Your are so wrong when you imply that this is not an intrinsic problem in the US. It is, in fact, the corporate standard behavior for US business. Workers, clients, and investors are all disposable, and exists only to fill the bank accounts of the corrupt executive class.
Here are some examples from today's headlines. And by today I mean this week!
Yesterday, the AP reported that Marlene Griffith, a widow of William Griffith, one of the 29 men killed in last week’s explosion at a coal mine in West Virginia, is suing Massey Energy, the owner of the mine. Griffith filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Raleigh County Circuit Court, arguing that Massey’s handling of work conditions at the mine plus its history of safety violations amounted to aggravated conduct that rises above the level of ordinary negligence.
...
Responding to the lawsuit, Nathan Coffey, the Public Affairs Coordinator of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), took to Twitter yesterday to mock Marlene Griffith. Coffey posted a link to the AP story about Marlene Griffith, sarcastically commenting that “Everyone wants free money!”
As only someone from Mars doesn’t know by now, Goldman allegedly sold collateralized debt obligation, or bonds backed by mortgage securities, to institutional investors without disclosing that the specific securities were handpicked by hedge-fund manager John Paulson. Paulson was betting on the securities to fall and, for that reason, structured the securities to include losers -- not winners.
As expected, the line of people preparing to sue Goldman is now longer than the posers who bought the iPad on launch day. Reuters reports that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who himself has been in hot water over his much lamented decision to sell UK's gold despite protests from the BOE and likely under the guidance of Goldman and JPM, wants an investigation into the Goldman affair by the FSA, and is saying that impacted UK banks will be considering legal action. Furthermore, GB slammed Goldman after the TimesOnline reported that Goldman will pay $5.6 billion in bonuses for just three months work, including 600 million pounds for London-based staff.
According to reports by ProPublica/National Public Radio/This American Life that came out in early April 2010, Magnetar "sponsored" mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations by agreeing to buy the worst tranche (portion) of the CDO, the "equity tranche". The reports claim that Magnetar then shorted (bet against) those CDOs by buying credit default swaps that insured the CDOs. If the CDOs failed, Magnetar would get back many times its initial investment in the equity tranche by receiving the insurance payoff.[2][4]
Someone in China or Russia? Apache is so vital to corporate and even government operations that compromising the code base could have huge financial and/or intelligence implications. I'm sure that there are Apache behind security barriers, and using it to gather information and send it elsewhere would be greatly prized. Just guessing...
This could make cheap lower efficiency solar cells economically viable. The technique uses more materials,
but the overall cost/efficiency could be better then a flat array of higher price/ performance cells.
Note that he is using artificial evolution for optimization. My guess is that it is simulated annealing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing The video shows the random configurations that are being evaluated.
Since this "over-sulphated" variant is not naturally occurring and mimics the properties of heparin, the counterfeit is almost certainly intentional as opposed to an accidental lapse in manufacturing.[8] The heparin was cut from anywhere from 2-60% with a counterfeit substance due to cost effectiveness, and a shortage of suitable pigs in China.
The drywall has been linked to corrosion of wiring, air conditioning units, computers, doorknobs and jewelry, along with possible health effects. Tenenbaum said some samples of the Chinese-made product emit 100 times as much hydrogen sulfide as drywall made elsewhere.
Sometime in mid-March, an "unnamed pet food company" reported to Cornell that they had discovered an industrial chemical utilized in plastics manufacture, melamine, in internal testing of wheat gluten samples......
The chemical was found in the suspected wheat gluten in raw concentrations as high as 6.6 percent.
Chinese cooking oil siphoned from restaurants' waste tanks and stripped out of raw sewage is being resold on the cheap and has for years tainted approximately one out of every ten meals cooked in the eastern nation, according to a recent study.
In recent weeks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has identified a number of instances of contaminated toothpastes that have been imported and sold in the United States. The toothpaste from China and counterfeit Colgate toothpaste may contain diethylene glycol (DEG), a chemical used in antifreeze.
Two are current: cooking oil and drywall.
Yes, the US will be a much better competitor if we just give up regulation, make a few people rich and poison everyone. Actually we already have, if you consider how unregulated Toxic Assets have ruined both the domestic and world economy....
Thanks to to recent US Supreme Court ruling removing limits on corporate spending on politics, Hugo Chavez could easily funnel funds into the US to influence the political process. The same goes for China or Saudi Arabia or Libya or ???
It follows the classic Slashdot 3 Step Plan:
1. Acquire US corporation with overseas branches (Bahamas, anyone).
2. Transfer funds to US, make contributions, buy political advertising, etc.
3. Profit! In this case profit equals changing US behavior.
This is such a new ruling that the practical limits have not been tested in court. Even so, current law makes it difficult to find out who is really behind much existing political funding. And if you are willing to lie, it is even easier.
The movement is reshaping the way elections are waged in trendsetting California while offering a glimpse into America's future after the U.S. Supreme Court in January gave corporations and unions new freedom to spend on many campaigns.
