Rightly or wrongly, many people assume that there are only a limited number of "side-effect" from operators other than the "="/ASGN and "++" and "--" operators because it looks a little bit like "algebra" instead of an evaluation expression.
Some of the original design features of C make this a little bit more unlike most people's experience with algebra (e.g., the use of "=" instead of ":=" and other keystroke savings shortcuts often confuses people with expression like "i=i+1") and reduces the visual cues for side effects.
Later on C/C++ introduced "const" functions to between functions and procedures, but there aren't any syntactic visual cues for the person reading the code and at least for me, that is why I try to steer clear from operators that have "user-visible" side-effects to promote code readability...
Also, binary operators often have a visual ambiguity problem with precidence and are generally poor candidates for overloading (because people don't always remember the precidence orders of the operators on inspection in an arithmetic context, it's even worse when you lose the aritmetic context and have to remember them explicitly).
Of course, it's probably a losing battle with C++, but personally, I think it's worth trying to mitigate to the extent we can. It's too late for bit shift on I/O, but at least we can avoid it going forward. Just because operator is meaningless, we assign it some meaning might be okay, but only if it fits in the semantic framework that most people have. If it doesn't fit the framework that most people have, it's just another barrier to learning and it's a bad pattern/example to set for people to emulate. Remember it isn't technically part of the language, but the library, and people are writing new libraries all the time (and making more overloaded operators at the top scope of their programs all the time for the new objects they create).
Following your logic would argue that multiply doesn't mean anything on pointers, so it is okay to make it an overloaded operator to increase the reference count and make a backup of the underlying object in a log file (multiply like rabbits). I think that would be a totally broken use of the multiplication operator myself.
That tantalum in the capacitors your cell phone and computer may have been come from the ore called coltan which is mined in the Congo. Some believe that coltan mining is financing the war there.
This is sadly a true dilemma in the enforcement of intellectual property laws, to be effective, you sometimes have to invent definitions for word that marketing departments makes up.
Even if the word diamond isn't trademarkable, how do you make sure it is what the customer expected (especially when you can't tell them apart)? This is the same problem as "organic" carrots, or "fair-trade" coffee, or "bgh-free" milk, or "natural" vitamins, or "champagne", or "monterrey" jack cheese. Sometimes the producer has more information than the consumer and only regulations can force enough differentiation so that consumers can make a (possibly misinformed) choice.
The asymmetric information problem is really tough one to solve. Sometimes there are enough technological solutions to police it, and companies just generally comply (any one remember the yellow color packets that came with oleomargarine? or what they used to call "cheese-food"). But what happens in the case where the technological means to measure expectations don't exist? Or if the new products are actually superior to their incumbent competitors?
Are these so called "counterfeit" products (which are generally made by newer/smaller companies or larger companies entering new markets) really detrimental to society as a whole? Of course the incumbent businesses strive to make the description of emerging competitive products highly unattractive relative to theirs to defend their position in the market, but if the new descriptions are too repulsive, then there is the risk of damaging the emerging market and new companies. On the other hand, since the newer companies have no reputation, they want to make their descriptions as close as possible to the incumbents to smooth their entrance into the market. And since the new companies don't have anything to lose, they have less of an incentive for quality controls (although some companies start making their mark by theoretically providing higher quality). There is also the problem of distributors who usually don't have any financial incentive to police any distinctions (other than maximizing their profit by providing the cheapest product at the highest prices), there can be mixing of products (anyone remember the exploding capacitor problem a few years back?)
This isn't an easy problem for government to solve, so at least I'll cut them a break on this one for not knowing exactly what the right thing to do is, I'm not so sure I know either. Even the open source community has had to resort to a referee organization to "certify" open source licenses vs "open-sounding" source licenses. There aren't any easy answers...
A few PR suggestion to roll this new policy out to their citizens...
Silly iranians, clicks are for infid[el]s... Have I.T. OUR way... Yo quiero Dial-up Hell! Surf city yoU abStAin! Aren't you glad you use dial-[up]? [downloads] keep going, and going, and going... Where you don't want to go today... Just DON'T do I.T. Shout I.T. out... Don't leave home with I.T. I.T. is everywhere you want to be, [but can't]... The network is the computer [and only YOUR computer]... Think outside the box [just don't surf there] Let your fingers do the walking, [but not the surfing]... A mind is a terrible thing to waste, [surfing the internet]...
> The intelligent tend to equiocate when confronted with the unknown.
> The partisan tend to accept uncritically the propaganda discount the dissent.
In other words...
Liberals tend to equiocate when confronted with the unknown.
Conservatives tend to accept uncritically the propaganda discount the dissent.
I think you just made my other point, it doesn't take any special skills at all to be a partisan;^)
But more seriously, I've generally noticed intelligent people that are partisan tend to talk on both sides of their mouths. The intelligent of course have to feed their own egos and don't want to be wrong. The truely wise folks know that most of the time they are at least partially wrong, and realize the right answer is often unknowable, and aren't so high on their own horses...;^)
The intelligent tend to equiocate when confronted with the unknown. The partisan tend to accept uncritically the propaganda discount the dissent.
Sadly neither response is very good way to approach a complicated problem like global warming. It takes wise people to weight all the evidence to get insight to what the problem is and suggest a course of action and true leadership to try something in the face of the knowledge that it may not be the right thing to do (and/or there is possibility of failure), yet the followers are confident is in pursuit of the best out of all the current available alternatives.
For what it's worth, weighing the evidence isn't the same as weighing arguments made by intellectuals or their partisan spokespeople. That's a mistake that many people make.
Sadly, in the current political environment, we don't usually get leaders to lead us nor wise people to consult, but just the intelligent and the partisan. This is the biggest suffering the the global warming debate (and other big questions of our time). We are sadly reduced to weighing arguments of intellectuals through the glasses of partisans instead of seeking the consult of the wise and backing up the true leaders. As./-ers perhaps we put too much weight to the intellectual, however, in my experience many intellectuals aren't very wise nor are they very good leaders (although there are exceptional people of course who break the stereotype).
There's very little skill set involved to become a partisan, however.
Perhaps the EU doesn't actually want the US information, because then they'd be required to protect it (and who would want to go through all that trouble)...
Besides, looking at that information would probably be too depressing for them anyhow, credit card numbers for maxed out credit cards, finding out how little US folks pay for flights, that they use AOL email, tolerate the "standard" coach airline meal, and are travelling on a generic 21 country Trafalgar tour. I think after looking at a few hundred thousand of those database entries, most european countries would just cry Uncle...;^)
As I recall, the romans were sending christians to the lions and the christians were killing heretics, both in europe. Seems to me that both of these religions weren't very tolerate towards adaptation. Eventually, they somehow managed to adapt (well sort of)...
Some people would say that in some parts of europe, the "secular" government started out compromised by religion (germany, denmark, sweden, austria, switzerland, finland all collect church taxes from their citizens in some form or another, but strangly they give nothing to muslim religious institutions). Perhaps that's changing now, but to me it's a little like the pot calling the kettle black...
I don't know about "plenty of countries" with more wealth per capita...
According to this study...
