Bzzt! Sorry, but I doubt a dead person will ever show up for an e-vote. The paper printout for use as a hard, long-term copy/record is secure. As secure as e-voting can possibly get.
A "dead" person votes by either:
1) falsification of of records(say by a corrupt county clerk)
2) someone showing up with the dead persons voter registration card and using it(along with supplementary ID).
3) in areas that use vote by mail, by diversion of the mail records
I don't see that e-voting solves any of these except to the extent it handles 1(but a corrupt county clerk can still issue invalid voter registration and absentee ballots).
If a "dead" person can vote via punch card ballot or any other paper type ballot, they can certainly vote just as well on an e-voting machine. You must actually USE the e-voting machine to get the printout.
That is kind of my point. The goal here is to have more accurate election-there are lots of different kinds of vote fraud-and you need to handle them all as a comprehensive package. I don't see that being done here.
I suspect that SCO is going to get about as much sypathy from the technical community as someone that wanders into Harlem at 2AM and runs down the street shouting racial insults at the residents. Sure there are some folks that would think such a misguided individual deserves the protection of the law-but there ability to actually provide them protection is limited. There are quite simply limits to what a major corporation can do and get away with it.
The emergence of Linux has helped the careers/livelyhood of a lot of people here. I don't see SCO making any kind of similar contribution-which limits the degree to which they can expect the good Samaritan type behavior which enforcement of the law realistically requires.
Dead people can vote. Paper ballots can be forged/spoiled.
I think the idea of the paper trail is mainly important so there is a record folks can understand-but with good encryption it shouldn't be necessary. What _is_ necessary is better means of monitoring low tech vote fraud-and that probably means cameras at the polling places-and _never_ allowing ballots or media out of the view of a camera--and good encryption on those records.
I wonder what this implies about the way the genetic code is really organized. A friend suggested that 1% figure is a bit misleading beacuse it may involve parts of the genetic code that are more like a "high level language" not the "firmware".
I checked http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/index.asp and http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/index.asp I was fully expecting to find donations from IBM employees/officers. I was utterly surprised to find none.
I'm much less concerned personally about outsourcing than I am H-1b/L-1. The major problem with outsourcing IMHO is that a) there are major issues of privacy and security involved b) the US government has made some really bad trade deals-which make it pretty much inevitable that the US will have a rather bad trade imbalance. On the other hand, H-1b/L-1 basically offer public resources(i.e. immigration rights which would be quite valuable if they were for sale) to foreigners that can replace US citizens in the workforce. It could be argued that isn't such a bad thing in a rapidly growing industry-but in a industry that is contracting, it makes a bad situation much worse than it needs to be. Literally no developed country has ever treated a specific skilled occupation this badly since the days of the Robber Barons.
Is it congress's fault for selling out or the fault of corporate types for buying congress?
This strikes me as a chicken/egg type question. Now, my honest guess here: Gates is the type of technical leadership corporate America deserves. Corporate America can't get someone like Gates without putting a lot of money on the table. Remember, when Gates was younger he sounded almost like Stallman(yes, there were differences but some of them were subtle). But also, it just isn't possible for someone like Gates to stay that wealthy in the US today without being politically active. Gates _did_ try to avoid politics and it caused him lots of hassles.
I'm not sure if Gates really _can_ do anything I personally find most compelling with all his money-it seems like beyond some point, money doesn't do anything but bring con-artists and parasites into your life. Maybe in the big scheme of things, Gates is doing and OK job of being the "World's Richest Man" but I tend to think Carnegie will be seen by history as having gotten more done. Time will tell.
China has in the past had a substantial and self-sufficient economy-the trade in opium started because there was little interest in China in other foreign goods-and a lot of interest in Chinese goods outside of China.
My sense is that the Opium Trade and its consequences left a big impression on the Chinese-part of the reason they are such agressive manufacturers is they dont' want to be influenced by foreign powers.
I suspect what they are trying to do here:
create better standards to push chinese goods in foreign markets. Now time will tell if this really works.
The older, industrial elites basically create universal public education in the US and Germany. The legal and financial corporate elites _have_ influenced US education--just look at the explosion in law schools. This didn't just happen, it took a lot of money thrown at congress to create that kind of demand for the services of attorneys(i.e. a lot of other countries like Japan get by with a lot few attorneys per capita).
Check out www.opensecrets.org Just look at where the money flows into politics. Sure the Teachers Union is a major force in the Democratic party-but even their funding is tiny compared to the larger corporate interests(who bought things like H-1b/L-1 expansion).
