No, it is the point. Maybe there's a moral imperative to pay a reasonable sum to someone who's working for you -- and in Russia, $12,000 a year could well be a reasonable sum. I don't know, I haven't been there... but I have traveled to places where I know I could live quite well on an after-tax income of, say, $50 a day, or under $20,000 a year. If $12,000 a year is 99%th percentile Russian salary (again, I don't know), then how are those programmers being "exploited"? They could be living like czars for all you know!
If the project you're working on requires a highly cohesive team in order to succeed, then yes, it'll be tough to manage a team remotely. I've done it -- albeit across only three time zones, and with extensive travel. I can tell you from firsthand experience that it's very hard to, for example, initiate termination proceedings for an unproductive employee when you are on the opposite coast. It is definitely a stressful position to be in.
That said, I'm inclined to believe that certain projects could work in spite of the distances involved. If the problem domain is sufficiently well defined that developers can work on a solution without needing constant interaction with management, for example, I could imagine it working.
Incidentally, Boeing designed the 777 using engineering teams in three different parts of the world, if I remember correctly. That's a bigger project than most of us will ever work on, but it sort of demonstrates that physical proximity is not absolutely essential to success.
If a company can find someone to do the same job as me -- at the same level of quality etc. -- for less money, then they would be insane not to hire that person. And I would really have no basis to complain. Employment is fundamentally like any other form of trade: I give you my time/skills, you give me some money. Both parties agree to engage in that trade because both benefit. But if either party can get a better deal -- if I could go somewhere else and get a better salary, or if you could hire someone else to do the same job for less -- why would you expect them not to do so?
To take an example less close to home: If I were a car dealership and you as a consumer walked in and told me "I can get the same car for less if I buy it at the dealership down the road," should I blame you for making that choice? Similarly, if someone is willing to do the same job as you for less money, what basis do you have to complain?
Also, you say: The U.S. needs to make U.S. firms hire U.S. workers. I'd like you to try to explain, from a moral or ethical foundation, how you come to that conclusion. It's far from obvious to me. Is a citizen of India, for example, any less worthy of getting a decent job than a U.S. citizen? If that Indian citizen can do the job better, for less, than a U.S. citizen, why should I deny him the opportunity to do so? Simply because the U.S. citizen happens to have been born in the U.S.?
Incidentally, adding more labor laws is likely to have an effect exactly opposite what you desire: It will drive companies to other locations where they can get cheap labor entirely unfettered. Do some reading about the labor situation in France and you'll see what I mean. With the labor laws in place there (among other things, it is illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, even if you *want* to), companies should be -- and are -- loathe to locate in France or hire people there unless they have absolutely no alternative. And you see that in the ridiculously high unemployment rate, for example.
He's suggesting that people need to know enough about science and the scientific method to understand the world we live in. That doesn't have to be insane physics; "physics for poets" would be fine. And it's not just physics: It's also biology, chemistry, CS, etc. So people have enough background to understand basically what the dispute is when they pick up a newspaper and read about the debate over federal funding for stem-cell experimentation.
Interesting article, but I have to take issue with the monitor analogy. First off, the math is wrong: Going from a 19.9-inch to 20.0-inch viewable area is 1% more screen, not the stated 0.5%. (Screen area scales as the square of the diagonal; a 20-inch screen is four times the size of a 10-inch screen, not two times.) Second, chances are good that these two monitors have differences besides the extra 0.1 inch of viewable diagonal. The more expensive monitor could well have higher refresh rates, better color-calibration options, or other features that drive up cost.
.edu sites are not there to be "education-friendly". They may only be purchased by accredited post-secondary institutions. There's no sex.edu simply because there's no Sex University.
In the case of.edu, there's already this accreditation infrastructure in place. Who would accredit "kid-friendly" sites, and how would they accomplish that?
Let's set aside the whole business about the U.S. government trying to impose its standards a worldwide network -- for the sake of argument, pretend the suggested domain were instead.kids.us. I don't think it makes it much better: This still leaves big questions in my mind about how anyone can define "kid-safe".
First of all, safe for what age? Material that's perfectly reasonable for a 13-year-old might be inappropriate for a 7-year-old.
Secondly, "safe" is a gray area to begin with. If the goal of this legislation is to shield kids from porn, what qualifies as porn? Is a National Geographic picture of Australian aboriginals who aren't wearing any clothes off limits simply because it depicts nudity? What about a discussion of the reproductive behavior of pandas at the National Zoo?
Third, what standards does this law intend to place on areas outside of sex? Is foul language off limits? (If so, how foul is foul? There's a big difference between, say, "c--t" or "f--k" and "damn".) What about material on drugs/alcohol, violence, firearms, racial issues, religion, evolution, or anything else that might be considered controversial? Will there be a "kid-safe panel" who gets to decide if a site devoted to discussion of, say, the Holocaust falls outside the realm of "kid-safe"? How about a site that discusses "The Catcher in the Rye" or "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" -- both the kind of things that some school systems believe kids should get exposed to, and others believe are cause for censorship.
Some might argue this is just doing for the Web what the MPAA does for movies, but Web sites aren't like movies -- they change all the time, they have input from other users, etc. Who would be responsible for enforcing these standards on an ongoing basis?
Not sure about the CIA indicate a few years back, but IIRC there was a story in the NY Times about how in March or April of this year, a meteorite exploded over the south Pacific with approximately the force of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Good thing it vaporized over the ocean and not over some major metro area...
Wow, that is a really informative explanation. Thanks! It's always a refreshing surprise to get a truly knowledgeable response to a question on slashdot.
