I think we should give some credit to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that line in the Constitution you quoted. Out of all the accomplishments of his life, he only wanted three on his tombstone:
Author of the Declaration of American Independence of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom Father of the University of Virginia
Thomas Jefferson's famous friend and mentor, Ben Franklin, said:
"Even if the Mufti [chief jurist] of Constantinople [from the Muslim Ottoman Empire] were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service."
You don't get freedom without a struggle. Our nation's founding fathers fought it for us, and it's up to us to preserve the legacy.
There's too little time and space to educate slashdotters here, but "cactus sucker theory" covers all this and makes the answers clear. Unemployed is better than underpaid, in that unemployed is hopefully a temporary state between decent jobs, while underpaid is a job that creates a cactus sucker. Don't let the cactus suckers ruin the country! Chop down the damned cacti!
I agree. If you devote your life to teaching the next generation at the wages we pay teachers, the least we can do is provide you with a retirement in dignity.
It is not allowed to choose students. They have a lottery to see who gets in. Now you've still got a valid point. Our charter school only accepts kids from parents who go to the trouble of applying. For whatever reason, our school has less racial diversity than the county as a whole. There are not enough Blacks or Latinos to track in EOG tests. Parents are not wealthier than average I think, but there are few if any students who live in dire poverty, where parents worry more about finding money for dinner than helping with homework. However, there are many more students with issues such as ADHD, learning disorders, etc.
I did my own little study of the local student population during the redistricting mess a few years back that led to concentration of poverty at FPG. I found that the real cliff in student performance has to do with poverty. It seems that whether you're White, Black, or Hispanic, your first priorities are for food and a place to live for your family. If you can't afford that, you kids will generally do poorly at school, and there's not a lot teachers can do about it. Once the basics are met, parents of all races and cultures seem to make educating their kids a high priority. There seems to be a small culture related difference in test scores, but compared to poverty, culture has only a small effect, at least here in Chapel Hill. The other major factor is illegal immigration where the kids are mostly citizens, but their parents hide away from society. I was unable to interview a single Latino parent, as the parents refused to answer the door when a white guy comes knocking in the poor neighborhoods I was studying. These kids are often the ones who don't have enough to eat, but even if their parents are reasonably financially stable, it's hard on the kids when the parents don't come to school like the other kids parents.
Our charter school simply doesn't have kids who are too poor to afford food. The parents are all highly involved, and the kids of illegal immigrants don't apply either. Charter schools don't help parents feed their kids, so we'll need another solution for that problem. Making parents of citizens hide in fear of deportation is just a crime, and it's something Americans need to develop the political will to solve. But, charter schools do seem to solve the whole mess with too much politics and government inefficiency.
This is why charter schools have so much potential. My kids go to a charter school that was built for $11 million, but provides as many spaces for kids as the new elementary school that was built at the same time for $33 million. Our charter school pays interest on the $11 million loan out of the money they get from the state per student, while our local elementary school was paid for in full by the state on top of the money per student. Our teachers get paid less, but have more flexibility to build great programs for the kids, and we have only 16 kids per class vs > 20 at our local schools. The local board of education decided to trash our local elementary school by concentrating poverty and non-English speakers there so that the other elementary schools in the system could do a little better (it's Frank Porter Graham in Chapel Hill, NC). Now they're planning to shut it down and turn it into a dual language magnet school. If parents had any power, FPG would still be one of the best elementary schools in the state, but politics got in the way. At our charter school, the board is made up of parents with kids in the school. If the board of education members in Chapel Hill all had kids at FPG, FPG would still be one of the best places to send your kids.
TFA has a particular biased point of view they're selling, which is fine, but they're quite lose with the facts. They mention the success of Silicon Valley, but forgot to mention that's it's something like 50% imported talent doing the engineering there. It's disturbing to see the creators of Science 2.0 throwing statistics around like a politician.
That site you pointed to hasn't got anything close to accurate data for teacher pay. Take home is typically closer to half what that site says. Here's the North Carolina (where I live) official teacher pay schedule.
Starting salary for teachers with teaching degrees is $34,550. With > 30 years experience, a teacher makes $58,860. Now I wont argue the benefits aren't good, but you've got wildly inaccurate data.
I find that button to download Chrome highly offensive in my nice accessible Firefox browser. Google's search results are pretty easy to listen to in NVDA or any other screen reader, but Chrome itself is a nightmare. That button say's "Click me, and never listen to the web again!" Google's Android OS sucks for accessibility. Google Docs is another attack against the low-vision community. If Google were some no-name outfit, I'd cut them some slack, but as the #1 browser, #1 cloud document editor, #1 phone OS... at what point do we get to class-action law-suite these a-holes into submission?
