The reason housing prices are high and there is a housing shortage in desirable areas are simple: government keeps pushing up demand for housing in such areas through various housing subsidies (low income rent programs, Section 8, government support of mortgages), while at the same time discouraging the creation of new supply through price controls (rent control, affordable housing unit requirements, special taxes on developers) and regulations (zoning, usage restrictions, etc.).
I know, dear Elizabeth, you're just a greedy lawyer and a rabble rousing politician, but please, learn some basic economics: you and people like you are responsible for the housing shortage. And restricting the ability of people to rent out their places for short periods, as on AirBnB, will make the housing shortage worse. In fact, the reason AirBnB is likely so popular in the first place is because AirBnB hosts don't have to deal with all the other rental regulation bullshit people like you have created; in a free housing market, AirBnB would be much less attractive, since landlords could get similar income without all the risk associated with an unpredictable succession of short term renters. So, if you restrict AirBnB rentals, people will probably either leave their apartments empty, or they will convert them into expensive luxury condos. See, Elizabeth, you can certainly stop people from engaging in some economic transactions by wielding your big senatorial stick, but you cannot force them to engage in economic transactions against their will.
However, there is quite a difference between 2% and 20%. That amounts to quite a number of people who might yet have a few years (or months, as the case may be) to live *with a decent quality of life* - iff no hypoxic brain damage occurs,
No, I'm sorry, but the "20% number" is entirely made up on your part and is implausible. PulsePoint will doubtlessly increase the number of survivors of cardiac arrest. But irreversible brain damage occurs within four minutes after cardiac arrest. In order to prevent brain damage, you have to restore circulation within that amount of time. Look at the map in TFA: PulsePoint calls people from a couple of blocks away, meaning it will take minutes for someone competent to arrive and apply an AED, on top of an unknown number of minutes having elapsed after the cardiac arrest. PulsePoint will almost certainly increase survival, but the vast majority of survivors will still have serious neurological problems.
You never know whether someone you know might fall into the 18% group.
That's not the right question. The right question is: assuming you have a cardiac arrest, what's the probability that your life after resuscitation is going to be one of serious neurological impairment, loss of autonomy, and pain, and do you really want to take that risk. There is little reason to believe that PulsePoint decreases that risk; in fact, it probably increases it. And what makes this worse is that there is currently no reliable way of stopping people from resuscitating you, so more people will be undergoing resuscitation against their will.
You can make your own choices, but my choice is to avoid resuscitation. And I'm saying this to remind you that you should think about this too, rather than blindly believing the Hollywood fiction where someone hits your chest after a heart attack and you get up and walk away as if nothing happened. That fiction is particularly dangerous because there are safe and effective ways of dealing with heart attacks, namely diet and exercise. But it's so much easier to believe in a magic cell phone app, isn't it?
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
Tattooing DNR over your heart isn't reliable; doctors and EMTs ignore such tattoos because they aren't legally valid. Even if they could respect such tattoos, it wouldn't be in their financial interest: it's financially much more rewarding for them to wheel you into intensive care and "treat" you for a few weeks. It's even more rewarding if you remain permanently disabled and require their services for months and years.
You should seriously consider whether resuscitation after cardiac arrest is worth it: many people who survive it will suffer from severe neurological problems.
Much more important than this kind of gimmick would be a good technological solution for people to be able to refuse unwanted medical treatment. Right now, there is no reliable way of doing that, and many people are condemned to weeks or months of horrible suffering by being treated against their wishes.
Of course, the medical establishment is quick to embrace technology when it results in more people being brought in the door for their "treatments"; they are not interested in technology when it actually serves patient interests and preferences but causes them loss of revenue.
Western journalists are under no such oppressive restrictions and deliberately do such things of their own free will. Which system is worse?
Western journalists are poor sobs, with no valuable skills other than networking and rhetoric. If they want to have any sort of career, they need to suck up to politicians and/or create outrage, preferably both.
Yes, there are no socialist or communist parties. There are also no fascist or Christian parties. Great, isn't it? I hope we can keep it that way, rather than turning into Europe.