...
And in recent years, California has seen a surge in spending by Indian tribes, companies and labor groups trying to elect friendly candidates to the Legislature, sometimes in amounts that dwarf spending by candidate campaigns.
"Campaigns, particularly for governor and U.S. Senate, are not going to get waged between candidate A and candidate B," said Bill Carrick, a Los Angeles-based Democratic consultant with decades of experience in state and national politics.
"There will be all these satellite, independent campaigns that might have a more profound effect on the campaign than the candidates."
This is bad enough already. Imagine how i will be with foreign interests footing the bills...
As a non-astronomer, I wonder how this will appear from the inner sloar system, i.e. the earth? How bright will it be, will it be visible during the day, which parts of the earth will it be visible from, when will it start to be visible? These are all non-comet/end of the world questions, so i know that they are typically non-Slashdot ideas, but I'm still interested.
Any astronomy types out there who can figure this out?
I personally heard Dijkstra say say something ridiculous. I was working for Burroughs in Mission Viejo on their Algol machines when he was a Burroughs Fellow, and they trotted him out to lecture the troops. I guess that they hoped that we would somehow become smarter if we were exposed to his brilliance. As we were walking to the meeting I was in just behind him, and he turned to his companions and said "I need to take a negative drink", meaning that he was going to take a leak before he started speaking. Some how that always seemed wrong to me, because I thought it would be better to "put a negative drink."
As for the badness of Basic, all I can do is think of what Knuth said: it is good to know multiple different styles of programming languages. Only knowing languages descended from Algol: C, C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript, is too limiting. It's good to be proficient with LISP/Scheme, assembly on more then one CPU, a string processing language (Perl/Awk), and an industrial language like Fortran or Ada. Logic/declaritive programming is also a useful skill. One size does not fil all, and if you are comfortable with multiple paradidms you will be a bettere programmer. Personally, my next language experience is going to be with Haskell, because I really like Scheme, and I want to understand the functional paradigm.
That post also said "some economists" claim interventions is wrong, and then goes to state in the next sentence that "Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well", which is an unsupported claim; there is no logical inference from the previous statement. In other words, this is not logic but unsupported assertions, or bullshit.
If you read the Wikipedia article it shows that many economists refute the efficient market hypothesis.
Market strategist Jeremy Grantham has stated flatly that EMH is responsible for the current financial crisis, claiming that belief in the hypothesis caused financial leaders to have a "chronic underestimation of the dangers of asset bubbles breaking"
He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.
Minsky saw that stable markets lead to risk taking, which is rewarded, which leads to greater risk taking. Eventually the risk taking makes the markets unstable, and there is a general meltdown. He exactly described what has happened in the latest crash.
In the real world the Efficient Market Hypothesis is about as realistic as the Flat Earth Hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society, and leads to similar results if you use it. Of course. it is a core belief of Republicans/Neo-Cons, which is one reason that everything is so screw up right now.
The real shocker in this story is the IBM connection. Here is a IBM client that has a system without a hardware upgrade in 30 years!!! It's against the laws of nature. IBM wrote the book on installing big iron, and then getting users into an endless cycle of lock in and upgrades. Gates and Intel just copied this model to the i86/Windows franchise.
Somehow I feel let down. What happened to the classic IBM sales organization that used Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt to coerce their clients into endless expansion and upgrades, needed or not? To make matters worse, it's a Federal system! When other vendors used to bid against IBM for a US government contract, everyone else always started in last place. When other vendors won it seemed like a mistake.
If IBM can't suck endless amounts of money out of the US government then there is something seriously wrong with America. We've lost our competitive spirit. How the mighty have fallen.
Another Slashdot Pundit gets it wrong. When you have safety critical systems, there has to be somebody who can evaluate the system for safety. Preferably multiple somebodies.
The way it is supposed to work is that technically responsible people write requirements that when followed correctly lead to acceptable results. This is what ISO-9001 is all about. It does not mandate "you must do procedure X"; it mandates that you must have a system that defines what processes you employ, and how you verify that they have been followed. In theory, your process could be throwing darts at paper target, and by retaining the target as an "artifact" you can show you followed your process. In the real world there are "best practices", and a lot of meetings and reviews and "artifacts".
The organizational issue is having a group of people who understand the processes and independently evaluate the results. If the the results are not acceptable they say so, and the problems are fixed. This requires:
1. Technical domain competence
2. Independence
3. Authority
Obviously, the evaluators are at odds with the people doing the project, because there job is to stop things from being completed. They are the spoilers.
When the evaluators are part of the organization, it is easier for them to be underfunded and ignored. It is also hard to get the best people to do this work, because it tends to be low status and also tends to pay less.
The best solution is to have an independently funded group with a separate chain of command that reports outside the regular channels: like the NTSB being outside the FAA. Their major weakness is lack of authority, because the FAA can, and does, ignore them. Typically it takes a spectacular high fatality preventable accident for change to occur.