Thanks for the we informed reply. Obviously genetic databases need to be built and shared. The 1000 genome project is amazing. As software patents continue to damage America's software industry on the whole, with no real action to improve the situation over the last 20 years, I'm afraid I have no confidence in the patent system. In the end, they always seem to allow any sort of patent that well financed companies want.
So rather than junk this bill, I'm hoping they patch it. Informed consent is a pretty basic rule that should be followed. At the same time, we need to encourage the creation of as large an anonymous database of genomes/exomes as possible. It's too bad researchers wont let patients have access to their data, but I get why they're doing it.
TFA of course says nothing about the lost profits to genetic researchers who may no longer being able to patent parts of your genome without your consent. Their concern over the totally inflated number of $500K/year in administrative costs is sickening.
In reality, the cost wont be in filing the forms. The cost will be in explaining to every patent who has blood drawn that the hospital wants to "own" your blood, including any patents that can be made on it, or cell lines that could be derived from it. They'll be in the embarrassing and time consuming position of explaining to patents that they actually do with parts of their bodies.
Hopefully, I will soon have my entire exome sequenced in a clinical trial. I don't mind signing a form giving them ownership of a sample of my blood, but I prefer to own the rest. I'm just upset they wont let me have a copy of my exome. They are planning on destroying the data when the trial is finished, because they don't want get distracted by the debate over ethics. I understand their point of view. They just want to do some science, and could the hysterical crowed please go away?
I have about four inherited defects I know of. My relatives get cancer at a rate not likely to be coincidence. My red cones mostly don't work, which is a rare form of color blindness. I've got a weird inherited form of ADHD thing that makes reading difficult, but seems to enhance 3D visualization ability (try imagining the shape of the intersection of three perpendicular cylinders). Likely as not, I've also got Stargardt's Disease, which is causing me to lose central vision. I'm also a big geek capable of analyzing my exome and writing code to compare it to an exome database, taking into account a genetic knowledge base. It just kills me that I wont get a copy of my data.
That wont stop Meg from shipping R&D oversees as rapidly as possible. Because... that's worked so well for all the other companies that dumped US engineering and ramped up Chinese and Indian divisions. Let me see... the list must contain at least one big success... anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Yes, staying in a dying group sounds miserable. I'd find another job. As for out-sourcing to India or any other country which has cheap skilled programmers, it depends on whether this code is central to your business. In short, no matter what protections the software consulting firm offers, if your code has real value in your industry, you soon will find that competitors are being called by ex-employees of the consulting firm you hire, with offers to develop code that works a lot like yours. Whether they actually steal the code is not relevant, because just working with your code will train them to be able to re-implement it quickly. And, just to be clear, they will steal the code, if for no other reason than to be able to read it at their leisure from home. I'm not making this up. QuickLogic, where I wrote a lot of the place and route tools in the 90's, out-sourced software development to India, and now you can hire these guys to do FPGA P&R of a new FPGA for about $150K. Silicon Blue used them, and now they compete with QuickLogic.
The best code to out-source is code you don't mind making open-source. It can't be stolen in this case. If it's code you have to have, but it's not code you need to keep secret for any major competitive advantage, make it open source. Then, find the best low-cost programmers available to work on it, which more likely than not will not be in India.
The reason good skilled programmers continue to work very cheaply in some countries is that those countries do not enforce copyright laws, and thus "intellectual property" has no value there. Since code is just IP, it has no value. If you can get paid to write code at all, count yourself lucky.
The normal plan for a poor country to grow it's tech industry is a bit more realistic than stealing underwear and profiting:
1) Encourage your population to steal inventions and violate copyrights. They'll love you for it. Pass IP protection laws but don't enforce them. 2) Hire out your skilled engineers and programmers cheap. Let them live in poverty while learning valuable skills. 3) Enable home-grown IP companies by enforcing copyrights whenever the copyright holders live in your country. Continue to violate the IP of other countries with a passion. 4) As your home-grown industry generates wealth, you'll be forced to pay your techies higher and higher salaries. 5) Become a normal world citizen nation, fighting and bickering over IP at the ITC, winning dominance in some areas, losing in others. Start out-sourcing tech development to lower wage countries.
We saw this path in Japan, who's low cost high-tech labor for years were a nightmare for Silicon Valley. We saw it in S. Korea. The only major headache with India is just how huge India is. They will eventually fulfill the steps outlined above, but in the meantime, they're one hell of a lump in the snake. Digesting China is no picnic either. The poor souls in Taiwan, unfortunately, are not on this plan. The government requires low paid skilled labor to run all the fabs, so intellectual property is not gaining any protection or value there.