I knew that interferometry required a lot of precision, but I think my mental picture was off by a few orders of magnitude.:-) In fact, given these tolerances, I'm frankly amazed it's even possible (at visual wavelengths) on the ground -- you'd think that every little thing like thermal expansion of the telescope components would be enough to ruin your fringes (though I suppose that kind of thing is compensated for).
Your underlying facts are basically right but your conclusion is, fortunately for all of us who want one of these, somewhat mistaken. As you described, there are two kinds of photoreceptors in the eye: rods and cones. The cones are the ones that come in three varieties (the peaks of their sensitivity curves are not organized in a simple "red-green-blue" fashion, incidentally) and enable us to see color. (Simple memory aid: c = color = cones.) Cones are concentrated in the central 2 or 3 degrees (IIRC) of the retina, the area known as the "fovea" that is responsible for all our high-resolution vision. Outside of the fovea are rods, which function in low-light circumstances but come in only a single variety and thus produce monochromatic vision, as well as a sparser distribution of cones.
You mention that you worry about the possibility of "focusing on different parts in rapid sucession and getting a killer headache." Here's the thing: Your eyes "focus on different parts in rapid succession" all the time when viewing real-world images. That doesn't normally cause killer headaches. (The exception is usually if you're, say, farsighted and insist on looking at a close-up image all day long -- the muscles that focus your eyes spend all day working hard, which like any protracted muscle work get tiring.)
Admittedly, a display like this is probably best when you need to see lots of detail in static images rather than in movies. I think the idea is to be able to visualize lots of spatial detail in extremely complex systems -- to be able to look closely at one part of the image while still maintaining a sense of what's in the periphery. That's hard with current displays, where zooming in means you have to discard stuff outside your immediate field of focus. You're right that if you wanted to watch a moving image, a lot of this resolution would probably be wasted -- in fact, I'm led to believe that some professional flight simulators and similar devices use this fact to their advantage by performing eye-tracking and showing full detail only in the area that the user is actually focused on, while showing lower-resolution imagery in the periphery to save CPU cycles. (Of course, that only works if you have a single or very small number of viewers, all of whose eyes are being tracked.)
One other funny perceptual thing: it's unlikely that "the limitations imposed upon our vision by evolution will become more obvious" when using this or any other display. We cope with those limitations in a very high-resolution environment (the real world) every single day and rarely notice them unless we really take the time to think about them and/or do experiments. We all have a fairly sizable blind spot in each of our eyes, for example (caused because there are no receptors whatsoever where the optic nerve exits the eyeball), and yet we never notice that gaping hole in our field of vision. The combination of unconscious eye movements and the fact that the brain maintains a basically continuous picture of the environment around us do a pretty good job of convincing us that we see everything in the world around us fairly well even when we don't. If anything I suspect what this display will show is how good a job evolution has done at making us ignorant of all the visual limitations we actually have!
More people will take public transit, because it's cheaper than driving.
Highly unlikely. All the evidence I've seen (and gathered from talking to a friend of mine who's a transit planner) shows that cost alone plays relatively little role in determining individuals' choice between public transit and driving. What it primarily comes down to is convenience: People make their transportation choice based on what they perceive to be easier for them. If gas prices in the U.S. doubled (as they arguably should), you'd get a huge amount of griping, and maybe a handful of people would change their habits, but most people would just suck it up and continue driving -- because in most places, for most people, it's simply way too much of a pain in the ass to take mass transit. At least, it's perceived to be a pain in the ass, and perception is reality in this kind of thing.
Incidentally, mass transit is not, in general, particularly cheap to begin with. For example, the cost of operating the bus system in Seattle, where I live, works out to something like $5 per ride. (Of course it's subsidized so riders pay only a fraction of that amount.) There's a new light-rain line -- one line, not a network -- proposed for the city that looks like it will cost upwards of $4 billion (or about $8,000 per city resident) simply to construct. And of course, in this running-out-of-energy scenario we have to take into consideration that as energy prices climb, so to will the cost of operating mass transit too (buses and trains require pretty substantial amounts of power either in the form of fossil fuel or electricity).
Yet the really insidious problem isn't money, it's time: People don't want to wait for public transit to arrive, and they don't want to cope with the fact that it doesn't go door-to-door like a private automobile. For some strange psychological reason people are much more sensitive to waiting around two minutes for a bus to come than they are to, say, crawling slowly through traffic for half an hour.
I'm not anti-mass transit, I'm just a realist. It's hard for me to see energy scarcity and cost reducing dependence on the private automobile (at least in the U.S.) unless we're talking about an order-of-magnitude difference, and that's a long, long way off. (Proven oil reserves are larger than they were 30 years ago, and all that...)
Great post. But here's a question: Couldn't a spy satellite be designed to use interferometry to create a large virtual mirror with a greater resolving power than a single physical mirror? I believe this technique is used in ground-based telescopes to great effect. While I'd imagine the engineering issues of getting such a thing up on a satellite would be quite daunting, isn't it possible to do this in principle?
But the problem is nonlinear and we don't necessarily know what the "dominant forces" that need to be modeled are. For instance, I read a story the other day (I was traveling and it was on paper, so sorry, no link) that said something like "researchers are beginning to realize the the proportion and size of whitecaps on ocean waves may affect their computation of the planet's albedo by a couple of percentage points and therefore have a significant impact on calculations of how much solar energy is retained vs. how much is reflected." (This is a paraphrase, not a quote.)
While I agree with your assertion that weather and climate forecasting are two different things, I think it would be a gross mistake to claim that anybody has a global climactic model that they can confidently claim to accurately model all important variables and their interactions.