1. Switzerland ~9M
2. Denmark ~5M
3. Sweden ~9M 4. United States ~300M
5. Germany ~82M
6. Japan ~127M
7. Austria ~8M
8. Norway ~4M
9. France ~59M
10. Belux ~10M
Interestingly, the top 3 have their wealth spread over only 20M folks. Of course if you took a look at some regions with 20M folks out of 300M in the US (say california or new york), there's an interesting comparison there...
I think that the jury is out if Japan was capable of rebuilding itself after WW2 had they been allowed to remain isolationist and maintain their historical societial organization.
The japanese constitution was essentially a US draft granting civil rights to women and younger sons (instead of the historical "house/patriarch" system. The US pretty much forced the dissolution of the zaibatsu (large business cartels) as part of the economic stabilization acts. I think most historians would agree that the societal organization post-war imposed by the US was pretty much the catalyst for Japanese recovery after WW2 (although there's obviously no way to know if it would have worked the other way).
Siam on the other hand although was opened to foreign influence and trade, but was controlled by a monarchy that avoided foreign investment and ownership (e.g. loans for infrastructure development). Many historians regard this as one of the primary reason that Siam fell behind in their modernization effort even though they were open for trade (although some historian blame the French for appropriating land in Siam by force for their own purposes). Without foreign investment, their economy couldn't grow very fast just relying on income from trade.
I wonder how many people remember their history enough to recall that small little episode called the Opium wars?
Perhaps the US should worry somewhat about this. As I recall, most of the internet gaming sites are based in the UK. When China decided to banned opium, the Brits came in and forced them to accept it...;^)
On a more serious note, I think the US probably owes the UK for the iraq war (at least Blair) and reversing this could be a small favor. On the other hand, since Blair is a short-timer, perhaps there isn't anything to lose to pass this ban now...
yeah, well, I guess you'll have to throw away your luzr ipod now;^)
I think the real problem is not that we aren't buying locally designed/manufactured stuff, but that we don't respect foriegn innovation until it bites us in the ass. I'm guessing that many./-ers don't remember the japanese car "issue". Instead of competing, the USA decided to just "bravado" ourselves into thinking japanese cars were junk quality. Yes, initially they were compared to US autos, but you know what, they have some smart folks there and eventually, those junk cars were beating the pants off of US engineered/manufactured cars.
In a competition, the fatal mistake is often to underestimate your counterpart. The problem isn't that the stuff they do is of bad quality today, the problem is that they are improving at a rate (which if we don't get off of our asses), will eventually pass the quality of things that are locally made. Perpetuating the myth that forigners can't do the job only serves to delay any reponse until it might be too late.
As you said there is always a market for cheap stuff made cheaply. US corporations don't see much profit to even attack that market (making 2cent plastic widgets, etc). The real issue is the new innovative stuff at the top of the market. If we lose that, then we will have a much bigger problem which could take a generation or more to recover from.
If I had to speculate, the middle-east has the real jump on the next "industrial revolution". The "internet revolution" is like the printing press. Basically it's the information equalizer of our age, however, the economy of that age was transportation (for trade). Today, now that the economy is globalized, the power brokers (like they were in the 16th century) were the people that controlled the trade. Can you say Dubai Ports World? What shaped the world and the economy more in the last millenium the printing press or the merchant marines? I'm not saying it will happen, but it's some food for thought...
Perhaps I'll concede that my view of science is utopian.
However, when someone says to me "To cast any mroe doubt then you normally would on any scientific theory would be political..." I think it is _you_ that do not understand science or the scientific method.
Do I question general relativity the same way? In fact, yes I do. Many physists have known for a long time that general relativity (e.g, from the field equation point of view) is not likely to be consistant with quantum mechanical phenomena. Do we still teach it as "truth", sometimes, but most people aquainted with the field are comfortable with this approximation, since it can predict some thing reasonably well and people aren't comfortable with the alternate theories yet (e.g. strings, quantum foam, etc). That doesn't mean physicist that study and write papers on alternate theories are heretics.
Do I question thermodynamics the same way? Yes. It's a nice approximation for aggregate particle mathematics, but it isn't at the same level as a quantum theory that explain superconducing and bose-einstein condensates. I think many physicist would agree with questioning thermo approximations at the quantum level given the success of the quantum theories that explain things.
It's not dishonest to question things inside science. Whoever taught you science didn't do a very good job if they told you it's political to disagree.
I when you say "your [sic] working under a false view of science". I'll take issue with that. As a subscriber to Nature (and reading many article on the subject), I don't believe that to be the case. However, if you wish to make "ad-hominid" attacks, feel free (this is./ of course).
Since you just copied this text from somewhere else and pasted it, it of course doesn't address my point at all. Notice, of course, that I never said that evolution has never been observed (of course it has on some life forms), nor did I ever say that "evolution is only a theory, it has never been proved".
In fact your copied text also make the claim that evolution only has "evidence" and evolution is only a "scientific claim". I don't refute evolution, just people saying that any thing that is "evolution" is absolute and nobody can counter it. That, my friend, is dogma and makes it no better than religion.
Perhaps some day someone will come up with a better theory (no, the FSM isn't a better theory than evolution and certainly I don't think it creationism either), but evolution isn't the end-all of theories, like thermodynamics wasn't the end all of applied physics theories.
People as a general rule suffer too much from "I-know-this" delerium in this world. It's a shame that people that worship the religion of science aren't more immune to this affliction. This is like christians not forgiving. The christian religion says people should forgive, but most do not. Scientists should be looking for new hypotheses and be willing to challenge old ideas and look for evidence that support AND refutes their theory, but most do not. I guess that is why we "practice" our respective faiths.
>> Evolution/Creationism: I haven't heard of a valid "experiment" to test this either way.
this one is like staying there is a valid alternative to thermo dynamics and all the laws are wrong. It doesn't stand up. This is a purely political debate amoung one ideology and the very validity of science. There have been thousands of experiements verying and reforming aspects of evolution, all implications have been supported, the falsifying . Creationism is not science but theology. There is no contriversy about this within science only within a certain religious group.
From a purely scientific point of view, you could test evolution: create a copy of the dna of a "pre-human" and put it in an environment where it exhibited evolutionary pressure and see if random mutations caused it to evolve. But nobody is suggesting that we raise money to perform this experiment or if this experiment is even valid. This is a how science should work. Until then, it is a pretty good hypothesis that works and is tested on bacteria and _should_ be applicable to something like a human, but that's just a hypothesis.
I happen to believe in this evolution hypothesis and that creationism isn't good science, but to be perfectly honest (and that is what science is all about, right), it's only a very basic limited theory on lower-lifeforms that is _probably_ applicable to humans. To be a good theory it would (in addition to being consistent with past observations) have to predict something that could be validated/demonstrated or refuted. I don't think there's any controversy in the scientific community about if it is true or not, but it still isn't validated.
I think the mistake that people make (on both sides), is that they feel there is absolute truth out there and, by golly I know it and you'd better believe me. There's no shame in admitting we don't know everything for sure and pointing out the limitations of our own theory for other to validate and change. For those that have not, reading Feynman's Cargo Cult Science is a really interesting read.