Oracle's lawyers are being brilliant at what most lawyers do well: make insanely stupid arguments in order to run their clock as long as possible. It's not about justice. It's about that new yacht Oracle's head lawyer is saving up for. Those nine lines of code might be worth only $20, but the lawyers are making a killing.
True, this has been how it's traditionally done. However, that's just the simplest dumbest way to get the oil out of the easiest places to get it. That will run out. 3/4ths of Canada's "proven reserve" requires SAGD for recovery. While this may impact ground water, carbon emissions and devastation to the surface and river water is dramatically reduced. 10-15% higher well to wheel carbon emissions are now projected, according to Wikipedia, and this doesn't take into account the rapid improvement in extraction technologies.
It is politics as usual, but in this case, Obama is right. If we don't buy their oil, they'll just build a pipeline to the coast and sell it to Japan. In the end, humanity has proven over and over that money wins. Here in NC, there's a battle to keep fracking out. In the end, we'll have fracking here. We'll also open ANWR for oil exploration, because it is expected to increase our very short US oil reserves by 50%. You just can't fight that kind of money. However, opening up all offshore drilling is not expected to increase our oil reserves enough to make any significant difference, so that's just dumb politics.
On the positive side, from a green perspective, none of this oil is cheap. Also, Canada's oil sands companies have figured out how to generate oil much more efficiently, so it's not as dirty as it used to be. Not that they care about pollution, they just want to make more money. Oil sands might help keep oil prices below $200/bbl, which is a good thing, because prices that high would cause global suffering on a huge scale. However, none of the Canada oil is going to keep gas prices below $4/gallon. So, let them drill for it, and build them a pipeline to Texas. Keep fracking out of NC until natural gas prices are so high that voters decide to allow it. Hopefully by then, we'll have figured out how to do fracking safely. And, we need to use this time of permanent high oil prices to ramp up alternatives, like molten salt reactors.
But how could he not write the sniffer program? A co-worker of mine wrote a fun screen-saver. It posted each image sniffed over wifi in a random place on the background, creating a real-time collage of what people were viewing on the Internet. He wrote the program and showed it to his boss, and fortunately being at a start-up, he found it amusing. He also hacked our WEP security in a few hours with some hacker software, leading us to upgrade our protection rather than get pissed. It is the nature of good engineers to be curious, and Joe Engineer does not offend me. It's the government that scares me.
I'm not saying our intelligence is not a good survival trait, just that it has yet to prove so. The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 135 million years, and never seemed on the brink of destroying the Earth. We've been this way for only 50,000 years, yet we've become the biggest threat to life on Earth since the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. We face the looming energy crisis, the looming food shortage (that's going to be fun...), running out of key minerals, nuclear proliferation among terrorist states, global warming, and poisoning the environment. This is not unlike the case where a predator through evolution gains sight, and hunt's it's food to extinction. We ate the fruit of the Tree of Life, and now our fate is in our hands. We may have intelligence, but it does not mean we act intelligently as a species.
Just around the corner is the ability to choose the genetics of our children. Likely as not, I've passed one Stargardt's Disease gene to each of my children. I hope that they will be able to insure it's not passed to their children. When we begin designing our own children, we'll not only avoid genetic shadowing, but we'll no longer take part in the genetic algorithm that has driven evolution since the age of complex multi-cellular organisms. We'll still be evolving, but the rules will have changed.
When society selects on what makes people the least likely to procreate, then works very hard to reverse that, they do reverse the natural tendencies of evolution
That IS evolution. The nature of evolution is normally no change, or so little you wouldn't notice. Evolution during what I call a "step" is chaos. That's where we are now. We're applying advanced science to everything, food production, procreation, you name it. Feel free to call it "unnatural", but don't say it isn't evolution.
For example, let's take the greater half of our number in the US: women. 200 years ago, the roles of male and female were fairly clear, having been proven through the fire of evolution for centuries. Now, we send them to college, all the way to Ph.D's, and force on them the choice of devoting their time to motherhood or their careers. I know quite a few Ph.D's giving most of their time to raising children, and it's not just a loss to society of their gifts, but a loss to them in this tragic compromise so many have to make. This is the nature of a Step. In WWII, we broke up the extended family and sent people to wherever their talents were needed most. It helped us win that war, and those who sacrificed, which was just about everyone, deserve the label "the greatest generation." Our society has yet to find that stable new point where everything is in a natural balance, and I don't think it will for some generations to come. Where we land will be different, and that's just the nature of evolution.
There's no such thing as reversal of evolution, nor any way to escape it. I did a lot if simulated evolution in the 1990's and I think I gained some insights. For example, evolution is not smooth even progress. It's no progress at all for far too long and then great leaps forward, if all goes well. Sometimes, a trait that can prove highly useful winds up destroying a species. If you suddenly give a predator sight, it might drive it's only prey extinct.