Although the reaction in the U.S. was less pronounced, a March 2001 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans think the President should develop a plan to reduce the gas emissions that may contribute to global warming.
I don't know what specific question they asked, but in general polls like this are totally useless. Why? Because they ask questions in the format "Would you like X to happen?" without ever exploring any of the costs involved. Of course two-thirds of Americans believe, when asked in the abstract, that we should reduce emission of greenhouse gases. But get down to specifics and I guarantee you would see the numbers change.
The poll question I want to see would be something like this: What steps are you willing to take to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 20%? (Check all that apply.)
A. Pay $5/gallon for gas
B. Take mass transit to work (or carpool) twice a week, every week.
C. Raise taxes by $1,000 per person per year.
D. Cut home energy consumption by 20%.
I'm making up the specifics, obviously, but my point is this: Questions that ask people to indicate whether they'd like a particular benefit without making reference to the tradeoffs involved are pointless. And I bet that when you start making people realize that nothing comes for free, their opinions will change -- fast.
It's been a few years since I lived in CA, but to the best of my knowledge the state does still assess a property tax on all vehicles, both private and commercial. My recollection is that the tax portion on a brand-new $20K car works out to $300-$400 annually, though the number goes down as the vehicle depreciates. And just to be clear, that's a tax, in addition to the license/registration fee. (It's even deductible along with state/local income taxes on your Federal form 1040.) It's in addition to the sales tax that you pay when you purchase the car, of course.
I'm not aware of any property taxes that are assessed on corporate property such as PCs (though certainly real estate is taxed), but I also claim no particular expertise in this area.
I can only assume the reasoning behind such an action goes something like this: "SUVs [or whatever] are so godawfully bad for the environment that we can justify any action that helps reduce their impact." Perhaps there's an implied caveat: Destruction of property is OK, but injury of people is not.
Unfortunately, a moment's thought makes clear that such "logic" is utterly specious. The problem is that the notion of what's right and wrong is entirely in the mind of the person or people deciding to commit the act, and thus it's possible to justify essentially any action using this premise. For example, someone could argue that abortion clinics are bad because they kill unborn babies, and use that as justification to bomb an abortion clinic. On the other hand, pro-choice advocates could argue that pro-lifers are impinging on women's fundamental reproductive rights, and use that as justification to bomb the headquarters of a pro-life group. Genetically modified foods are bad for the ecosystem? Destroy the tractors used to plow the fields in which they'll be planted! But wait: GM foods are more productive per acre (say, for the sake of argument), meaning organic farms occupy more land per calorie produced -- and agriculture is already using too much of our land, so we'd better destroy the tractors used by the organic farmers!
The problem with this kind of vigilante "justice" (for lack of a better term) is that there are two or more sides to every argument, and in many cases all the participants will be able to claim that they are acting in a morally responsible fashion, simply because their value systems or premises differ. And if you condone violence or destruction of property as a means of enacting social change, you're basically saying that the rule of law is moot and that, simply speaking, might makes right. I don't know about you, but that's not a world I want to live in.
...radar detectors. I always thought it was stupid that states could outlaw using what is basically a special-purpose radio receiver to pick up signals the police are beaming at you.
I was also thinking about those stories that used to circulate about how, under the right circumstances, people could pick up radio signals with the fillings in their teeth. What if the radio signal you happened to pick up was somebody's cordless-phone conversation? Are you breaking the law? Is your dentist part of the conspiracy for building the "receiver" that you used?
Thanks for a thoughtful and lucid comment. I think you made a lot of good points.
I have to disagree with your comment about seniority, however. You wrote: It makes sense that the longer you work for a company you should make more money.
I don't see that as a given. The two primary factors that logically influence someone's pay are (a) how much they are contributing to the company and (b) supply and demand with regard to the position. If someone's contribution to the company indeed increases over time, then yes, it makes sense for him to make more as he gains more seniority. But I'm sure lots of folks here have seen how this can backfire -- working for companies where people who have been around for a long time are the ones on cruise control, drawing fat salaries and contributing little of real value. It's very important to distringuish between, on the one hand, seniority that leads to more experience, better decisions, better understanding of the company and its customers, and so on, and on the other hand, seniority that simply means time served.
One other thing: You mentioned the mistaken "idea that a union comes from the outside and does things to its members." In some cases things can happen this way. For example, right now some TAs at the University of Washington are unionized, and the union is demanding the right to negotiate on behalf of all the TAs. I recognize the right of the union to organize some employees, but I dispute the premise that an employee should be put under the union umbrella if he doesn't want to be. Personally I prefer to negotiate for myself.
You're right, I may have overgeneralized by saying "retail" when it's the fast-food places that have the really outrageous (triple-digit) turnover rates. Also, as you hint at, the smaller operations seem to have much less turnover than big chain stores. I don't have any hard numbers to back that up, but it's definitely been my observation as well.
Uhh, I lived in the Bay Area, and although I moved recently to a place where rents are cheaper, I'm well aware of how much it costs and still have plenty of friends and family struggling with the rental and real-estate situation there. It's absolute BS to claim that $1800/month will only get you a 400-sq-foot apartment in the Bay Area. Of course, it depends hugely on WHERE in the Bay Area you are looking. Sure, if you want to be in a really desirable area like San Francisco itself or some of the more affluent cities on the Peninsula, that can be true. But until recently, for example, my brother had a share in (an admittedly pretty run-down part of) Oakland for which he was paying around $300/month. He actually was making pretty good money, but the cheap rent was his way of saving up on the down payments for the truly outrageous cost of a house.
