I'm not sure that teaching a functional language is a good call for a studen't first exposure to programming. While they're nice from a theoretical point of view, it dosen't seem that teaching a language that's fundamentally different from most of the big languages out there does them much good in the future. DrScheme (sticking to its functional part) is a good language to learn functional programming in, but not to learn the basicis of programming in general.
Give them a nice procedural or OO-centered language, so that they can get the overall feel of programming, and can try things at home. Once they're interested, then take them into things like functional programming.
As for language choices, start them with something like C++ (get the idea of compiling in there, but avoid the more complex bits of it), then a simple assembly language, then a functional one.
Yuo do know that by doing that, you'd be pretty much ending the existence of most corporations, right? Assuming that's not what you were going for, I think you missa few key steps in your logic.
Let's look at movies, for a start. If there are (say) 100 people invilved in the creative side of a movie, then by your system all revenues from the movie in question would be split 100 ways. Make a blockbuster movie, each of the 100 people get four million dollars a head, and they're happy. So what about the 990 other people involved in the process? The lighting guys, the sound guys, the editors, the makeup guys? So let's add them in, and now each person gets $400K. So now that we've given all the profits out to the individual people, who's going to pay for the next movie? If a movie made $400 million in profits, wh paid for the development of the movie? Who put of the initial cash to pay for the production, until the revenues started coming in? And who's going to do it for the next one? It sure ain't gonna be the movie company, as they (as a company) made no money off the first movie, since it all went to the people involved in it.
Now let's think even more generally - about widgets. WidgetCo spends 12 engineer-years (12 engineers for a year of work) developing the Widget2. Where did the company get the money to pay these engineers? Unless you grant that a corporation (WidgetCo) can be one of the creators of the product - and hence deserving of some of the profits from Widget1 - there would be no product, as there would be no one to pay the developers while they made it. There would be no one to stake the millions on R&D in the bet that a widget may work out.
Explain to me how a company could get any money and get anything done under your plan, and then I'll listen. Until then, it's ridiculous.
Just to clarify, what makes it even better is that Terry Wogan isn't hosting the actual contest - he's just hosting the BBC telecast of it. His role is more of a play-by-play commentary of what the actual hosts are saying and doing, and lampooning them.
Examples of his comments involve said Moldovan jokes, predicting the votes of the Nordic countries before they would say them (and then talking about how right he was), and signing off for the interval (when they count the votes) by saying "...I don't know about you, but now I turn to drink to continue."
For a comparasion of his role, imagine if the guys from Monday Night Football were funnier, and did play-by-play of the Emmys.
My father goes through laptops on an annual basis (the company gets him a new one, and I get the old one), so I have a few o fthey lying around. In its current configuration, I've got...
* My desktop (2Ghz, also acts as the media server) * An old IBM Celeron desktop I got from the library, that feeds video to the TV * A Celeron ThinkPad, that feeds video to the 19in monitor next to the dinner table * My roomate's dersktop (acts as another media server) * A Toshiba Portege (my main "work" laptop) * A second (larger) Portege that sits on the table in front of the TV, and dosen't get used for all that much besides checking TVGuide.com
All hooked together (wired and wirelessly) through a stock WRT54G, and connected to the 2 old Laserjets in the TV room (only one of which works at any given time). Plus another pair of old 486 laptops in the closet which don't get used.
I got back from modern Russia yesterday (literally - I was there on holiday for a week) and on four different ocassions I was stopped and asked for my "papers" (AKA my passport).
The first was walking down the street in St. Petersburg - a pair of cops stopped me, and demanded "papers".
The second was as I was getting onto the St. Petersburg metro (I think the station was Moskovstaya). There were a whole bunch of OMON soldiers around, and a pair (and a cop) stopped me and asked for my papers.
The third was when my taxi got pulled over (in a nice part of Moscow) and the cops checked my and the driver's papers.
The fourth was as I was taking a picture of a convoy of important people (I guess they were inportant - they had one hell of an escort) leaving the VE-Day celebrations. As I raised my camera, a passer-by stepped in front of me, pushed me against the nearby wall, showed me his ID (with the cyrilic letters FSB and the shield on it) and demanded my papers in awful english. I pretended to not understand, and after a few tries he lost interest in me and ran to go stop an old lady who crossed the security perimeter.
So it's not only in Soviet Russia - it's in Putin's Russia as well.