Humans are at such a cross roads. Our superior intelligence has yet to prove useful for our survival. Our advanced medicine is "shadowing" genetic flaws, making use more and more dependent on the continuation of advanced medicine. In mice raised for many generations labs with no pressure from cats, some are drawn to their killers, in that they like how cats smell and want to be close to them. The rapid mixing of all human genetics globally is causing some havoc in our genomes, pulling our population from various directions we had been going to a global middle where it will take centuries to find new balance.
Some people worry that people of poor intelligence are seeding the next generation. This has always been the case. Evolution balances 10,000 factors simultaneously, like how much smarter on average your children will be than you, especially those of us on slashdot!
I'll just point out that this piece of shit GOP total BS cluster fuck did in fact get passed with an amendment to make it more palatable... Your ISP is free to share all your personal information, EXCEPT for anything about your guns! Because they want to protect America, not worry about who is shooting who.
So true! It makes my head hurt a bit, but real-time measurements of what data is accessed in what loops could be used to seriously optimize memory layout. If you're hammering a red-black tree, just pull out those to left/right pointers and the color, and put them in an array as objects by themselves. Cache hit rates increase by several times. On my last signal-processing Java app (speeding up speech - libsonic in Debian), Java ran only 5% slower than C. I was impressed. Of course, I wasn't hammering memory, but if I were, and we had some serious Java innovation in memory layout, Java could easily beat C.
This is why I claim we could build programming languages that are faster than C, yet productive like Python (though I find Java similar in productivity, if a bit verbose).
Yes, your points are correct. What kills me is that we have no fundamental reason why our super-fast languages can't also be the ones that we call "rapid prototyping" languages. The speed of C sucks. I know that the youngsters here on slashdot don't want to hear that, but C's memory layout completely fails to take into account modern memory architecture. C was, after all, designed in the '60s. Worse, C (and C++) make that layout visible to programs, meaning that C compiler wonks aren't allowed to fix that layout for you. Randomly mallocing objects around the heap is brain-dead stupid if you care about speed. If you're slightly less than brain-dead, you might implement a buddy-system allocator, which sounds great so long as you are ignorant of cache architecture. C++ is worse, and Java doesn't even give low level hackers like me the opportunity to give standard libraries a big fat finger and implement my own memory layout.
There's little reason that a high level language similar to Python couldn't be considerably faster than C. What pisses me off is that we geniuses here on Slashdot have mostly lost sight of the real speed bottlenecks. You have to get a freaking logic analyzer and paste it onto the memory interface to see what's really going on. I remember doing exactly that on a PN-10 Spectrum CPU on the Cupertino campus of HP (which is being bought by Apple) in 1989 when the building started to shake. I was so involved in my logic analyzer output that I chased the mini-computer I was debugging around the server room floor during the earthquake without realizing what was going on. It was on wheels that someone forgot to lock down. It eventually found a space where a floor tile was missing and fell over. That's when I came out of my tech comma and realized the world was shaking.
So, with a but of understanding about how modern computers actually work, we could build something faster than C, and hopefully quite close to as productive as Python. It kills me that we geeks have given up on such an ideal and bicker about focusing the big O or whether that N constant counts. Let's get real and fix it.
TFA said that Bob and Alice did not communicate. I really wish it had provided more detail here, because that seems to be a key point, and many of us in Slashdot land are wondering exactly what the difference would be if they did communicate. If they were allowed to communicate and predict Victor's future decision, there's money to be made in the stock market with this technique. So, I assume that a careful part of this experiment is somehow isolating the decisions of Alice and Bob from each other. How did their detectors avoid becoming entangled while waiting for Victor's decision? Why was this not important enough to talk about in TFA?
Mobile devices like the original iPhone had a black background for good reason. It conserves power. I always view my computer screen in inverse video, not to save power, though it does extend battery life on my laptop a good deal. I need the improved readability that white on black provides. People with low vision universally prefer white on black. The whole black on white background is an unfortunate hold over from dead tree publishing. And likely as not having Stargardt's Disease, I want as few photons lighting up my retina as possible.
So, I hope this whole stupid Apple white page thing goes the way of the dinosaur. Life was better when it was green on black.
Neal's books totally rock. He's one of the most influential sci-fi writers out there. There's exactly one book I read with my Dad, Cryptonomicon, and it was so cool that I build a hardware random number generator, and he wrote some software for one-time-pad encryption, and we had fun sending each other stupid e-mails that no one would ever be interested in decrypting, but they couldn't if they tried. Actually I sometimes wonder if our super-secure little unknown communication channel caused some poor NSA dweeb to have to listen to our phones for a year or two. If so... sorry!