As for thermodynamics, you could call quantum dynamics a valid "theory" and that thermo "laws" are only approximate and breakdown when you have things like bose-einstein condensates and superconductivity, but I'm guessing that probably wouldn't stand up under analysis when we figure out that grand unifying theory.
Okay, perhaps science _is_ science, that's a tautology (and not a very good one at that).
I would argue that nearly all the debates about science in politics aren't really about science at all, but policy. Not too many people debate science in its true form (i.e., hypothesis, experiment, theory), but today most of the debate is about the hypothesis. In these case, there isn't an experiment yet, and there is a debate on which of several hypotheses are valid and _if_ we should do something before it's tested (long before there is a theory). Remember there needs to be a way to _disprove_ a hypothesis, but most policy wonks aren't interested in that aspect of science.
Some quick examples.
Global warming: I don't think we have another earth to test this hypothisis on.
Stem cells: People are only speculating if this will pan out, but the have a hypothesis want to try and test it (and get money to help them try).
Evolution/Creationism: I haven't heard of a valid "experiment" to test this either way.
I think people are really caught up in trying to frame this as a science "us vs them", but in reality, this is a policy debate about which hypotheses are worth persuing expermiments on, that really has nothing to do about science (other than scientists want money to do their experiment to go to a theory stage).
For example, the fact that the earth is getting warmer is a observation/measurement. What should we do about it. Well lots of people have some hypothesis about it (like humans are causing it), but it's still a _policy_ decision to decide how to proceed. The so-called science advanced to address this is all still in the hypothesis stage (since there are no large scale expermiments, but historical data and models). What the stage we are at now is the "experimental" validation phase of science, not the theory stage (which comes _after_ the experimental stage).
Perhaps the reality is that can't afford not to do some experments (like reduce carbon output), but that's not a _scientific_ issue, that's a policy decision to experiment with one of several hypotheses. It's important to examine this outside of science, because in reality, _science_ really doesn't have much to offer in the policy area except the reputation and experience of scientists to guide a reasonable course of action. Of course that's all we can expect of politicians to use their reputation and experience to guide a reasonable course of action. In this respect the scientists are just performing the job of politicians with PhDs. You may choose to respect this more or less, we live in a democracy, not a timocracy or a plutocracy.
I've found that scientist are often too quick to apply their "religion" outside of the scope of their proven applicability. Sometime those scientific tools work outside their domain, but sometimes they do not. One is always reminded of the "cargo-cult" described so well in a book by Richard Feynman. Just because you go through the similar motions doesn't mean it's science.
Although the OTA had done some interesting work and was a professional, but small fact finding organization, in the end, it was pretty much just vicim of the fact that its congressional oversite board was a dumping ground for low ranking staffers that didn't have the clout with their bosses (the congress members assigned to the board) to fight for a budget.
Historically, the OTA was primarily a provider of alternative policy choices not doing much actual technology assessment since it was just a small shadow of the technology "big-guns" available to the executive branch. When the congress and the executive are in different parties, the OTA was often used by congress people as source of policy advice that could counter the policy advice advanced by the executive branch. However, when one party controls both congress and the executive, it's a duplicate waste of resources.
I'm not saying that certain politicos have no interest in knowledge and might of had an agenda, but more likely the truth of the matter is that the dems didn't care enough to defend it because they get most of their techno-policy advice from alternate sources anyhow. In a normal chain of events common in modern budgetting, since it was small, it got squashed in the budget process (which tends to preserve large programs and agencies that have large constituents, but just eliminate small programs).
I think it's just intellectually lazy to attribute this to malice or agenda, since it was most likely just something that got crushed in the normal budgetting process that favors large constituent backing over beneficial programs.
In a power supply unit transfomer you can generate other _AC_ output voltages on one transformer (using multiple secondaries), but to get DC outputs you still need those AC/DC rectifiers and regulators to get the normal _DC_ voltages going out of the typical power supply unit. The selection of the ratings on the rectifiers and regulators limit the current/power individually for each voltage coming out of the PSU by the designer/manufacturer.
In contrast, if all the power comes out of the PSU at 12VDC, then each device can draw what they want using a DC/DC converter without worrying about the quantization of X power available @ 5V and Y power available @ 12V. If you aren't drawing on one of the other rails, the power allocated to control that other rail is basically wasted.
Others have address the conversion efficiency elsewhere, suffice to say distributed regulation starting at a higher voltage (e.g. 12VDC to 48VDC) is going to be more efficient if you need tight regulation to low voltages (e.g. 1VDC highly stable) anyhow. This is why automobiles are going to higher voltage batteries. The _DC_ regulation available in todays PSU doesn't really cut it since it's really too far away from the device and generally the wrong voltage anyhow.
I seem to remember a challenger disaster report that stated that many NASA managers were using similar logic to predict how likely it was for certain failures to cause a launch disaster when signing engineering waivers. They basically stated it was very unlikely for the shuttle to explode and we should first look at emperical evidence: shuttles were launched many times without an explosion, so it must be very unlikely. Certainly, NASA engineers kept considering such possibilites, but they all estimated the probabilities to be tiny and antecdotally considered them to be an acceptable margin to continue to launch.
Actually in the aftermath when they coalated the estimated number using more rigorous methodologies to determine mean-time before failure, they got much more pessimistic results than the "off-the-cuff" analysis made by the NASA managers. I'm always suspicious when people talk about probablities, and don't use real established procedures for determining risk. Of course, hind-sight is twenty-twenty, but it's always good to know the number when making a decision rather than use numbers to justify a pre-ordained decision.
On the other side of that coin, it is instructive to remember that the previous civil war started after the Conservatives lost an election.
Back then, the "republican" conservatives opposed the expansion of slavery and made freeing the slaves a goal. I believe they actually won the election before the civil war. Techically, Lincoln started out as a "whig", although by then the whig party was split along pro-slave/anti-slave lines and most of the anti-slave whigs (including Lincoln) became republicans by the time of the election.
Often, the pro-slave ex-whigs called themselves the "conservatives" (in an attempt to reconcile the whig party), but they mostly just teamed up with the democrats in the south and of course the democrats lost that antebellum election and the conservative "republicans" won.
Perhaps you can make the case that technically the north-conservatives won and the south-conservatives lost, but I don't think that makes your case...
FWIW, the paper your reference seems to be circa 2004 and used a Gigahertz scope on 10Mb wired ethernet. Even so, they didn't think they could use the same technique on 100Mb ethernet.
Initial work has already begun on attempting to profile 100Mb Ethernet signals. Preliminary results indicate that the aforementioned techniques will be adequate for discriminating between different model devices; however, a deeper investigation into the signaling characteristics of 100Mb Ethernet devices may be required in order to provide accurate results for devices of the same model.