It also seems to me that the "corporate elites" have even less influence on the education level of the average citizen than the government does. To the extent that they do have influence, I see them pouring billions of dollars into research at universities. They want English-speaking engineers and knowledge workers. Next time you see a job ad from a company which is a front for the "corporate elite", see if it doesn't say "excellent communication skills" or some such.
This is a fundamentally incorrect analysis of the situation facing the US workforce. There are lots of capable, well-educated technical folks in the US that simply aren't being fully utilized. What H-1b did was offer a government subsidy(immigration rights) to folks that could replace US technical workers. Now, the "market value" of US citizenship is about $100,000(that is the difference in dowry between an Indian Engineer in the US on an H-1b visa and a similar engineer in India). Education is far less expensive in India. So US students are competing against a less expensive, more politically adept/politically correct competition that is largely willing to work at less than cost to get immigration rights.
There just isn't much happening in the USA today except gradual liquidation of assets-which is the reason so many US students opt to participate in that liquidation-to do otherwise is swimming against the current.
I have some real problems with the US educational system-but virtually no industry can succeed in the present context of government by legal and financial elites. Stuff like exporting of almost the entire non-ferrous metals industry to Canada and Mexico was a governmental decision(i.e. the government regulated production in the US but allowed importing items produced by the same polluting process right next door). This is what you get when you let lawyers and MBA run a country with no adult supervision.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the public school system. Blame parents who refuse to discipline their kids and refuse to let the schools do so. Blame teachers who are more interested in inculcating politically correct ideology than in teaching hard stuff. Blame education lobbyists who want to shut down home school competition, even though home schoolers are demonstrably better off than their public school counterparts. The foregoing is by no means an exhaustive list, but I don't think the government or "corporate elites" can be added.
As far as namecalling-I called the government corrupt(which is my opinion based on current US election and donation regulations). You responded with a personal attack. Think about it.
Entrance to technical fields is cyclical, following supply and demand and what's trendy. The pressure of immigration on the job market more constant, since people want to come to the U.S.
We both know that H-1b and L-1 expansion have been specific, recent legislation that has dramatically affected the US engineering profession. It isn't an issue of who wants to come to the US, but who can.
The expansion of H-1b quotas was in response to the dot com boom, which had resulted in high demand for tech workers. When the bubble burst, there was suddenly a glut of workers (most of whom were and still are domestic). They can't find jobs at the pay rate they're used to getting. Add to that the burst bubble itself, which gave tech careers the aura of risk.
Every other major guest worker program in a developed country had clauses in place that made sure visas would get tapered back in the event of the growing dislocation of their US workforce-that was done with H-1b/L-1 in the US. The reason? Possibly the millions of dollars in campaign donations that come from corporate interests in the US(donations that would be illegal in other developed countries).
Calling the downswing in the cycle the government's fault is no more correct than giving the government credit for the upswing
I'm suggesting that US policies here have made the situation _much_ worse than it would be otherwise. US IT employment has declined by something like 500,000 from its peak. More than that number of Temporary worker Visas have been issued the last 5 years. That suggests that problems with tech employment have more to do with Visa regulations than with the business cycle.
Namecalling is the technique of the intellectually bankrupt.
It seems to me that Western governments are trying their best to improve the technical education of their people. Do you have evidence otherwise?
What I would suggest you want to look at here:
Enrollment in Science programs prior to H-1b/L-1 expansion and after. I think what you'll see is that the effect of offering large numbers of visas to those in Scientific and technical fields has been to drive US citizens from those fields. When I look at what the promoters of the H-1b/L-1 expansion were promising a few years ago, the effect was the opposite(Phil Gramm was saying stuff like "every one of these guys is going to create 20 jobs").
I'm not commenting on the moment about trade deals-but specifically about the wisdom of creating visa categories for specific jobs in a situation where the US economy isn't creating jobs at the same pace as immigration.
China is likely to become the world's largest economy in the not so distant future. The technical community there _will_ want to make their mark on important standards in IT. The real way around this for the United States and the EU is to cultivate technical excellence among their own citizens-something the current corrupt governments and corporate elites are hesitant to do.
What I'm most personally interested in are those moves that might make space commercially viable. The Chinese are talking about mining the moon-that is exciting to me and may have a lot more long term impact IMHO than purely scientific missions.