Slashdot Mirror
I think we should give some credit to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that line in the Constitution you quoted. Out of all the accomplishments of his life, he only wanted three on his tombstone:
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
Father of the University of Virginia
Thomas Jefferson's famous friend and mentor, Ben Franklin, said:
"Even if the Mufti [chief jurist] of Constantinople [from the Muslim Ottoman Empire] were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service."
You don't get freedom without a struggle. Our nation's founding fathers fought it for us, and it's up to us to preserve the legacy.
There's too little time and space to educate slashdotters here, but "cactus sucker theory" covers all this and makes the answers clear. Unemployed is better than underpaid, in that unemployed is hopefully a temporary state between decent jobs, while underpaid is a job that creates a cactus sucker. Don't let the cactus suckers ruin the country! Chop down the damned cacti!
I agree. If you devote your life to teaching the next generation at the wages we pay teachers, the least we can do is provide you with a retirement in dignity.
It is not allowed to choose students. They have a lottery to see who gets in. Now you've still got a valid point. Our charter school only accepts kids from parents who go to the trouble of applying. For whatever reason, our school has less racial diversity than the county as a whole. There are not enough Blacks or Latinos to track in EOG tests. Parents are not wealthier than average I think, but there are few if any students who live in dire poverty, where parents worry more about finding money for dinner than helping with homework. However, there are many more students with issues such as ADHD, learning disorders, etc.
I did my own little study of the local student population during the redistricting mess a few years back that led to concentration of poverty at FPG. I found that the real cliff in student performance has to do with poverty. It seems that whether you're White, Black, or Hispanic, your first priorities are for food and a place to live for your family. If you can't afford that, you kids will generally do poorly at school, and there's not a lot teachers can do about it. Once the basics are met, parents of all races and cultures seem to make educating their kids a high priority. There seems to be a small culture related difference in test scores, but compared to poverty, culture has only a small effect, at least here in Chapel Hill. The other major factor is illegal immigration where the kids are mostly citizens, but their parents hide away from society. I was unable to interview a single Latino parent, as the parents refused to answer the door when a white guy comes knocking in the poor neighborhoods I was studying. These kids are often the ones who don't have enough to eat, but even if their parents are reasonably financially stable, it's hard on the kids when the parents don't come to school like the other kids parents.
Our charter school simply doesn't have kids who are too poor to afford food. The parents are all highly involved, and the kids of illegal immigrants don't apply either. Charter schools don't help parents feed their kids, so we'll need another solution for that problem. Making parents of citizens hide in fear of deportation is just a crime, and it's something Americans need to develop the political will to solve. But, charter schools do seem to solve the whole mess with too much politics and government inefficiency.
This is why charter schools have so much potential. My kids go to a charter school that was built for $11 million, but provides as many spaces for kids as the new elementary school that was built at the same time for $33 million. Our charter school pays interest on the $11 million loan out of the money they get from the state per student, while our local elementary school was paid for in full by the state on top of the money per student. Our teachers get paid less, but have more flexibility to build great programs for the kids, and we have only 16 kids per class vs > 20 at our local schools. The local board of education decided to trash our local elementary school by concentrating poverty and non-English speakers there so that the other elementary schools in the system could do a little better (it's Frank Porter Graham in Chapel Hill, NC). Now they're planning to shut it down and turn it into a dual language magnet school. If parents had any power, FPG would still be one of the best elementary schools in the state, but politics got in the way. At our charter school, the board is made up of parents with kids in the school. If the board of education members in Chapel Hill all had kids at FPG, FPG would still be one of the best places to send your kids.
TFA has a particular biased point of view they're selling, which is fine, but they're quite lose with the facts. They mention the success of Silicon Valley, but forgot to mention that's it's something like 50% imported talent doing the engineering there. It's disturbing to see the creators of Science 2.0 throwing statistics around like a politician.
That site you pointed to hasn't got anything close to accurate data for teacher pay. Take home is typically closer to half what that site says. Here's the North Carolina (where I live) official teacher pay schedule.
Starting salary for teachers with teaching degrees is $34,550. With > 30 years experience, a teacher makes $58,860. Now I wont argue the benefits aren't good, but you've got wildly inaccurate data.
I find that button to download Chrome highly offensive in my nice accessible Firefox browser. Google's search results are pretty easy to listen to in NVDA or any other screen reader, but Chrome itself is a nightmare. That button say's "Click me, and never listen to the web again!" Google's Android OS sucks for accessibility. Google Docs is another attack against the low-vision community. If Google were some no-name outfit, I'd cut them some slack, but as the #1 browser, #1 cloud document editor, #1 phone OS... at what point do we get to class-action law-suite these a-holes into submission?
