I don't see this device as selling to 4 billion people in the first iteration. What it _might_ do is sell to a significant fraction of those folks-enough that most of these folks would know somebody that had one--or could go to a local gathering place and use one. What that means is stuff like a lot of interesting 3rd world art work showing up on ebay-and emergence of web sites geared to the concerns/needs of the 3rd world.
The government fusion program was from the start a badly managed program-as even its founder admits
IMHO there is a valid role for the government in technology, but it should be manily providing an incentive structure via prizes and intellectual property law. These big socialistic programs have simply not provided a lot of benefit for the money expended on them.
Expanding the poing above just a bit. The original ideal of Quaker isolation was to break the cycle of criminal association. Many criminals identify with a community in which their behavior is quite acceptable. Some of those people are _quite_ prone to accept societal norms-and if they are surrounded by people with different expectations they'll behave differently. Just putting those folks into ill-patrolled communities with people facing the same difficulties as they are doesn't do anything positive(and may do quite a bit of harm). At the same time, many of these folks are quite gregarious and _need_ a social group to identify with. In this country with have _millions_ of lonely shutins. Getting them to interact with our young prisoners might be something those shut ins _could_ do that would be useful to society at large.
My sense is that such an approach could be coupled with movement of offenders to controlled communities. There are quite a few people in prison that are quite harmless if they don't get behind the wheel of a car(i.e. drunk drivers) or are in a commnity where drugs are readily available(folks with criminal activity associated with drug use). In addition, there is a real question of whether the folks involved in simple drug possession charges/prositution should be in prison at all (IMHO simply restricting such folks from communities that have strong taboos against such behavior should be sufficient).
The extraordinarily high rate of incarceration in the US is a national tragedy-one that future generations will be appalled at.
In 2000 the state and federal prison population of the United States stood at 1,381,892. In 1990 the total prison population numbered only 773,905, by 2002 it had risen to around 2.1 million.
Now, when i see growth from 1.38 Million to 2.1 million that appears to be just over 50% growth.
Re:Why Jail Cams are needed
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The real question is what kind of situation would be most likely to allow criminals to turn their lives around. The penal system used to involve rather extreme deterrents. The Quakers as I understand it, came up with the idea of leaving an offender alone with a Bible-and their only human contact a minister. This practice of isolation was abandoned because a lot of the guys "went crazy". I tend to personally feel that allowing prisoners to mix may in some cases be a bad idea-as is allowing exposure to network TV. Computers are cheap enough, we _could_ conceive of allowing the worse prisoners only contact via internet chat lines with carefully screened volunteers.
The real criminals are the wealthy and politically influential that have used their privilege and authority to promote legislation like mass immigration. When you displace a population as has been done in the US the last 40 years, yes, the original population does start acting a bit strangely. I'm not opposed to the use of deadly force to counteract violent behavior. I question if police agencies prone to doing things like threatening suspects with prison rape(yes this happened to the brother of a friend of mine in California) are fit to wield such deadly force.
The US prison system has reached the point it is in gross violation of basic constitutional assurances against cruel and inhuman punishment. The 2001 Human Rights Watch Report, No Escape details this American tragedy. Proper use of jail cams would assure that gangs don't control the prisons and the guard follow established procedures.
Now, aside from this, we as a society need to ask ourselves, why is the prison population in the US growing so very rapidly(we are looking at over 50% growth the first few years of the Bush administration)?
Just FYI, I _did_ move out of Silicon Valley. Now, that said, the horrible legislative tendencies in the US make the job situation for technical folks difficult in _anyplace_ in the US. We've seen about a 40% displacement of US tech workers the last 3 years(about half due to outsourcing and the rest due to predatory, corporate sponsored immigration practices that let companies use promise of a green card as a corporate perk).
That company is _heavily_ dependent upon illegal immigration to staff its operation--so much that it is questionable that company would exist if it had to pay for the costs of government services associated with its employees.
In Silicon Valley, you can _easily_ pay $1200/month in rent even as a single guy. A house with a yard suitable for raising kids? Figure at least $2500/month. $75K/year isn't exactly a flush income if you are trying to raise a family on it(folks do it on less, I know--but I'm not going to act like someone at that income level is flush-particularly if they are in a high rent area like Silicon Valley).
Now, you _can_ argue that it isn't important that engineers have a salary sufficient for reproduction--and I would argue a society that thinks that way is doomed.
