Manufacturing has not doubled. In twenty years it has added about 60%. That's not even 2.5% per year. Inflation over the same period was 3.1% per year. Besides, the concern is that as a function of per capita GNP, which is obviously a function of popluation, is changing and not in an upward direction. You've failed to site direct references to authoritative sources, so here's mine:
http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn2/gpoc.htm
No, real manufacturing output (after adjusting for inflation) has doubled in the last twenty years. Your data only covers 14 years. See the link I provided for full references.
You will notice that we have dropped from total manufacturing being about 18% of GNP to 14% of GNP between 1987 and 2001. You will also notice that we have added roughly 30 million in population. In terms of electronics manufacturing, we've lost nearly 30% in that sector just between 1994 and 2001 (.020% of GNP to.014% of GNP). "Soaring" my ass.
All that means is that other sectors of the economy were growing faster than manufacturing. This has been true since the 1940s, at least. So what?????
Realize what is happening: production is MOVING not dramatically INCREASING.
This is completely wrong. Production worldwide has been soaring! Manufacturing output in the United States has doubled in the last twenty years. See this.
Now, considering the amount of production moving to China and India, which represent a third of the world population, and that the United States represents 10% of the global economy, one can assume that for every $1000 increase in GDP per capita in China and India, it will cost the United States $868 in GDP per capita.
This is completely bogus zero-sum economics. It has no correspondence to reality.
The minimum wage of $3.80 in 1983 would require $5.70 today, but that wage is now only $5.15, which is a loss of 11% in standard of living, or about $1100/year. Since this is generally the wage we pay our manufacturing line workers, do you think these things are unrelated?
What are you talking about? Fewer than 5% of adult full-time workers earn minimum wage. The average blue-collar wage is $14.51/hour. For the category "machine operators, assembers, and inspectors", the average is $12.94/hour. The lowest wage occupation in this category is "laundering and dry cleaning machine operators", who still average $8.49/hour. So your comment about the minimum wage has zero relevance.
The gene does not cause infertility, just maleness. So it can spread. Which is in fact what they want.
It's exactly because this gene reduces fertitlity that they want to introduce it. It's a fundamental result of evolutionary theory--Fisher's Theorem of Sex Ratios--that this gene will not spread. Any gene which causes the sex ratio to deviate from 50-50 will die out.
He figures the math will work this way: To eliminate carp from a river, you need to introduce daughterless carp at a rate equal to between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of the total population each year for 20 years. So a lake with 100,000 wild carp would need to be stocked with 500 to 1,000 daughterless carp annually.
The Bell Curve (the book not the concept) has pretty much been completely discredited.
Not really. There was of course much politically-motivated agitation against it, but most of what the book said was already well-established science. After the Bell Curve controversy, the American Psychological Association formed an expert panel to produce a consensus statement on what is known about IQ. I think most people who read it will be surprised to find out that what they think are the most controversial parts of The Bell Curve are actually well in the mainstream of science. See Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 1
It was that as a race blacks have lower average intelligence and a much lower chance of producing a geniuses. The Bell Curve for blacks is shifted to the left. So yes, that is pretty much what he concluded: blacks are dumber than other races.
The fact that the bell curve for blacks is shifted to the left is just that, a statistical fact. It's not a conclusion. There is controversy over (1) why the average IQ is lower and (2) what significance this has to achievement in education and other fields.
But if you cherry pick your data and measuring methods (one military aptitude test that was never even intended to measure "intelligence"...
First of all, the difference of IQ between blacks and whites does not rest on one test. It appears on all valid IQ tests. Second, Murray and Hernstein use the Armed Forces Qualification Test for the main part of the book (which does not have anything to do with race), and they show in an appendix that it is a highly g-loaded test, easily adequate for the purpose of their study. If you learn anything about psychometrics, it's that it is difficult for any test not to be an IQ test. The g factor dominates performance.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 1
Well, since the conclusion of his last book was that blacks are inherently stupid, I'm not surprised that he comes to the conclusion in this book that Westerners do all the great work.