An example in a different area is public prosecutors in our legal system. They are (supposedly) independent and follow the law, not the dictates of any particular group. (In practice, not so much. At the local level then are aligned with law enforcement, which is why cops are almost never caught or conviced of crimes.)
Now some real world failures from today's news. Literally today.
Toyota They used pressure tactics and out maneuvered the regulators. This whole discussion is about the failure to have technical expertise on the part of the regulator.
Nuclear Regulatory Commision In Vermont it was just revealed that tritium leaks were unreported starting in 2005, although leaks were also reported later. The plant operator lied. The NRC has a relative small number of inspectors, and they count on operators to follow all the rules and self report. I guess they also believe in the Tooth Fairy.
SEC/Bank of America/Merrill Lynch The judge just approved a $150 million fine for B of A for lying to stockholders about their merger with Merrill Lynch. The judge called the settlement "paltry" and "half baked justice", but had to approve it under existing law. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010
Well, it's great to see how the all knowing Slashdot Pundits can completely dismiss a technology with almost no information.
I hate to be spoil sport but let's look at what we do know. (Actually I LOVE being a spoil sport on Slashdot, but never mind.)
-------
Look at the initial client list: eBay, Google, Staples, FedEx, and Walmart. Clearly a bunch of looser companies with no technical expertise who can easily be taken in by a smooth talker who is selling a fake product that will never deliver. (Sarcasm.)
The inventor: "Mr. Sridhar originally invented a similar device when he was working for NASA designing infrastructure for a
prospective Mars colony". I know you all have an irrational hatred of NASA, but they do send spacecraft all over the solar system and help keep the ISS manned and in orbit. So it is at least possible that Mr. Sridhar is a smart guy who has done something interesting.
The technology: "The discs are produced from baked sand and then painted on each side with the special ink. In between the discs an inexpensive metal (not platinum) is placed." So just maybe he has figured out how to reduce costs by using materials less expensive then semiconductor grade silicon an precious metals. This obviously leads to the Slashdot consensus that he is wrong.
Current cost vs. long term cost: "Mr. Sridhar hopes the funding that's being virtually thrown at him and his enigmatic box will help
drive down costs to below $3,000 for a residential unit within 5 to 10 years." The current "useless" price of $800,000 for an industrial unit means he has failed, and his projection of better prices in the future with mass production and further development is unfounded. Clearly decreasing prices of newly introduced technology never occur, according to Slashdot Pundits .
Yep, the Slashdot Pundits are 100% right in trash talking this effort. The could do something much better themselves, but they are all far to busy doing the impotant business of living in their parents basements, playing WoW and posting on Slashdot.
If they really want a balanced budget they should tax religion. It would serve dual purposes: fix the budget and cut back the parasites sucking on society. The religious have nothing to fear, since god loves them so much he (they know god is a dude with a white beard) will make up any material loss. If they complain they jsut don't have enough faith...
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a college student who was arrested by the TSA and detained for five hours over a set of Arabic-language flash cards he was carrying.
Among the questions a TSA agent asked him were "Do you know who did 9/11?" and "Do you know what language Osama bin Laden spoke?"
So one of the morons in the TSA, whom I'm sure has the functional skills of an 8 year old child, actually recognized Arabic script. On flash cards. With English on the back. He must have unhappy memories from the times tables he never mastered for multiplication, so he assumes TERRORIST! The student is detained, and the geniuses from the FBI are called in. They have an equivalent mental level of a 12 year old. The one who should have redone a year, but passed by stealing class notes and cheating, who was the class bully. This is where you get the gem: "Do you know what language Osama bin Laden spoke?" Kind of a '"Who is buried in Grants Tomb?" statement from our own so professional law inforcement personal.
This is not "far from perfect". it is a waste of time, effort and resources. They are incapable and uninterested in fighting terrorism. What they really want is to control other people. To assert their power in an arbitrary fashion, and mess with somebodies life.
But it's OK. The people in power all well meaning. And you feel really really safe. And you never have to worry about being detained for studying Arabic. And you don't have to worry about your email, phone, bank records, medical record and confidential employment history being accessed by a group of low wattage workers. People who's primary qualifications are that they work cheap, and have trouble getting employed in more demanding positions (sworn law enforcement/security guard).
Remember the people doing the actual work at TSA and pushing papers for the Patriot Act (aka the War is Peace Double Speak Act) are all private contractors working for politically connected (i.e. Republican political donor) security firms. And they always follow the rules, and never make mistakes, and whenever there is a problem there is always strict accountability. No one lies, and the victim is never blamed.
From the article:
The agency said George had been flagged for inspection even before he arrived at the security gate because he was "acting suspiciously."
And during the questioning, George's "behavior escalated to a point where our officers deemed it necessary to contact the Philadelphia Police Department," a TSA spokesman told the news network.
I'm really glad you feel safe, because I'm scared shitless.
A few years ago I worked on a variant H.264 codec, and I found out about MPEG politics. It's not about standards, technical quality or user access, it's
about MONEY. Specifically, patent portfolios and MPEG-LA.