Thanks for the support here. However, I think what you need to look at: what portion of the benefit from mass immigration/globalism goes to corporate elites vs. 3rd world masses? I would suggest that _most_ of the value here gets captured by the wealthy-who in turn buy your congress critter(via campaign donations aka legal bribery). I personally support restricted immigration and tarriffs sufficient to balance the trade deficit, however, I don't think either of those policies will work especially well if we don't ask ourselves what got us in this mess to start with. A society in which 1% of the population control 50% of the wealth is just plain not a good idea-and that situation is incompatible with technical progress, civil liberties and democracy.
I'd want the best person to do the job, not look at salaries and location. I know if I could get the job done in India for 1/5 the price in the US, I'd go to India.
Given that productivity between programmers can vary by a much larger factor than 5 to 1, your decision to go to India may or may not make business sense.
It just depends on what quality of people you want entering a profession. If coders make less than lawyers, folks that can do either profession's work will become lawyers. Now, I would argue that coders can do a lot more for society than attorneys do-I would rather see more incentives for folks to be engineers/coders and fewer incentives for people to be lawyers/media moguls/real estate speculators/corporate ceo's.
America prospered when it respected the work of innovators and technicians. In recent years, America has turned its back on that heritage and is I believe doomed to suffer for it.
$75K in the USA--particularly someplace like NYC or LA is VERY different than $75K in India. The difference is that the USA is on the whole a rather high rent district. $75K/year for a _good_ developer is _cheap_. You won't get a really good attorney at that price.
The reason why the US is loosing jobs has more to do with incredibly bad, corporate sponsored trade deals(that involve the US borrowing $500 Billion/year to prop up those bad trade deals--and bad US tax policy that make productive individuals bear the costs imposed by corporate welfare cases.
I thought this article was cool. What I would personally rather have here than just a simple RAID in one location(for something like my entire data collection) is the ability to distribute replicas accross a variety of locations--that way I wouldn't loose my collection even if my house burned down or whatever.
As long as the US government props up corrupt rich folks in the US using $500 Billion/year in foreign borrowing, it won't be practical to do _anything_ productive in the US.
However, the US government _is_ the world's premier mercenary entity in the world today(i.e. killing Arabs for oil). Microsoft products are important in quite a few defense applications. What kinds of issues are brought up by the fact that Microsoft is relying on a workforce intimately tied up in a politically unstable place in the world where it isn't unheard of for folks to be declared legally dead(and it may never get sorted out)? Can any "US" company really do a background check in India?
Islamic terrorists can do a lot of stuff in India(where there is a large, established population) they can't do in the US-what that means is that Indians in the US with relatives back home could easily be blackmailed by threatening those relatives.
I hate to think what kind of nasty cloak and dagger operations are going on at Microsoft right now.
Chuck Moore's Forth Chips pack an amazing amount of power into a small package. They aren't super computers-but they are some of the more interesting architecture intensive computing projects I've seen recently.
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 would tend to agree that it isn't obvious that current manned space flights by superpowers have real relevance to advancing scientific knowledge. What IMHO is _more_ important: how does humanity make development of space economically viable? I tend to think robotics is more likely to make this happen sooner than manned space flights under present conditions.
The real fundamental question here: does the NASA budget really affect if/how soon economic development of space will happen?
Nasa made a _lot_ of promises that weren't really delivered by the shuttle. The X-prize entries have gotten a lot further for the amount of money expended than has Nasa. Now you can argue-well Nasa already built the shuttle. Still, is a politically correct bureacracy like Nasa _really_ the way a society ought to reach for the stars? I'm not sure that greedy corporations doing it for money is quite the right way either. This stuff really doesn't inherently need to be expensive. Thirty years ago, it looked like something was going to happen. What went wrong? Was it simple bad luck or a fundamental societal organizational problem? By now organizations like the National Geographic Society really _ought_ to have a space program. If the nascent Mormon church could organize colonization of Utah 150 years ago, why isn't anyone similarly motivated today? The folks running the USA today seem very, very different than those running the USA 100 years ago.
My guess here: if the USA were to go away, somebody else would pick up the ball-maybe the Russians or Chinese. Hell, I can even believe that if the US government were fundamentally restructured(ala Yugoslavia), it might have a better shot at space than this bunch of looser attorneys/media folks that will spend $1.2 trillion protecting an antique energy source in the Middle East-and not consider having a few hundred billion in prize incentives for a new energy sources to stop that bleeding.