Thanks for the we informed reply. Obviously genetic databases need to be built and shared. The 1000 genome project is amazing. As software patents continue to damage America's software industry on the whole, with no real action to improve the situation over the last 20 years, I'm afraid I have no confidence in the patent system. In the end, they always seem to allow any sort of patent that well financed companies want.
So rather than junk this bill, I'm hoping they patch it. Informed consent is a pretty basic rule that should be followed. At the same time, we need to encourage the creation of as large an anonymous database of genomes/exomes as possible. It's too bad researchers wont let patients have access to their data, but I get why they're doing it.
TFA of course says nothing about the lost profits to genetic researchers who may no longer being able to patent parts of your genome without your consent. Their concern over the totally inflated number of $500K/year in administrative costs is sickening.
In reality, the cost wont be in filing the forms. The cost will be in explaining to every patent who has blood drawn that the hospital wants to "own" your blood, including any patents that can be made on it, or cell lines that could be derived from it. They'll be in the embarrassing and time consuming position of explaining to patents that they actually do with parts of their bodies.
Hopefully, I will soon have my entire exome sequenced in a clinical trial. I don't mind signing a form giving them ownership of a sample of my blood, but I prefer to own the rest. I'm just upset they wont let me have a copy of my exome. They are planning on destroying the data when the trial is finished, because they don't want get distracted by the debate over ethics. I understand their point of view. They just want to do some science, and could the hysterical crowed please go away?
I have about four inherited defects I know of. My relatives get cancer at a rate not likely to be coincidence. My red cones mostly don't work, which is a rare form of color blindness. I've got a weird inherited form of ADHD thing that makes reading difficult, but seems to enhance 3D visualization ability (try imagining the shape of the intersection of three perpendicular cylinders). Likely as not, I've also got Stargardt's Disease, which is causing me to lose central vision. I'm also a big geek capable of analyzing my exome and writing code to compare it to an exome database, taking into account a genetic knowledge base. It just kills me that I wont get a copy of my data.
That wont stop Meg from shipping R&D oversees as rapidly as possible. Because... that's worked so well for all the other companies that dumped US engineering and ramped up Chinese and Indian divisions. Let me see... the list must contain at least one big success... anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Yes, staying in a dying group sounds miserable. I'd find another job. As for out-sourcing to India or any other country which has cheap skilled programmers, it depends on whether this code is central to your business. In short, no matter what protections the software consulting firm offers, if your code has real value in your industry, you soon will find that competitors are being called by ex-employees of the consulting firm you hire, with offers to develop code that works a lot like yours. Whether they actually steal the code is not relevant, because just working with your code will train them to be able to re-implement it quickly. And, just to be clear, they will steal the code, if for no other reason than to be able to read it at their leisure from home. I'm not making this up. QuickLogic, where I wrote a lot of the place and route tools in the 90's, out-sourced software development to India, and now you can hire these guys to do FPGA P&R of a new FPGA for about $150K. Silicon Blue used them, and now they compete with QuickLogic.
The best code to out-source is code you don't mind making open-source. It can't be stolen in this case. If it's code you have to have, but it's not code you need to keep secret for any major competitive advantage, make it open source. Then, find the best low-cost programmers available to work on it, which more likely than not will not be in India.
The reason good skilled programmers continue to work very cheaply in some countries is that those countries do not enforce copyright laws, and thus "intellectual property" has no value there. Since code is just IP, it has no value. If you can get paid to write code at all, count yourself lucky.
The normal plan for a poor country to grow it's tech industry is a bit more realistic than stealing underwear and profiting:
1) Encourage your population to steal inventions and violate copyrights. They'll love you for it. Pass IP protection laws but don't enforce them.
2) Hire out your skilled engineers and programmers cheap. Let them live in poverty while learning valuable skills.
3) Enable home-grown IP companies by enforcing copyrights whenever the copyright holders live in your country. Continue to violate the IP of other countries with a passion.
4) As your home-grown industry generates wealth, you'll be forced to pay your techies higher and higher salaries.
5) Become a normal world citizen nation, fighting and bickering over IP at the ITC, winning dominance in some areas, losing in others. Start out-sourcing tech development to lower wage countries.
We saw this path in Japan, who's low cost high-tech labor for years were a nightmare for Silicon Valley. We saw it in S. Korea. The only major headache with India is just how huge India is. They will eventually fulfill the steps outlined above, but in the meantime, they're one hell of a lump in the snake. Digesting China is no picnic either. The poor souls in Taiwan, unfortunately, are not on this plan. The government requires low paid skilled labor to run all the fabs, so intellectual property is not gaining any protection or value there.