As somebody who grew up in a country with proportional representation, I agree: proportional representation is not particularly left wing, it is something that political extremists in general like, whether on the left or on the right. It turns a parliament into a collection of many small parties with extremist viewpoints and unstable, unpredictable coalitions.
Proportional representation also gives those political parties enormous power over their party members (since "proportionality" is determined at the party level), making independent candidacy next to impossible. If you add government regulation and public financing of campaigns into the mix, you have essentially created a political aristocracy.
In the US, proportional representation is mostly associated with the left because there is a pretty large political minority of progressives and democratic socialists who are frustrated that the majority is rejecting their ideas. They are hoping to gain power through proportional representation.
Proportional representation allowed the Nazis to come to power in the Weimar Republic and has brought many socialists and communists to power in Europe and South America. It is a bad idea, and one of the strengths of the US system is that it doesn't have it.
No one I know who does high performance code (such as numerics, real time computer vision, that sort of thing) uses anything but C++, especially for new projects. There is nothing out there that combines the speed and expressivity of C++, and when you know performance is going to be a factor at some point, C++ is the only choice.
And:
Check out something like Eigen or TooN (a somewhat more obscure library which is used in the vision world for things like PTAM). They are very far from C++. The code written down in an editor reads more like maths. There's no explict loops, no explicit memory allocation. They're both high performance libraries used in challenging applications (seriously download and run PTAM, it's amazing).
PTAM is decent C++ code with probably pretty decent performance, but it isn't "high performance numerical code" or even high performance embedded code; it contains none of the performance tuning that such code usually should have.
I think it is dishonest on your part to recommend Eigen, when you know (or ought to know) that it actually isn't high performance and is deeply mired in C++ idiosyncracies. Likewise, I think it is dishonest of you to portray C++ as the only high performance computing language in town, when you know full well that many people are using other languages, and you are simply not even familiar with those other languages.
I do use C++ a lot in my work and I recommend it to other people. But unlike you, I don't feel any need to lie about what it is and isn't. There are many alternatives to C++, and I think people should keep an open mind about what they use.
So, you agree then that, numerical performance of Eigen sucks for large matrices. For small, fixed size matrices it likely is no better than Fortran either. Syntactically, Eigen is pretty lousy as well: you can write some array expressions, but defining functions on matrices is messy, and slicing and similar operations also are restrictive. Eigen's error messages are impenetrable due to the use of template metaprogramming, and parallelization support in it is close to non-existent.
Fortran these days has built in matrices that automatically use the best possible BLAS/LAPACK backends. You can write Matlab-like array expressions, get clear error messages, and can efficiently pass and return arrays, matrices, and slices. And it provides user-defined data types, operator overloading, virtual functions, and built-in parallel and distributed programming support.
I do a lot of C++ programming (including Eigen) and use C++ because I need to interface with a lot of C and C++ code. But, objectively, C++ is not a very good language for numerical or high performance computing. You can sort of get the job done in it, but it takes a lot longer to write code and ends up much more complex than in a decent numerical language. And while anybody who knows Matlab can write high performance Fortran code almost instantly, becoming a sufficiently good C++ programmers to even get started writing good numerical code takes years.
Large parts of the numerical and high performance computing community never touch C++ at all. C++ is mostly popular in computer vision, embedded systems, and some areas of machine learning.
So you think an economic question like this cannot be analyzed by objective statistical data.
That's a question of mathematics: there are many questions that provably cannot be answered using objective statistical data.
As a proponent of H-1B's, how would you make the argument? Subjectively? Good luck.
Against Matloff? That's easy: Matloff wants to limit labor mobility in order to increase salaries in his profession and, taken at face value, his own data suggests that limiting H-1B visas would accomplish that. That alone is sufficient economic reason to increase, rather than decrease, H-1B visa quotas.
Matloff publishes in peer reviewed CS journals, and this debate is a sideline of his.
According to Google Scholar, Matloff hasn't published in peer reviewed CS journals for half a decade. What a joke.
A straw man? It's a claim made by H-1B proponents.... In other words, like the infamous phrase "best and brightest", Matloff is guilty of rebutting the arguments of the proponents using exactly the terminology that they use. Once more: complain to the proponents.