Oversampling at wireless rates is quite a bit more challenging because it's no longer baseband in the wireless world, it's modulated up to 2.4-5GHz already. Sometimes wireless chipsets only sample at 20MHz (using one of several undersampling techniques). The original paper used a 100MHz undersampling technique in a signal analyzer.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but relying on this as security is false security since the number of "dimensions" to create the fingerprint is probably pretty small given all the uncertainty it has to deal with anyhow to demodulate. I'm hypothesizing, the number of dimensions of the fingerprint is probably not much better than that dip-switch they had on the early garage door openers. I'd much rather also have a 40-bit number than just rely on a dip-switch setting. I don't think anyone is even thinking that this type of technique would in any way replace mac filtering, it would just make mac filtering less succeptible to snooping. As a bad analogy, imagine replacing your credit card number with your fingerprint. Then later finding out they are only checking 6 dimensions of your finger print. You would probably assume that your fingerprint was one in a million which is was, but your 16-digit credit card number is much more unique than what they are probably measuring in your fingerprint. For example, in the original paper, they claim a 95% accuracy rate and an attack false alarm rate of 2.13%.
In security, you always need to be wary of new things that people don't fully understand yet. People use fancy words like "fingerprint", and "neural networks", and "wavelets". However, if you read the original paper, they are taking transients, and classification, not oversampling. They are also using 802.11b which is QPSK based, not the newer OFDM schemes which don't have the same transients. I'm not sure their technique is applicable to anything but the pilot wave in OFDM.
Okay, a show of hands, how many folks use centrino wireless vs buying a wireless card for their old computer? Now how many will buy a computer in the next year which has integrated wireless. How many of those will buy centrino wireless?
Does anyone remember the good old days when your garage remote control that you just bought from sears would open the door down the street? That's why they had to put in the codes. Just relying on a "fingerprint" when the majority of devices are from the same manufacturer is just a false sense of security.
However, if you really want to be scared, just google "bump key"...
Let me give you an example. In a graduate program that I used to be in, I was familiar with the adminissions process. The way it worked was that a certain number of slots were reserved for a particular minority group. Lets say there were X "regular slots" and Y "minority slots". We wanted people with high grades and high GRE scores. So, for the regular slots, we took the X people with the highest grades and GRE scores. For the minority slots, we took Y minorities who had the highest grades and GRE scores among the minority applicants. What this resulted in was that to be admitted to the program you had to have GRE scores and grades about 20% better if you were not a member of the minority group than if you were. This does not mean that grades or GRE scores are not pertinent to the selection of candidates.
I think you just made my point for me. Did those Y minorities you brought in all fail out? If not, I'll be guessing that even though you wanted people with high grades and high GRE scores, the criteria was totally arbitrary and potentially discriminatory. However, your group was too lazy to come up with real indicative criteria and just dropped the bar just to make your quota 'Y'. That is why affirmative action is broken. It's because people are too lazy to take it seriously. I'll submit to you that grades and GRE scores above a certain level cease to be actual pertinant indicators of any type of success in the positions you are interested in, but your graduate program group's admission team was just jacking them as high as they could go so they could bask in the "after glow" effect of being "selective". How about all those "regular slot" folks your admission crew screwed over because they were too lazy to develop a more pertinent criteria? That's only epsilon better than professors grading reports by counting the number of words or grading computer programs by counting the number of comments or source code lines.
This is why most of these so-called tests for admissions are doomed. As a recent example, the University of California eventually shamed the ETS to develop a better test. Although many blamed the college for being political in their stance on testing, colleges have been running statistics on standardized tests for many years. The general conclusions are that after a certain score level (which was pretty low), they found they are not much better than random than predicting college performance. To toss in my own antecdote, when I was editor for my college newspaper, we did some reporting about the admissions department, during the course of the series, I found it interesting that admission only saw a small correlation on scores (sort of understandble because caltech applicants tend to self-select for higher scores). Although this is antedotal, the UC and other structured studies have found similar lack of correlation across a broader range of applicants.
The GRE doesn't fair any better in many of these comparisons.
ETS guidelines specify: "A cutoff score based solely on GRE scores should never be used as the sole criterion for denial of admissions." Yet one ETS study revealed that only 10% of schools adhere to these guidelines, with almost 30% of those surveyed indicating they use a cutoff score and 10% recommending use of a cutoff. ETS has done little to curb such misuses.
Why people continue to put any weight into these test scores is totally beyond me....
IANAL, but usually the rationale for the criteria being set lower is that the criteria are not actually indicative of or required for the performance of the job and are often used to artificially discriminate. Generally this is true, companies set artificial minimum criteria for jobs which have no bearing on the job performance and they can (intentionally or unintentionally) cause discrimination. The minimum criteria bar isn't lower for affirmative action applicants, they are lower for everyone and additional non-discriminatory comparative criteria are supposed to be used. Under Affirmative Action, ties will generally go to the affirmative action applicant.
The reason affirmative action is broken is because companies are too afraid to really set any comparative criteria above the minimium critera (e.g., B.S. required, M.S. or equivalent experience preferred, PhD, a plus, just becomes B.S. required, equal opportunity employer) and the presense of job requirements tweaking by affirmative action advocates in HR departments generally discourage any over-qualified applicants (e.g, they won't hire me because I have PhD and they would think I'm too expensive or they are giving it away to someone else) or at least suggests that they are tailor making a position for a specific affirmative action candidate that already technically has the job and they are just going through formalities (and of course that happens many times).
Companies usually aren't very good at coming up with job hiring criteria anyhow (I remember all the ads during the dot-com boom for minimum 20years of Java coding experience, yeah, right). To expect a company to do this and still correctly interpret the law and spirit of affirmative action is just too high a bar (a sad state of affairs). Mostly, companies just chicken out and just lower the bar as far as they can and hire the first affirmative action candidate that walks through the door and then raises the bar after their imaginary quota is filled out of fear and goading by affirmative action advocates in their HR departments. Unfortunatly, this unspoken quota system does a disservice to everyone involved.
Hiring is generally a crap shoot anyways unless you are hiring someone you know (and that's called either neoptism or favoritism or just good-old-boy-ism). Sadly, it's one of those situations, where neither companies nor people can win without taking a risk, and the lawyers and affirmative action advocates have taking all the fun out of risk by making the punishment so high that there's no joy in mudville.
Remember, that Iran is a signatory to the NNPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty). Iran can choose to withdraw from the NNPT (by giving notice like North Korea), or they never had to sign it in the first place (like India, Pakistan and Israel). The purpose of the NNPT was so that signatory countries can avoid a multi-sided destabilizing nuclear arms race by being reasonably sure that it's neighbors and enemies aren't doing so. This would be your so-called leagalistic argument.
The US's argument (at least from the legalistic point of view) is that Iran signed the NPT and need to abide by it's provisions. Iran could of course withdraw from the treaty and the US couldn't have any arguments (legalistly anyhow), but I'm sure Iran has thought about it, but for some reason rejected this course of action. I'm guessing that it is probably because they don't want to become an international pharriah like North Korea, given that they have a booming economy and likely can become the dominate economic powerhouse in that region in the world.
It seems like the core of your argument is that Iran thinks that US isn't being honest so Iran is free to ignore US protestations of guilt. But why isn't the converse also true that the US thinks that Iran is not being honest so it is free to ingore Iranian protestations of innocence? The only thing that I can see in your argument is that the US is "bad" and has a history of being "bad", so it must be "bad" in this case too. I'm not so sure that Iran is in any position to call the kettle black...
I also don't understand your argument about "morality". If any thing, your quote "no rational government with any interest in preserving the independance of their country could possibly swallow the treatment" could equally be applied to Iran and Israel. I'm no defender of Israel, but they seem to have taken the brunt of "immorality" from other neighbor nations using your argument.
