It's the "rather than" that blows me away. It's not just that we have no way of knowing who was behind the crime, clueless or not, but that you somehow think there aren't the resources to go after everyone responsible.
Have you ever been the victim of a property crime? I have, multiple times. There isn't any real effort at finding the perpetrators or recovery. It's the same with identity theft. I've been a victim of that, too.
If any of those 500000 innocent people have their identity stolen and their life savings taken away, most likely, it will ruin their credit ratings for years to come. They'll get their money back, eventually, because the credit card company eats the loss. But nobody will make an effort to find the criminals, and nobody will compensate the victims for the time and money they'll spend recovering their money and restoring their credit rating, not to mention the anguish and other problems.
The sad fact is that we already don't try very hard to find the perpetrators in a lot of property crimes--because it's too expensive.
The other sad fact is that we don't go after companies that treat data negligently. But while we can't easily stop muggings on the street, it is easy to stop mass theft of personal data from computer servers. The technology is there. It isn't very costly even. Companies just need to deploy it. And the only incentive for deploying it is if they face big risks and penalties when something goes wrong. Instead, banks keep deploying ASP on NT servers, don't use encryption to protect data, and don't bother keeping their systems up to date.
Absent some sort of immunity, the contractor is civilly liable for consequential losses to both the government and the individuals.
Yeah, and they'll pay up to individuals when hell freezes over. At best, they may play nice with the government because they want another contract.
They appear quite aware of this judging from their remedial steps, and they have plenty on the line without the government butting in with "penalties." At worst the company was negligent -- and we don't know that, either. There is not a thing in the articles suggesting TriWest was at fault. As it now stands they may be a mere victim.
I cannot construct a scenario in which the company could be a "mere victim". Anybody who has 500000 personal records stolen, in any shape or form, is almost by definition, negligent. At a minimum, the data should have been encrypted on disk with a key in volatile memory, so that if anybody walks off with the hardware, the data is useless. This is in addition to reasonable physical security--even for our rather non-secure data center, we have 24h guards and various alarms.
The only way I see in which the company could have been a "mere victim" is if they had been blackmailed into giving up the data and its cryptographic keys, under threat of death to hostages. That clearly didn't happen.
Your analogy is wrong. Among other things, your analogy doesn't take into account that there are three parties involved: the victim, the thief, and the party to which the valuable property was entrusted. A better analogy would be...
Traveler to airline: Where is my luggage?
Airline: We don't know. We left it on the sidewalk last night, and today it's gone. Sorry, it's not our problem. File a complaint with the police, maybe they can find it.
You see, your private information is valuable. If it falls into the wrong hands, you may lose your life savings. Companies that you entrust with it have a duty to treat it with care.
Furthermore, the tax payer shouldn't be responsible for tracking down losses that are enabled by the complete carelessness of poorly run businesses.
It's a well-established legal principle that if you entrust somebody with something valuable, in many cases, they are legally responsible if it's lost or stolen if they didn't take proper care of it. In fact, airlines are liable for loss of your luggage even if they did take proper care of it.
Since personal information is often much more valuable than luggage and since losses are hard to quantify (e.g., suffering from identity theft, etc.), penalties should be stiff.
If a company takes reasonable care to secure their computer systems physically and against break-ins, then they shouldn't be penalized for negligence when data is stolen (although they may still be liable). But this case, like most others, smacks of complete negligence on the part of the company.
See, in the real world, we are governed by laws. There is no law that states: "You must treat customer data with appropriate care."
Sure, there is. In many situations, where you entrust companies or individuals with valuable or private information, they have a responsibility to take reasonable care to keep it private. It's just that there aren't particularly stiff penalties right now. And that has resulted in an unacceptable carelessness by companies when dealing with customer information.
The business deserves, simply, to lose its government contract. Why you want to complicate this matter and rewrite corporate law is beyond me.
We have notions of "fiduciary duty" and "criminal negligence" for physical property. It makes sense to apply them to what companies do with personal information.