The big problem here that I see: There is a relative lack fo emphasis in the Nasa prizes in producing Open Source solutions. What that means is that for many of the more strategic prizes, we'll see a few large companies that have already acquired substantial monopolistic positions as the only 'competitors'. Since public funds are being used here, I'd rather see the objectives as things that might be useful to a broad range of the public. For example, demonstration of how to build an orbital launch system using only tools commonly available in a high power automotive shop--and complete instructions so someone else might actually do it.
My point is I think Bill would be a lot happier-and live a lot longer if he'd throw some money into the direction of the Methuselah Mouse prize or some other similar efforts that would make a positive difference in the lives of the people around him. I also think the money he's spending on AIDS research would go a lot further if organized this way.
The big problem I have with what the Gates foundatino is doing is the overall planning of donations seems to have relatively little thought put into it compared to what is possible here.
We have the richest man in the USA who can't really talk about anything except maintaining the intellectual property rules that made him rich. There are a lot of alternative ways to fund innovation-prizes like the Methuselah Mouse and Xprize come to mind. Gates has the money to be a serious force changing the human condition-but I see little evidence that he's really serious about acting in that direction.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see this device as selling to 4 billion people in the first iteration. What it _might_ do is sell to a significant fraction of those folks-enough that most of these folks would know somebody that had one--or could go to a local gathering place and use one. What that means is stuff like a lot of interesting 3rd world art work showing up on ebay-and emergence of web sites geared to the concerns/needs of the 3rd world.
IMHO there is a valid role for the government in technology, but it should be manily providing an incentive structure via prizes and intellectual property law. These big socialistic programs have simply not provided a lot of benefit for the money expended on them.
My sense is that such an approach could be coupled with movement of offenders to controlled communities. There are quite a few people in prison that are quite harmless if they don't get behind the wheel of a car(i.e. drunk drivers) or are in a commnity where drugs are readily available(folks with criminal activity associated with drug use). In addition, there is a real question of whether the folks involved in simple drug possession charges/prositution should be in prison at all (IMHO simply restricting such folks from communities that have strong taboos against such behavior should be sufficient).
The extraordinarily high rate of incarceration in the US is a national tragedy-one that future generations will be appalled at.
Now, when i see growth from 1.38 Million to 2.1 million that appears to be just over 50% growth.
The real question is what kind of situation would be most likely to allow criminals to turn their lives around. The penal system used to involve rather extreme deterrents. The Quakers as I understand it, came up with the idea of leaving an offender alone with a Bible-and their only human contact a minister. This practice of isolation was abandoned because a lot of the guys "went crazy". I tend to personally feel that allowing prisoners to mix may in some cases be a bad idea-as is allowing exposure to network TV. Computers are cheap enough, we _could_ conceive of allowing the worse prisoners only contact via internet chat lines with carefully screened volunteers.
The real criminals are the wealthy and politically influential that have used their privilege and authority to promote legislation like mass immigration. When you displace a population as has been done in the US the last 40 years, yes, the original population does start acting a bit strangely. I'm not opposed to the use of deadly force to counteract violent behavior. I question if police agencies prone to doing things like threatening suspects with prison rape(yes this happened to the brother of a friend of mine in California) are fit to wield such deadly force.
This article gives soem citations on the growth of the US prison.population
Now, aside from this, we as a society need to ask ourselves, why is the prison population in the US growing so very rapidly(we are looking at over 50% growth the first few years of the Bush administration)?
Just FYI, I _did_ move out of Silicon Valley. Now, that said, the horrible legislative tendencies in the US make the job situation for technical folks difficult in _anyplace_ in the US. We've seen about a 40% displacement of US tech workers the last 3 years(about half due to outsourcing and the rest due to predatory, corporate sponsored immigration practices that let companies use promise of a green card as a corporate perk).
That company is _heavily_ dependent upon illegal immigration to staff its operation--so much that it is questionable that company would exist if it had to pay for the costs of government services associated with its employees.
Now, you _can_ argue that it isn't important that engineers have a salary sufficient for reproduction--and I would argue a society that thinks that way is doomed.