Perhaps some historical perspective, some of the middle east's issues can be traced to post-imperialistic european map-line-drawing (or more specifically Sykes-Picot and Anglo-Russian Entente). Perhaps you blame that on the US, but I think that most of the world is to blame for this phenomena, and the US being a one-time victim (but since recovered) of Dutch-French-English-Spanish map-line-drawing, can be blamed as the orginator of this problem (although the US isn't totally blameless on many of the map-lines that exist today, e.g, korea, taiwan, etc). This specific middle-east problem seems directly attributable to Russia, England and France circa WW-I. The US is only a recent player in this probably, although you seem to attribute all ills to the modern US involvment. I for one blame the Europeans in their post WW-I zeal to hang on to their fading imperialistic empires. This one has been festering on for a long, long time...
Sadly, so the conclusion (which seem to be indeed playing out today), is that neither the US or Iran really has anything to say to each other and the "war" is really just a war of public opinion (in this case, the public being the governments of the world). I don't see how it could be any other way, and some of the "public" sees the US as a bully, and some of the "public" sees Iran as a thug, but of course that is only an opinion (e.g., vi vs emac, c++ vs java). There's no winner in a war of words, and no convincing staunch zealots on either side. Basically either one side will just give up (e.g., the cold war or Libya) because the don't want to argue any more or they can't afford to argue any more, or it'll eventually come down to a real war. That is the way history has generally played out. Regardless of who is right and wrong, generally these things end up in a war and as you say usually in that case "might makes right"...
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Rightly or wrongly, many people assume that there are only a limited number of "side-effect" from operators other than the "="/ASGN and "++" and "--" operators because it looks a little bit like "algebra" instead of an evaluation expression.
Some of the original design features of C make this a little bit more unlike most people's experience with algebra (e.g., the use of "=" instead of ":=" and other keystroke savings shortcuts often confuses people with expression like "i=i+1") and reduces the visual cues for side effects.
Later on C/C++ introduced "const" functions to between functions and procedures, but there aren't any syntactic visual cues for the person reading the code and at least for me, that is why I try to steer clear from operators that have "user-visible" side-effects to promote code readability...
Also, binary operators often have a visual ambiguity problem with precidence and are generally poor candidates for overloading (because people don't always remember the precidence orders of the operators on inspection in an arithmetic context, it's even worse when you lose the aritmetic context and have to remember them explicitly).
Of course, it's probably a losing battle with C++, but personally, I think it's worth trying to mitigate to the extent we can. It's too late for bit shift on I/O, but at least we can avoid it going forward. Just because operator is meaningless, we assign it some meaning might be okay, but only if it fits in the semantic framework that most people have. If it doesn't fit the framework that most people have, it's just another barrier to learning and it's a bad pattern/example to set for people to emulate. Remember it isn't technically part of the language, but the library, and people are writing new libraries all the time (and making more overloaded operators at the top scope of their programs all the time for the new objects they create).
Following your logic would argue that multiply doesn't mean anything on pointers, so it is okay to make it an overloaded operator to increase the reference count and make a backup of the underlying object in a log file (multiply like rabbits). I think that would be a totally broken use of the multiplication operator myself.
That tantalum in the capacitors your cell phone and computer may have been come from the ore called coltan which is mined in the Congo. Some believe that coltan mining is financing the war there.
This is sadly a true dilemma in the enforcement of intellectual property laws, to be effective, you sometimes have to invent definitions for word that marketing departments makes up.
Even if the word diamond isn't trademarkable, how do you make sure it is what the customer expected (especially when you can't tell them apart)? This is the same problem as "organic" carrots, or "fair-trade" coffee, or "bgh-free" milk, or "natural" vitamins, or "champagne", or "monterrey" jack cheese. Sometimes the producer has more information than the consumer and only regulations can force enough differentiation so that consumers can make a (possibly misinformed) choice.
The asymmetric information problem is really tough one to solve. Sometimes there are enough technological solutions to police it, and companies just generally comply (any one remember the yellow color packets that came with oleomargarine? or what they used to call "cheese-food"). But what happens in the case where the technological means to measure expectations don't exist? Or if the new products are actually superior to their incumbent competitors?
Are these so called "counterfeit" products (which are generally made by newer/smaller companies or larger companies entering new markets) really detrimental to society as a whole? Of course the incumbent businesses strive to make the description of emerging competitive products highly unattractive relative to theirs to defend their position in the market, but if the new descriptions are too repulsive, then there is the risk of damaging the emerging market and new companies. On the other hand, since the newer companies have no reputation, they want to make their descriptions as close as possible to the incumbents to smooth their entrance into the market. And since the new companies don't have anything to lose, they have less of an incentive for quality controls (although some companies start making their mark by theoretically providing higher quality). There is also the problem of distributors who usually don't have any financial incentive to police any distinctions (other than maximizing their profit by providing the cheapest product at the highest prices), there can be mixing of products (anyone remember the exploding capacitor problem a few years back?)
This isn't an easy problem for government to solve, so at least I'll cut them a break on this one for not knowing exactly what the right thing to do is, I'm not so sure I know either. Even the open source community has had to resort to a referee organization to "certify" open source licenses vs "open-sounding" source licenses. There aren't any easy answers...
A few PR suggestion to roll this new policy out to their citizens...
Silly iranians, clicks are for infid[el]s...
Have I.T. OUR way...
Yo quiero Dial-up Hell!
Surf city yoU abStAin!
Aren't you glad you use dial-[up]?
[downloads] keep going, and going, and going...
Where you don't want to go today...
Just DON'T do I.T.
Shout I.T. out...
Don't leave home with I.T.
I.T. is everywhere you want to be, [but can't]...
The network is the computer [and only YOUR computer]...
Think outside the box [just don't surf there]
Let your fingers do the walking, [but not the surfing]...
A mind is a terrible thing to waste, [surfing the internet]...
But more seriously, I've generally noticed intelligent people that are partisan tend to talk on both sides of their mouths. The intelligent of course have to feed their own egos and don't want to be wrong. The truely wise folks know that most of the time they are at least partially wrong, and realize the right answer is often unknowable, and aren't so high on their own horses... ;^)
The intelligent tend to equiocate when confronted with the unknown.
./-ers perhaps we put too much weight to the intellectual, however, in my experience many intellectuals aren't very wise nor are they very good leaders (although there are exceptional people of course who break the stereotype).
The partisan tend to accept uncritically the propaganda discount the dissent.
Sadly neither response is very good way to approach a complicated problem like global warming. It takes wise people to weight all the evidence to get insight to what the problem is and suggest a course of action and true leadership to try something in the face of the knowledge that it may not be the right thing to do (and/or there is possibility of failure), yet the followers are confident is in pursuit of the best out of all the current available alternatives.
For what it's worth, weighing the evidence isn't the same as weighing arguments made by intellectuals or their partisan spokespeople. That's a mistake that many people make.
