I think you are right-mathemeticians are trusting folks. I'm not an especially good mathematician. However, I have substantial experience dealing with fraud detection systems. I did an early database implementation for what become the world's most popular credit card fraud detection system. I've also worked on an investigation that put the CEO of a major corporation in prison.
Much fraud is pretty low tech but involves manipulating lots of people. Basically many security mechanisms come down to the word of some combination of people-if those people can be compromised, the security is compromised.
In the credit card world, it became pretty obvious that lots of license departments and law enforcement agencies were pretty much infiltrated. Stuff like voter registration cards? Well, it all comes down to paper. You might handle this to some extent by cameras in the polling places-but then there are still the mail-in ballots.
The thing is that winner take all elections tend to encourage fraud-particularlly in close elections. It is hard to very results wildly from the polls these days(say more than 5%). This is all an excellent argument for proportional representation at least in the house. Condorcet voting offers another option for races where you are electing a single guy(the idea is to pick the least bad candidate in series of 2 way races that are simulated from candidate rankings).
What folks miss: there is pretty substantial evidence that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all engaged in substantial fraud. Between that and corporate influence-the US political system is pretty sick.
Folks can' still vote multiple times if they get more than multiple registration cards. Dead people can still vote. Illegal aliens can still vote(i.e. someoen can get a drivers license with Mexican ID-and then get a voter registration card).
The main thing the Chaum proposal handles is fraud by a few people via voting machines. Fraud by election officials using lower tech mechanisms would be more difficult-but still possible.
There are still quite a few low tech means of commiting vote fraud. IMHO open source and a paper trail are decent steps-but hard encryption so that anyone with a receipt can:
prove they have an authentic receipt
audit the records
would also help quite a bit.
Now, even that still doesn't handle stuff like people voting twice. We'll still need to worry about stuff like folks using false/invalid ID and voting(which is pretty rare I would suspect, but give them time).
Dell didn't properly handle a pilot project to asssess what would happen when they moved operations to India. When the Dell management invested other people's money this way, they should really have understood the risks/benefits involved up-front.
This is yet another example of quality problems on the part of Dell. I own a Dell-it has been rebuilt-3 times in 3 years(I'm glad I got the warrenty!).
Major changes in business practices are risky. The software business is one where 200-1 productivity differences in organizations aren't uncommon. It is short-sighted to disassemble the highly productive software organizations-or to cast off highly productive workforces-whereever they might be. The pool of folks with 150+ IQ's in the world just isn't that large and may not be growing despite a world population boom--and the pool of such people inclined to do technical work is another issue. The productivity differences simply swamp any cost of living differences. If we have organizations that are ceasing to be optimally productive-they need to look at their business practices.
My own guess here, McManagers with McMBA's are a major part of the problem. The Dotcon era attracted a lot of slick operators that understood money well-but didn't understand much else and offshoring is a last desperate attempt on the part of these guys to avoid the chickens inevitably coming home to roost.
I tend to think that there is room for more stuff to be done in a PC's firmware. I know the bios on older Sun's was a lot smarter than anything in the PC world. I also think it will be a serious problem for Microsoft to try to do anything that departs from the older BIOS standard in a way that gets in the way of stuff folks are used to doing on conventional PC's. I also think that BIOS is a natural area for Open Source solutions simply because the low end motherboard market is so price sensitive.
I would personally like firmware on motherboards that made stuff like installing linux accross a network and configuring dual boot machines a little easier-particularly for novices.
Well, my point is that going from $500 to $1500 just says that the US border patrol just isn't doing very much. The value of the service the coyote's provide is so great, that a $1000 increase in price just doesn't affect things much.
Now, even if you controlled illegal immigration(say cameras on the borders and at sea) you'd still have a big issue with stuff like Visa overstays. That could be handled rather simply bying requiring visa holders and their sponsors to post substantial bonds upon entry(that would be refundable on exit). The bonding requirements could be immediately active on all existing visa holders or those that had overstayed their visas.
There would still be some folks inclined to terrorism that would jump through all the hoops, but a few simple measures would raise the bar considerably-and Congress and the president are so addicted to the present state of affairs they simply can't act in a way that reflects popular will.
What are the theoretical limits to how well this could work? If you had a bunch of these kinds of devices, appropriately networked, you'd have a lot more information about currents than we now have. It seems to me like that information could be used to speed things up a bit. I'd like to hear from someone that knows more about oceanography than I do.