There are many arguments people make for H-1B visas, some relevant and some not relevant. Matloff choosees to rebut irrelevant arguments, hence he is picking a straw man. Even if his statistical analysis were sound, it would be irrelevant.
Then please give us some plausible scenarios, without which your argument is hand waving.
You seriously claim to be a statistician, and you can't figure this out yourself? Let's leave that discussion to peer review, shall we?
There is almost no mention (and none from you) of what a better way to do this analysis would be.
That's like saying "what's a better analysis of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin"; the premises of Matloff's analysis themselves are wrong, so there is no better way of doing the analysis (that is in addition to the fact that his analysis is also wrong from a statistical point of view).
"Wealth of the nation"? Such a brilliantly precise term from someone who called "shortage" ambiguous. What the hell does "wealth of the nation" mean?
It was an allusion to Adam Smith's classical work "The Wealth of Nations"; look there for what I mean by the term. Furthermore, I don't have to be precise, I'm not publishing a paper. I don't pretend that there is objective statistical data that can answer this question, Matloff does. He needs to make his case.
While he's currently a CS prof, he used to be a statistics prof, and it shows. He uses hard data properly analyzed
As an immigrant and someone who does data analytics professionally, I have to say: his analysis is logically, statistically, economically, and legally unsound. (Note that his report hasn't even been peer reviewed.)
It is logically unsound because, among other things, it starts with the premise that for the H-1b program to be desirable or economically valid, its workers should be, on average, "better and brighter" than US workers (a straw man), and because it uses arbitrary and unvalidated measures of quality.
It is statistically unsound because he infers that foreign workers are "less bright" than American workers because the "foreign" attribute correlates negatively with measures such as salaries and number of patents; however, it is easy to construct scenarios for which such negative correlations exist even if the workers are objectively still "brighter" than US workers. Inferring that populations of foreign workers are "less bright" based on his statistical analysis is incorrect.
It is economically unsound because he keeps arguing in terms of a "labor shortage"; while such a fuzzy term is often being used to justify H-1b visas politically, it makes little sense as the basis of an economic argument either way. And if one wanted to argue in terms of a "labor shortage", a labor shortage for low-skilled tech workers would be as important economically as a shortage of "the best and the brightest".
Matloff also argues for trying to create an artificial scarcity of workers in his profession by restricting admission of foreign workers. This has a long history in economics. Its effect is to benefit members of that profession, while making everybody else economically worse off. But if H-1b workers do the same work as Americans at a lower salary and free the best and brightest Americans to work in higher paid professions, that is a good thing from an economic point of view and for the wealth of the nation.
Finally, legally, he postulates the existence of "green card indenture", but in practice both H-1b and green card workers frequently experience only brief periods where they can't change employers.
And if Matloff (and let's not beat around the bush, "ebno-10eb" is Matloff) claims having been a statistics professor as credentials in order to lend weight to his arguments, the inference from that is not that his argument is stronger, but that he must have been a pretty poor professor of statistics.
There is some common ground is that if we limit immigration at all, we should limit it to those most valuable to the economy. One way of doing that would be to simply auction off a fixed quota of employment-based H-1b and green card slots to the highest bidders each year. That way, we don't need to get into silly debates as to who is needed, or who is not getting paid enough, and people like Matloff don't get to abuse the immigration system to achieve higher salaries for their preferred profession.
I'm wondering what other images will become illegal because they elicit violence...
In Germany (bastion of free speech that it is), any speech that is "capable of disturbing the public peace" is forbidden. Insulting someone is also prohibited by law. You also can't insult the "organs and representatives of foreign states" (so no talking about Dick's you-know-what). You also may not insult any faith.
H1b limits mean that US-educated students have to leave rather than stay in the US and contribute. They mean that PhDs that companies desperately want to hire have to wait sometimes for years to come to the US and often just give up.
Microsoft has R&D labs in India, China, and most of Europe. If they can't bring people to the US on H1b's, they are just going to move more and more of their operations overseas. How is that going to give any US engineer a job? How is that good for the US?
Your posting is sad, not funny, and it's even sadder that you don't understand why.