The price of admission is sending people to the four times a year MPEG meetings. The chips are the patentable intellectually property. The game is to get
your IP into the standard by any means possible. When you are in the standard then you get profit participation in the MPEG-LA revenue stream.
When I was involved, the Japanese had a notorious reputation for sending lots of people and stacking the meetings. They would use procedural methods
to extend the meetings into late night and then after others left they would use their numbers to force through their proposals.
Of course other players had other ways of stacking the deck. Remember that big corporations can afford to employ people full time to chair
committees and that gives the extra clout (MicroSoft, apple, Sun, Philips,...).
This all means that smaller independent groups, like the one I worked for, had a very difficult time making any headway. No matter how good the technology, political considerations had a lot more impact.
The trick is that while MPEG is an open international body that supports "open standards", MPEG-LA is a foul black pit full of zombies, orcs and lawyers. In fact, the orcs and zombies are at the bottom of the heap, because the lawyer are the bad asses who run the show.
How are licenses fees set? Nobody knows. How are revenues divided? Nobody knows. How much is spent on MPEG-LA costs? Nobody knows. How do they decided to engage in legal action and who do target? Nobody knows.
It is a completely independent body with no oversight by any of the international standards bodies, or any government for that matter. It is only constrained by the software copyright rules in an individual jurisdiction.
It is a closed black box that can charge as much as it wants, and because it is an "international standard", it is almost impossible to compete with it based on cost or quality, and and you can't go after it using the legal system. (This one reason is why Ogg Theodora is not looked at as a meaningful option by the big players; it is not a standard, so it gives big companies headaches. Who is responsible if there is any trouble? What happens if a key person is hit by a bus? Having access to the source does not fully address all these legal issues.)
The reason that this such a bit deal is that large amounts of money are involved. I Googled around and I couldn't get a clue about total amounts, which is suspicious in itself. Remember, from the corporate viewpoint this is "free money", because the initial investment is small; a lab with some computers, some PHDs, a travel buget and some lawyers and the cost of their shark tanks. Very high rate of return over a long period of time.
And a shout out to all you libertarian morons out there: THIS IS A TAX!!! It is a tax collected by corrupt self serving insiders who have subverted the legal system. It restrains trade and stifles innovation. It is not subject to competition. Those who are taxed have no say in the matter.
It is arbitrary, and you cannot escape it by taking your business elsewhere. It is all the things you claim to hate about government. How come you this behavior is good when done by business for greed and bad when done by governments, which are more accountable to the people?
One of the best ways to bring workers together is to hate the boss. Nothing builds cohesion like having a common enemy. It helps if you have a Pointy Headed boss, but even modestly bad behavior on the part of an authority figure will do. Not only can you complain at work, but it will give you a common topic of conversation away from the office; you can go out for breaks of after work to talk trash.Try it, you'll like it.
It's not just that being on the ice leads to crazy behavior, it's that the management is back in the US and they treat the workers like dirt. While they have
picnics back in Kansas City. The NSF, which pays for it all, is equally brain dead. Here are some some "uncomfortable questions" from the blog.
The Supreme Court has ruled that Antarctica is "a foreign country". The IRS has emphasized recently that Antarctica is "not a foreign country". Does NSF consider Antarctica to be "a foreign country" or "not a foreign country"?
Do American citizens legally have Constitutional rights in Antarctica?
Does NSF voluntarily support the Constitutional rights of American citizens in Antarctica?
What legal model is used by NSF to determine the rights of American citizens in Antarctica?
Since NSF manages all facilities at the stations, which areas or facilities are considered "public" areas (guaranteed Constitutional protection)? If there are no "public" areas, then what policies does NSF have to ensure protection of "free speech" and "free press"? What policies does NSF have to keep its contractors from undermining these protections, if any?
If there are no civil protections granted to Americans in Antarctica, are employees explicitly told this by NSF and its contractors?
Having pointed this all out, it also sounds like fun in a weird way, if you enjoy hanging with funny disfunctional drunks in a potentially lethal environment.
Why is there a requirement that NASA build a full scale version? Because you said so? They are building and flying a 1/3 scale version to test the design. It will be used to test the transition between vertical take off, horizontal flight, and vertical landing. If they were to go further with this design it is a reasonable step to take. So how is this not real?
You want a full scale version, how about you fund it yourself. NASA has procedures for working with outside organizations. You could do it out of your vast personal fortune, or raise the venture funding.
The last I heard NASA did research, not making production prototypes. I would say this is in their charter. Why are you bitching?
Nothing has been proven by the saying "A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers' individual sites." So what? This does not show that readership has gone either up or down. The statement can be true and more readers go to the news source then without Google. News papers are failing on their own lack of content, they are just lookig for someone to blame.
This is an example of Cognitive Regulatory Capture, a term recently applied to the US Fed and Wall Street
by Willem Buiter, a British economist. He said:
The Fed listens to Wall Street and believes what it hears. This distortion into a partial and often highly distorted perception of reality is unhealthy and dangerous.