Rather than spending money on tracking down and throwing a bunch of clueless hackers in jail, law enforcement should really focus on the criminals that are easy to identify and prosecute: companies that don't treat customer data with appropriate care. If a few high-profile cases resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, these cases would soon stop happening: companies would finally make the modest investments necessary to keep customer data secure.
There are two common strategies for IP claims by CEOs. The first is to make gigantic claims even if there is nothing of much value; it helps with the stock price. The second is to keep quiet about IP while establishing something as a standard, then hitting people with licensing fees. It's the latter you have to worry about.
Factually, Ballmer may be right: within the vast, ill-specified mess of APIs that is.NET, Microsoft may have some patents. But that doesn't matter:.NET is not a standard and it doesn't matter whether open source clones implement it 100% or 98%; it's fine to leave out some APIs around the periphery. It is clear that Microsoft has no patents on ECMA C# or most other.NET technologies.
For Java, in contrast, we know that Sun holds patents essential to the core of compliant implementations. If you implement any form of Java, you infringe. The only thing we have so far is legally non-binding promises from Sun not to bother open source implementations. That is a very, very serious problem.
I don't get the whole Mitnick thing
on
Kevin Free
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It strikes me that the hacking he did was pretty dumb and not much different from what probably thousands of other kids did, that the systems he broke into were managed poorly, that the people who tracked him down weren't all that smart either, and that the whole thing just has been milked by everybody for their 15 minutes of fame. It's just so much more media-friendly if a mediocre hack gets portrayed in terms of super-villains and super-heroes.
If there is one thing at all notable about the whole thing, it's the ridiculous overreaction of the court during the sentencing.
So the person you're responding to can't move to India to take advantage of the greater demand for talent there.
I seriously doubt he even investigated the possibility. Many foreign countries welcome skilled US labor. Of course, most American workers probably lack the language skills or cultural adaptability to take advantage of jobs overseas, and they are often not willing to work for lower wages or under working conditions in other countries.
For the "global economy" to truly work, people must be able to move as easily as the demand for labor does.
The fact is that most people don't want to move anyway, even if they have the opportunity. The way to address wage differentials is much simpler than moving lots of people around: ensure a good standard of living around the globe. That way, companies have no "low wage" countries to move their production to.
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
No. If all of the H1B visas were revoked, companies wouldn't hire less qualified US workers, nor would they retrain. Instead, millions of jobs would move overseas almost instantly, where most companies already have development centers.
You see, if it were up to companies, they'd like to have workers work overseas anyway--it's cheaper. Bringing them to the US is a perk, something that helps them attract the best. Revoking the H1B program would merely give companies the excuse and incentive to do what makes financial sense for them anyway.
Everyone seems to make this same mistake when talking about globalization and free trade - you assume they go hand in hand. [...] So globalization will not work as defined by "making the whole globe reasonably wealthy."
You are barking up the wrong tree--I made no claims that globalization makes people wealthy. Globalization is simply a reality--you can't stop it with immigration laws or protectionism or tariffs--any country that tries just ruins its economy.
Now, with the ability to purchase goods globally comes the simple reality that our engineers, garment workers, and farmers really can't expect to earn more money than other people working in the third world, plus the cost of moving their goods and services to the US. You can rail against that all you want, it's not going to change.
The only way to address that is to increase the standard of living, wealth, and expectations of the worst off in the world. Globalization itself doesn't do that, as you yourself observe. We need to do other things to achieve that goal. One is to let people live in the US and become familiar with our standard of living and our protections and have them take those back to their countries. And there are other things we can do, through education, cooperation, etc.
Frankly, I don't even see anything unjust about it all. There are billions of people living in dismal poverty. American workers have no reason or moral justification to expect living in wealth just because they happen to be born here. Globalization just finally brings the hard reality of life around the globe back home, and that, after all, probably is a good thing, not by making us wealthier, but by having us finally experience the poverty of the rest of the world. Maybe that will finally move us into action, after centuries of isolationism, greed, and disregard for the suffering of others.
Even if they were like people, people are not reliable too
Yes, but with people, you have some expectation that there are some that you can trust. With companies, there is no basis ever to have such an expectation.