I fully expect you to pursue whatever path is from your question profitable/gratifying. The question here is what kind of incentives should the public create by the laws they create. I see no reason to use public assets enforcing copyright in products that aren't being sold--any more than a contract to sell oneself into slavery is an enforceable contract.
I'm suggesting that the US would be more prosperous and safer if copyright law(and for that matter trade secret law) so that copyright items were registered with the government and released after some regular period of time-which was the objective Ben Franklin originally proposed(not to use the power of the state to allow vendors to direct/intimidate their customers or cut off particular routes of artistic/technical development).
If a company ceases to support a product, the source code for that product should be automatically released into the public domain or under and Open Source license. I have a client that has thousands of Win98 machines that are still being used. The the Win98 source were available, Wine would get real good, real fast.
It is clear that other industrial items can at least in theory be done with smaller scale manufacturing. Chip chip production is tricky though. Once small scale manufacturing of computers is nailed, the most complicated items will all become "software" of one type or another.
I personally think this shift will be as big as the shift from stone tools to blacksmithing or from blacksmithing to use of lathes.
Chuck Moore has been doing forth chip design for a while. His chip design software and Forth development system is public domain, but he hasn't Open Sourced his CPU designs yet. What makes his designs important IMHO is that they are very simple compared to conventional chip designs-which makes them appropriate for things like very low power consumption and makes it possible for one person to understand/implement their design.
Part of what makes Open Source hardware important is that Open Source designs are what will actually be implemented as small scale manufacturing becomes more practical. There are various proposals around for doing manufacturing of chips using rather different processes than we are used to today(i.e. "growing" chips in a chemical medium). What these ultimately take us towards is robotic infrastructure that can be remotely controlled and is as "self-replicating" as a lathe or a blacksmith's shop.
In Japan, mass immigration is simply politically unacceptable. Robotics is a means by which Japan may cope with an aging population without immigration. Time will tell if the leaders of Japan are wiser than those of the United States and the EU(personally I suspect the Japanese leaders are wiser-leadership in Japan carries very real responsiblities and consequences for failure can be severe).
When I see companies where administrators get in the way, it usually is accompanied by a management composed of folks that don't know the first thing about the current literature of software process(i.e. the stuff that comes out of proces like SEI at CMU) and who think they are God's gift to business because they have an MBA. Usually such companies have a very short horizon in their planning and think only about costs and have poor practices of risk assessment(i.e. think Enron). US corporate leadership frequently understands money very well-and understands nothing else that is basic to their business. The reason that the US can seemingly afford this type of corporate leadership is that compared to other highly developed countries, the US has an exceptionally rich resource base and a lot of credit.
I don't think this situation will last forever-but some of the means by which that situation might change aren't entirely pleasant. The US has had a fundamental shift away from Industrial leadership towards financial and legal leadership. The old Austro-Hungarian empire had some similar problems for example-and look at what happened there.
When I see stuff like this
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 1
I think it is high time for legislation that would remove tax deductions for high executive salaries and stock perks(say as measured by a multiple of the national and/or company median-and make it a non-revenue measure and just use the funds to increase the personal deduction). What it seems like is that there are some CEO's that will say anything for money-and they are gradually destroying the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
A "dead" person votes by either:
1) falsification of of records(say by a corrupt county clerk)
2) someone showing up with the dead persons voter
registration card and using it(along with
supplementary ID).
3) in areas that use vote by mail, by diversion of the mail records
I don't see that e-voting solves any of these except to the extent it handles 1(but a corrupt county clerk can still issue invalid voter registration and absentee ballots).
If a "dead" person can vote via punch card ballot or any other paper type ballot, they can certainly vote just as well on an e-voting machine. You must actually USE the e-voting machine to get the printout.
That is kind of my point. The goal here is to have more accurate election-there are lots of different kinds of vote fraud-and you need to handle them all as a comprehensive package. I don't see that being done here.
The emergence of Linux has helped the careers/livelyhood of a lot of people here. I don't see SCO making any kind of similar contribution-which limits the degree to which they can expect the good Samaritan type behavior which enforcement of the law realistically requires.
I think the idea of the paper trail is mainly important so there is a record folks can understand-but with good encryption it shouldn't be necessary. What _is_ necessary is better means of monitoring low tech vote fraud-and that probably means cameras at the polling places-and _never_ allowing ballots or media out of the view of a camera--and good encryption on those records.