This is what happens to many regulatory bodies, like the US Fed, FCC, US Patent Office, SEC, FDA, FERC
(Federal Electric Regulatory Commission), etc. They end up promoting and defending their institutional clients rather then performing honest regulation.
The problem is made much worse by revolving doors, money and right wing ideology. The FED is a horrible example of the revolving door: just look at Paulson. When he was in charge of Goldman-Sacks they successfully lobbied to change the leverage ratio of banks (like Goldman-Sacks) from 20:1 to 30:1. This made the crash even worse. Then when he was the Treasury Secretary, he bails out banks at the expense of the national deficit. And by the way, he also helped preserve his own personal wealth. (Why is Pauson not under indictment for fraud?)
As for the corruption of money, a lot of lead researchers at the FDA in charge of specific programs were on the payroll of he very companies that were applying for FDA approval on their topic. All undisclosed to anyone, and all legal under the then current rules. Can you say conflict of interest?
Or look at FERC during the California energy chrisis when ENRON was gaming the system. The energy lobby got a bunch of pro-industry/anti-regulation hacks (some of whom owned energy monopolies) appointed to FERC, and when the chrisis hit they refused to do anything. On top of that, they blocked California regulators from doing anything. After the damage was done and Califonia wanted to get out of the bad deals that wer made during the worst part of the problem, FERC ruled that the contracts were valid, and the court backed them up. As a result California is still paying for the bad results of deregulation to this day. For some details see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blackout/themes/ferc.html
The FBI has a history of using completely unverified pseudo-science to convict people. For 40 years they used bullet lead analysis, where they compared fired slugs from crime scenes to unfired bullets in the possesion of suspects. They assumed that there was consistency from batch to batch of bullets and that all the slugs in a box came from the same batch. Neither assumption was true. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/16/60minutes/main3512453.shtml [cbsnews.com]
It was only when a retired FBI metallurgist did testing by himself that he proved that the technique was useless. Then the NSF did a study and found the same result, and the FBI stopped using this test. http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel05/bullet_lead_analysis.htm [fbi.gov]
Now the FBI has a secret data base that they use to claim that people are guilty. They will not release the data for independent verification of their results. Do you really think that they can be trusted one more time?
The USA could get out of debt by going after all the cowboy movies made in Italy and other places, and a lot of hard boiled detective films as well! And what about stupid fried food like fried twinkies?
Even though we don't have a compete lock on stupid, but a lot of our stupid stuff gets copied all over the world. Rap music, gang signs and baggy hip-hop fashions! World, you own us big time for our stupid!
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some examples from today's headlines. And by today I mean this week!
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/17/alec-massey-mine/
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-18/goldman-s-staged-explosion-deserves-apology-roger-lowenstein.html
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/yesterday-germany-today-uk-tomorrow-world-goldmans-response-lawsuits-everyone-q1-stub-bonuse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar_Capital
Someone in China or Russia? Apache is so vital to corporate and even government operations that compromising the code base could have huge financial and/or intelligence implications. I'm sure that there are Apache behind security barriers, and using it to gather information and send it elsewhere would be greatly prized. Just guessing...
Note that he is using artificial evolution for optimization. My guess is that it is simulated annealing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing The video shows the random configurations that are being evaluated.
Heparin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_heparin_adulteration
Since this "over-sulphated" variant is not naturally occurring and mimics the properties of heparin, the counterfeit is almost certainly intentional as opposed to an accidental lapse in manufacturing.[8] The heparin was cut from anywhere from 2-60% with a counterfeit substance due to cost effectiveness, and a shortage of suitable pigs in China.
Drywall: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100402/ap_on_bi_ge/us_chinese_drywall
The drywall has been linked to corrosion of wiring, air conditioning units, computers, doorknobs and jewelry, along with possible health effects. Tenenbaum said some samples of the Chinese-made product emit 100 times as much hydrogen sulfide as drywall made elsewhere.
Pet Food: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
Sometime in mid-March, an "unnamed pet food company" reported to Cornell that they had discovered an industrial chemical utilized in plastics manufacture, melamine, in internal testing of wheat gluten samples. .....
The chemical was found in the suspected wheat gluten in raw concentrations as high as 6.6 percent.
Cooking Oil: http://rawstory.com/2010/03/chinese-consumed-millions-gallons-toxic-sewage-oil-study/
Chinese cooking oil siphoned from restaurants' waste tanks and stripped out of raw sewage is being resold on the cheap and has for years tainted approximately one out of every ten meals cooked in the eastern nation, according to a recent study.
Tooth Paste http://publicsafety.tufts.edu/ehs/?pid=27
In recent weeks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has identified a number of instances of contaminated toothpastes that have been imported and sold in the United States. The toothpaste from China and counterfeit Colgate toothpaste may contain diethylene glycol (DEG), a chemical used in antifreeze.