But when a website (Playhouse Disney) started asking her to install flash, which she knew how to do very simply on the Windows machine. And could not duplicate in any reasonable fashion (she attempted to read and understand the directions for linux for 2 and a half hours). It took me honestly, roughly 2 hours to install flash for her, (to include switching accounts several times, and a trip through the Linux command line, which I give all Unix and Linux users my respect).
The Adobe Flash player is part of the Ubuntu distribution; you install it with the package manager, like everything else. It takes less than a minute to install.
You can't blame Ubuntu for the fact that Adobe puts the wrong instructions on their web site.
Generally, just remember this: only install software using the package manager and you'll be fine.
This is when I know it is not ready for prime time.
Well, then Windows really isn't ready for prime time, because a large fraction of software installations fail or break something. I just spend several hours trying to get a supposedly Windows-compatible cellular modem to work on Windows and it's just not working properly (I'm going to return it).
Again, for a programmer or a user who is skilled in Unix / Linux, I'm very sure it is a good OS. It does have some intriguing features, (some of which I wish were duplicated in Windows), but unless the system as a whole becomes easier to use it will have problems dominating the desktop.
Oh, please, do you make this stuff up? Millions of laymen use Linux every day with no problems. Ease of software installation and maintenance is a big advantage of Linux over Windows. The fact that you can't figure out how to install Flash for your daughter doesn't make Linux hard to use or limited to "programmers".
What doesn't work is if you try to do stupid things, like install software "by hand" or using unsupported hardware.
On a side note, I persuaded her to try and use it again (at a rate of 2 dollars per hour) so maybe she will tough it out now...
I don't see why you bother. You obviously don't like Linux, you obviously aren't willing to learn about it, and she clearly isn't happy either. Just stick with Windows and stop complaining about Linux.
I don't think its that simple. As an experiment I wiped a spare machine of Windows 2000 (which my 10 year old daughter was so fond of) and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 on it. After 1 month of struggling with learning the machine, she won't even touch that computer. I'm not downing the OS though, but my point is, I am willing to pay for software (and probably so is many others) that is easy to use.
So, you're saying you're taking an eight year old computer and you erase the operating system that your daughter likes and replace it with one that you yourself hate, that she has never used and didn't ask for, and that probably doesn't run any of the software she likes or is used to. And then you force your 10 year old daughter to use it. And because she complains about that, you conclude that Linux is less usable than Windows.
Your "experiment" tells us nothing about the relative usability of Windows and Linux. All it tells us is that you really aren't very smart.
Apple didn't lock anything down that hasn't always been locked down.
Nearly from day 1, Apple tried to make sure that they controlled what you could and could not use with Apple computers. For example, on the Lisa, they deliberately made system software not work with non-Apple disk drives, even though standard hardware would have been otherwise compatible.
You can look through old PC mags from the 80s and find $8-10,000 Macs, but you can also find $10-12,000 PCs
At the same time, you could get UNIX workstations for a fraction of the price; both the Macs and the PCs were overpriced.
Your deluded, Dvorak-brainwashed generation will have to die off before technology can make any progress.
And the Jobs-brainwashed generation will have to die off before technology can make any progress, because Apple has been responsible for holding back progress as much as Microsoft. Apple doesn't spend significant amounts of money on research, they are running 20 year old software they bought from NeXT, and their big successes (GUI, iPod, etc.) were things other people invented and they just copied.
Apple is a copycat company with good designers and great marketing.
This is in addition to a lot of other ways in which they screwed their customers and business partners over the years.
Apple has always been evil; what distinguishes them from Microsoft is that they are the underdog and that their products are a bit nicer. But a world dominated by Apple would be just as bad as a world dominated by Microsoft.
He says that intentionally introducing little errors (Lissabon vs Lebanon etc.) and watching the angry letters and corrections roll in is "better than sex".
The video is well worth watching, though, also for some other insights into how the business publishing world works (e.g., Icahn placing stories that paint a bleak picture of Motorola in order to get rid of Zander).
He may well have invented this entire legal stuff as a publicity stunt. If so, he may have crossed the line.
11 Years no GUI, and no JIT and only partial MATLAB support. Tell me again why GNU FreeSoftware is a better development model if you don't mind.