Oracle's lawyers are being brilliant at what most lawyers do well: make insanely stupid arguments in order to run their clock as long as possible. It's not about justice. It's about that new yacht Oracle's head lawyer is saving up for. Those nine lines of code might be worth only $20, but the lawyers are making a killing.
True, this has been how it's traditionally done. However, that's just the simplest dumbest way to get the oil out of the easiest places to get it. That will run out. 3/4ths of Canada's "proven reserve" requires SAGD for recovery. While this may impact ground water, carbon emissions and devastation to the surface and river water is dramatically reduced. 10-15% higher well to wheel carbon emissions are now projected, according to Wikipedia, and this doesn't take into account the rapid improvement in extraction technologies.
It is politics as usual, but in this case, Obama is right. If we don't buy their oil, they'll just build a pipeline to the coast and sell it to Japan. In the end, humanity has proven over and over that money wins. Here in NC, there's a battle to keep fracking out. In the end, we'll have fracking here. We'll also open ANWR for oil exploration, because it is expected to increase our very short US oil reserves by 50%. You just can't fight that kind of money. However, opening up all offshore drilling is not expected to increase our oil reserves enough to make any significant difference, so that's just dumb politics.
On the positive side, from a green perspective, none of this oil is cheap. Also, Canada's oil sands companies have figured out how to generate oil much more efficiently, so it's not as dirty as it used to be. Not that they care about pollution, they just want to make more money. Oil sands might help keep oil prices below $200/bbl, which is a good thing, because prices that high would cause global suffering on a huge scale. However, none of the Canada oil is going to keep gas prices below $4/gallon. So, let them drill for it, and build them a pipeline to Texas. Keep fracking out of NC until natural gas prices are so high that voters decide to allow it. Hopefully by then, we'll have figured out how to do fracking safely. And, we need to use this time of permanent high oil prices to ramp up alternatives, like molten salt reactors.
But how could he not write the sniffer program? A co-worker of mine wrote a fun screen-saver. It posted each image sniffed over wifi in a random place on the background, creating a real-time collage of what people were viewing on the Internet. He wrote the program and showed it to his boss, and fortunately being at a start-up, he found it amusing. He also hacked our WEP security in a few hours with some hacker software, leading us to upgrade our protection rather than get pissed. It is the nature of good engineers to be curious, and Joe Engineer does not offend me. It's the government that scares me.
I'm not saying our intelligence is not a good survival trait, just that it has yet to prove so. The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 135 million years, and never seemed on the brink of destroying the Earth. We've been this way for only 50,000 years, yet we've become the biggest threat to life on Earth since the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. We face the looming energy crisis, the looming food shortage (that's going to be fun...), running out of key minerals, nuclear proliferation among terrorist states, global warming, and poisoning the environment. This is not unlike the case where a predator through evolution gains sight, and hunt's it's food to extinction. We ate the fruit of the Tree of Life, and now our fate is in our hands. We may have intelligence, but it does not mean we act intelligently as a species.
Just around the corner is the ability to choose the genetics of our children. Likely as not, I've passed one Stargardt's Disease gene to each of my children. I hope that they will be able to insure it's not passed to their children. When we begin designing our own children, we'll not only avoid genetic shadowing, but we'll no longer take part in the genetic algorithm that has driven evolution since the age of complex multi-cellular organisms. We'll still be evolving, but the rules will have changed.
That IS evolution. The nature of evolution is normally no change, or so little you wouldn't notice. Evolution during what I call a "step" is chaos. That's where we are now. We're applying advanced science to everything, food production, procreation, you name it. Feel free to call it "unnatural", but don't say it isn't evolution.
For example, let's take the greater half of our number in the US: women. 200 years ago, the roles of male and female were fairly clear, having been proven through the fire of evolution for centuries. Now, we send them to college, all the way to Ph.D's, and force on them the choice of devoting their time to motherhood or their careers. I know quite a few Ph.D's giving most of their time to raising children, and it's not just a loss to society of their gifts, but a loss to them in this tragic compromise so many have to make. This is the nature of a Step. In WWII, we broke up the extended family and sent people to wherever their talents were needed most. It helped us win that war, and those who sacrificed, which was just about everyone, deserve the label "the greatest generation." Our society has yet to find that stable new point where everything is in a natural balance, and I don't think it will for some generations to come. Where we land will be different, and that's just the nature of evolution.
There's no such thing as reversal of evolution, nor any way to escape it. I did a lot if simulated evolution in the 1990's and I think I gained some insights. For example, evolution is not smooth even progress. It's no progress at all for far too long and then great leaps forward, if all goes well. Sometimes, a trait that can prove highly useful winds up destroying a species. If you suddenly give a predator sight, it might drive it's only prey extinct.