Were such promises ever made? Not doubting you, but I do not remember them being made.
In 1996, when people like myself were deciding whether to get our companies to support Java big time, yes. Sun definitely told people that they wanted Java to become an open standard, that they wanted to encourage multiple implementations, that they wanted to open source it (but perhaps not under the GPL/LGPL), etc. None of that has really happened.
Can you provide URLs about these things? I am not familiar with them.
Look around JavaGrande.org, and also take a look at pointers to Java Grande from Sun's site (via Google). Gosling and others were talking about these kinds of features even before the founding of Java Grande in 1998. The only thing that has gotten addressed is some floating point issues.
In any case, the overall point remains: C# delivers all the major points that Sun has promised but not delivered: standardization, full open source implementations (no thanks to Microsoft, however), and decent support for numerical programs (operators, subscripting, iteration, value classes). Furthermore, we know that the core of C#/CLR is not covered by Microsoft patents, while the core of Java/JVM is covered by some Sun patents. I think if openness and features are primary issues, the choice is clear.
I still use Java instead of C# for now, but only because we have a lot of Java legacy code and because the Mono implementation isn't quite up to snuff. In a year or so, I see nothing keeping me with Java.
it's because the reality is that H-1B employees are often here being trained to take the jobs back home with them.
And what's your point? H-1Bs are temporary visas. Of course, if the people can't stay, they'll take their jobs with them. If you don't like that, the solution would be to increase immigrant visas, not decrease H-1B visas.
Guess who was in charge in India? Right. The very same Indians who had quickly risen into management positions. These guys had (apparently) been hired to learn the business and then to export it to some place where the workforce is cheaper
Of course. I don't see anything wrong with that. At least they learn US business and engineering practices, which are generally pretty good. They also make business contacts here.
What do you think is going to happen if you don't let them come here? Are you naive enough to think that they'll take up farming instead?
The US is far from having a monopoly on successful business practices or engineering methods. If you don't let them come here, they'll go to Europe or Japan, or trainers will just go directly to India. They'll make business contacts there. They'll adopt European or Japanese standards and business practices. That's worse for the US.
and there aren't all those pesky EPA and OSHA types to deal with.
US educated and trained engineers going back to India will be much more sympathetic to introducing EPA and OSHA regulations there. In the long run, that will bring India up to our levels of costs and standards, and it will make us more competitive. If you don't let the people come here and experience life in the US, things will change much more slowly in India and other developing nations.
Idiot
You don't have an argument, that's why you need to resort to insults. I'm sorry if you think your job is threatened, but the reality is that engineers are just facing the same globalization issues that farmers, garment workers, and many others have faced before.
Our best approach for dealing with that is openness: we need to make the whole globe reasonably wealthy and decrease poverty. Then, we don't have to worry about losing our jobs to some third world nation because they can cut costs.
A computer-science professor in California has statistics to show that programmers have careers not much longer than pro-football players.
In my experience, most programmers are the equivalent of assembly line workers, trained to do a few specific steps on specific machinery without any deeper understanding of what is going on. And most of them probably don't want to continue programming into their 40's or 50's anyway, they want to move up into management, design, and other non-programming jobs. Think of the career path of most programmers as that of MacDonald's cooks: their job is not about the food, and you wouldn't expect them to be gourmet chefs in their 40's or 50's, you'd expect them to move up in management or go into other professions.
People who are dedicated to programming as a life-long profession and who are skilled enough to pull it of are far and few between.
"About 80,0000 engineers were unemployed a few months ago. If you take out the H-1Bs who came in, you'd have jobs for all of them," the IEEE-USA's Bryant says. The organization is lobbying Congress to lower the number of H-1B issued.
If you take out the H-1Bs, the jobs won't go to US engineers, they will simply move to sites in India, China, and Europe. That can happen on a moment's notice, since big companies already have R&D centers there. The main reason why companies bring engineers to the US is because the engineers themselves prefer it; it's a kind of perk.w
If the US forces those jobs to move overseas by reducing H-1B quotas, the US will lose the tax revenue, production and know-how will move abroad, and the trade deficit will increase. The net result is much worse for the US.