Go back to slide plates. In all my years (5) of competitive rowing, the only times I ever lost a seat that was connected via a slide plate was when I wasn't paying attention to my technicque. The few times I did, it was because I was putting too much weight onto one side of the seat (which will throw off the set of the boat anyways), or too much pressure on the front edge of the seat (which leads to an inefficient stroke.
So my advice - go back to what works. Slide plates have very few moving parts, and do the job. Fix your stroke, and the rest will follow.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're looking for something that will do everything a SpeedCoach does, but you want a better resolution, and you want it (presumably) for less money.
My immediate thought would be to go grab a few Vernier sensors (as someone else mentioned) and a TI-92, and do it on that. However, NK has spend a whole lot of time and cash making sure their impellers work perfectly for what they're supposed to do, and produce the minimum drag possible. I know if I was rowing at that level (I rowed in HS for a while), I wouldn't want some homemade impeller giving me excess drag.
Upon further though, why would you want that much resolution in terms of speed? The SpeedCoach measues at the midpoint of each stroke, as the power phase is finishing. If you want something more specific than that (maybe to analyze for the effect of small changes in stroke shape or recovery speed), I would think that you'd be using a tank anyways, and you could do something with video for that (not needing an impeller at all).
Also, think about this: most national teams use SpeedCoaches for their training. If it's good enough for them, why do you need more prescision?
I think you need to rethink your problem. If you're measuring for the impact of rudder usage on speed, you can do that with models in a flow tank (go talk to your hydrodynamics departement). If you're doing stroke geometry, use an erg (or a tank, a videocamera, and a few Vernier probes). I can't think of a good reason for needing that much prescision in an on-water situation.
Personally, I find rowing takes much less energy per unit distance than running does. I've always found that when I sit down on an erg (even if I'm totally out of shape) and start pulling with very little effort, I start to stabilize in the mid-threes - maybe that's just me.
Is 6-10min/Km realistic for a couch potato? That's between a three and five minute split time, and a five minute spilt time is essentially just moving your arms, or making an effor to row at full slide verrrrrrry slowly. I think a 3 minute split is reasonable for someone just starting up.
And I'm suprised at the lack of ConceptIIs in the UK. When I rowed in London, our boat house was full of them. Maybe his club uses WaterRowers?
For the record and all, it was Boxer, Clinton, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones. She may only be a representative (and not a Senator), but she deserves to have her name written properly and fully.
For the interested, she's the Representative from the 11th District of Ohio - which seems to include most of Cleveland, and some of its suburbs. She was also the Rep. who (with Boxer) officially objected to the counting of the ballots from Ohio.
If you're US-centric, CharityNavigator usualy has some good information on pretty much everyone, including percentages of monies raised that go to Program expenses, and so on.
For example, Plan USA has a working capital ratio of about half a year, negative reveneue growth, and positive expense growth - meaning that they're short on cash. Their overall score was a 42 out of 70. The ran a defecit of 3.4 mil last year, although they have reported assets of over 20 mil.
RIM was started by two guys from the Kit/Woo area (Kitchener-Watreloo). Paul Martin is from the Maritimes and comes from a very priviledged shipping background.
Maybe he was outside their offices because RIM is a great Canadian success story, both in terms of profit and of philanthropy?
For the latter, I lead you to the Perimiter Institute, Canada's premier think-tank for foundational theoretical physics. Which was entirely started and paid-for by the two RIM guys. In essence, it's a place for brilliant scientists to go and be brilliant, and every once-in-a-while give lectures about what they've been thinking about (for free) to teh general population.
It's like Public Art, but for science.
New College Thing
on
Google Tidbits
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Based on what you say, this seesm to be the new form of College recruiting Google uses. A few months ago Google came and visited McGill, and did a 2-hour presenation on the basics of GFS, but primarily on MapReduce. Included was a few demos by the presenter (Karel someone - used to be a McGill prof) demo'ing some of the internal MapReduce funcctions, like calculating the number of links between words and the number of MapReduce keys needed, and so forth.
Plus, they gave out free pens and T-Shirts. The actual recruiting part took up about 10 minutes - only a brief mention of what it was like working at Google. Good presentation tho.
I've understood that when you buy a phone subsidized by (say) Verizon, they cripple the shit out of it. But what about when you but it from the full-price?