If you need to cut down on rent, the two best ways are to (a) live in a crappy location and (b) to get as big a place as possible and split it among as many people as you can, so you essentially get to amortize the cost of the common areas across more people. So instead of getting a bachelor apartment on the Peninsula, you rent an old, run-down house or something in the East Bay and have five people living there. And incidentally, even a tiny place can accommodate more than one person if you are really motivated; I used to date a girl (this was in New York) who was one of two living in an apartment that was no bigger than 300 sq feet. (I dated another girl who lived in a so-called "railroad flat" where one of her roommates had to walk through her room in order to get to his room -- and back through her room if he wanted to, say, go to the bathroom in the middle of the night -- which is a *really* interesting living arrangement.)
Just out of curiosity I went and checked out rental listings on sfgate.com. There are a handful of 2BR places listing for $1100-$1200 in San Francisco itself. Now, it's just a few listings, and I'm sure they'll be gone faster than you can say "make the check out to...". And I'm not suggesting that sharing a 2-BR place three or four ways makes for a fantastic life, nor that the real-estate situation in the Bay Area is not insane (it clearly is). I'd hate to have to go back to that kind of lifestyle now that I'm comfortable and can take care of myself pretty well. But my point is that people need to reconsider their standards of living when the shit hits the fan career-wise and they've got nothing to fall back on. Lots of people live this way all the time, and I'm frankly surprised that a techie would be so deeply insolvent and uncreative about his living situation that he'd find himself relegated to a shelter.
You say the jobs are there... no, these are "junk" jobs. In fact, getting such jobs isn't even that easy. The managers will know you're not the kind of person to stick around for a couple years to make the training worth while.
Mmmm, many jobs in retail have turnover rates well in excess of 100% -- I've seen numbers for fast food chains of well over 200% -- so I find it hard to believe that managers would be that worried about your not sticking around for a couple of years. Nobody sticks around for a couple of years, and at least you're likely to show up on time and sober.
"Even those who qualify for unemployment benefits soon discover the $40 to $230 weekly check will not cover an apartment here, where rent averages around $1,800 a month."
I guess it never occurs to people that they might do what college students, recent graduates, and other financially strapped and/or marginally employed people have done since time immemorial: Find a roommate! Sheesh. When I got out of school in the early 90s and went to live in New York City (making a princely $10/hour -- this with significant business and tech experience and a degree from a top-ten university), I had friends who somehow managed to get by on even less than I did. Typically their living situation went something like this: Minuscule two-bedroom apartment with three or four people occupying it. Either there were bunk beds in the bedroom(s), or someone had a bed lofted over the couch in the 80-square-foot living room. Dinner was ramen noodles, the entertainment budget was sufficient to cover maybe two beers a week (though probably not if you bought them at a bar), and there was nothing as extravagant as cable TV.
This does not make for a glamorous life, but then again, it doesn't require much income either. Assuming rent of $2,400 a month, that's $600 divided four ways. You can cover that working at Starbucks: Every time I visit the Bay Area, I laugh when I see the help-wanted signs offering $9+/hour plus tips and benefits and, probably, a handful of stock options! Maybe that's not quite enough because you've still got student loans or something, so you get a second job temping or whatever. Oh, the tragedy.
Basically, I contend that former dot-commers who declare themselves homeless are either (a) unwilling to stoop to a job they consider beneath themselves or (b) unable to throttle back on their consumption. There are homeless people with real problems: They're substance abusers, or mentally disturbed, or illiterate, or single parents with kids. Them I feel sympathy for. These posers who are whining about not being able to find sufficiently cushy jobs, on the other hand, are not about to earn my sympathy.
I have a couple of friends who sort of compete with each other on this ultra-high-end stereo stuff. They could easily be the guys described in this story. One of them has one of the big Mark Levinson systems that's well upward of $100K; the other contends he gets much more bang for the buck from another manufacturer whose name I can't recall just now. Maybe it's Naim (he's upgraded so many times it's hard to keep track). Anyway, it's worth noting that these experiences systems actually provide very few features. A $10,000 (or whatever) CD player does not give you a changer. It does not give you programming. What it gives you is (quite possibly in two wholly separate pieces of equipment) an incredibly precise transport mechanism and a very, very good D-A converter, both of which will have truly incredible components and specs.
Can you tell the difference between a $100,000 system and a $10,000 system? I don't know. I do know that I can tell the difference between a $100,000 system and a $1,000 system (which is probably about what my home stereo system cost). I go to my friends' houses and listen to music and it's almost as if the instruments are there in the room. The sound staging is phenomenal. The precision and power and detail is unbelievable. I'm constantly hearing things that I never hear on my own stereo, and it almost depresses me to listen to my system for days after listening to their because the quality of mine is so inferior.
I am not by any means a hard-core audiophile, and in fact I'm highly skeptical about the value of, say, $10,000 *cables*. Even if I had all the money in the world to spend, I'm not sure I'd spend it on a higher-end stereo, because the reality is that for the listening I do, what I've got is good enough. But I can't deny that the really high-end stuff sounds absolutely spectacular -- and as far as what you're paying for, it's definitely quality rather than features.
You don't think that they didn't have IBM honcho's prodding them along constantly? They didn't have accountants telling them they were above the budget?...
The story explicitly points out that the project was approved with a nod and never had a formal budget.
Don't get me wrong: I'm actually one of the people who believes that (good) managers are an asset to a company. But in this case, it really sounds like this thing was a skunkworks, something flying so far below the radar of management -- or at least management who might gripe about it -- that the environment had a much more academic flavor. That's the kind of thing that a company with IBM's muscle could afford to do at the time.