Sadly, in the current political environment, we don't usually get leaders to lead us nor wise people to consult, but just the intelligent and the partisan. This is the biggest suffering the the global warming debate (and other big questions of our time). We are sadly reduced to weighing arguments of intellectuals through the glasses of partisans instead of seeking the consult of the wise and backing up the true leaders. As
There's very little skill set involved to become a partisan, however.
Perhaps the EU doesn't actually want the US information, because then they'd be required to protect it (and who would want to go through all that trouble)...
;^)
Besides, looking at that information would probably be too depressing for them anyhow, credit card numbers for maxed out credit cards, finding out how little US folks pay for flights, that they use AOL email, tolerate the "standard" coach airline meal, and are travelling on a generic 21 country Trafalgar tour. I think after looking at a few hundred thousand of those database entries, most european countries would just cry Uncle...
As I recall, the romans were sending christians to the lions and the christians were killing heretics, both in europe. Seems to me that both of these religions weren't very tolerate towards adaptation. Eventually, they somehow managed to adapt (well sort of)...
Some people would say that in some parts of europe, the "secular" government started out compromised by religion (germany, denmark, sweden, austria, switzerland, finland all collect church taxes from their citizens in some form or another, but strangly they give nothing to muslim religious institutions). Perhaps that's changing now, but to me it's a little like the pot calling the kettle black...
According to this study...
1. Switzerland ~9M
2. Denmark ~5M
3. Sweden ~9M
4. United States ~300M
5. Germany ~82M
6. Japan ~127M
7. Austria ~8M
8. Norway ~4M
9. France ~59M
10. Belux ~10M
Interestingly, the top 3 have their wealth spread over only 20M folks. Of course if you took a look at some regions with 20M folks out of 300M in the US (say california or new york), there's an interesting comparison there...
I think that the jury is out if Japan was capable of rebuilding itself after WW2 had they been allowed to remain isolationist and maintain their historical societial organization.
The japanese constitution was essentially a US draft granting civil rights to women and younger sons (instead of the historical "house/patriarch" system. The US pretty much forced the dissolution of the zaibatsu (large business cartels) as part of the economic stabilization acts. I think most historians would agree that the societal organization post-war imposed by the US was pretty much the catalyst for Japanese recovery after WW2 (although there's obviously no way to know if it would have worked the other way).
Siam on the other hand although was opened to foreign influence and trade, but was controlled by a monarchy that avoided foreign investment and ownership (e.g. loans for infrastructure development). Many historians regard this as one of the primary reason that Siam fell behind in their modernization effort even though they were open for trade (although some historian blame the French for appropriating land in Siam by force for their own purposes). Without foreign investment, their economy couldn't grow very fast just relying on income from trade.
Perhaps the US should worry somewhat about this. As I recall, most of the internet gaming sites are based in the UK. When China decided to banned opium, the Brits came in and forced them to accept it...
On a more serious note, I think the US probably owes the UK for the iraq war (at least Blair) and reversing this could be a small favor. On the other hand, since Blair is a short-timer, perhaps there isn't anything to lose to pass this ban now...
yeah, well, I guess you'll have to throw away your luzr ipod now ;^)
./-ers don't remember the japanese car "issue". Instead of competing, the USA decided to just "bravado" ourselves into thinking japanese cars were junk quality. Yes, initially they were compared to US autos, but you know what, they have some smart folks there and eventually, those junk cars were beating the pants off of US engineered/manufactured cars.
I think the real problem is not that we aren't buying locally designed/manufactured stuff, but that we don't respect foriegn innovation until it bites us in the ass. I'm guessing that many
In a competition, the fatal mistake is often to underestimate your counterpart. The problem isn't that the stuff they do is of bad quality today, the problem is that they are improving at a rate (which if we don't get off of our asses), will eventually pass the quality of things that are locally made. Perpetuating the myth that forigners can't do the job only serves to delay any reponse until it might be too late.
As you said there is always a market for cheap stuff made cheaply. US corporations don't see much profit to even attack that market (making 2cent plastic widgets, etc). The real issue is the new innovative stuff at the top of the market. If we lose that, then we will have a much bigger problem which could take a generation or more to recover from.
If I had to speculate, the middle-east has the real jump on the next "industrial revolution". The "internet revolution" is like the printing press. Basically it's the information equalizer of our age, however, the economy of that age was transportation (for trade). Today, now that the economy is globalized, the power brokers (like they were in the 16th century) were the people that controlled the trade. Can you say Dubai Ports World? What shaped the world and the economy more in the last millenium the printing press or the merchant marines? I'm not saying it will happen, but it's some food for thought...
Perhaps I'll concede that my view of science is utopian.
However, when someone says to me "To cast any mroe doubt then you normally would on any scientific theory would be political..." I think it is _you_ that do not understand science or the scientific method.
Do I question general relativity the same way? In fact, yes I do. Many physists have known for a long time that general relativity (e.g, from the field equation point of view) is not likely to be consistant with quantum mechanical phenomena. Do we still teach it as "truth", sometimes, but most people aquainted with the field are comfortable with this approximation, since it can predict some thing reasonably well and people aren't comfortable with the alternate theories yet (e.g. strings, quantum foam, etc). That doesn't mean physicist that study and write papers on alternate theories are heretics.
Do I question thermodynamics the same way? Yes. It's a nice approximation for aggregate particle mathematics, but it isn't at the same level as a quantum theory that explain superconducing and bose-einstein condensates. I think many physicist would agree with questioning thermo approximations at the quantum level given the success of the quantum theories that explain things.
It's not dishonest to question things inside science. Whoever taught you science didn't do a very good job if they told you it's political to disagree.
Since you just copied this text from somewhere else and pasted it, it of course doesn't address my point at all. Notice, of course, that I never said that evolution has never been observed (of course it has on some life forms), nor did I ever say that "evolution is only a theory, it has never been proved".
In fact your copied text also make the claim that evolution only has "evidence" and evolution is only a "scientific claim". I don't refute evolution, just people saying that any thing that is "evolution" is absolute and nobody can counter it. That, my friend, is dogma and makes it no better than religion.
Perhaps some day someone will come up with a better theory (no, the FSM isn't a better theory than evolution and certainly I don't think it creationism either), but evolution isn't the end-all of theories, like thermodynamics wasn't the end all of applied physics theories.
People as a general rule suffer too much from "I-know-this" delerium in this world. It's a shame that people that worship the religion of science aren't more immune to this affliction. This is like christians not forgiving. The christian religion says people should forgive, but most do not. Scientists should be looking for new hypotheses and be willing to challenge old ideas and look for evidence that support AND refutes their theory, but most do not. I guess that is why we "practice" our respective faiths.
I happen to believe in this evolution hypothesis and that creationism isn't good science, but to be perfectly honest (and that is what science is all about, right), it's only a very basic limited theory on lower-lifeforms that is _probably_ applicable to humans. To be a good theory it would (in addition to being consistent with past observations) have to predict something that could be validated/demonstrated or refuted. I don't think there's any controversy in the scientific community about if it is true or not, but it still isn't validated.
I think the mistake that people make (on both sides), is that they feel there is absolute truth out there and, by golly I know it and you'd better believe me. There's no shame in admitting we don't know everything for sure and pointing out the limitations of our own theory for other to validate and change. For those that have not, reading Feynman's Cargo Cult Science is a really interesting read.