Here's my example - I had a handset that came with my contract. Cost me twenty bucks. About a year later, I got drunk at a party and lost it. So I went back to the Rogers store, and wante dto buy another handset, whereupon I was told that since it wasn't the start of the plan I had to pay C$250 for a SonyEricsson T226 - which they called "full price." (BTW this was all in Canada).
So a few questions from that: - Is what I paid the full price, or is it subsidized still? - Assuming that there were features locked out on the subsidized one I got earlier, would they be locked out on the second one as well?
As someone downthread mentioned, the actual quote is In the end you care more about Los Angeles than you do about Taipei. which comes with a very different posture than we'll nuke LA if you help Taiwan. What they're saying is that if we interfer in a mainland attack on Taiwan, they'll send some nukes over our way.
Would they do it? I'm not sure. What they've done with the policy, however, is akin to what we did with the Soviets during the cold war. They've established standard operating procedure and announced them publicly (our CW one was something to the effect of "if you roll tanks outside of the COMECON or Warsaw Pact, they get nuked"), and have placed the imperitus for security on the US. Strategically, not a bad move.
Would they loft a few nukes if we interveened in their efforts to retake Taiwan? I think they probably would. If we entered the fray, we would win (thanks mainly to our friend Aegis). This would be quite the affront to several thousand years of Chinese pride, being beaten by this upstart 200-year old state. So in response, they'd win they only way they can - launching on LA and the west coast.
Could they hit something? I think so. The most recently developed Russian nukes could probably beat our "missle shield" assuming it works, as the warheads are essentially cruise missles (that get delivered on an ICBM). Common knowledge is that they've allready started seling these to the Chinese. I suspect enough of them would get through to make a difference.
The other thing to remember is that in nuclear war, China considers its population to be much less significant than we do. There's over a billion of them, and their country is bigger - they can deal with 300 million deaths.
Three years ago, my family moved to the UK for pretty much just this reason. We'd always wanted to live there, and my father had just padded his resume enough to make it worthwhile. So he - to make a long story short - called some friends in Germany, had them incorporate a small company, form a join-venture agreement with a large-ish German corporation, have them establish an office in London (with three people in it), and that was the basis to get him a sponsorship.
In the UK, being an immigrant (business) worker is a pretty good deal. You get NHS coverage, a decent tax system, and (if you're Commonwealth) the ability to vote in UK and EU elections. You're also only tied to your job for four years. After that, you become a permenant resident (technically, your passport stamp changes from "Leave to Enter to Complete Previous Leave 3(3)(c)" to a "Permenant Leave to Enter"), meaning that you only have to have a job somewhere, as opposed to where you worked to get the visa in the first place. After two years of that, you're eligible for citizenship, which is only really a paperwork battle - the theory being if you've managed six years straight of being gainfully employed in the country, you've probably got enough contacts to keep you employed, and hence, you're good bet to them.
What about Califonia's fucked-up experiment in direct democracy, leaving the legislature with almost no control of what it can spend money on - think that might be a bit of a problem as well?
A while ago I saw a Discovery Channel show on these things, which explained how spinning won't cut it. Apparently, it's a short blast of high energy that is what does the damage, which a spin wouldn't effect. The analogy given was shooting a balerina with a shotgun - no matter how fast she spins, the brief high-energy hit does the job.
(Note this was from a special some months go - my memory could be fading)
As you flat-out say in one of your later posts, you have a small amount of European blood in you. So why can't someone who's entirely Native go and call you a dirty forgeiner? Ameri's been in this country for about 35 years, Wu about 45 - what's the difference between them and the local people you say that these jobs should be reserved for? In my books, living in a country for 35 or 45 years makes you count as a local.
From you post it makes it sounds like you'd like some sort of caste system, where "foreigners" (a term you don't really define) are second class citizens - unless they've been here as long as you, in which case they get to criticize new foreigners. Which, by my reading, kinda goes against the American Dream. Ohm and what about Arhhhhhhnod - does he still count as "contracting out" the governorship of California?
As for who to vote for (taking aside their races), I would vote for Wu. He's a nice guy, a former small businessman, and has more experience than Ameri.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that teaching a functional language is a good call for a studen't first exposure to programming. While they're nice from a theoretical point of view, it dosen't seem that teaching a language that's fundamentally different from most of the big languages out there does them much good in the future. DrScheme (sticking to its functional part) is a good language to learn functional programming in, but not to learn the basicis of programming in general.