I've helped teach (admittedly privileged) elementary-school kids in the past, and I've also done some work with a volunteer organization that helped wire New York City schools and gave computer instruction to teachers, so here are some observations I've derived from those experiences.
The Prime Directive: Be as direct, and hands-on, as possible.
Try to minimize the amount of time you spend on background material. While it's fascinating to techie types like us to know what's going on under the hood, the thing the kids will probably want most is simply to get their hands on the machines and play. Put as few obstacles in the way of that as possible, and encourage exploration. Get their hands on the computers on the first day! You can circle back and teach the "why" material later.
Also, don't try to shove too much material into too little time. Save time for the kids to explore and have fun, not just plow through prefab lessons.
Find out what the kids are most interested in, and teach them that.
You want to keep the excitement level and sense of discovery high so that the kids will develop a lasting interest in computers, so I encourage flexibility rather than strict adherence to any particular course of study. The kids may not know enough about computers to even know what most interests them, but think about Web surfing (careful with what sites they can access, of course), email/IM, games, maybe even digital imaging if you can get your hands on a digicam or scanner. It'll be a lot easier to introduce word processing after you've gotten people hooked on email (which has a much higher fun quotient) than vice versa. Things involving graphics will also have a lot more appeal than those involving text, particularly since many of the kids may not know how to type or, in the worst case, may have limited literacy.*
Encourage the more knowledgeable/experienced kids to help their classmates.
The kids will learn at different speeds. Some will pick things up right away and others will agonize over it forever. Use this to your advantage and have the fast learners help out the slower learners, if you can do this without causing too much friction.
Come up with lessons that convey the ideas that the kids will need to know for future success with computers -- but subtly and in the course of something they can relate to.
Identify the basic concepts you want kids to understand when they leave. That probably includes something like:
The difference between working memory and permanent storage
Basic filesystem concepts (what's a file, what's a folder, what does copying and deleting/trashing do)
What an application is, how to start it, how to get information from one to another (i.e., the clipboard)
How to get on and use the Internet for e-mail, basic research (search engines and the like), etc.
(Some of these might be overkill if you're talking early elementary school -- first-graders might not need to know about filesystems, for example, but fifth- or sixth-graders ought to be at least introduced to the concept.)
Come up with a list of resources the kids can use after the class is over.
Two things: First, where are places they can go to continue using computers if they don't have one at home. That could be places like public libraries. Second, what books, Web sites, etc. can they turn to if they want to learn more on their own.
*--Note: the comment about limited literacy, in this context of teaching a summer camp that includes "inner-city" kids, is not meant to be any kind of coded racist reference. It's simply the sad truth that many kids in school in the U.S. who are not in affluent suburban schools (and probably quite a few who are, as well) are reading well below grade level. This is something you should be prepared for.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it is the point. Maybe there's a moral imperative to pay a reasonable sum to someone who's working for you -- and in Russia, $12,000 a year could well be a reasonable sum. I don't know, I haven't been there... but I have traveled to places where I know I could live quite well on an after-tax income of, say, $50 a day, or under $20,000 a year. If $12,000 a year is 99%th percentile Russian salary (again, I don't know), then how are those programmers being "exploited"? They could be living like czars for all you know!
That said, I'm inclined to believe that certain projects could work in spite of the distances involved. If the problem domain is sufficiently well defined that developers can work on a solution without needing constant interaction with management, for example, I could imagine it working.
Incidentally, Boeing designed the 777 using engineering teams in three different parts of the world, if I remember correctly. That's a bigger project than most of us will ever work on, but it sort of demonstrates that physical proximity is not absolutely essential to success.
To take an example less close to home: If I were a car dealership and you as a consumer walked in and told me "I can get the same car for less if I buy it at the dealership down the road," should I blame you for making that choice? Similarly, if someone is willing to do the same job as you for less money, what basis do you have to complain?
Also, you say: The U.S. needs to make U.S. firms hire U.S. workers. I'd like you to try to explain, from a moral or ethical foundation, how you come to that conclusion. It's far from obvious to me. Is a citizen of India, for example, any less worthy of getting a decent job than a U.S. citizen? If that Indian citizen can do the job better, for less, than a U.S. citizen, why should I deny him the opportunity to do so? Simply because the U.S. citizen happens to have been born in the U.S.?
Incidentally, adding more labor laws is likely to have an effect exactly opposite what you desire: It will drive companies to other locations where they can get cheap labor entirely unfettered. Do some reading about the labor situation in France and you'll see what I mean. With the labor laws in place there (among other things, it is illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, even if you *want* to), companies should be -- and are -- loathe to locate in France or hire people there unless they have absolutely no alternative. And you see that in the ridiculously high unemployment rate, for example.
He's suggesting that people need to know enough about science and the scientific method to understand the world we live in. That doesn't have to be insane physics; "physics for poets" would be fine. And it's not just physics: It's also biology, chemistry, CS, etc. So people have enough background to understand basically what the dispute is when they pick up a newspaper and read about the debate over federal funding for stem-cell experimentation.
Interesting article, but I have to take issue with the monitor analogy. First off, the math is wrong: Going from a 19.9-inch to 20.0-inch viewable area is 1% more screen, not the stated 0.5%. (Screen area scales as the square of the diagonal; a 20-inch screen is four times the size of a 10-inch screen, not two times.) Second, chances are good that these two monitors have differences besides the extra 0.1 inch of viewable diagonal. The more expensive monitor could well have higher refresh rates, better color-calibration options, or other features that drive up cost.
In the case of .edu, there's already this accreditation infrastructure in place. Who would accredit "kid-friendly" sites, and how would they accomplish that?