There is fairly little effort going into Octave. Why? Because MATLAB isn't worth cloning; MATLAB sucks. Even if more effort were going into it, Octave could never catch up with MATLAB, simply because it takes 1-2 years to clone MATLAB features after a MATLAB release.
The real comparison is with the true open source alternative to MATLAB: SciPy. SciPy is where all the open source effort goes, and it beats MATLAB in pretty much every regard: language, GUIs, plotting, compilers, packages, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason housing prices are high and there is a housing shortage in desirable areas are simple: government keeps pushing up demand for housing in such areas through various housing subsidies (low income rent programs, Section 8, government support of mortgages), while at the same time discouraging the creation of new supply through price controls (rent control, affordable housing unit requirements, special taxes on developers) and regulations (zoning, usage restrictions, etc.).
I know, dear Elizabeth, you're just a greedy lawyer and a rabble rousing politician, but please, learn some basic economics: you and people like you are responsible for the housing shortage. And restricting the ability of people to rent out their places for short periods, as on AirBnB, will make the housing shortage worse. In fact, the reason AirBnB is likely so popular in the first place is because AirBnB hosts don't have to deal with all the other rental regulation bullshit people like you have created; in a free housing market, AirBnB would be much less attractive, since landlords could get similar income without all the risk associated with an unpredictable succession of short term renters. So, if you restrict AirBnB rentals, people will probably either leave their apartments empty, or they will convert them into expensive luxury condos. See, Elizabeth, you can certainly stop people from engaging in some economic transactions by wielding your big senatorial stick, but you cannot force them to engage in economic transactions against their will.
No, I'm sorry, but the "20% number" is entirely made up on your part and is implausible. PulsePoint will doubtlessly increase the number of survivors of cardiac arrest. But irreversible brain damage occurs within four minutes after cardiac arrest. In order to prevent brain damage, you have to restore circulation within that amount of time. Look at the map in TFA: PulsePoint calls people from a couple of blocks away, meaning it will take minutes for someone competent to arrive and apply an AED, on top of an unknown number of minutes having elapsed after the cardiac arrest. PulsePoint will almost certainly increase survival, but the vast majority of survivors will still have serious neurological problems.
That's not the right question. The right question is: assuming you have a cardiac arrest, what's the probability that your life after resuscitation is going to be one of serious neurological impairment, loss of autonomy, and pain, and do you really want to take that risk. There is little reason to believe that PulsePoint decreases that risk; in fact, it probably increases it. And what makes this worse is that there is currently no reliable way of stopping people from resuscitating you, so more people will be undergoing resuscitation against their will.
You can make your own choices, but my choice is to avoid resuscitation. And I'm saying this to remind you that you should think about this too, rather than blindly believing the Hollywood fiction where someone hits your chest after a heart attack and you get up and walk away as if nothing happened. That fiction is particularly dangerous because there are safe and effective ways of dealing with heart attacks, namely diet and exercise. But it's so much easier to believe in a magic cell phone app, isn't it?
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
Tattooing DNR over your heart isn't reliable; doctors and EMTs ignore such tattoos because they aren't legally valid. Even if they could respect such tattoos, it wouldn't be in their financial interest: it's financially much more rewarding for them to wheel you into intensive care and "treat" you for a few weeks. It's even more rewarding if you remain permanently disabled and require their services for months and years.
You should seriously consider whether resuscitation after cardiac arrest is worth it: many people who survive it will suffer from severe neurological problems.
Much more important than this kind of gimmick would be a good technological solution for people to be able to refuse unwanted medical treatment. Right now, there is no reliable way of doing that, and many people are condemned to weeks or months of horrible suffering by being treated against their wishes.
Of course, the medical establishment is quick to embrace technology when it results in more people being brought in the door for their "treatments"; they are not interested in technology when it actually serves patient interests and preferences but causes them loss of revenue.
What I see is a privileged, rich white dude presuming to speak for women.
Women are welcome on the open source projects I work on. You can go to hell.
Western journalists are poor sobs, with no valuable skills other than networking and rhetoric. If they want to have any sort of career, they need to suck up to politicians and/or create outrage, preferably both.
Yes, there are no socialist or communist parties. There are also no fascist or Christian parties. Great, isn't it? I hope we can keep it that way, rather than turning into Europe.