I wonder what this implies about the way the genetic code is really organized. A friend suggested that 1% figure is a bit misleading beacuse it may involve parts of the genetic code that are more like a "high level language" not the "firmware".
Several folks here have been saying there are better deals in fanless, small servers. What are they? Where would you get them/the parts?
Thanks!
I checked http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/index.asp and
http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/index.asp
I was fully expecting to find donations from IBM employees/officers. I was utterly surprised to find none.
I'm much less concerned personally about outsourcing than I am H-1b/L-1. The major problem with outsourcing IMHO is that a) there are major issues of privacy and security involved b) the US government has made some really bad trade deals-which make it pretty much inevitable that the US will have a rather bad trade imbalance. On the other hand, H-1b/L-1 basically offer public resources(i.e. immigration rights which would be quite valuable if they were for sale) to foreigners that can replace US citizens in the workforce. It could be argued that isn't such a bad thing in a rapidly growing industry-but in a industry that is contracting, it makes a bad situation much worse than it needs to be. Literally no developed country has ever treated a specific skilled occupation this badly since the days of the Robber Barons.
Is it congress's fault for selling out or the fault of corporate types for buying congress?
This strikes me as a chicken/egg type question. Now, my honest guess here: Gates is the type of technical leadership corporate America deserves. Corporate America can't get someone like Gates without putting a lot of money on the table. Remember, when Gates was younger he sounded almost like Stallman(yes, there were differences but some of them were subtle). But also, it just isn't possible for someone like Gates to stay that wealthy in the US today without being politically active. Gates _did_ try to avoid politics and it caused him lots of hassles.
I'm not sure if Gates really _can_ do anything I personally find most compelling with all his money-it seems like beyond some point, money doesn't do anything but bring con-artists and parasites into your life. Maybe in the big scheme of things, Gates is doing and OK job of being the "World's Richest Man" but I tend to think Carnegie will be seen by history as having gotten more done. Time will tell.
what Microsoft is gettin for their money
My sense is that the Opium Trade and its consequences left a big impression on the Chinese-part of the reason they are such agressive manufacturers is they dont' want to be influenced by foreign powers.
I suspect what they are trying to do here:
create better standards to push chinese goods in foreign markets. Now time will tell if this really works.
The legal and financial corporate elites _have_ influenced US education--just look at the explosion in law schools. This didn't just happen, it took a lot of money thrown at congress to create that kind of demand for the services of attorneys(i.e. a lot of other countries like Japan get by with a lot few attorneys per capita).
Check out www.opensecrets.org
Just look at where the money flows into politics. Sure the Teachers Union is a major force in the Democratic party-but even their funding is tiny compared to the larger corporate interests(who bought things like H-1b/L-1 expansion).
It also seems to me that the "corporate elites" have even less influence on the education level of the average citizen than the government does. To the extent that they do have influence, I see them pouring billions of dollars into research at universities. They want English-speaking engineers and knowledge workers. Next time you see a job ad from a company which is a front for the "corporate elite", see if it doesn't say "excellent communication skills" or some such.
situation facing the US workforce. There are lots of capable, well-educated technical folks in the US that simply aren't being fully utilized. What H-1b did was offer a government subsidy(immigration rights) to folks that could replace US technical workers. Now, the "market value" of US citizenship is about $100,000(that is the difference in dowry between an Indian Engineer in the US on an H-1b visa and a similar engineer in India). Education is far less expensive in India.
So US students are competing against a less expensive, more politically adept/politically correct competition that is largely willing to work at less than cost to get immigration rights.
There just isn't much happening in the USA today except gradual liquidation of assets-which is the reason so many US students opt to participate in that liquidation-to do otherwise is swimming against the current.
I have some real problems with the US educational system-but virtually no industry can succeed in the present context of government by legal and financial elites. Stuff like exporting of almost the entire non-ferrous metals industry to Canada and Mexico was a governmental decision(i.e. the government regulated production in the US but allowed importing items produced by the same polluting process right next door). This is what you get when you let lawyers and MBA run a country with no adult supervision.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the public school system. Blame parents who refuse to discipline their kids and refuse to let the schools do so. Blame teachers who are more interested in inculcating politically correct ideology than in teaching hard stuff. Blame education lobbyists who want to shut down home school competition, even though home schoolers are demonstrably better off than their public school counterparts. The foregoing is by no means an exhaustive list, but I don't think the government or "corporate elites" can be added.
I see folks mentioning quality issues with eMachine products. Does anyone have high quality, upgradable, Linux compatible Athlong they can suggest?