Two are current: cooking oil and drywall.
Yes, the US will be a much better competitor if we just give up regulation, make a few people rich and poison everyone. Actually we already have, if you consider how unregulated Toxic Assets have ruined both the domestic and world economy....
Just wondering...
It follows the classic Slashdot 3 Step Plan:
1. Acquire US corporation with overseas branches (Bahamas, anyone).
2. Transfer funds to US, make contributions, buy political advertising, etc.
3. Profit! In this case profit equals changing US behavior.
This is such a new ruling that the practical limits have not been tested in court. Even so, current law makes it difficult to find out who is really behind much existing political funding. And if you are willing to lie, it is even easier.
And if you don't think that money buys political influence, just look at the record breaking spending in the California governs race: http://www.kcbs.com/localnews/Spending-Soars-in-CA-Governor-s-Race/6639828
This is bad enough already. Imagine how i will be with foreign interests footing the bills...
Any astronomy types out there who can figure this out?
As for the badness of Basic, all I can do is think of what Knuth said: it is good to know multiple different styles of programming languages. Only knowing languages descended from Algol: C, C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript, is too limiting. It's good to be proficient with LISP/Scheme, assembly on more then one CPU, a string processing language (Perl/Awk), and an industrial language like Fortran or Ada. Logic/declaritive programming is also a useful skill. One size does not fil all, and if you are comfortable with multiple paradidms you will be a bettere programmer. Personally, my next language experience is going to be with Haskell, because I really like Scheme, and I want to understand the functional paradigm.
That post also said "some economists" claim interventions is wrong, and then goes to state in the next sentence that "Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well", which is an unsupported claim; there is no logical inference from the previous statement. In other words, this is not logic but unsupported assertions, or bullshit.
If you read the Wikipedia article it shows that many economists refute the efficient market hypothesis.
Another economic critic is Minsky http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/13/why_capitalism_fails/
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis#Minsky.27s_theory
Minsky saw that stable markets lead to risk taking, which is rewarded, which leads to greater risk taking. Eventually the risk taking makes the markets unstable, and there is a general meltdown. He exactly described what has happened in the latest crash.
In the real world the Efficient Market Hypothesis is about as realistic as the Flat Earth Hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society, and leads to similar results if you use it. Of course. it is a core belief of Republicans/Neo-Cons, which is one reason that everything is so screw up right now.
Somehow I feel let down. What happened to the classic IBM sales organization that used Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt to coerce their clients into endless expansion and upgrades, needed or not? To make matters worse, it's a Federal system! When other vendors used to bid against IBM for a US government contract, everyone else always started in last place. When other vendors won it seemed like a mistake.
If IBM can't suck endless amounts of money out of the US government then there is something seriously wrong with America. We've lost our competitive spirit. How the mighty have fallen.
The way it is supposed to work is that technically responsible people write requirements that when followed correctly lead to acceptable results. This is what ISO-9001 is all about. It does not mandate "you must do procedure X"; it mandates that you must have a system that defines what processes you employ, and how you verify that they have been followed. In theory, your process could be throwing darts at paper target, and by retaining the target as an "artifact" you can show you followed your process. In the real world there are "best practices", and a lot of meetings and reviews and "artifacts".
The organizational issue is having a group of people who understand the processes and independently evaluate the results. If the the results are not acceptable they say so, and the problems are fixed. This requires:
1. Technical domain competence
2. Independence
3. Authority
Obviously, the evaluators are at odds with the people doing the project, because there job is to stop things from being completed. They are the spoilers.
When the evaluators are part of the organization, it is easier for them to be underfunded and ignored. It is also hard to get the best people to do this work, because it tends to be low status and also tends to pay less.
The best solution is to have an independently funded group with a separate chain of command that reports outside the regular channels: like the NTSB being outside the FAA. Their major weakness is lack of authority, because the FAA can, and does, ignore them. Typically it takes a spectacular high fatality preventable accident for change to occur.
An example in a different area is public prosecutors in our legal system. They are (supposedly) independent and follow the law, not the dictates of any particular group. (In practice, not so much. At the local level then are aligned with law enforcement, which is why cops are almost never caught or conviced of crimes.)
Now some real world failures from today's news. Literally today.
Toyota They used pressure tactics and out maneuvered the regulators. This whole discussion is about the failure to have technical expertise on the part of the regulator.
Nuclear Regulatory Commision In Vermont it was just revealed that tritium leaks were unreported starting in 2005, although leaks were also reported later. The plant operator lied. The NRC has a relative small number of inspectors, and they count on operators to follow all the rules and self report. I guess they also believe in the Tooth Fairy.
FDA The diabetes drug Avandia is responsible for hundred of heart attacks per month. This has been systematically under reported in the medical press and critics have been pressured and given the run around. The FDA knows about it, and had a review/whitewash session last year. During the Bush years the revolving door and payments from drug companies to "independent" research groups became a lucrative way of life. So hundreds of people die every month http://www.examiner.com/x-32805-Norfolk-Healthy-Living-Examiner~y2010m2d23-Major-Medical-Alert-Diabetes-drug-Avandia-responsible-for-monthly-heart-attacks-and-heart-failures. Who cares when Big Pharma is raking in the cash.