And if you look at these numbers, you can see how good that is: http://www.heritage.org/index/...
As somebody who grew up in a country with proportional representation, I agree: proportional representation is not particularly left wing, it is something that political extremists in general like, whether on the left or on the right. It turns a parliament into a collection of many small parties with extremist viewpoints and unstable, unpredictable coalitions.
Proportional representation also gives those political parties enormous power over their party members (since "proportionality" is determined at the party level), making independent candidacy next to impossible. If you add government regulation and public financing of campaigns into the mix, you have essentially created a political aristocracy.
In the US, proportional representation is mostly associated with the left because there is a pretty large political minority of progressives and democratic socialists who are frustrated that the majority is rejecting their ideas. They are hoping to gain power through proportional representation.
Proportional representation allowed the Nazis to come to power in the Weimar Republic and has brought many socialists and communists to power in Europe and South America. It is a bad idea, and one of the strengths of the US system is that it doesn't have it.
Your "ie" is wrong. Proportional representation is only one of many forms of democracy, and not a very good one.
You're shifting your claim.
And:
PTAM is decent C++ code with probably pretty decent performance, but it isn't "high performance numerical code" or even high performance embedded code; it contains none of the performance tuning that such code usually should have.
I think it is dishonest on your part to recommend Eigen, when you know (or ought to know) that it actually isn't high performance and is deeply mired in C++ idiosyncracies. Likewise, I think it is dishonest of you to portray C++ as the only high performance computing language in town, when you know full well that many people are using other languages, and you are simply not even familiar with those other languages.
I do use C++ a lot in my work and I recommend it to other people. But unlike you, I don't feel any need to lie about what it is and isn't. There are many alternatives to C++, and I think people should keep an open mind about what they use.
So, you agree then that, numerical performance of Eigen sucks for large matrices. For small, fixed size matrices it likely is no better than Fortran either. Syntactically, Eigen is pretty lousy as well: you can write some array expressions, but defining functions on matrices is messy, and slicing and similar operations also are restrictive. Eigen's error messages are impenetrable due to the use of template metaprogramming, and parallelization support in it is close to non-existent.
Fortran these days has built in matrices that automatically use the best possible BLAS/LAPACK backends. You can write Matlab-like array expressions, get clear error messages, and can efficiently pass and return arrays, matrices, and slices. And it provides user-defined data types, operator overloading, virtual functions, and built-in parallel and distributed programming support.
I do a lot of C++ programming (including Eigen) and use C++ because I need to interface with a lot of C and C++ code. But, objectively, C++ is not a very good language for numerical or high performance computing. You can sort of get the job done in it, but it takes a lot longer to write code and ends up much more complex than in a decent numerical language. And while anybody who knows Matlab can write high performance Fortran code almost instantly, becoming a sufficiently good C++ programmers to even get started writing good numerical code takes years.
Large parts of the numerical and high performance computing community never touch C++ at all. C++ is mostly popular in computer vision, embedded systems, and some areas of machine learning.
That's a question of mathematics: there are many questions that provably cannot be answered using objective statistical data.
Against Matloff? That's easy: Matloff wants to limit labor mobility in order to increase salaries in his profession and, taken at face value, his own data suggests that limiting H-1B visas would accomplish that. That alone is sufficient economic reason to increase, rather than decrease, H-1B visa quotas.
According to Google Scholar, Matloff hasn't published in peer reviewed CS journals for half a decade. What a joke.
There are many arguments people make for H-1B visas, some relevant and some not relevant. Matloff choosees to rebut irrelevant arguments, hence he is picking a straw man. Even if his statistical analysis were sound, it would be irrelevant.
You seriously claim to be a statistician, and you can't figure this out yourself? Let's leave that discussion to peer review, shall we?
That's like saying "what's a better analysis of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin"; the premises of Matloff's analysis themselves are wrong, so there is no better way of doing the analysis (that is in addition to the fact that his analysis is also wrong from a statistical point of view).
It was an allusion to Adam Smith's classical work "The Wealth of Nations"; look there for what I mean by the term. Furthermore, I don't have to be precise, I'm not publishing a paper. I don't pretend that there is objective statistical data that can answer this question, Matloff does. He needs to make his case.