H-1Bs are a wonderful deal for the US: other countries pay for decades of child care, schooling, medical care, and social services, and the US reaps the most productive years of those individuals. The countries who ought to be upset about it is the countries where foreign engineers are coming from, not the US. And, in fact, European and Asian countries would love nothing more than if the US closed its borders--it would be a shot in the arm for their own industries.
Whatever. I gave other examples. The point is: companies aren't people. Companies generally cannot be relied on to keep promises. If they aren't willing to commit to something in writing, don't rely on it.
Never assign to ill faith what can be explained by incompetence (Napoleon). But what do you have in mind?
I don't ascribe it to anything in particular. I don't care why they behave the way they do. I don't even care whether they have "good reasons" (Sun may well find some "good reason" to sue open source implementations of Java off the face of this planet). I just note that I can't rely on them to keep their promises. For example, Sun has dropped out of two standardization processes, they weaseled out of early open source promises, they have failed to deliver things like VM sharing and value classes for Java, they have failed to keep the VM competitive across platforms (the X11 version of Java2D sucks, and that's Suns fault), and they promised to make Java a platform for portable client applications but instead put most of their efforts into server-side applications, to name just a few Java-related issues.hae
Imagine a programmer trying to fix a huge piece of software that has been developed over a long time with little modularity. The programmer has only a marginal understanding of how it work. The programmer is kept awake by Jolt and deadlines. I think it's a fair guess that they are going to be making lots of avoidable mistakes. Well, welcome to the world of medicine.
No, I'm not. It's just that you have trouble reading carefully.
IBM has two jvm's. They have the Hursley JVM which is a port/licensed jvm based on Sun's source base. However, IBM also own's OTI and OTI has j9, which is a totally clean-room jvm that recently got full certification. So IBM does in fact have it's own JVM.
A "JVM" isn't a "Java" implementation. Furthermore, IBM is a Java licensee, so no matter what they implement, they are not an example of Sun allowing independent third party implementation.
If that's true it's only needed because certain companies, are greedy enough to try to pollute the language with their own platform dependent extensions for their own gain.
Whatever the reason, it means that Java is not free, and it means that any open source effort that "pollutes" the language might end up in Sun's cross-hairs as well.
There are ton's of JVMs out there, many of the opensource or done by small groups of individuals. I doubt ( but I can't be sure ) that they all have agreements with Sun. http://java-virtual-machine.net/other.html
Yup, there are many JVMs, but those are not independent Java implementations. A Java implementation consists of JVMs together with a complete set of libraries.
There might be independent J2ME implementations somewhere from some small outfit, but there don't seem to be independent J2SE or J2EE implementations, either open source or commercial.
If you think that there are indepdent, open source Java platform implementations, please point me at the non-Sun source code for the part of the implementation that implements Swing.
I've also worked with Sun professionally, but my experience is that I've never seen them try half the stuff I see MS try to pull.
It's only "pulling" with MS because MS has a monopoly. Sun doesn't, so it's legally OK and reasonably accepted for them to do certain things. If MS had 20% of the market, little of what they have done would cause any legal problems.
I'm just saying: you can't rely on Sun's PR statements. Sun is a publically traded company, and if their prior promises were not legally binding, they can reneg on their promises. And they have, in a big way in the past, for example, with Java standardization.
Well, look at Sun's "contamination clauses" for Java sources, the way their business is built on taking open source software proprietary, McNealy's and Gosling's apparent disdain for open source, their broken promises over Java and Java's future, among others. Also, when talking to Sun as a customer, coming from UCB, you probably didn't get an entirely normal customer experience.
In any case, I'm not saying that anything Sun has done has been wrong. I am saying, however, that you are kidding yourself if you think that you can trust Sun to stick to promises of "openness" any more than you can trust Microsoft. Sun has the same kind of lawyers, PR people, and stock holders. They will say anything that's legal, defensible, and doesn't damage their PR too badly as long as it makes more profit or gets the stock price up; that's not just common sense, it's the fiduciary duty of its officers. And, if anything, Sun has demonstrated that they can't be trusted by pulling out of standardization efforts and failing to pull through on other Java-related promises.