There have been all these restrictions on the rights of US citizens-but all that has happened since 911 is the price of a smuggler taking folks from Mexico to the US has gone up from $500 to $1500. That doesn't strike me as a lot of increased security.
I tend to think the surveillance/tracking applications are more significant. There are already lots of way to deliver nukes. There aren't many ways to effectively guard against subs. Now, what is tricky here: these things are both their own problem and solution. It seems like guarding against these gliders might be most effectively done by the gliders themselves.
I can imagine these things evolving into a rather effective means of monitoring ocean borders. It would simply become impossible to sneak into an appropriately guarded terroritory without detection.
Very low cost maybe, but not free. The equipment might last 10-15 years. In mass production, you can probably get costs way down. This is really the time of thing that belongs in the category of "global infrastructure". If enough folks started using these, they'd become highly practical.
I can imagine this basic idea might also get adapted in various ways for non-time critical transport. The hard part here seems like the embedded software/hardware--the other technology is based on stuff that has been around a while.
I have a feeling this is one that really will take off in time.
When I worked at Sun, the developers pretty much all had private offices or shared with one other person. Those were the days when Sun was growing and making money. Now, real estate in Silicon Valley wasn't quite as insanely priced then as now.
Since then, Silicon Valley real estate has become a lot more expensive. To stay in Silicon Valley, Sun has replaced their US work force with H-1b workers overwelmingly from India and China and proceeded to loose over 90% of their shareholders value.
I personally,think it would have been a wise business decision to set up a campus someplace like rural Utah or Oregon. If present trends continue, it appears likely Sun will eventually move operations to India or China.
Basically, there is a workforce that has proven itself able to build a company like sun-but they aren't real productive in high-rent situations. There is another workforce that is much more unproven. We haven't seen really major IT innovations out of India or China yet. We may, but that is still somewhat speculative.
It looks to me like Sun, HP, Compaq, Lucent are all killing the geese that have laid the golden eggs form them.
I'm working at a large public school district. I've been successful at getting some Open Source tools in use here(CVS, Python, cygwin). Although there are academic versions of some of the Microsoft products, sometimes these aren't quite the same as the commercial versions. Also, event he discounted cost of some of the development tools is prohibitive.
This district is in fact heading towards Linux-the big reason is that they are heavy users of Novell--and Novell is moving towards Linux in a substantial way. That is how Linux is getting its foot in the door here.
I think you misread my comments above. I still contend that more people get rich by lying, cheating and stealing than by doing remarkable things. However, most people get rich do so by doing things that are neither actively dishonest or remarkably contributive. In this category I would put folks that inherit money, win the lottery or simply get lucky. I do have a problem with institutionalized hypocrisy. Lots of wealthy folks are dependent upon things like using labor of illegal immigrants, lying on their taxes, making political donations to make money or working the system in various ways.
Governmental vs. Business corruption IMHO is a chicken vs. egg kind of question. At the level of state government the dominant force is typically real estate developers. Lots of these folks really do work, but at the same time, as a group, they manipulate the political process against the will of the people to make money.
This has all reached a pretty extreme state in which during the 2000 H-1b expansion the congress voted 96-1 for a bill 82% of the public opposed. I suspect that is an extreme case-but I think there are quite a few others.
According to Frank Knight of U of Chicago, it takes about 20 players in a market for there to be a really "Free" market. That generally just doesn't happen with power utilities.
What I would want to see here is a country by country and region by region comparison of how power utilities work in various dimensions. Enron for example was a disaster, a corrupt organizations systematically attempting to defraud the public-and Enron as sold originally as a more "free market" solution.
My guess here is that there are good examples of public utilities working--and better market based solutions than Enron.
First Energy has been a major concern of Congressman Kucinich for a while now. There is a long standing feud between Kucinich and First Energy-at this point it looks like Dennis was right about these folks.
Lessons from Tucker
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Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In the film, Tucker, a man and his dream, an auto exec testified "you never innovate until your competitors force you do". Now consider what has happened to the US auto industry. If the US doesn't get guys like that out of positions of leadership, the US will go the way of the US auto industry.
I think you are correct. A lot of the people that have played prominent roles in the outsourcing and H-1b/L-1 fads will find themselves in VERY lonely positions. I used to work at Sun. I was proud to work at Sun. At this point though, I can't say I would trust McNeally at all. Any manager that has been signing lots of H-1b/L-1 visa requests, particularly the last year, isn't someone that I will trust.