Entrance to technical fields is cyclical, following supply and demand and what's trendy. The pressure of immigration on the job market more constant, since people want to come to the U.S.
We both know that H-1b and L-1 expansion have been specific, recent legislation that has dramatically affected the US engineering profession. It isn't an issue of who wants to come to the US, but who can.
The expansion of H-1b quotas was in response to the dot com boom, which had resulted in high demand for tech workers. When the bubble burst, there was suddenly a glut of workers (most of whom were and still are domestic). They can't find jobs at the pay rate they're used to getting. Add to that the burst bubble itself, which gave tech careers the aura of risk.
Every other major guest worker program in a developed country had clauses in place that made sure visas would get tapered back in the event of the growing dislocation of their US workforce-that was done with H-1b/L-1 in the US. The reason? Possibly the millions of dollars in campaign donations that come from corporate interests in the US(donations that would be illegal in other developed countries).
Calling the downswing in the cycle the government's fault is no more correct than giving the government credit for the upswing
I'm suggesting that US policies here have made the situation _much_ worse than it would be otherwise. US IT employment has declined by something like 500,000 from its peak. More than that number of Temporary worker Visas have been issued the last 5 years. That suggests that problems with tech employment have more to do with Visa regulations than with the business cycle.
Namecalling is the technique of the intellectually bankrupt.
It seems to me that Western governments are trying their best to improve the technical education of their people. Do you have evidence otherwise?
What I would suggest you want to look at here:
Enrollment in Science programs prior to H-1b/L-1 expansion and after. I think what you'll see is that the effect of offering large numbers of visas to those in Scientific and technical fields has been to drive US citizens from those fields. When I look at what the promoters of the H-1b/L-1 expansion were promising a few years ago, the effect was the opposite(Phil Gramm was saying stuff like "every one of these guys is going to create 20 jobs").
I'm not commenting on the moment about trade deals-but specifically about the wisdom of creating visa categories for specific jobs in a situation where the US economy isn't creating jobs at the same pace as immigration.
China is likely to become the world's largest economy in the not so distant future. The technical community there _will_ want to make their mark on important standards in IT. The real way around this for the United States and the EU is to cultivate technical excellence among their own citizens-something the current corrupt governments and corporate elites are hesitant to do.
Helium 3 is a likely substance for early lunar mining.
What I'm most personally interested in are those moves that might make space commercially viable. The Chinese are talking about mining the moon-that is exciting to me and may have a lot more long term impact IMHO than purely scientific missions.
I'm suggesting that the US would be more prosperous and safer if copyright law(and for that matter trade secret law) so that copyright items were registered with the government and released after some regular period of time-which was the objective Ben Franklin originally proposed(not to use the power of the state to allow vendors to direct/intimidate their customers or cut off particular routes of artistic/technical development).
If a company ceases to support a product, the source code for that product should be automatically released into the public domain or under and Open Source license. I have a client that has thousands of Win98 machines that are still being used. The the Win98 source were available, Wine would get real good, real fast.
I personally think this shift will be as big as the shift from stone tools to blacksmithing or from blacksmithing to use of lathes.
Part of what makes Open Source hardware important is that Open Source designs are what will actually be implemented as small scale manufacturing becomes more practical. There are various proposals around for doing manufacturing of chips using rather different processes than we are used to today(i.e. "growing" chips in a chemical medium). What these ultimately take us towards is robotic infrastructure that can be remotely controlled and is as "self-replicating" as a lathe or a blacksmith's shop.
When I see companies where administrators get in the way, it usually is accompanied by a management composed of folks that don't know the first thing about the current literature of software process(i.e. the stuff that comes out of proces like SEI at CMU) and who think they are God's gift to business because they have an MBA.
Usually such companies have a very short horizon in their planning and think only about costs and have poor practices of risk assessment(i.e. think Enron). US corporate leadership frequently understands money very well-and understands nothing else that is basic to their business. The reason that the US can seemingly afford this type of corporate leadership is that compared to other highly developed countries, the US has an exceptionally rich resource base and a lot of credit.
I don't think this situation will last forever-but some of the means by which that situation might change aren't entirely pleasant. The US has had a fundamental shift away from Industrial leadership towards financial and legal leadership.
The old Austro-Hungarian empire had some similar problems for example-and look at what happened there.
What it seems like is that there are some CEO's that will say anything for money-and they are gradually destroying the United States.