First of all, safe for what age? Material that's perfectly reasonable for a 13-year-old might be inappropriate for a 7-year-old.
Secondly, "safe" is a gray area to begin with. If the goal of this legislation is to shield kids from porn, what qualifies as porn? Is a National Geographic picture of Australian aboriginals who aren't wearing any clothes off limits simply because it depicts nudity? What about a discussion of the reproductive behavior of pandas at the National Zoo?
Third, what standards does this law intend to place on areas outside of sex? Is foul language off limits? (If so, how foul is foul? There's a big difference between, say, "c--t" or "f--k" and "damn".) What about material on drugs/alcohol, violence, firearms, racial issues, religion, evolution, or anything else that might be considered controversial? Will there be a "kid-safe panel" who gets to decide if a site devoted to discussion of, say, the Holocaust falls outside the realm of "kid-safe"? How about a site that discusses "The Catcher in the Rye" or "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" -- both the kind of things that some school systems believe kids should get exposed to, and others believe are cause for censorship.
Some might argue this is just doing for the Web what the MPAA does for movies, but Web sites aren't like movies -- they change all the time, they have input from other users, etc. Who would be responsible for enforcing these standards on an ongoing basis?
Not sure about the CIA indicate a few years back, but IIRC there was a story in the NY Times about how in March or April of this year, a meteorite exploded over the south Pacific with approximately the force of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Good thing it vaporized over the ocean and not over some major metro area...
I knew that interferometry required a lot of precision, but I think my mental picture was off by a few orders of magnitude. :-) In fact, given these tolerances, I'm frankly amazed it's even possible (at visual wavelengths) on the ground -- you'd think that every little thing like thermal expansion of the telescope components would be enough to ruin your fringes (though I suppose that kind of thing is compensated for).
You mention that you worry about the possibility of "focusing on different parts in rapid sucession and getting a killer headache." Here's the thing: Your eyes "focus on different parts in rapid succession" all the time when viewing real-world images. That doesn't normally cause killer headaches. (The exception is usually if you're, say, farsighted and insist on looking at a close-up image all day long -- the muscles that focus your eyes spend all day working hard, which like any protracted muscle work get tiring.)
Admittedly, a display like this is probably best when you need to see lots of detail in static images rather than in movies. I think the idea is to be able to visualize lots of spatial detail in extremely complex systems -- to be able to look closely at one part of the image while still maintaining a sense of what's in the periphery. That's hard with current displays, where zooming in means you have to discard stuff outside your immediate field of focus. You're right that if you wanted to watch a moving image, a lot of this resolution would probably be wasted -- in fact, I'm led to believe that some professional flight simulators and similar devices use this fact to their advantage by performing eye-tracking and showing full detail only in the area that the user is actually focused on, while showing lower-resolution imagery in the periphery to save CPU cycles. (Of course, that only works if you have a single or very small number of viewers, all of whose eyes are being tracked.)
One other funny perceptual thing: it's unlikely that "the limitations imposed upon our vision by evolution will become more obvious" when using this or any other display. We cope with those limitations in a very high-resolution environment (the real world) every single day and rarely notice them unless we really take the time to think about them and/or do experiments. We all have a fairly sizable blind spot in each of our eyes, for example (caused because there are no receptors whatsoever where the optic nerve exits the eyeball), and yet we never notice that gaping hole in our field of vision. The combination of unconscious eye movements and the fact that the brain maintains a basically continuous picture of the environment around us do a pretty good job of convincing us that we see everything in the world around us fairly well even when we don't. If anything I suspect what this display will show is how good a job evolution has done at making us ignorant of all the visual limitations we actually have!
Highly unlikely. All the evidence I've seen (and gathered from talking to a friend of mine who's a transit planner) shows that cost alone plays relatively little role in determining individuals' choice between public transit and driving. What it primarily comes down to is convenience: People make their transportation choice based on what they perceive to be easier for them. If gas prices in the U.S. doubled (as they arguably should), you'd get a huge amount of griping, and maybe a handful of people would change their habits, but most people would just suck it up and continue driving -- because in most places, for most people, it's simply way too much of a pain in the ass to take mass transit. At least, it's perceived to be a pain in the ass, and perception is reality in this kind of thing.
Incidentally, mass transit is not, in general, particularly cheap to begin with. For example, the cost of operating the bus system in Seattle, where I live, works out to something like $5 per ride. (Of course it's subsidized so riders pay only a fraction of that amount.) There's a new light-rain line -- one line, not a network -- proposed for the city that looks like it will cost upwards of $4 billion (or about $8,000 per city resident) simply to construct. And of course, in this running-out-of-energy scenario we have to take into consideration that as energy prices climb, so to will the cost of operating mass transit too (buses and trains require pretty substantial amounts of power either in the form of fossil fuel or electricity).
Yet the really insidious problem isn't money, it's time: People don't want to wait for public transit to arrive, and they don't want to cope with the fact that it doesn't go door-to-door like a private automobile. For some strange psychological reason people are much more sensitive to waiting around two minutes for a bus to come than they are to, say, crawling slowly through traffic for half an hour.
I'm not anti-mass transit, I'm just a realist. It's hard for me to see energy scarcity and cost reducing dependence on the private automobile (at least in the U.S.) unless we're talking about an order-of-magnitude difference, and that's a long, long way off. (Proven oil reserves are larger than they were 30 years ago, and all that...)
Great post. But here's a question: Couldn't a spy satellite be designed to use interferometry to create a large virtual mirror with a greater resolving power than a single physical mirror? I believe this technique is used in ground-based telescopes to great effect. While I'd imagine the engineering issues of getting such a thing up on a satellite would be quite daunting, isn't it possible to do this in principle?