A government that doesn't dispose of techies over the objection of 82% of the public, simply to get political donations. Americans deserve leaders that don't sell their office as did Bush, Gephardt, Kerry, Lieberman and Edwards. The polls predicted that what has happened would happen.
The claim that people that are rich get rich by doing remarkable things is bogus--some do, far more simply lie, cheat and steal effectively. Money is a poor measure of someone's contribution. Look at Kary Mullis-he built and entire industry and got $20K for a patent sold for over $100 Million(he got the Nobel Prize and Japan Medal-but that was inspite of Cetus management, not because of it).
You also need to factor in that in 2002 there were 195,000 H-1b and something like 60,000 L-1 Worker replacement Visas. If 2/3 of these were in High Tech, then the real numbers are something like 30% worse from the perspective of US workers.
It also appears that rather than creating jobs in the US, H-1b and L-1 have been intensively used to facilitate outsourcing and to facilitate movement of capital to places like India. For example, Enron had 21,000 employees worldwide, about half were in the United States, and they had over 4700 Visa applications(overwhelmingly from India). Interestingly, out of $12 Billion of shareholders losses, at least $3 billion wound up in India.
Bad trade deals, including the WTO/NATFA have played a very important role causing the US currency to be highly valued, creating a large trade imbalence and locking the US into worker replacement programs like H-1b/L-1, and into the present tax structure.
The sad thing is that the US range of options is rather limited. We have a nuclear power that has shrinking manufacturing capability and enormous amounts of debt held by powers that have their own agendas.
The real question here should be not just the practicalities involved. I would suggest that if space is developed, another world war is much less likely than if space is not developed.
Look at Europe. The rise of the Nazi's is intimately tied with the closing of America as s destination for German migration.
Both Linus and Bill have families. Bill however has the stress that comes from being the world's richest man-part of that job description means dealing with things like Anti-trust lawsuits and buying politicians. Look at the hassles that were caused Bill when he didn't make the right politican donations. While Bill was worried about that-Linus moved ahead. I suspect that in 200 years, Linus will be seen as a much more significant figure than Bill. Look at JP Morgan-he was once one of the world's richest men. Look at Ford and Rockefeller. How do they _really_ compare in history compared to Pasteur or the Wright Brothers or Goddard?
Linus also has more ability to actually use his resources. He's not spending time with folks like Warren Buffet playing bridge-he's focused on technical issues. Linus may have a few "yes men" around distorting his perception, but nothing like Bill Gates.
The kind of extreme wealth Bill Gates has also brings some serious hassles. Gates can't travel anyplace without security measures--and even with those security measures, a suicide bomber in a station wagon full of fertilizer and diesel fuel could take him out at any time. Anyone that has to think about this sort of stuff-or hire people to think about this sort of stuff has a problem.
Gates, to his credit, at least seems to have some old friends(some prominent Silicon Valley executives don't). Still, I honestly suspect that if money were suddenly worthless (say due to a major economic collapse or EMP of the financial system), Linus would be in a much stronger position than Gates.
This is an interesting approach to infrastructure. Now, the next question: how will this approach affect Korea's economic development? What types of businesses will get located in Korea specifically to because of the ubiquitous availability of this type of infrastructure? How will the universal availability of broadband affect Korea's land use of development patterns? Will folks still commute via cars? Will factories start to become remote controlled?
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Much fraud is pretty low tech but involves manipulating lots of people. Basically many security mechanisms come down to the word of some combination of people-if those people can be compromised, the security is compromised.
In the credit card world, it became pretty obvious that lots of license departments and law enforcement agencies were pretty much infiltrated. Stuff like voter registration cards? Well, it all comes down to paper. You might handle this to some extent by cameras in the polling places-but then there are still the mail-in ballots.
The thing is that winner take all elections tend to encourage fraud-particularlly in close elections. It is hard to very results wildly from the polls these days(say more than 5%). This is all an excellent argument for proportional representation at least in the house. Condorcet voting offers another option for races where you are electing a single guy(the idea is to pick the least bad candidate in series of 2 way races that are simulated from candidate rankings).
What folks miss: there is pretty substantial evidence that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all engaged in substantial fraud. Between that and corporate influence-the US political system is pretty sick.