Give them a nice procedural or OO-centered language, so that they can get the overall feel of programming, and can try things at home. Once they're interested, then take them into things like functional programming.
As for language choices, start them with something like C++ (get the idea of compiling in there, but avoid the more complex bits of it), then a simple assembly language, then a functional one.
Or you could click on the new "Hybrid" view in Googele Maps and get a semi-transparent overlay with street names and such.
If you're in a true zero-g environment, how do you drop anything, let alone a cat?
Yuo do know that by doing that, you'd be pretty much ending the existence of most corporations, right? Assuming that's not what you were going for, I think you missa few key steps in your logic.
Let's look at movies, for a start. If there are (say) 100 people invilved in the creative side of a movie, then by your system all revenues from the movie in question would be split 100 ways. Make a blockbuster movie, each of the 100 people get four million dollars a head, and they're happy. So what about the 990 other people involved in the process? The lighting guys, the sound guys, the editors, the makeup guys? So let's add them in, and now each person gets $400K. So now that we've given all the profits out to the individual people, who's going to pay for the next movie? If a movie made $400 million in profits, wh paid for the development of the movie? Who put of the initial cash to pay for the production, until the revenues started coming in? And who's going to do it for the next one? It sure ain't gonna be the movie company, as they (as a company) made no money off the first movie, since it all went to the people involved in it.
Now let's think even more generally - about widgets. WidgetCo spends 12 engineer-years (12 engineers for a year of work) developing the Widget2. Where did the company get the money to pay these engineers? Unless you grant that a corporation (WidgetCo) can be one of the creators of the product - and hence deserving of some of the profits from Widget1 - there would be no product, as there would be no one to pay the developers while they made it. There would be no one to stake the millions on R&D in the bet that a widget may work out.
Explain to me how a company could get any money and get anything done under your plan, and then I'll listen. Until then, it's ridiculous.
Just to clarify, what makes it even better is that Terry Wogan isn't hosting the actual contest - he's just hosting the BBC telecast of it. His role is more of a play-by-play commentary of what the actual hosts are saying and doing, and lampooning them.
Examples of his comments involve said Moldovan jokes, predicting the votes of the Nordic countries before they would say them (and then talking about how right he was), and signing off for the interval (when they count the votes) by saying "...I don't know about you, but now I turn to drink to continue."
For a comparasion of his role, imagine if the guys from Monday Night Football were funnier, and did play-by-play of the Emmys.
My father goes through laptops on an annual basis (the company gets him a new one, and I get the old one), so I have a few o fthey lying around. In its current configuration, I've got...
* My desktop (2Ghz, also acts as the media server)
* An old IBM Celeron desktop I got from the library, that feeds video to the TV
* A Celeron ThinkPad, that feeds video to the 19in monitor next to the dinner table
* My roomate's dersktop (acts as another media server)
* A Toshiba Portege (my main "work" laptop)
* A second (larger) Portege that sits on the table in front of the TV, and dosen't get used for all that much besides checking TVGuide.com
All hooked together (wired and wirelessly) through a stock WRT54G, and connected to the 2 old Laserjets in the TV room (only one of which works at any given time). Plus another pair of old 486 laptops in the closet which don't get used.
I got back from modern Russia yesterday (literally - I was there on holiday for a week) and on four different ocassions I was stopped and asked for my "papers" (AKA my passport).
The first was walking down the street in St. Petersburg - a pair of cops stopped me, and demanded "papers".
The second was as I was getting onto the St. Petersburg metro (I think the station was Moskovstaya). There were a whole bunch of OMON soldiers around, and a pair (and a cop) stopped me and asked for my papers.
The third was when my taxi got pulled over (in a nice part of Moscow) and the cops checked my and the driver's papers.
The fourth was as I was taking a picture of a convoy of important people (I guess they were inportant - they had one hell of an escort) leaving the VE-Day celebrations. As I raised my camera, a passer-by stepped in front of me, pushed me against the nearby wall, showed me his ID (with the cyrilic letters FSB and the shield on it) and demanded my papers in awful english. I pretended to not understand, and after a few tries he lost interest in me and ran to go stop an old lady who crossed the security perimeter.
So it's not only in Soviet Russia - it's in Putin's Russia as well.
