The problem with prizes of that nature is the process is more "political" but it might provide incentives for technologies that are unexpected.
Is a more generic form of prize devoted to energy sources. It would be worthwhile to have a prize that would simply related to non-patented technological changes that make their way into energy sources-particularly power plants.
Planning and _doing_ are different. I'd personally put the odds of these 30 plants actually going live at 50-50.
What also needs to be mentioned here:
China, like France has a rather centrally controlled government that is assuming substantial risks as part of this nuclear program. I suspect that getting private insurance for plants like these would be _very_ expensive-if such insurance could be obtained at all.
There is more to Open Source and game development than just writing games and open sourcing them:
:
Games can take advantage of the infrastructure that open Source makes possible.
Personally, I think we need a substantial annual prize for
1) the best game that currently open source
2) the best game that runs on Linux _and_ has
source code in escrow so it will go open source
sometime in the near future.
This is the type of thing that would make it more sensible to use and support Open Source Software with games.
Quite simply the US economy is not growing as fast as the new entrants to the workforce. A _best_ the rate of decline has slowed down a bit.
Computer professionals have been near the epicenter of recent manifestations of these problems-but many of the problems go back a long time.
Well, they _do_ have the money to fund something similar to the X-prize. Now, I tend to agree, they would do _much_ more good putting together some decent prizes of that type than some of the alternatives. They might in time develop skills outside their "core skills". The problem is that they have so much money at this point that they much may get an illusion of success by simply going into an area that other folks with similar fortunes have ignored.
They are basically a lot of the same names as the folks that are major shareholders in the companies that paid congress critters to write bad trade deals and bad immigration policies that made this whole mess possible. The IIE is basically an intellectual infomercial posing as a legitimate scholarly institution.
was one of the most intellectually dishonest pieces I've seen in a long time.
First off, both of the major categories cited are part of an overall pool that is decreasing according to the BLS There were
2.933 Million workers in "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" according the BLS in 2000
2.827 Million workers in "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" in 2003
Secondly, this job category has been affect massively by immigration polices that IT companies paid congressmen handsomely to get:
In this period, we had 300K new H-1b visas issued inside the cap to folks that went to work in IT.
Probably about - 80K visa holder went home at the end of their visas(about 50% get permanet residency)
80K The US pool of IT workers expanded by about 80K (natural increase--this is probably way too low because the retiree pool is small and the academic programs expanded dramatically)
20K visa holders "went illegal"(Which they can do now that they have friends in the USA). This proportion is a guess. This number may be quite a bit larger due to the tendency of folks to use business visas this way.
100K IT workers that came in outside the cap to folks in IT (this is an estimate)
100K IT workers that came in under L-1 (this was lower then and is just now getting ramped up(this is an estimate)
100K IT workers that came by other means(married a US citizen or chain migration)
The estimates are necessary because the figures the government keeps are so bad.
If we had the above up, we get around 640K. So we are looking at about a 21% displacement rate of US tech workers overall during this period-and this is probably much higher in some categories like DBA's and programmers-and much less among statisticians and actuaries from looking at the BLS category.
The issue here is that in many cases there is an active bias towards hiring foreigners for these jobs. Businesses like Enron like having a workforce that they can control (due to the illegal nature of their business). Managers at places like Hewlett Packard see as part of their personal "bottom line" the ability to get friend and family "green cards"(which would be worth upwards of $100,000 if they could be purchased on the open market). It is quite simply worth considerable investment and organization to obtain those immigration rights. Acting like simple "education" of US workers will solve the problem is sadistic in this context.
I've also had horrible experiences with Dell's Indian tech support-bad enough I'm inclined not to buy Dell equipment again.
It isn't reasonable to expect someone to be able to predict attacks with 100% accuracy.
IMHO what _is_ reasonable, that they can come up with reasonable odds over time. Maybe there _was_ an increased chance of an e-attack today and we just got lucky. Personally, I would think a guy that could name 10 days with a 10% chance of terrorism and get a resonable number right was doing _very_ good.
Why in the days of the internet haven't we seen any serious cultural icons emerge from non-commercial distribution of media?
What would the founding fathers really think of mercantile elites playing this big a role in artistic expression?
Yes, and my understand is that the accident involved 1 of the four reactors-and wasn't quite the worse accident theoretically possible for that reactor. Personally, I think nuclear power isn't a very good idea--and building reactors without safeguards is even worse. Still, that doesn't detract from the heroism shown by the men that kept a bad situation from getting worse. You didn't loose your entire community in this disaster-some folks did.
Regardless of how you feel about nuclear power politically, the heroism demonstrated by the crew at Chernobyl was incredible-and deserves commendation.
If not for them, things could have gotten much worse. Many of these brave men knowingly gave their lives.
The current attempt to save social security is mass immigration of younger folks. One problem is that social security is skewed to be a transfer program so this doesn't really work very well. The solutions that I think need to be seriously looked at are massive improvements of automation/robotics(which Japan is trying) and serious expansion of life extension technologies that can prolong folks working lives.
Now, when I worked in the area of fraud detection, it was clear that there were organized gangs that were working inside banks to defraud them. It doesn't seem like a big stretch to me that someone might not work in corporatations for purely political, not monetary ends(i.e. slip a few thousand to someone in the right position is all it might take).
is the current technology to enabling something like this to be somewhat self-powered via solar cells?
IMHO there would be quite a few uses for something like this if it could run 10-15 minutes _and_ be self-charging--even if the payload went down a bit.
My favorite current forcasting site is Ideosphere.com. The problem with science fiction is that they've generally got out of dealing with plausible future scenarios at all. Personally, I think we need more good "what if" type fiction. Also, we need to look at the future more as a probabilistic thing-which Ideosphere encourages.
Here's the thing, as I understand it if I'm a consultant working at the CIA and have been hired by the CIA fix a bug in a piece of GPL code, if I have signed a non-disclosure agreement, I _can_ be sued if I choose to redistribute my changes to that code. The RPL gets around that.
IMHO the most likely immediate source of a serious problem is ecoterrorists and biological weapons. There is a strain in the radical environmental movement that feels "people are the problem". Now, traditionally, those folks haven't had the technical capability to do anything about their perceived problem-but that could change. Overpopulation could be eliminated by something as simple as a beefed up version of the 1918 flu pandemic.
Given the way corporate interests are acting these days, I think there will be a strong demands for licenses that push the envelope in terms of modifying corporate behavior.
My own perspective is that Open Source can play a major role in reducing major concentration of power (both financial and political). I tend to see both communists and capitalists(even anarcho libertarians) as largely favoring concentration of power-despite much rhetoric to the contrary. Overall, I tend to see decentralization of power as a very good thing.
However, there are some issues that concern me:
will decentralization have negative side effects like getting advanced weapons technology into the hands of folks that seriously misuse that technology?