While I agree with your assertion that weather and climate forecasting are two different things, I think it would be a gross mistake to claim that anybody has a global climactic model that they can confidently claim to accurately model all important variables and their interactions.
I don't know what specific question they asked, but in general polls like this are totally useless. Why? Because they ask questions in the format "Would you like X to happen?" without ever exploring any of the costs involved. Of course two-thirds of Americans believe, when asked in the abstract, that we should reduce emission of greenhouse gases. But get down to specifics and I guarantee you would see the numbers change.
The poll question I want to see would be something like this: What steps are you willing to take to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 20%? (Check all that apply.)
A. Pay $5/gallon for gas
B. Take mass transit to work (or carpool) twice a week, every week.
C. Raise taxes by $1,000 per person per year.
D. Cut home energy consumption by 20%.
I'm making up the specifics, obviously, but my point is this: Questions that ask people to indicate whether they'd like a particular benefit without making reference to the tradeoffs involved are pointless. And I bet that when you start making people realize that nothing comes for free, their opinions will change -- fast.
I'm not aware of any property taxes that are assessed on corporate property such as PCs (though certainly real estate is taxed), but I also claim no particular expertise in this area.
Unfortunately, a moment's thought makes clear that such "logic" is utterly specious. The problem is that the notion of what's right and wrong is entirely in the mind of the person or people deciding to commit the act, and thus it's possible to justify essentially any action using this premise. For example, someone could argue that abortion clinics are bad because they kill unborn babies, and use that as justification to bomb an abortion clinic. On the other hand, pro-choice advocates could argue that pro-lifers are impinging on women's fundamental reproductive rights, and use that as justification to bomb the headquarters of a pro-life group. Genetically modified foods are bad for the ecosystem? Destroy the tractors used to plow the fields in which they'll be planted! But wait: GM foods are more productive per acre (say, for the sake of argument), meaning organic farms occupy more land per calorie produced -- and agriculture is already using too much of our land, so we'd better destroy the tractors used by the organic farmers!
The problem with this kind of vigilante "justice" (for lack of a better term) is that there are two or more sides to every argument, and in many cases all the participants will be able to claim that they are acting in a morally responsible fashion, simply because their value systems or premises differ. And if you condone violence or destruction of property as a means of enacting social change, you're basically saying that the rule of law is moot and that, simply speaking, might makes right. I don't know about you, but that's not a world I want to live in.
I was also thinking about those stories that used to circulate about how, under the right circumstances, people could pick up radio signals with the fillings in their teeth. What if the radio signal you happened to pick up was somebody's cordless-phone conversation? Are you breaking the law? Is your dentist part of the conspiracy for building the "receiver" that you used?
I have to disagree with your comment about seniority, however. You wrote: It makes sense that the longer you work for a company you should make more money.
I don't see that as a given. The two primary factors that logically influence someone's pay are (a) how much they are contributing to the company and (b) supply and demand with regard to the position. If someone's contribution to the company indeed increases over time, then yes, it makes sense for him to make more as he gains more seniority. But I'm sure lots of folks here have seen how this can backfire -- working for companies where people who have been around for a long time are the ones on cruise control, drawing fat salaries and contributing little of real value. It's very important to distringuish between, on the one hand, seniority that leads to more experience, better decisions, better understanding of the company and its customers, and so on, and on the other hand, seniority that simply means time served.
One other thing: You mentioned the mistaken "idea that a union comes from the outside and does things to its members." In some cases things can happen this way. For example, right now some TAs at the University of Washington are unionized, and the union is demanding the right to negotiate on behalf of all the TAs. I recognize the right of the union to organize some employees, but I dispute the premise that an employee should be put under the union umbrella if he doesn't want to be. Personally I prefer to negotiate for myself.
You're right, I may have overgeneralized by saying "retail" when it's the fast-food places that have the really outrageous (triple-digit) turnover rates. Also, as you hint at, the smaller operations seem to have much less turnover than big chain stores. I don't have any hard numbers to back that up, but it's definitely been my observation as well.
If you need to cut down on rent, the two best ways are to (a) live in a crappy location and (b) to get as big a place as possible and split it among as many people as you can, so you essentially get to amortize the cost of the common areas across more people. So instead of getting a bachelor apartment on the Peninsula, you rent an old, run-down house or something in the East Bay and have five people living there. And incidentally, even a tiny place can accommodate more than one person if you are really motivated; I used to date a girl (this was in New York) who was one of two living in an apartment that was no bigger than 300 sq feet. (I dated another girl who lived in a so-called "railroad flat" where one of her roommates had to walk through her room in order to get to his room -- and back through her room if he wanted to, say, go to the bathroom in the middle of the night -- which is a *really* interesting living arrangement.)
Just out of curiosity I went and checked out rental listings on sfgate.com. There are a handful of 2BR places listing for $1100-$1200 in San Francisco itself. Now, it's just a few listings, and I'm sure they'll be gone faster than you can say "make the check out to...". And I'm not suggesting that sharing a 2-BR place three or four ways makes for a fantastic life, nor that the real-estate situation in the Bay Area is not insane (it clearly is). I'd hate to have to go back to that kind of lifestyle now that I'm comfortable and can take care of myself pretty well. But my point is that people need to reconsider their standards of living when the shit hits the fan career-wise and they've got nothing to fall back on. Lots of people live this way all the time, and I'm frankly surprised that a techie would be so deeply insolvent and uncreative about his living situation that he'd find himself relegated to a shelter.