Go back to slide plates. In all my years (5) of competitive rowing, the only times I ever lost a seat that was connected via a slide plate was when I wasn't paying attention to my technicque. The few times I did, it was because I was putting too much weight onto one side of the seat (which will throw off the set of the boat anyways), or too much pressure on the front edge of the seat (which leads to an inefficient stroke.
So my advice - go back to what works. Slide plates have very few moving parts, and do the job. Fix your stroke, and the rest will follow.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're looking for something that will do everything a SpeedCoach does, but you want a better resolution, and you want it (presumably) for less money.
My immediate thought would be to go grab a few Vernier sensors (as someone else mentioned) and a TI-92, and do it on that. However, NK has spend a whole lot of time and cash making sure their impellers work perfectly for what they're supposed to do, and produce the minimum drag possible. I know if I was rowing at that level (I rowed in HS for a while), I wouldn't want some homemade impeller giving me excess drag.
Upon further though, why would you want that much resolution in terms of speed? The SpeedCoach measues at the midpoint of each stroke, as the power phase is finishing. If you want something more specific than that (maybe to analyze for the effect of small changes in stroke shape or recovery speed), I would think that you'd be using a tank anyways, and you could do something with video for that (not needing an impeller at all).
Also, think about this: most national teams use SpeedCoaches for their training. If it's good enough for them, why do you need more prescision?
I think you need to rethink your problem. If you're measuring for the impact of rudder usage on speed, you can do that with models in a flow tank (go talk to your hydrodynamics departement). If you're doing stroke geometry, use an erg (or a tank, a videocamera, and a few Vernier probes). I can't think of a good reason for needing that much prescision in an on-water situation.
Personally, I find rowing takes much less energy per unit distance than running does. I've always found that when I sit down on an erg (even if I'm totally out of shape) and start pulling with very little effort, I start to stabilize in the mid-threes - maybe that's just me.
Is 6-10min/Km realistic for a couch potato? That's between a three and five minute split time, and a five minute spilt time is essentially just moving your arms, or making an effor to row at full slide verrrrrrry slowly. I think a 3 minute split is reasonable for someone just starting up.
And I'm suprised at the lack of ConceptIIs in the UK. When I rowed in London, our boat house was full of them. Maybe his club uses WaterRowers?
For the record and all, it was Boxer, Clinton, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones. She may only be a representative (and not a Senator), but she deserves to have her name written properly and fully.
For the interested, she's the Representative from the 11th District of Ohio - which seems to include most of Cleveland, and some of its suburbs. She was also the Rep. who (with Boxer) officially objected to the counting of the ballots from Ohio.
If you're US-centric, CharityNavigator usualy has some good information on pretty much everyone, including percentages of monies raised that go to Program expenses, and so on.
r ch.summary/orgid/4337.htm
For example, Plan USA has a working capital ratio of about half a year, negative reveneue growth, and positive expense growth - meaning that they're short on cash. Their overall score was a 42 out of 70. The ran a defecit of 3.4 mil last year, although they have reported assets of over 20 mil.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm/bay/sea
RIM was started by two guys from the Kit/Woo area (Kitchener-Watreloo). Paul Martin is from the Maritimes and comes from a very priviledged shipping background.
Maybe he was outside their offices because RIM is a great Canadian success story, both in terms of profit and of philanthropy?
For the latter, I lead you to the Perimiter Institute, Canada's premier think-tank for foundational theoretical physics. Which was entirely started and paid-for by the two RIM guys. In essence, it's a place for brilliant scientists to go and be brilliant, and every once-in-a-while give lectures about what they've been thinking about (for free) to teh general population.
It's like Public Art, but for science.
Based on what you say, this seesm to be the new form of College recruiting Google uses. A few months ago Google came and visited McGill, and did a 2-hour presenation on the basics of GFS, but primarily on MapReduce. Included was a few demos by the presenter (Karel someone - used to be a McGill prof) demo'ing some of the internal MapReduce funcctions, like calculating the number of links between words and the number of MapReduce keys needed, and so forth.
Plus, they gave out free pens and T-Shirts. The actual recruiting part took up about 10 minutes - only a brief mention of what it was like working at Google. Good presentation tho.
Current headline from Google News:
"ABC News Probe Lands on Saturn Moon; Sends Photos"
They either forgot a colon in there, or the ESA just got bought out.
I've understood that when you buy a phone subsidized by (say) Verizon, they cripple the shit out of it. But what about when you but it from the full-price?