I doubt you actually read The Bell Curve if you think that was "the conclusion." One conclusion was that part of the average difference in IQ between blacks and whites is probably genetic. This happens to be the opinion of many, maybe most, experts on the topic. See Snyderman and Rothman's 1987 study for the American Psychologist (house journal of the APA) Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing in which 661 lottery selected experts in psychology and educational fields were polled on their conclusions concerning intelligence measurement. According to the survey:
"The source of black-white difference in IQ.This is perhaps the central question in the IQ controversy. Respondents were asked to express their opinion of the role of genetic differences in the black-white IQ differential. Forty-five percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15% who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. Twenty-four percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to suport any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination."
Consider, for example, gunpowder. Invented in China, but they only ever used it for fireworks to amuse the aristocrats.
Robin D. S. Yates, Professor of History and East Asian Studies at McGill University on Nova's web site:
" In my own research, I have been able to refute the common notion that the Chinese invented gunpowder but only used it for fireworks. I'm sure that they discovered military uses for it. I have found the earliest illustration of a cannon in the world, which dates from the change-over from the Northern Song to the Southern Song around 1127, which was 150 years before the development of the cannon in the West. The Song also used gunpowder to make fire lances - actually flame throwers - and many other gunpowder weapons, such as anti-personnel mines, which are thankfully now being taken out of general use."
the US sold Saddam WMDs and other assorted weapons (using loaned US taxpayer's money to pay for them)
These two things are false. The U.S. had nothing to do with Saddam getting to power. The U.S. did not even have diplomatic relations with Iraq from 1967 to 1984. Saddam seized power in 1979.
The United States never sold Iraq any weapons of mass destruction. It hardly sold Iraq any weapons at all (just some lightly armored helicopters). The U.S. accounted for less than 1% of Iraq's weapons. Iraq was a Soviet client state and bought arms mainly from the Soviet Union and France. The money for Iraq's weapons came from Iraq itself, other Arab oil states, the USSR and France.
The U.S. did give Iraq some agricultural loans in the mid-1980s when it was trying to improve relations with Iraq.
These are just outrageous lies that people have come to believe through repetition. Believe it or not, the United States is not responsible for every bad regime in the world.
Same false information about Trusted Computing
on
Trusted Computing
·
· Score: 0
On a Trusted Computing system, the ability to back up, mirror, and transfer data will be necessarily limited.
False. That's just not how Trusted Computing works. You can copy all you want, it's decrypting that is made harder.
Operating systems not certified as implementing all the requirements of Trusted Computing will not be issued certificates, and may not be booted on such systems.
Wrong again. That's just not how it works. He should learn more about it before he writes a 30-page essay.
For an informed take on Trusted Computing, see this article by Seth Schoen at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And knowing microsoft, and the huge amount of money they have for these things, they will attempt to enforce it if they can kill a competitor by doing so.
Maybe they will in the future, but they haven't used patents offensively yet.
Here's my blog reply to Tim Bray:
Tim Bray proposes
having people pay 1 cent per email. It's not much,
but it would make some many non-profit email lists unworkable. Most other
proposals like this charge only for the first email from
an unknown sender, and usually a lot more than one cent. This does
require the recipient (perhaps at the ISP level) keeping track of who
is already authorized to send free mail.
There are actually quite a few workable schemes for preventing spam.
Tim Bray is right that any system where sending is both free and
anonymous will always be open to spam, but it's not necessary to charge
on a per-message basis. One system that is beta-testing right now is Bonded Sender. With this system,
the owner of an outgoing mail-sending server puts up money to guarantee
that his system won't be sending spam (on the order of $1000 per
server, with $500/year renewal). There's a contract that specifies what
is spam and a third-party arbitrator for handling disputes. Existing
mail-filtering software can easily
check the BondedSender status via the DNS system, as they generally
already check the DNS status of senders.
There are a couple of drawbacks to this. First, the IP verification
won't work with dynamically-assigned addresses. Second, some smaller
email senders may not want to spend as much as $1000 on this. Third, it
doesn't help you if your ISP is not participating. All of
these can be overcome by using a paid relayer, as Tim Bray suggests. It
would be up to the relayer to determine how to prevent abuse of its own
system.