Humans are at such a cross roads. Our superior intelligence has yet to prove useful for our survival. Our advanced medicine is "shadowing" genetic flaws, making use more and more dependent on the continuation of advanced medicine. In mice raised for many generations labs with no pressure from cats, some are drawn to their killers, in that they like how cats smell and want to be close to them. The rapid mixing of all human genetics globally is causing some havoc in our genomes, pulling our population from various directions we had been going to a global middle where it will take centuries to find new balance.
Some people worry that people of poor intelligence are seeding the next generation. This has always been the case. Evolution balances 10,000 factors simultaneously, like how much smarter on average your children will be than you, especially those of us on slashdot!
I'll just point out that this piece of shit GOP total BS cluster fuck did in fact get passed with an amendment to make it more palatable... Your ISP is free to share all your personal information, EXCEPT for anything about your guns! Because they want to protect America, not worry about who is shooting who.
So true! It makes my head hurt a bit, but real-time measurements of what data is accessed in what loops could be used to seriously optimize memory layout. If you're hammering a red-black tree, just pull out those to left/right pointers and the color, and put them in an array as objects by themselves. Cache hit rates increase by several times. On my last signal-processing Java app (speeding up speech - libsonic in Debian), Java ran only 5% slower than C. I was impressed. Of course, I wasn't hammering memory, but if I were, and we had some serious Java innovation in memory layout, Java could easily beat C.
This is why I claim we could build programming languages that are faster than C, yet productive like Python (though I find Java similar in productivity, if a bit verbose).
Yes, your points are correct. What kills me is that we have no fundamental reason why our super-fast languages can't also be the ones that we call "rapid prototyping" languages. The speed of C sucks. I know that the youngsters here on slashdot don't want to hear that, but C's memory layout completely fails to take into account modern memory architecture. C was, after all, designed in the '60s. Worse, C (and C++) make that layout visible to programs, meaning that C compiler wonks aren't allowed to fix that layout for you. Randomly mallocing objects around the heap is brain-dead stupid if you care about speed. If you're slightly less than brain-dead, you might implement a buddy-system allocator, which sounds great so long as you are ignorant of cache architecture. C++ is worse, and Java doesn't even give low level hackers like me the opportunity to give standard libraries a big fat finger and implement my own memory layout.
There's little reason that a high level language similar to Python couldn't be considerably faster than C. What pisses me off is that we geniuses here on Slashdot have mostly lost sight of the real speed bottlenecks. You have to get a freaking logic analyzer and paste it onto the memory interface to see what's really going on. I remember doing exactly that on a PN-10 Spectrum CPU on the Cupertino campus of HP (which is being bought by Apple) in 1989 when the building started to shake. I was so involved in my logic analyzer output that I chased the mini-computer I was debugging around the server room floor during the earthquake without realizing what was going on. It was on wheels that someone forgot to lock down. It eventually found a space where a floor tile was missing and fell over. That's when I came out of my tech comma and realized the world was shaking.
So, with a but of understanding about how modern computers actually work, we could build something faster than C, and hopefully quite close to as productive as Python. It kills me that we geeks have given up on such an ideal and bicker about focusing the big O or whether that N constant counts. Let's get real and fix it.
TFA said that Bob and Alice did not communicate. I really wish it had provided more detail here, because that seems to be a key point, and many of us in Slashdot land are wondering exactly what the difference would be if they did communicate. If they were allowed to communicate and predict Victor's future decision, there's money to be made in the stock market with this technique. So, I assume that a careful part of this experiment is somehow isolating the decisions of Alice and Bob from each other. How did their detectors avoid becoming entangled while waiting for Victor's decision? Why was this not important enough to talk about in TFA?
Mobile devices like the original iPhone had a black background for good reason. It conserves power. I always view my computer screen in inverse video, not to save power, though it does extend battery life on my laptop a good deal. I need the improved readability that white on black provides. People with low vision universally prefer white on black. The whole black on white background is an unfortunate hold over from dead tree publishing. And likely as not having Stargardt's Disease, I want as few photons lighting up my retina as possible.
So, I hope this whole stupid Apple white page thing goes the way of the dinosaur. Life was better when it was green on black.
Neal's books totally rock. He's one of the most influential sci-fi writers out there. There's exactly one book I read with my Dad, Cryptonomicon, and it was so cool that I build a hardware random number generator, and he wrote some software for one-time-pad encryption, and we had fun sending each other stupid e-mails that no one would ever be interested in decrypting, but they couldn't if they tried. Actually I sometimes wonder if our super-secure little unknown communication channel caused some poor NSA dweeb to have to listen to our phones for a year or two. If so... sorry!