As for thermodynamics, you could call quantum dynamics a valid "theory" and that thermo "laws" are only approximate and breakdown when you have things like bose-einstein condensates and superconductivity, but I'm guessing that probably wouldn't stand up under analysis when we figure out that grand unifying theory.
Okay, perhaps science _is_ science, that's a tautology (and not a very good one at that).
I would argue that nearly all the debates about science in politics aren't really about science at all, but policy. Not too many people debate science in its true form (i.e., hypothesis, experiment, theory), but today most of the debate is about the hypothesis. In these case, there isn't an experiment yet, and there is a debate on which of several hypotheses are valid and _if_ we should do something before it's tested (long before there is a theory). Remember there needs to be a way to _disprove_ a hypothesis, but most policy wonks aren't interested in that aspect of science.
Some quick examples.
Global warming: I don't think we have another earth to test this hypothisis on.
Stem cells: People are only speculating if this will pan out, but the have a hypothesis want to try and test it (and get money to help them try).
Evolution/Creationism: I haven't heard of a valid "experiment" to test this either way.
I think people are really caught up in trying to frame this as a science "us vs them", but in reality, this is a policy debate about which hypotheses are worth persuing expermiments on, that really has nothing to do about science (other than scientists want money to do their experiment to go to a theory stage).
For example, the fact that the earth is getting warmer is a observation/measurement. What should we do about it. Well lots of people have some hypothesis about it (like humans are causing it), but it's still a _policy_ decision to decide how to proceed. The so-called science advanced to address this is all still in the hypothesis stage (since there are no large scale expermiments, but historical data and models). What the stage we are at now is the "experimental" validation phase of science, not the theory stage (which comes _after_ the experimental stage).
Perhaps the reality is that can't afford not to do some experments (like reduce carbon output), but that's not a _scientific_ issue, that's a policy decision to experiment with one of several hypotheses. It's important to examine this outside of science, because in reality, _science_ really doesn't have much to offer in the policy area except the reputation and experience of scientists to guide a reasonable course of action. Of course that's all we can expect of politicians to use their reputation and experience to guide a reasonable course of action. In this respect the scientists are just performing the job of politicians with PhDs. You may choose to respect this more or less, we live in a democracy, not a timocracy or a plutocracy.
I've found that scientist are often too quick to apply their "religion" outside of the scope of their proven applicability. Sometime those scientific tools work outside their domain, but sometimes they do not. One is always reminded of the "cargo-cult" described so well in a book by Richard Feynman. Just because you go through the similar motions doesn't mean it's science.
Although the OTA had done some interesting work and was a professional, but small fact finding organization, in the end, it was pretty much just vicim of the fact that its congressional oversite board was a dumping ground for low ranking staffers that didn't have the clout with their bosses (the congress members assigned to the board) to fight for a budget.
Historically, the OTA was primarily a provider of alternative policy choices not doing much actual technology assessment since it was just a small shadow of the technology "big-guns" available to the executive branch. When the congress and the executive are in different parties, the OTA was often used by congress people as source of policy advice that could counter the policy advice advanced by the executive branch. However, when one party controls both congress and the executive, it's a duplicate waste of resources.
I'm not saying that certain politicos have no interest in knowledge and might of had an agenda, but more likely the truth of the matter is that the dems didn't care enough to defend it because they get most of their techno-policy advice from alternate sources anyhow. In a normal chain of events common in modern budgetting, since it was small, it got squashed in the budget process (which tends to preserve large programs and agencies that have large constituents, but just eliminate small programs).
I think it's just intellectually lazy to attribute this to malice or agenda, since it was most likely just something that got crushed in the normal budgetting process that favors large constituent backing over beneficial programs.
In a power supply unit transfomer you can generate other _AC_ output voltages on one transformer (using multiple secondaries), but to get DC outputs you still need those AC/DC rectifiers and regulators to get the normal _DC_ voltages going out of the typical power supply unit. The selection of the ratings on the rectifiers and regulators limit the current/power individually for each voltage coming out of the PSU by the designer/manufacturer.
In contrast, if all the power comes out of the PSU at 12VDC, then each device can draw what they want using a DC/DC converter without worrying about the quantization of X power available @ 5V and Y power available @ 12V. If you aren't drawing on one of the other rails, the power allocated to control that other rail is basically wasted.
Others have address the conversion efficiency elsewhere, suffice to say distributed regulation starting at a higher voltage (e.g. 12VDC to 48VDC) is going to be more efficient if you need tight regulation to low voltages (e.g. 1VDC highly stable) anyhow. This is why automobiles are going to higher voltage batteries. The _DC_ regulation available in todays PSU doesn't really cut it since it's really too far away from the device and generally the wrong voltage anyhow.
I seem to remember a challenger disaster report that stated that many NASA managers were using similar logic to predict how likely it was for certain failures to cause a launch disaster when signing engineering waivers. They basically stated it was very unlikely for the shuttle to explode and we should first look at emperical evidence: shuttles were launched many times without an explosion, so it must be very unlikely. Certainly, NASA engineers kept considering such possibilites, but they all estimated the probabilities to be tiny and antecdotally considered them to be an acceptable margin to continue to launch.
Actually in the aftermath when they coalated the estimated number using more rigorous methodologies to determine mean-time before failure, they got much more pessimistic results than the "off-the-cuff" analysis made by the NASA managers. I'm always suspicious when people talk about probablities, and don't use real established procedures for determining risk. Of course, hind-sight is twenty-twenty, but it's always good to know the number when making a decision rather than use numbers to justify a pre-ordained decision.
Some people listen to too much manager-speak.
Back then, the "republican" conservatives opposed the expansion of slavery and made freeing the slaves a goal. I believe they actually won the election before the civil war. Techically, Lincoln started out as a "whig", although by then the whig party was split along pro-slave/anti-slave lines and most of the anti-slave whigs (including Lincoln) became republicans by the time of the election.
Often, the pro-slave ex-whigs called themselves the "conservatives" (in an attempt to reconcile the whig party), but they mostly just teamed up with the democrats in the south and of course the democrats lost that antebellum election and the conservative "republicans" won.
Perhaps you can make the case that technically the north-conservatives won and the south-conservatives lost, but I don't think that makes your case...
I'm not saying it can't be done, but relying on this as security is false security since the number of "dimensions" to create the fingerprint is probably pretty small given all the uncertainty it has to deal with anyhow to demodulate. I'm hypothesizing, the number of dimensions of the fingerprint is probably not much better than that dip-switch they had on the early garage door openers. I'd much rather also have a 40-bit number than just rely on a dip-switch setting. I don't think anyone is even thinking that this type of technique would in any way replace mac filtering, it would just make mac filtering less succeptible to snooping. As a bad analogy, imagine replacing your credit card number with your fingerprint. Then later finding out they are only checking 6 dimensions of your finger print. You would probably assume that your fingerprint was one in a million which is was, but your 16-digit credit card number is much more unique than what they are probably measuring in your fingerprint. For example, in the original paper, they claim a 95% accuracy rate and an attack false alarm rate of 2.13%.