Other systems work by verifying a digital signature and certificate of
the sender, either on a per-message basis (S/MIME or PGP) or on a per
connection-basis (using SMTP over TLS).
This doesn't require a static IP address to verify identity.
Although it may seem complex and even chaotic, more than one mechanism
will exist to prevent spam, even in the long-term. For a variety of
legal, political, and financial reasons, no one solution will please
everyone. We need to have some sort of meta-email system for allowing
these to co-exist effectively.
What I propose is that an independent group be established which will
provide a framework for interoperability. What needs to be done?
A description of anti-spam policies. For example, Tim Bray's
proposed SMTP4ALL charges $.01 per message. Or FirstClassEmail may
charge $1 per message. BondedSender contractually forbids spam and
requires a cash bond up front, as well as identity verification.
There are a lot of possible policies. It should be up to the
recipient to specify what policy is acceptable, but there needs to be
a concise list so that the decision can be coded in a program.
There also needs to be a way for the recipient to find the policy.
For certificate-based systems, the policy can be encoded directly into
the certificate, but the exact syntax needs to be defined. For other
systems, something else needs to be devised.
A way to describe the properties of an individual sender or
message. It may be part of the sender's anti-spam policy that unsolicited
mailings are allowed, but that each mail will be labeled with what
type of mail it is, e.g. commercial, personal, political, charitable
soliciting, etc. Similarly, a system such as Hotmail may want to
label each user as to whether they are a verified, paying customer, or
an anonymous, free customer.
Some sort of meta-enforcement scheme. There needs to be a way of
knowing if SMTP4ALL is really charging $.01 per message or if it's
letting spammers send through at 1/1000 of that price. Is a CA
shirking its duties?
We don't want the chaos of the current RBL system. This is not
something that should be c
The very fact that Unix-like OSs have a concept of a "root" account (which the Windows "equivalent", "administrator", does not even come CLOSE to matching in terms of actual separation of permissions), makes it all but invincible to virii.
It only makes a small difference. The fact that mail programs make it hard to run executables is important, but the fact that the user is not running as root is of little importance. Any worm that is executed could easily send out copies of itself and leave ways to execute in the future.
If Linux were really popular, few in the ignorant masses would know enough to check.bashrc,.profile, crontab, etc.
Following up to my own post, I found that 0.85 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced, according to this, mostly in the conversion of limestone to lime. So the estimate of 1 tonne of CO2 for each tonne of concrete is not that far off. I also found that there are products that replace much of the cement with fly-ash from coal plants, which reduce the CO2 a lot.
The thing is, each turbine (there will be 30 or so in total) requires a 400 cubic metre concrete foundation. Now, 1cu.m. of concrete weighs 7 tonnes. Making 1 tonne of concrete releases 1 tonne of carbon dioxide (damn slashcode, no >sub
Do you have a source for "Making 1 tonne of concrete releases 1 tonne of carbon dioxide". That seems way high to me.
The constitutional issue is the seperation of legislative and executive power. The congress granted the FTC the authority to make rules concerning telemarketing fraud. The court felt that this rule was outside the authority granted by congress. An executive branch agency does not have the ability to make law, but the do have the ability to make the rules used to implement a law. The court held that the FTC overreached, it tried to make law instead of rules.
Congress now needs to make a law authorizing the FTC to implement a Do-Not-Call registry.
Congress did pass just such a law. It is the Do-Not-Call Implemtation Act, enacted as Public Law 108-10, March 11, 2003.
Here is the decision the judge rendered. It seems an incredible reach to find that Congress did not authorize the FTC to create the Do-Not-Call list.
I would be surprised if there were any common law country where the identify of users of an IP address were NOT subject to subpoena in a civil suit.
In most civilised countries in Europe a judge actually has to decide wheter the company can give out the identity of a user. DCMA gives an assistant/clerk(?) the authority to allow identification based on a subpoena.