Folks can' still vote multiple times if they get more than multiple registration cards. Dead people can still vote. Illegal aliens can still vote(i.e. someoen can get a drivers license with Mexican ID-and then get a voter registration card).
The main thing the Chaum proposal handles is fraud by a few people via voting machines. Fraud by election officials using lower tech mechanisms would be more difficult-but still possible.
prove they have an authentic receipt
audit the records
would also help quite a bit.
Now, even that still doesn't handle stuff like people voting twice. We'll still need to worry about stuff like folks using false/invalid ID and voting(which is pretty rare I would suspect, but give them time).
Dell didn't properly handle a pilot project to asssess what would happen when they moved operations to India. When the Dell management invested other people's money this way, they should really have understood the risks/benefits involved up-front.
This is yet another example of quality problems on the part of Dell. I own a Dell-it has been rebuilt-3 times in 3 years(I'm glad I got the warrenty!).
Major changes in business practices are risky. The software business is one where 200-1 productivity differences in organizations aren't uncommon. It is short-sighted to disassemble the highly productive software organizations-or to cast off highly productive workforces-whereever they might be. The pool of folks with 150+ IQ's in the world just isn't that large and may not be growing despite a world population boom--and the pool of such people inclined to do technical work is another issue. The productivity differences simply swamp any cost of living differences. If we have organizations that are ceasing to be optimally productive-they need to look at their business practices.
My own guess here, McManagers with McMBA's are a major part of the problem. The Dotcon era attracted a lot of slick operators that understood money well-but didn't understand much else and offshoring is a last desperate attempt on the part of these guys to avoid the chickens inevitably coming home to roost.
I would personally like firmware on motherboards that made stuff like installing linux accross a network and configuring dual boot machines a little easier-particularly for novices.
Now, even if you controlled illegal immigration(say cameras on the borders and at sea) you'd still have a big issue with stuff like Visa overstays. That could be handled rather simply bying requiring visa holders and their sponsors to post substantial bonds upon entry(that would be refundable on exit). The bonding requirements could be immediately active on all existing visa holders or those that had overstayed their visas.
There would still be some folks inclined to terrorism that would jump through all the hoops, but a few simple measures would raise the bar considerably-and Congress and the president are so addicted to the present state of affairs they simply can't act in a way that reflects popular will.
What are the theoretical limits to how well this could work? If you had a bunch of these kinds of devices, appropriately networked, you'd have a lot more information about currents than we now have. It seems to me like that information could be used to speed things up a bit. I'd like to hear from someone that knows more about oceanography than I do.
There have been all these restrictions on the rights of US citizens-but all that has happened since 911 is the price of a smuggler taking folks from Mexico to the US has gone up from $500 to $1500. That doesn't strike me as a lot of increased security.
This all strikes me as a big scam.
I can imagine these things evolving into a rather effective means of monitoring ocean borders. It would simply become impossible to sneak into an appropriately guarded terroritory without detection.
Very low cost maybe, but not free. The equipment might last 10-15 years. In mass production, you can probably get costs way down. This is really the time of thing that belongs in the category of "global infrastructure". If enough folks started using these, they'd become highly practical.
I have a feeling this is one that really will take off in time.
Since then, Silicon Valley real estate has become a lot more expensive. To stay in Silicon Valley, Sun has replaced their US work force with H-1b workers overwelmingly from India and China and proceeded to loose over 90% of their shareholders value.
I personally,think it would have been a wise business decision to set up a campus someplace like rural Utah or Oregon. If present trends continue, it appears likely Sun will eventually move operations to India or China.
Basically, there is a workforce that has proven itself able to build a company like sun-but they aren't real productive in high-rent situations. There is another workforce that is much more unproven. We haven't seen really major IT innovations out of India or China yet. We may, but that is still somewhat speculative.
It looks to me like Sun, HP, Compaq, Lucent are all killing the geese that have laid the golden eggs form them.
This district is in fact heading towards Linux-the big reason is that they are heavy users of Novell--and Novell is moving towards Linux in a substantial way. That is how Linux is getting its foot in the door here.
Governmental vs. Business corruption IMHO is a chicken vs. egg kind of question. At the level of state government the dominant force is typically real estate developers. Lots of these folks really do work, but at the same time, as a group, they manipulate the political process against the will of the people to make money.