And your point is what? We aren't talking about "JVM implementations" we are talking about Java platform implementations.
Furthermore, IBM is a licensee no matter what they implement it or how they implement it, so they are not an example of how Sun lets third parties implement Java freely.
Mono also implements parts of.NET that have NOT been submitted to ECMA and ISO standards. Those parts of Mono lack even the protection for IP infringement with re-implementation that ISO documentation licensing implies.
That objection is irrelevant, for several reasons. First, we pretty much know what the related Microsoft's and Sun's patents are. Microsoft does not appear to hold any key patents necessary for any parts of.NET that most people would care about, and they almost certainly don't hold any patents on the core C#/CLR language and runtime. Second, since.NET is not a well-defined platform, even if small parts of it cannot be reimplemented due to patent issues, it doesn't affect much of anything.
For Sun, in contrast, we know that they hold key patents on core Java technology. Furthermore, Sun has made no legally binding commitments to letting others use those patents in their implementations. And, if you fail to implement parts of the Java 2 platform, you basically fail to implement Java.
However, Java Community Process director Onno Kluyt said: [...]
That's all a bunch of hot air, nothing legally binding. We know that Sun holds key patents on core technologies required to implement a conforming JVM. Sun has made no commitment to allowing commercial third party implementations, and even for open source implementations, it's all a bunch of inferences and promises. Anybody who actually wants to create a third party Java implementation has to get something from Sun in writing or forever live at risk of a lawsuit. And that will be true until Sun's patents enter the public domain.
It's pretty clear at this point that Microsoft holds no patents on core C#/CLR technology, and we can presume that they designed C#/CLR to avoid running afoul of any Sun patents. Whatever patents Microsoft may hold are at best tangential. Overall, that leaves us with a significantly better situation for C#/CLR than Java/JVM: with Java/JVM, we have to trust Sun's promises, with C#/CLR, we don't have to trust anybody.
Well, I think Java has as many problems as Python. Just off the top of my head:
No support for value classes.
Java generics are not type safe across compilation units.
Java arrays require dynamic type checks.
No iteration syntax.
Does not have basic operator overloading (arithmetic operators).
Does have non-operator overloading.
Poorly thought out source file and binary file packaging conventions.
Casts are prefix.
No lexical closures.
Java2D bindings to non-Windows environments are low quality.
Some very poorly thought out core libraries: I/O, image handling, text/string.
These, and other problems with Java seriously limit its utility and scope. Java is decent for the server side hacking where it is currently popular, but it's a poor choice for things like numerical and semi-numerical algorithms. C# improves on it somewhat.
Python is a decent language. But it has a number of problems:
It does not have a clear cross-platform GUI (Tkinter doesn't work on OS X, wxPython isn't a standard part of the platform binary distributions).
Many packages rely on native code in shared libraries.
Python byte code is orders of magnitude slower than Java or C# code.
Python does not have optional static type checking.
It is hard to make standalone, self-contained applications out of it.
Python does not have a well-defined language standard, nor does it have multiple independent implementations.
Python could be more of a contender if someone built a good native code compiler for it. None of the current attempts are very good or result in much speedup.
The way it is, Python is good for many scripting and prototyping applications. But for a general-purpose, high-quality programming language, we still have to look elsewhere.
Loan sharking is illegal because the sharks charge illegally exorbitant interest rates, not because they are greedy.
"Exorbitant" means "greedy" in this context, and that's why we declared it to be illegal.
And "we, the people" have nothing at all to do with deciding where ownership ends and greed begins.
We, the people, decide where ownership ends. With real property, it's a constitutional issue. With intellectual property, for the most part, it's not even that. We can change both through the democratic process.
Ownership of something is a real, legal, fact. Greed is a human emotion.
That's what I was saying. That's why music companies can both own tunes legally and still be greedy. Get it now?
(i) Sun has supported third party implentations to the point where they used a third party implementations themself. What's the original linux jvm a third party jvm ( name was black-something, I can't remember).