I should clarify that by "common law" I meant English common law. That's the basis in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, and most other former territories of the U.K. I don't know about Euproe. It would be interesting to see a source for your claim. I find that in the United States most people have an unrealistic view of their privacy rights. They think the PATRIOT act changed more than it did. See this chart for a summary of requirements for the police and other government officials. As I said in other posts, there is nothing unusual about a clerk issuing a subpoena. See this article.
A judge needs to approve such a subpoena. The issue
here is that the DMCA removes this limitation.
No,
that is not correct. The DMCA merely specified that a clerk at any
United States district court may issue a subpoena, but there was not a
previous requirement that a judge review a subpoena.
Subpoenas to
identify anonymous Internet users have been issued in other cases
unrelated to the DMCA (mostly related to libel or trade secrets).
Sometimes those subpoenas have been quashed when challenged, but usually
not.
People are just misinformed if they the the RIAA has some
special right. Here is some information from an article for N.C. school
employees on how to reply to subpoenas. Some of it is specific to North
Carolina, but generally there's more similarity than difference between
jurisdictions:
Question 1. Are there different types of
subpoenas?
Yes. There are two basic types:
a subpoena
to testify (also called a witness subpoena), which requires the person
named in the subpoena to appear for the purpose of giving testimony; and
a subpoena to produce documents (also called a document
subpoena or subpoena duces tecum), which requires the named
person to appear and produce documents.
The subpoena that
you as a school employee receive may not be specifically labeled as a
witness subpoena or document subpoena, but it will state whether you are
being called to testify, produce documents, or both.
[...]
Question 3. Is a subpoena sufficient authorization for
disclosure of confidential records?
Not necessarily. Most
confidentiality laws--including those dealing with student and personnel
records--contain some provision permitting disclosure of confidential
records in legal proceedings. These provisions are not uniform, however.
Some simply allow disclosure in response to a subpoena, whereas others
impose stricter conditions on disclosure, such as entry of an order by a
judge or prior notification of the individual who is the subject of the
records. If you receive a subpoena for confidential information, you
must consider the particular statute or regulation governing the records
and determine the conditions under which you may disclose the
information. Questions 22 through 30 discuss those conditions.
[...]
Question 6. Are there any circumstances in which
one does not have to respond to a subpoena?
Very few. A subpoena
is a form of court order. If you ignore it and a judge later finds that
it was validly issued, you could be held in contempt.[7] Only in the rarest of
circumstances would it be safe for you to disregard a subpoena (see
Question 13, below, on subpoenas for out-of-state proceedings).
Mechanics of Subpoenas
Question 7. Who can issue a
subpoena?
Any judicial official may issue a subpoena for a trial
or deposition. Judges, magistrates, and clerks of court all are
judicial officials. An attorney for a party to the case also may issue a
subpoena, and often the subpoena you receive will be from an attorney. A
party to the case also may issue a subpoena, but only to require a
person to testify, not to produce documents. For example, if John Smith
is the plaintiff in a case, he could issue a subpoena to testify even
though not represented by an attorney, but he would have to apply to a
judicial official for a subpoena for documents.[8]
Question 8. Does a
judicial official have to review a subpoena before it is issued by an
attorney?
No. An attorney may issue a subpoena without obtaining
permission from a judicial official. But there is a threshold
requirement: A case must be pending before an attorney may issue a
subpoena.[9]
Question 9.
Is a subpoena issued by an attorney considered a court order even if it
has not been reviewed by a judicial official?
Yes. A lawfully
issued subpoena is a court order no matter who issues it. If you fail to
respond, you could be held in contempt of court.
Here are some more plaintiffs that may want to know how you feel--
(1) Infocision http://www.infocision.com/commercial_d ivision_page s/contact.html Want more information about InfoCision's teleservices outsourcing capabilities? You can contact us using one of the following methods:
By phone Todd Grable, Sr. Vice President - Marketing 330-668-1400
(2) Global Contact Services http://www.gcsagents.com/gcsweb/gcs%20we bsite2.htm What's the GCS advantage? We've assembled a team of Call Center industry experts and have built a company fully focused on our clients. If you're looking for experience and expertise, look no further than GCS. We're The Right Call.