This has all reached a pretty extreme state in which during the 2000 H-1b expansion the congress voted 96-1 for a bill 82% of the public opposed. I suspect that is an extreme case-but I think there are quite a few others.
What I would want to see here is a country by country and region by region comparison of how power utilities work in various dimensions. Enron for example was a disaster, a corrupt organizations systematically attempting to defraud the public-and Enron as sold originally as a more "free market" solution.
My guess here is that there are good examples of public utilities working--and better market based solutions than Enron.
First Energy has been a major concern of Congressman Kucinich for a while now. There is a long standing feud between Kucinich and First Energy-at this point it looks like Dennis was right about these folks.
In the film, Tucker, a man and his dream, an auto exec testified "you never innovate until your competitors force you do". Now consider what has happened to the US auto industry. If the US doesn't get guys like that out of positions of leadership, the US will go the way of the US auto industry.
I think you are correct. A lot of the people that have played prominent roles in the outsourcing and H-1b/L-1 fads will find themselves in VERY lonely positions. I used to work at Sun. I was proud to work at Sun. At this point though, I can't say I would trust McNeally at all. Any manager that has been signing lots of H-1b/L-1 visa requests, particularly the last year, isn't someone that I will trust.
The claim that people that are rich get rich by doing remarkable things is bogus--some do, far more simply lie, cheat and steal effectively. Money is a poor measure of someone's contribution. Look at Kary Mullis-he built and entire industry and got $20K for a patent sold for over $100 Million(he got the Nobel Prize and Japan Medal-but that was inspite of Cetus management, not because of it).
of US workers.
It also appears that rather than creating jobs in the US, H-1b and L-1 have been intensively used to facilitate outsourcing and to facilitate movement of capital to places like India. For example, Enron had 21,000 employees worldwide, about half were in the United States, and they had over 4700 Visa applications(overwhelmingly from India). Interestingly, out of $12 Billion of shareholders losses, at least $3 billion wound up in India.
Bad trade deals, including the WTO/NATFA have played a very important role causing the US currency to be highly valued, creating a large trade imbalence and locking the US into worker replacement programs like H-1b/L-1, and into the present tax structure.
The sad thing is that the US range of options is rather limited. We have a nuclear power that has shrinking manufacturing capability and enormous amounts of debt held by powers that have their own agendas.
The real question here should be not just the practicalities involved. I would suggest that if space is developed, another world war is much less likely than if space is not developed.
Look at Europe. The rise of the Nazi's is intimately tied with the closing of America as s destination for German migration.
Both Linus and Bill have families. Bill however has the stress that comes from being the world's richest man-part of that job description means dealing with things like Anti-trust lawsuits and buying politicians. Look at the hassles that were caused Bill when he didn't make the right politican donations. While Bill was worried about that-Linus moved ahead. I suspect that in 200 years, Linus will be seen as a much more significant figure than Bill. Look at JP Morgan-he was once one of the world's richest men. Look at Ford and Rockefeller. How do they _really_ compare in history compared to Pasteur or the Wright Brothers or Goddard?
Linus also has more ability to actually use his resources. He's not spending time with folks like Warren Buffet playing bridge-he's focused on technical issues. Linus may have a few "yes men" around distorting his perception, but nothing like Bill Gates.
The kind of extreme wealth Bill Gates has also brings some serious hassles. Gates can't travel anyplace without security measures--and even with those security measures, a suicide bomber in a station wagon full of fertilizer and diesel fuel could take him out at any time. Anyone that has to think about this sort of stuff-or hire people to think about this sort of stuff has a problem.
Gates, to his credit, at least seems to have some old friends(some prominent Silicon Valley executives don't). Still, I honestly suspect that if money were suddenly worthless (say due to a major economic collapse or EMP of the financial system), Linus would be in a much stronger position than Gates.
What is more interesting to me that stuff like real-time delivery of movies/TV, is that this opens possibilities like:
Enabling teleoperation of factories and various equipment--once infrastructure like this is in place, this sort of stuff starts to make sense.
Dramatically enhancing neighborhood security(i.e. making stuff like burglarly virtually impossible).
This is an interesting approach to infrastructure. Now, the next question: how will this approach affect Korea's economic development? What types of businesses will get located in Korea specifically to because of the ubiquitous availability of this type of infrastructure? How will the universal availability of broadband affect Korea's land use of development patterns? Will folks still commute via cars? Will factories start to become remote controlled?