It's Blackdown Java. It is not a third party implementation. Sun simply dumped their source code onto a bunch of people outside Sun who then fixed a bunch of bugs and ported it to Linux.
IBM has had it's JVM for eons now. There are lots of embedded JVMs.
IBM does not have its own Java implementation--they have a license to Sun's Java implementation, and they replace some of Sun's components with their own.
(ii) Sun has tolerated those implementations for years now.
Sun hasn't tolerated anything. As far as I can tell, anybody who is shipping anything remotely resembling a Java platform implementation has a contractual agreement with Sun. In fact, merely to claim that something is Java, you need a contractual agreement with Sun (because of their trademark).
(iii) In the past, Sun has never shown to be anti-competitive as microsoft. They don't defend or promote Solaris at any cost the way microsoft does.
I see no basis for that statement. Sun simply isn't leveraging their monopoly because they don't have one. As a 15 year Sun customer, all the indications I have seen are that Sun is worse than Microsoft when it comes to cut-throat competition and intellectual property, they are simply not as successful.
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Have you ever been the victim of a property crime? I have, multiple times. There isn't any real effort at finding the perpetrators or recovery. It's the same with identity theft. I've been a victim of that, too.
If any of those 500000 innocent people have their identity stolen and their life savings taken away, most likely, it will ruin their credit ratings for years to come. They'll get their money back, eventually, because the credit card company eats the loss. But nobody will make an effort to find the criminals, and nobody will compensate the victims for the time and money they'll spend recovering their money and restoring their credit rating, not to mention the anguish and other problems.
The sad fact is that we already don't try very hard to find the perpetrators in a lot of property crimes--because it's too expensive.
The other sad fact is that we don't go after companies that treat data negligently. But while we can't easily stop muggings on the street, it is easy to stop mass theft of personal data from computer servers. The technology is there. It isn't very costly even. Companies just need to deploy it. And the only incentive for deploying it is if they face big risks and penalties when something goes wrong. Instead, banks keep deploying ASP on NT servers, don't use encryption to protect data, and don't bother keeping their systems up to date.
Absent some sort of immunity, the contractor is civilly liable for consequential losses to both the government and the individuals.
Yeah, and they'll pay up to individuals when hell freezes over. At best, they may play nice with the government because they want another contract.
They appear quite aware of this judging from their remedial steps, and they have plenty on the line without the government butting in with "penalties." At worst the company was negligent -- and we don't know that, either. There is not a thing in the articles suggesting TriWest was at fault. As it now stands they may be a mere victim.
I cannot construct a scenario in which the company could be a "mere victim". Anybody who has 500000 personal records stolen, in any shape or form, is almost by definition, negligent. At a minimum, the data should have been encrypted on disk with a key in volatile memory, so that if anybody walks off with the hardware, the data is useless. This is in addition to reasonable physical security--even for our rather non-secure data center, we have 24h guards and various alarms.
The only way I see in which the company could have been a "mere victim" is if they had been blackmailed into giving up the data and its cryptographic keys, under threat of death to hostages. That clearly didn't happen.
You see, your private information is valuable. If it falls into the wrong hands, you may lose your life savings. Companies that you entrust with it have a duty to treat it with care.
Furthermore, the tax payer shouldn't be responsible for tracking down losses that are enabled by the complete carelessness of poorly run businesses.
It's a well-established legal principle that if you entrust somebody with something valuable, in many cases, they are legally responsible if it's lost or stolen if they didn't take proper care of it. In fact, airlines are liable for loss of your luggage even if they did take proper care of it.
Since personal information is often much more valuable than luggage and since losses are hard to quantify (e.g., suffering from identity theft, etc.), penalties should be stiff.
If a company takes reasonable care to secure their computer systems physically and against break-ins, then they shouldn't be penalized for negligence when data is stolen (although they may still be liable). But this case, like most others, smacks of complete negligence on the part of the company.
Sure, there is. In many situations, where you entrust companies or individuals with valuable or private information, they have a responsibility to take reasonable care to keep it private. It's just that there aren't particularly stiff penalties right now. And that has resulted in an unacceptable carelessness by companies when dealing with customer information.