(3) Chartered Benefit Services, Inc. http://www.charteredbenefit.com/ Need more information? If you are a financial institution and would like information about partnering with us, please call (847) 797-8500 Our address is: 315 W. University Drive, Arlington Heights, IL 60004
I would be surprised if there were any common law country where the identify of users of an IP address were NOT subject to subpoena in a civil suit. Why should it be? There's no presumption of confidentiality.
b) Bell, probably the biggest ISP in cananda (also the biggest provider of phonelines!!!) has this document about private customer information.
Ummm yeah.. In most countries (I'd bet), even the police would have to get a warrant of some sort, before they can just get this information from a company. Why on God's green earth does an association of stupid record labels, have the power to bypass all these laws?!?!?
To quote from the law:
3) For the purpose of clause 4.3 of Schedule 1, and despite the note that accompanies that clause, an organization may disclose personal information without the knowledge or consent of the individual only if the disclosure is
[...]
* (c) required to comply with a subpoena or warrant issued or an order made by a court, person or body with jurisdiction to compel the production of information, or to comply with rules of court relating to the production of records;
Police do not have to get a warrant for these kind of business records, just a subpoena, which is much easier. (In most countries, police do not need warrants for anything, but let's just limit this to English common law countries.)
It's usually pretty easy to subpoena these records in a civil suit, but I don't want to generalize across countries. There's nothing exceptional about this part of the process. The RIAA does not have any special powers and is not bypassing any laws.
Slashdot Mirror
While the treatment of Arar is appalling, it has nothing to do with the Patriot Act.
Sorry about omitting my source for wage data. It is the Bureau of Labor Services National Compensation Survey July, 2002
Of course the Australian biologists know this. Here's a quote from a Wired story from last year:
The scientist's web site is here.How is any gene that causes infertility suppose to multiply or spread anywhere? It's absurd on the face of it.
"Infertility is hereditary. If your parents didn't have any children, you probably won't have any either."
"The source of black-white difference in IQ.This is perhaps the central question in the IQ controversy. Respondents were asked to express their opinion of the role of genetic differences in the black-white IQ differential. Forty-five percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15% who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. Twenty-four percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to suport any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination."
" In my own research, I have been able to refute the common notion that the Chinese invented gunpowder but only used it for fireworks. I'm sure that they discovered military uses for it. I have found the earliest illustration of a cannon in the world, which dates from the change-over from the Northern Song to the Southern Song around 1127, which was 150 years before the development of the cannon in the West. The Song also used gunpowder to make fire lances - actually flame throwers - and many other gunpowder weapons, such as anti-personnel mines, which are thankfully now being taken out of general use."
The United States never sold Iraq any weapons of mass destruction. It hardly sold Iraq any weapons at all (just some lightly armored helicopters). The U.S. accounted for less than 1% of Iraq's weapons. Iraq was a Soviet client state and bought arms mainly from the Soviet Union and France. The money for Iraq's weapons came from Iraq itself, other Arab oil states, the USSR and France.
The U.S. did give Iraq some agricultural loans in the mid-1980s when it was trying to improve relations with Iraq.
These are just outrageous lies that people have come to believe through repetition. Believe it or not, the United States is not responsible for every bad regime in the world.
Not for the U.S., but check this out.
For an informed take on Trusted Computing, see this article by Seth Schoen at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Tim Bray proposes having people pay 1 cent per email. It's not much, but it would make some many non-profit email lists unworkable. Most other proposals like this charge only for the first email from an unknown sender, and usually a lot more than one cent. This does require the recipient (perhaps at the ISP level) keeping track of who is already authorized to send free mail.
There are actually quite a few workable schemes for preventing spam. Tim Bray is right that any system where sending is both free and anonymous will always be open to spam, but it's not necessary to charge on a per-message basis. One system that is beta-testing right now is Bonded Sender. With this system, the owner of an outgoing mail-sending server puts up money to guarantee that his system won't be sending spam (on the order of $1000 per server, with $500/year renewal). There's a contract that specifies what is spam and a third-party arbitrator for handling disputes. Existing mail-filtering software can easily check the BondedSender status via the DNS system, as they generally already check the DNS status of senders.