SEC/Bank of America/Merrill Lynch The judge just approved a $150 million fine for B of A for lying to stockholders about their merger with Merrill Lynch. The judge called the settlement "paltry" and "half baked justice", but had to approve it under existing law. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010
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Look at the initial client list: eBay, Google, Staples, FedEx, and Walmart. Clearly a bunch of looser companies with no technical expertise who can easily be taken in by a smooth talker who is selling a fake product that will never deliver. (Sarcasm.)
The inventor: "Mr. Sridhar originally invented a similar device when he was working for NASA designing infrastructure for a prospective Mars colony". I know you all have an irrational hatred of NASA, but they do send spacecraft all over the solar system and help keep the ISS manned and in orbit. So it is at least possible that Mr. Sridhar is a smart guy who has done something interesting.
The technology: "The discs are produced from baked sand and then painted on each side with the special ink. In between the discs an inexpensive metal (not platinum) is placed." So just maybe he has figured out how to reduce costs by using materials less expensive then semiconductor grade silicon an precious metals. This obviously leads to the Slashdot consensus that he is wrong.
Current cost vs. long term cost: "Mr. Sridhar hopes the funding that's being virtually thrown at him and his enigmatic box will help drive down costs to below $3,000 for a residential unit within 5 to 10 years." The current "useless" price of $800,000 for an industrial unit means he has failed, and his projection of better prices in the future with mass production and further development is unfounded. Clearly decreasing prices of newly introduced technology never occur, according to Slashdot Pundits .
Yep, the Slashdot Pundits are 100% right in trash talking this effort. The could do something much better themselves, but they are all far to busy doing the impotant business of living in their parents basements, playing WoW and posting on Slashdot.
If they really want a balanced budget they should tax religion. It would serve dual purposes: fix the budget and cut back the parasites sucking on society. The religious have nothing to fear, since god loves them so much he (they know god is a dude with a white beard) will make up any material loss. If they complain they jsut don't have enough faith...
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a college student who was arrested by the TSA and detained for five hours over a set of Arabic-language flash cards he was carrying.
Among the questions a TSA agent asked him were "Do you know who did 9/11?" and "Do you know what language Osama bin Laden spoke?"
So one of the morons in the TSA, whom I'm sure has the functional skills of an 8 year old child, actually recognized Arabic script. On flash cards. With English on the back. He must have unhappy memories from the times tables he never mastered for multiplication, so he assumes TERRORIST! The student is detained, and the geniuses from the FBI are called in. They have an equivalent mental level of a 12 year old. The one who should have redone a year, but passed by stealing class notes and cheating, who was the class bully. This is where you get the gem: "Do you know what language Osama bin Laden spoke?" Kind of a '"Who is buried in Grants Tomb?" statement from our own so professional law inforcement personal.
This is not "far from perfect". it is a waste of time, effort and resources. They are incapable and uninterested in fighting terrorism. What they really want is to control other people. To assert their power in an arbitrary fashion, and mess with somebodies life.
But it's OK. The people in power all well meaning. And you feel really really safe. And you never have to worry about being detained for studying Arabic. And you don't have to worry about your email, phone, bank records, medical record and confidential employment history being accessed by a group of low wattage workers. People who's primary qualifications are that they work cheap, and have trouble getting employed in more demanding positions (sworn law enforcement/security guard).
Remember the people doing the actual work at TSA and pushing papers for the Patriot Act (aka the War is Peace Double Speak Act) are all private contractors working for politically connected (i.e. Republican political donor) security firms. And they always follow the rules, and never make mistakes, and whenever there is a problem there is always strict accountability. No one lies, and the victim is never blamed.
From the article: The agency said George had been flagged for inspection even before he arrived at the security gate because he was "acting suspiciously."
And during the questioning, George's "behavior escalated to a point where our officers deemed it necessary to contact the Philadelphia Police Department," a TSA spokesman told the news network.
I'm really glad you feel safe, because I'm scared shitless.
The price of admission is sending people to the four times a year MPEG meetings. The chips are the patentable intellectually property. The game is to get your IP into the standard by any means possible. When you are in the standard then you get profit participation in the MPEG-LA revenue stream.
When I was involved, the Japanese had a notorious reputation for sending lots of people and stacking the meetings. They would use procedural methods to extend the meetings into late night and then after others left they would use their numbers to force through their proposals.
Of course other players had other ways of stacking the deck. Remember that big corporations can afford to employ people full time to chair committees and that gives the extra clout (MicroSoft, apple, Sun, Philips,...).
This all means that smaller independent groups, like the one I worked for, had a very difficult time making any headway. No matter how good the technology, political considerations had a lot more impact.