Mmmm, many jobs in retail have turnover rates well in excess of 100% -- I've seen numbers for fast food chains of well over 200% -- so I find it hard to believe that managers would be that worried about your not sticking around for a couple of years. Nobody sticks around for a couple of years, and at least you're likely to show up on time and sober.
I guess it never occurs to people that they might do what college students, recent graduates, and other financially strapped and/or marginally employed people have done since time immemorial: Find a roommate! Sheesh. When I got out of school in the early 90s and went to live in New York City (making a princely $10/hour -- this with significant business and tech experience and a degree from a top-ten university), I had friends who somehow managed to get by on even less than I did. Typically their living situation went something like this: Minuscule two-bedroom apartment with three or four people occupying it. Either there were bunk beds in the bedroom(s), or someone had a bed lofted over the couch in the 80-square-foot living room. Dinner was ramen noodles, the entertainment budget was sufficient to cover maybe two beers a week (though probably not if you bought them at a bar), and there was nothing as extravagant as cable TV.
This does not make for a glamorous life, but then again, it doesn't require much income either. Assuming rent of $2,400 a month, that's $600 divided four ways. You can cover that working at Starbucks: Every time I visit the Bay Area, I laugh when I see the help-wanted signs offering $9+/hour plus tips and benefits and, probably, a handful of stock options! Maybe that's not quite enough because you've still got student loans or something, so you get a second job temping or whatever. Oh, the tragedy.
Basically, I contend that former dot-commers who declare themselves homeless are either (a) unwilling to stoop to a job they consider beneath themselves or (b) unable to throttle back on their consumption. There are homeless people with real problems: They're substance abusers, or mentally disturbed, or illiterate, or single parents with kids. Them I feel sympathy for. These posers who are whining about not being able to find sufficiently cushy jobs, on the other hand, are not about to earn my sympathy.
Can you tell the difference between a $100,000 system and a $10,000 system? I don't know. I do know that I can tell the difference between a $100,000 system and a $1,000 system (which is probably about what my home stereo system cost). I go to my friends' houses and listen to music and it's almost as if the instruments are there in the room. The sound staging is phenomenal. The precision and power and detail is unbelievable. I'm constantly hearing things that I never hear on my own stereo, and it almost depresses me to listen to my system for days after listening to their because the quality of mine is so inferior.
I am not by any means a hard-core audiophile, and in fact I'm highly skeptical about the value of, say, $10,000 *cables*. Even if I had all the money in the world to spend, I'm not sure I'd spend it on a higher-end stereo, because the reality is that for the listening I do, what I've got is good enough. But I can't deny that the really high-end stuff sounds absolutely spectacular -- and as far as what you're paying for, it's definitely quality rather than features.
The story explicitly points out that the project was approved with a nod and never had a formal budget.
Don't get me wrong: I'm actually one of the people who believes that (good) managers are an asset to a company. But in this case, it really sounds like this thing was a skunkworks, something flying so far below the radar of management -- or at least management who might gripe about it -- that the environment had a much more academic flavor. That's the kind of thing that a company with IBM's muscle could afford to do at the time.
The Prime Directive: Be as direct, and hands-on, as possible.
Try to minimize the amount of time you spend on background material. While it's fascinating to techie types like us to know what's going on under the hood, the thing the kids will probably want most is simply to get their hands on the machines and play. Put as few obstacles in the way of that as possible, and encourage exploration. Get their hands on the computers on the first day! You can circle back and teach the "why" material later.
Also, don't try to shove too much material into too little time. Save time for the kids to explore and have fun, not just plow through prefab lessons.
Find out what the kids are most interested in, and teach them that.
You want to keep the excitement level and sense of discovery high so that the kids will develop a lasting interest in computers, so I encourage flexibility rather than strict adherence to any particular course of study. The kids may not know enough about computers to even know what most interests them, but think about Web surfing (careful with what sites they can access, of course), email/IM, games, maybe even digital imaging if you can get your hands on a digicam or scanner. It'll be a lot easier to introduce word processing after you've gotten people hooked on email (which has a much higher fun quotient) than vice versa. Things involving graphics will also have a lot more appeal than those involving text, particularly since many of the kids may not know how to type or, in the worst case, may have limited literacy.*
Encourage the more knowledgeable/experienced kids to help their classmates.
The kids will learn at different speeds. Some will pick things up right away and others will agonize over it forever. Use this to your advantage and have the fast learners help out the slower learners, if you can do this without causing too much friction.
Come up with lessons that convey the ideas that the kids will need to know for future success with computers -- but subtly and in the course of something they can relate to.
Identify the basic concepts you want kids to understand when they leave. That probably includes something like:
- The difference between working memory and permanent storage
- Basic filesystem concepts (what's a file, what's a folder, what does copying and deleting/trashing do)
- What an application is, how to start it, how to get information from one to another (i.e., the clipboard)
- How to get on and use the Internet for e-mail, basic research (search engines and the like), etc.
(Some of these might be overkill if you're talking early elementary school -- first-graders might not need to know about filesystems, for example, but fifth- or sixth-graders ought to be at least introduced to the concept.)Come up with a list of resources the kids can use after the class is over.
Two things: First, where are places they can go to continue using computers if they don't have one at home. That could be places like public libraries. Second, what books, Web sites, etc. can they turn to if they want to learn more on their own.
*--Note: the comment about limited literacy, in this context of teaching a summer camp that includes "inner-city" kids, is not meant to be any kind of coded racist reference. It's simply the sad truth that many kids in school in the U.S. who are not in affluent suburban schools (and probably quite a few who are, as well) are reading well below grade level. This is something you should be prepared for.