Here's my example - I had a handset that came with my contract. Cost me twenty bucks. About a year later, I got drunk at a party and lost it. So I went back to the Rogers store, and wante dto buy another handset, whereupon I was told that since it wasn't the start of the plan I had to pay C$250 for a SonyEricsson T226 - which they called "full price." (BTW this was all in Canada).
So a few questions from that:
- Is what I paid the full price, or is it subsidized still?
- Assuming that there were features locked out on the subsidized one I got earlier, would they be locked out on the second one as well?
As someone downthread mentioned, the actual quote is In the end you care more about Los Angeles than you do about Taipei. which comes with a very different posture than we'll nuke LA if you help Taiwan. What they're saying is that if we interfer in a mainland attack on Taiwan, they'll send some nukes over our way.
Would they do it? I'm not sure. What they've done with the policy, however, is akin to what we did with the Soviets during the cold war. They've established standard operating procedure and announced them publicly (our CW one was something to the effect of "if you roll tanks outside of the COMECON or Warsaw Pact, they get nuked"), and have placed the imperitus for security on the US. Strategically, not a bad move.
Would they loft a few nukes if we interveened in their efforts to retake Taiwan? I think they probably would. If we entered the fray, we would win (thanks mainly to our friend Aegis). This would be quite the affront to several thousand years of Chinese pride, being beaten by this upstart 200-year old state. So in response, they'd win they only way they can - launching on LA and the west coast.
Could they hit something? I think so. The most recently developed Russian nukes could probably beat our "missle shield" assuming it works, as the warheads are essentially cruise missles (that get delivered on an ICBM). Common knowledge is that they've allready started seling these to the Chinese. I suspect enough of them would get through to make a difference.
The other thing to remember is that in nuclear war, China considers its population to be much less significant than we do. There's over a billion of them, and their country is bigger - they can deal with 300 million deaths.
Three years ago, my family moved to the UK for pretty much just this reason. We'd always wanted to live there, and my father had just padded his resume enough to make it worthwhile. So he - to make a long story short - called some friends in Germany, had them incorporate a small company, form a join-venture agreement with a large-ish German corporation, have them establish an office in London (with three people in it), and that was the basis to get him a sponsorship.
In the UK, being an immigrant (business) worker is a pretty good deal. You get NHS coverage, a decent tax system, and (if you're Commonwealth) the ability to vote in UK and EU elections. You're also only tied to your job for four years. After that, you become a permenant resident (technically, your passport stamp changes from "Leave to Enter to Complete Previous Leave 3(3)(c)" to a "Permenant Leave to Enter"), meaning that you only have to have a job somewhere, as opposed to where you worked to get the visa in the first place. After two years of that, you're eligible for citizenship, which is only really a paperwork battle - the theory being if you've managed six years straight of being gainfully employed in the country, you've probably got enough contacts to keep you employed, and hence, you're good bet to them.
Coral'ed at http://www.benheck.com.nyud.net:8090/Games/PS2p%20 1.htm.
Coral'ed here.
What about Califonia's fucked-up experiment in direct democracy, leaving the legislature with almost no control of what it can spend money on - think that might be a bit of a problem as well?
A while ago I saw a Discovery Channel show on these things, which explained how spinning won't cut it. Apparently, it's a short blast of high energy that is what does the damage, which a spin wouldn't effect. The analogy given was shooting a balerina with a shotgun - no matter how fast she spins, the brief high-energy hit does the job.
(Note this was from a special some months go - my memory could be fading)
I take it this means I'm now fired...
As you flat-out say in one of your later posts, you have a small amount of European blood in you. So why can't someone who's entirely Native go and call you a dirty forgeiner? Ameri's been in this country for about 35 years, Wu about 45 - what's the difference between them and the local people you say that these jobs should be reserved for? In my books, living in a country for 35 or 45 years makes you count as a local.
From you post it makes it sounds like you'd like some sort of caste system, where "foreigners" (a term you don't really define) are second class citizens - unless they've been here as long as you, in which case they get to criticize new foreigners. Which, by my reading, kinda goes against the American Dream. Ohm and what about Arhhhhhhnod - does he still count as "contracting out" the governorship of California?
As for who to vote for (taking aside their races), I would vote for Wu. He's a nice guy, a former small businessman, and has more experience than Ameri.