The trick is that while MPEG is an open international body that supports "open standards", MPEG-LA is a foul black pit full of zombies, orcs and lawyers. In fact, the orcs and zombies are at the bottom of the heap, because the lawyer are the bad asses who run the show.
How are licenses fees set? Nobody knows. How are revenues divided? Nobody knows. How much is spent on MPEG-LA costs? Nobody knows. How do they decided to engage in legal action and who do target? Nobody knows.
It is a completely independent body with no oversight by any of the international standards bodies, or any government for that matter. It is only constrained by the software copyright rules in an individual jurisdiction.
It is a closed black box that can charge as much as it wants, and because it is an "international standard", it is almost impossible to compete with it based on cost or quality, and and you can't go after it using the legal system. (This one reason is why Ogg Theodora is not looked at as a meaningful option by the big players; it is not a standard, so it gives big companies headaches. Who is responsible if there is any trouble? What happens if a key person is hit by a bus? Having access to the source does not fully address all these legal issues.)
The reason that this such a bit deal is that large amounts of money are involved. I Googled around and I couldn't get a clue about total amounts, which is suspicious in itself. Remember, from the corporate viewpoint this is "free money", because the initial investment is small; a lab with some computers, some PHDs, a travel buget and some lawyers and the cost of their shark tanks. Very high rate of return over a long period of time.
And a shout out to all you libertarian morons out there: THIS IS A TAX!!! It is a tax collected by corrupt self serving insiders who have subverted the legal system. It restrains trade and stifles innovation. It is not subject to competition. Those who are taxed have no say in the matter. It is arbitrary, and you cannot escape it by taking your business elsewhere. It is all the things you claim to hate about government. How come you this behavior is good when done by business for greed and bad when done by governments, which are more accountable to the people?
One of the best ways to bring workers together is to hate the boss. Nothing builds cohesion like having a common enemy. It helps if you have a Pointy Headed boss, but even modestly bad behavior on the part of an authority figure will do. Not only can you complain at work, but it will give you a common topic of conversation away from the office; you can go out for breaks of after work to talk trash.Try it, you'll like it.
It's not just that being on the ice leads to crazy behavior, it's that the management is back in the US and they treat the workers like dirt. While they have picnics back in Kansas City. The NSF, which pays for it all, is equally brain dead. Here are some some "uncomfortable questions" from the blog.
Having pointed this all out, it also sounds like fun in a weird way, if you enjoy hanging with funny disfunctional drunks in a potentially lethal environment.
You want a full scale version, how about you fund it yourself. NASA has procedures for working with outside organizations. You could do it out of your vast personal fortune, or raise the venture funding.
The last I heard NASA did research, not making production prototypes. I would say this is in their charter. Why are you bitching?
Nothing has been proven by the saying "A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers' individual sites." So what? This does not show that readership has gone either up or down. The statement can be true and more readers go to the news source then without Google. News papers are failing on their own lack of content, they are just lookig for someone to blame.
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2008/08/fireworks-at-jackson-hole-buiter-lets.html
This is what happens to many regulatory bodies, like the US Fed, FCC, US Patent Office, SEC, FDA, FERC (Federal Electric Regulatory Commission), etc. They end up promoting and defending their institutional clients rather then performing honest regulation.
The problem is made much worse by revolving doors, money and right wing ideology. The FED is a horrible example of the revolving door: just look at Paulson. When he was in charge of Goldman-Sacks they successfully lobbied to change the leverage ratio of banks (like Goldman-Sacks) from 20:1 to 30:1. This made the crash even worse. Then when he was the Treasury Secretary, he bails out banks at the expense of the national deficit. And by the way, he also helped preserve his own personal wealth. (Why is Pauson not under indictment for fraud?)
As for the corruption of money, a lot of lead researchers at the FDA in charge of specific programs were on the payroll of he very companies that were applying for FDA approval on their topic. All undisclosed to anyone, and all legal under the then current rules. Can you say conflict of interest?
Or look at FERC during the California energy chrisis when ENRON was gaming the system. The energy lobby got a bunch of pro-industry/anti-regulation hacks (some of whom owned energy monopolies) appointed to FERC, and when the chrisis hit they refused to do anything. On top of that, they blocked California regulators from doing anything. After the damage was done and Califonia wanted to get out of the bad deals that wer made during the worst part of the problem, FERC ruled that the contracts were valid, and the court backed them up. As a result California is still paying for the bad results of deregulation to this day. For some details see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blackout/themes/ferc.html
It was only when a retired FBI metallurgist did testing by himself that he proved that the technique was useless. Then the NSF did a study and found the same result, and the FBI stopped using this test. http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel05/bullet_lead_analysis.htm [fbi.gov]
Now the FBI has a secret data base that they use to claim that people are guilty. They will not release the data for independent verification of their results. Do you really think that they can be trusted one more time?
Even though we don't have a compete lock on stupid, but a lot of our stupid stuff gets copied all over the world. Rap music, gang signs and baggy hip-hop fashions! World, you own us big time for our stupid!