There are a couple of drawbacks to this. First, the IP verification won't work with dynamically-assigned addresses. Second, some smaller email senders may not want to spend as much as $1000 on this. Third, it doesn't help you if your ISP is not participating. All of these can be overcome by using a paid relayer, as Tim Bray suggests. It would be up to the relayer to determine how to prevent abuse of its own system.
Other systems work by verifying a digital signature and certificate of the sender, either on a per-message basis (S/MIME or PGP) or on a per connection-basis (using SMTP over TLS). This doesn't require a static IP address to verify identity.
Although it may seem complex and even chaotic, more than one mechanism will exist to prevent spam, even in the long-term. For a variety of legal, political, and financial reasons, no one solution will please everyone. We need to have some sort of meta-email system for allowing these to co-exist effectively.
What I propose is that an independent group be established which will provide a framework for interoperability. What needs to be done?
There are a lot of possible policies. It should be up to the recipient to specify what policy is acceptable, but there needs to be a concise list so that the decision can be coded in a program.
We don't want the chaos of the current RBL system. This is not something that should be c
So, yeah, Grandma would lose $10, but that's a good thing; it'll teach her to switch to Linux :-).
Right now, hacked systems just keep sending and sending and sending. Tim Bray's system looks like a plus to me.
If Linux were really popular, few in the ignorant masses would know enough to check .bashrc, .profile, crontab, etc.
Following up to my own post, I found that 0.85 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced, according to this, mostly in the conversion of limestone to lime. So the estimate of 1 tonne of CO2 for each tonne of concrete is not that far off. I also found that there are products that replace much of the cement with fly-ash from coal plants, which reduce the CO2 a lot.
Here is the decision the judge rendered. It seems an incredible reach to find that Congress did not authorize the FTC to create the Do-Not-Call list.
I should clarify that by "common law" I meant English common law. That's the basis in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, and most other former territories of the U.K. I don't know about Euproe. It would be interesting to see a source for your claim. I find that in the United States most people have an unrealistic view of their privacy rights. They think the PATRIOT act changed more than it did. See this chart for a summary of requirements for the police and other government officials. As I said in other posts, there is nothing unusual about a clerk issuing a subpoena. See this article.
I meant to include this link to the article on subpoenas.
Subpoenas to identify anonymous Internet users have been issued in other cases unrelated to the DMCA (mostly related to libel or trade secrets). Sometimes those subpoenas have been quashed when challenged, but usually not.
People are just misinformed if they the the RIAA has some special right. Here is some information from an article for N.C. school employees on how to reply to subpoenas. Some of it is specific to North Carolina, but generally there's more similarity than difference between jurisdictions:
Here are some more plaintiffs that may want to know how you feel--
d ivision_page s/contact.html
e bsite2.htm
(1) Infocision
http://www.infocision.com/commercial_
Want more information about InfoCision's teleservices outsourcing capabilities? You can contact us using one of the following methods:
By phone
Todd Grable, Sr. Vice President - Marketing
330-668-1400
(2) Global Contact Services
http://www.gcsagents.com/gcsweb/gcs%20w
What's the GCS advantage? We've assembled a team of Call Center industry
experts and have built a company fully focused on our clients. If you're
looking for experience and expertise, look no further than GCS. We're
The Right Call.
Want more information? Please contact: Benny Callahan EVP, Sales
Phone: (704) 782-0596
E-mail: benny.callahan@gcsagents.com
(3) Chartered Benefit Services, Inc.
http://www.charteredbenefit.com/
Need more information?
If you are a financial institution and would like information about
partnering with us, please call (847) 797-8500
Our address is:
315 W. University Drive,
Arlington Heights, IL 60004
It's usually pretty easy to subpoena these records in a civil suit, but I don't want to generalize across countries. There's nothing exceptional about this part of the process. The RIAA does not have any special powers and is not bypassing any laws.