As an immigrant and someone who does data analytics professionally, I have to say: his analysis is logically, statistically, economically, and legally unsound. (Note that his report hasn't even been peer reviewed.)
It is logically unsound because, among other things, it starts with the premise that for the H-1b program to be desirable or economically valid, its workers should be, on average, "better and brighter" than US workers (a straw man), and because it uses arbitrary and unvalidated measures of quality.
It is statistically unsound because he infers that foreign workers are "less bright" than American workers because the "foreign" attribute correlates negatively with measures such as salaries and number of patents; however, it is easy to construct scenarios for which such negative correlations exist even if the workers are objectively still "brighter" than US workers. Inferring that populations of foreign workers are "less bright" based on his statistical analysis is incorrect.
It is economically unsound because he keeps arguing in terms of a "labor shortage"; while such a fuzzy term is often being used to justify H-1b visas politically, it makes little sense as the basis of an economic argument either way. And if one wanted to argue in terms of a "labor shortage", a labor shortage for low-skilled tech workers would be as important economically as a shortage of "the best and the brightest".
Matloff also argues for trying to create an artificial scarcity of workers in his profession by restricting admission of foreign workers. This has a long history in economics. Its effect is to benefit members of that profession, while making everybody else economically worse off. But if H-1b workers do the same work as Americans at a lower salary and free the best and brightest Americans to work in higher paid professions, that is a good thing from an economic point of view and for the wealth of the nation.
Finally, legally, he postulates the existence of "green card indenture", but in practice both H-1b and green card workers frequently experience only brief periods where they can't change employers.
And if Matloff (and let's not beat around the bush, "ebno-10eb" is Matloff) claims having been a statistics professor as credentials in order to lend weight to his arguments, the inference from that is not that his argument is stronger, but that he must have been a pretty poor professor of statistics.
There is some common ground is that if we limit immigration at all, we should limit it to those most valuable to the economy. One way of doing that would be to simply auction off a fixed quota of employment-based H-1b and green card slots to the highest bidders each year. That way, we don't need to get into silly debates as to who is needed, or who is not getting paid enough, and people like Matloff don't get to abuse the immigration system to achieve higher salaries for their preferred profession.
I'm wondering what other images will become illegal because they elicit violence...
In Germany (bastion of free speech that it is), any speech that is "capable of disturbing the public peace" is forbidden. Insulting someone is also prohibited by law. You also can't insult the "organs and representatives of foreign states" (so no talking about Dick's you-know-what). You also may not insult any faith.
For other restrictions, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country
How is this "funny"?
H1b limits mean that US-educated students have to leave rather than stay in the US and contribute. They mean that PhDs that companies desperately want to hire have to wait sometimes for years to come to the US and often just give up.
Microsoft has R&D labs in India, China, and most of Europe. If they can't bring people to the US on H1b's, they are just going to move more and more of their operations overseas. How is that going to give any US engineer a job? How is that good for the US?
Your posting is sad, not funny, and it's even sadder that you don't understand why.
But when a website (Playhouse Disney) started asking her to install flash, which she knew how to do very simply on the Windows machine. And could not duplicate in any reasonable fashion (she attempted to read and understand the directions for linux for 2 and a half hours). It took me honestly, roughly 2 hours to install flash for her, (to include switching accounts several times, and a trip through the Linux command line, which I give all Unix and Linux users my respect).
The Adobe Flash player is part of the Ubuntu distribution; you install it with the package manager, like everything else. It takes less than a minute to install.
You can't blame Ubuntu for the fact that Adobe puts the wrong instructions on their web site.
Generally, just remember this: only install software using the package manager and you'll be fine.
This is when I know it is not ready for prime time.
Well, then Windows really isn't ready for prime time, because a large fraction of software installations fail or break something. I just spend several hours trying to get a supposedly Windows-compatible cellular modem to work on Windows and it's just not working properly (I'm going to return it).
Again, for a programmer or a user who is skilled in Unix / Linux, I'm very sure it is a good OS. It does have some intriguing features, (some of which I wish were duplicated in Windows), but unless the system as a whole becomes easier to use it will have problems dominating the desktop.