Thanks for the support here. However, I think what you need to look at: what portion of the benefit from mass immigration/globalism goes to corporate elites vs. 3rd world masses? I would suggest that _most_ of the value here gets captured by the wealthy-who in turn buy your congress critter(via campaign donations aka legal bribery). I personally support restricted immigration and tarriffs sufficient to balance the trade deficit, however, I don't think either of those policies will work especially well if we don't ask ourselves what got us in this mess to start with. A society in which 1% of the population control 50% of the wealth is just plain not a good idea-and that situation is incompatible with technical progress, civil liberties and democracy.
Given that productivity between programmers can vary by a much larger factor than 5 to 1, your decision to go to India may or may not make business sense.
America prospered when it respected the work of innovators and technicians. In recent years, America has turned its back on that heritage and is I believe doomed to suffer for it.
The reason why the US is loosing jobs has more to do with incredibly bad, corporate sponsored trade deals(that involve the US borrowing $500 Billion/year to prop up those bad trade deals--and bad US tax policy that make productive individuals bear the costs imposed by corporate welfare cases.
I thought this article was cool. What I would personally rather have here than just a simple RAID in one location(for something like my entire data collection) is the ability to distribute replicas accross a variety of locations--that way I wouldn't loose my collection even if my house burned down or whatever.
As long as the US government props up corrupt rich folks in the US using $500 Billion/year in foreign borrowing, it won't be practical to do _anything_ productive in the US.
However, the US government _is_ the world's premier mercenary entity in the world today(i.e. killing Arabs for oil). Microsoft products are important in quite a few defense applications. What kinds of issues are brought up by the fact that Microsoft is relying on a workforce intimately tied up in a politically unstable place in the world where it isn't unheard of for folks to be declared legally dead(and it may never get sorted out)? Can any "US" company really do a background check in India?
Islamic terrorists can do a lot of stuff in India(where there is a large, established population) they can't do in the US-what that means is that Indians in the US with relatives back home could easily be blackmailed by threatening those relatives.
I hate to think what kind of nasty cloak and dagger operations are going on at Microsoft right now.
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 would tend to agree that it isn't obvious that current manned space flights by superpowers have real relevance to advancing scientific knowledge. What IMHO is _more_ important: how does humanity make development of space economically viable? I tend to think robotics is more likely to make this happen sooner than manned space flights under present conditions.
I agree. Here is something I wrote on this topic a couple years ago.
Nasa made a _lot_ of promises that weren't really delivered by the shuttle. The X-prize entries have gotten a lot further for the amount of money expended than has Nasa. Now you can argue-well Nasa already built the shuttle. Still, is a politically correct bureacracy like Nasa _really_ the way a society ought to reach for the stars? I'm not sure that greedy corporations doing it for money is quite the right way either. This stuff really doesn't inherently need to be expensive. Thirty years ago, it looked like something was going to happen. What went wrong? Was it simple bad luck or a fundamental societal organizational problem? By now organizations like the National Geographic Society really _ought_ to have a space program. If the nascent Mormon church could organize colonization of Utah 150 years ago, why isn't anyone similarly motivated today? The folks running the USA today seem very, very different than those running the USA 100 years ago.
My guess here: if the USA were to go away, somebody else would pick up the ball-maybe the Russians or Chinese. Hell, I can even believe that if the US government were fundamentally restructured(ala Yugoslavia), it might have a better shot at space than this bunch of looser attorneys/media folks that will spend $1.2 trillion protecting an antique energy source in the Middle East-and not consider having a few hundred billion in prize incentives for a new energy sources to stop that bleeding.
The big problem here that I see:
There is a relative lack fo emphasis in the Nasa prizes in producing Open Source solutions. What that means is that for many of the more strategic prizes, we'll see a few large companies that have already acquired substantial monopolistic positions as the only 'competitors'. Since public funds are being used here, I'd rather see the objectives as things that might be useful to a broad range of the public. For example, demonstration of how to build an orbital launch system using only tools commonly available in a high power automotive shop--and complete instructions so someone else might actually do it.
The big problem I have with what the Gates foundatino is doing is the overall planning of donations seems to have relatively little thought put into it compared to what is possible here.
We have the richest man in the USA who can't really talk about anything except maintaining the intellectual property rules that made him rich. There are a lot of alternative ways to fund innovation-prizes like the Methuselah Mouse and Xprize come to mind. Gates has the money to be a serious force changing the human condition-but I see little evidence that he's really serious about acting in that direction.
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.