In security, you always need to be wary of new things that people don't fully understand yet. People use fancy words like "fingerprint", and "neural networks", and "wavelets". However, if you read the original paper, they are taking transients, and classification, not oversampling. They are also using 802.11b which is QPSK based, not the newer OFDM schemes which don't have the same transients. I'm not sure their technique is applicable to anything but the pilot wave in OFDM.
Okay, a show of hands, how many folks use centrino wireless vs buying a wireless card for their old computer? Now how many will buy a computer in the next year which has integrated wireless. How many of those will buy centrino wireless?
Does anyone remember the good old days when your garage remote control that you just bought from sears would open the door down the street? That's why they had to put in the codes. Just relying on a "fingerprint" when the majority of devices are from the same manufacturer is just a false sense of security.
However, if you really want to be scared, just google "bump key"...
I think you just made my point for me. Did those Y minorities you brought in all fail out? If not, I'll be guessing that even though you wanted people with high grades and high GRE scores, the criteria was totally arbitrary and potentially discriminatory. However, your group was too lazy to come up with real indicative criteria and just dropped the bar just to make your quota 'Y'. That is why affirmative action is broken. It's because people are too lazy to take it seriously. I'll submit to you that grades and GRE scores above a certain level cease to be actual pertinant indicators of any type of success in the positions you are interested in, but your graduate program group's admission team was just jacking them as high as they could go so they could bask in the "after glow" effect of being "selective". How about all those "regular slot" folks your admission crew screwed over because they were too lazy to develop a more pertinent criteria? That's only epsilon better than professors grading reports by counting the number of words or grading computer programs by counting the number of comments or source code lines.
This is why most of these so-called tests for admissions are doomed. As a recent example, the University of California eventually shamed the ETS to develop a better test. Although many blamed the college for being political in their stance on testing, colleges have been running statistics on standardized tests for many years. The general conclusions are that after a certain score level (which was pretty low), they found they are not much better than random than predicting college performance. To toss in my own antecdote, when I was editor for my college newspaper, we did some reporting about the admissions department, during the course of the series, I found it interesting that admission only saw a small correlation on scores (sort of understandble because caltech applicants tend to self-select for higher scores). Although this is antedotal, the UC and other structured studies have found similar lack of correlation across a broader range of applicants.
The GRE doesn't fair any better in many of these comparisons.
Why people continue to put any weight into these test scores is totally beyond me....
IANAL, but usually the rationale for the criteria being set lower is that the criteria are not actually indicative of or required for the performance of the job and are often used to artificially discriminate. Generally this is true, companies set artificial minimum criteria for jobs which have no bearing on the job performance and they can (intentionally or unintentionally) cause discrimination. The minimum criteria bar isn't lower for affirmative action applicants, they are lower for everyone and additional non-discriminatory comparative criteria are supposed to be used. Under Affirmative Action, ties will generally go to the affirmative action applicant.
The reason affirmative action is broken is because companies are too afraid to really set any comparative criteria above the minimium critera (e.g., B.S. required, M.S. or equivalent experience preferred, PhD, a plus, just becomes B.S. required, equal opportunity employer) and the presense of job requirements tweaking by affirmative action advocates in HR departments generally discourage any over-qualified applicants (e.g, they won't hire me because I have PhD and they would think I'm too expensive or they are giving it away to someone else) or at least suggests that they are tailor making a position for a specific affirmative action candidate that already technically has the job and they are just going through formalities (and of course that happens many times).
Companies usually aren't very good at coming up with job hiring criteria anyhow (I remember all the ads during the dot-com boom for minimum 20years of Java coding experience, yeah, right). To expect a company to do this and still correctly interpret the law and spirit of affirmative action is just too high a bar (a sad state of affairs). Mostly, companies just chicken out and just lower the bar as far as they can and hire the first affirmative action candidate that walks through the door and then raises the bar after their imaginary quota is filled out of fear and goading by affirmative action advocates in their HR departments. Unfortunatly, this unspoken quota system does a disservice to everyone involved.
Hiring is generally a crap shoot anyways unless you are hiring someone you know (and that's called either neoptism or favoritism or just good-old-boy-ism). Sadly, it's one of those situations, where neither companies nor people can win without taking a risk, and the lawyers and affirmative action advocates have taking all the fun out of risk by making the punishment so high that there's no joy in mudville.
Remember, that Iran is a signatory to the NNPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty). Iran can choose to withdraw from the NNPT (by giving notice like North Korea), or they never had to sign it in the first place (like India, Pakistan and Israel). The purpose of the NNPT was so that signatory countries can avoid a multi-sided destabilizing nuclear arms race by being reasonably sure that it's neighbors and enemies aren't doing so. This would be your so-called leagalistic argument.
The US's argument (at least from the legalistic point of view) is that Iran signed the NPT and need to abide by it's provisions. Iran could of course withdraw from the treaty and the US couldn't have any arguments (legalistly anyhow), but I'm sure Iran has thought about it, but for some reason rejected this course of action. I'm guessing that it is probably because they don't want to become an international pharriah like North Korea, given that they have a booming economy and likely can become the dominate economic powerhouse in that region in the world.
It seems like the core of your argument is that Iran thinks that US isn't being honest so Iran is free to ignore US protestations of guilt. But why isn't the converse also true that the US thinks that Iran is not being honest so it is free to ingore Iranian protestations of innocence? The only thing that I can see in your argument is that the US is "bad" and has a history of being "bad", so it must be "bad" in this case too. I'm not so sure that Iran is in any position to call the kettle black...
I also don't understand your argument about "morality". If any thing, your quote "no rational government with any interest in preserving the independance of their country could possibly swallow the treatment" could equally be applied to Iran and Israel. I'm no defender of Israel, but they seem to have taken the brunt of "immorality" from other neighbor nations using your argument.
Perhaps some historical perspective, some of the middle east's issues can be traced to post-imperialistic european map-line-drawing (or more specifically Sykes-Picot and Anglo-Russian Entente). Perhaps you blame that on the US, but I think that most of the world is to blame for this phenomena, and the US being a one-time victim (but since recovered) of Dutch-French-English-Spanish map-line-drawing, can be blamed as the orginator of this problem (although the US isn't totally blameless on many of the map-lines that exist today, e.g, korea, taiwan, etc). This specific middle-east problem seems directly attributable to Russia, England and France circa WW-I. The US is only a recent player in this probably, although you seem to attribute all ills to the modern US involvment. I for one blame the Europeans in their post WW-I zeal to hang on to their fading imperialistic empires. This one has been festering on for a long, long time...
Sadly, so the conclusion (which seem to be indeed playing out today), is that neither the US or Iran really has anything to say to each other and the "war" is really just a war of public opinion (in this case, the public being the governments of the world). I don't see how it could be any other way, and some of the "public" sees the US as a bully, and some of the "public" sees Iran as a thug, but of course that is only an opinion (e.g., vi vs emac, c++ vs java). There's no winner in a war of words, and no convincing staunch zealots on either side. Basically either one side will just give up (e.g., the cold war or Libya) because the don't want to argue any more or they can't afford to argue any more, or it'll eventually come down to a real war. That is the way history has generally played out. Regardless of who is right and wrong, generally these things end up in a war and as you say usually in that case "might makes right"...