Oh, please, do you make this stuff up? Millions of laymen use Linux every day with no problems. Ease of software installation and maintenance is a big advantage of Linux over Windows. The fact that you can't figure out how to install Flash for your daughter doesn't make Linux hard to use or limited to "programmers".
What doesn't work is if you try to do stupid things, like install software "by hand" or using unsupported hardware.
On a side note, I persuaded her to try and use it again (at a rate of 2 dollars per hour) so maybe she will tough it out now...
I don't see why you bother. You obviously don't like Linux, you obviously aren't willing to learn about it, and she clearly isn't happy either. Just stick with Windows and stop complaining about Linux.
I don't think its that simple. As an experiment I wiped a spare machine of Windows 2000 (which my 10 year old daughter was so fond of) and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 on it. After 1 month of struggling with learning the machine, she won't even touch that computer. I'm not downing the OS though, but my point is, I am willing to pay for software (and probably so is many others) that is easy to use.
So, you're saying you're taking an eight year old computer and you erase the operating system that your daughter likes and replace it with one that you yourself hate, that she has never used and didn't ask for, and that probably doesn't run any of the software she likes or is used to. And then you force your 10 year old daughter to use it. And because she complains about that, you conclude that Linux is less usable than Windows.
Your "experiment" tells us nothing about the relative usability of Windows and Linux. All it tells us is that you really aren't very smart.
Apple didn't lock anything down that hasn't always been locked down.
Nearly from day 1, Apple tried to make sure that they controlled what you could and could not use with Apple computers. For example, on the Lisa, they deliberately made system software not work with non-Apple disk drives, even though standard hardware would have been otherwise compatible.
You can look through old PC mags from the 80s and find $8-10,000 Macs, but you can also find $10-12,000 PCs
At the same time, you could get UNIX workstations for a fraction of the price; both the Macs and the PCs were overpriced.
Your deluded, Dvorak-brainwashed generation will have to die off before technology can make any progress.
And the Jobs-brainwashed generation will have to die off before technology can make any progress, because Apple has been responsible for holding back progress as much as Microsoft. Apple doesn't spend significant amounts of money on research, they are running 20 year old software they bought from NeXT, and their big successes (GUI, iPod, etc.) were things other people invented and they just copied.
Apple is a copycat company with good designers and great marketing.
apple seems WORSE than other companies when it comes to this legal bullshit
Seems? Apple tried to keep everybody from using GUIs by trying to claim that anybody who created a GUI was violating their intellectual property:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel
This is in addition to a lot of other ways in which they screwed their customers and business partners over the years.
Apple has always been evil; what distinguishes them from Microsoft is that they are the underdog and that their products are a bit nicer. But a world dominated by Apple would be just as bad as a world dominated by Microsoft.
I think Fake Steve Jobs is funny, but, in the end, a lot of it is trolling. Listen to his talk at Google:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLpxX9vqr5c
He says that intentionally introducing little errors (Lissabon vs Lebanon etc.) and watching the angry letters and corrections roll in is "better than sex".
The video is well worth watching, though, also for some other insights into how the business publishing world works (e.g., Icahn placing stories that paint a bleak picture of Motorola in order to get rid of Zander).
He may well have invented this entire legal stuff as a publicity stunt. If so, he may have crossed the line.
Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit.
I think Gtk is becoming more and more the "de-facto python windowing kit", in particular as Gtk's cross platform support is improving.
11 Years no GUI, and no JIT and only partial MATLAB support. Tell me again why GNU FreeSoftware is a better development model if you don't mind.
There is fairly little effort going into Octave. Why? Because MATLAB isn't worth cloning; MATLAB sucks. Even if more effort were going into it, Octave could never catch up with MATLAB, simply because it takes 1-2 years to clone MATLAB features after a MATLAB release.
The real comparison is with the true open source alternative to MATLAB: SciPy. SciPy is where all the open source effort goes, and it beats MATLAB in pretty much every regard: language, GUIs, plotting, compilers, packages, etc.
by not using them. They are some holdover from a time when people thought that VMS was so much better than UNIX because it had so many more features.
The first principle of security is KISS, and they violate this principle big time.