The business deserves, simply, to lose its government contract. Why you want to complicate this matter and rewrite corporate law is beyond me.
We have notions of "fiduciary duty" and "criminal negligence" for physical property. It makes sense to apply them to what companies do with personal information.
Rather than spending money on tracking down and throwing a bunch of clueless hackers in jail, law enforcement should really focus on the criminals that are easy to identify and prosecute: companies that don't treat customer data with appropriate care. If a few high-profile cases resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, these cases would soon stop happening: companies would finally make the modest investments necessary to keep customer data secure.
Factually, Ballmer may be right: within the vast, ill-specified mess of APIs that is .NET, Microsoft may have some patents. But that doesn't matter: .NET is not a standard and it doesn't matter whether open source clones implement it 100% or 98%; it's fine to leave out some APIs around the periphery. It is clear that Microsoft has no patents on ECMA C# or most other .NET technologies.
For Java, in contrast, we know that Sun holds patents essential to the core of compliant implementations. If you implement any form of Java, you infringe. The only thing we have so far is legally non-binding promises from Sun not to bother open source implementations. That is a very, very serious problem.
If there is one thing at all notable about the whole thing, it's the ridiculous overreaction of the court during the sentencing.
I seriously doubt he even investigated the possibility. Many foreign countries welcome skilled US labor. Of course, most American workers probably lack the language skills or cultural adaptability to take advantage of jobs overseas, and they are often not willing to work for lower wages or under working conditions in other countries.
For the "global economy" to truly work, people must be able to move as easily as the demand for labor does.
The fact is that most people don't want to move anyway, even if they have the opportunity. The way to address wage differentials is much simpler than moving lots of people around: ensure a good standard of living around the globe. That way, companies have no "low wage" countries to move their production to.
No. If all of the H1B visas were revoked, companies wouldn't hire less qualified US workers, nor would they retrain. Instead, millions of jobs would move overseas almost instantly, where most companies already have development centers.
You see, if it were up to companies, they'd like to have workers work overseas anyway--it's cheaper. Bringing them to the US is a perk, something that helps them attract the best. Revoking the H1B program would merely give companies the excuse and incentive to do what makes financial sense for them anyway.
You are barking up the wrong tree--I made no claims that globalization makes people wealthy. Globalization is simply a reality--you can't stop it with immigration laws or protectionism or tariffs--any country that tries just ruins its economy.
Now, with the ability to purchase goods globally comes the simple reality that our engineers, garment workers, and farmers really can't expect to earn more money than other people working in the third world, plus the cost of moving their goods and services to the US. You can rail against that all you want, it's not going to change.
The only way to address that is to increase the standard of living, wealth, and expectations of the worst off in the world. Globalization itself doesn't do that, as you yourself observe. We need to do other things to achieve that goal. One is to let people live in the US and become familiar with our standard of living and our protections and have them take those back to their countries. And there are other things we can do, through education, cooperation, etc.
Frankly, I don't even see anything unjust about it all. There are billions of people living in dismal poverty. American workers have no reason or moral justification to expect living in wealth just because they happen to be born here. Globalization just finally brings the hard reality of life around the globe back home, and that, after all, probably is a good thing, not by making us wealthier, but by having us finally experience the poverty of the rest of the world. Maybe that will finally move us into action, after centuries of isolationism, greed, and disregard for the suffering of others.
Yes, but with people, you have some expectation that there are some that you can trust. With companies, there is no basis ever to have such an expectation.
Were such promises ever made? Not doubting you, but I do not remember them being made.
In 1996, when people like myself were deciding whether to get our companies to support Java big time, yes. Sun definitely told people that they wanted Java to become an open standard, that they wanted to encourage multiple implementations, that they wanted to open source it (but perhaps not under the GPL/LGPL), etc. None of that has really happened.
Can you provide URLs about these things? I am not familiar with them.
Look around JavaGrande.org, and also take a look at pointers to Java Grande from Sun's site (via Google). Gosling and others were talking about these kinds of features even before the founding of Java Grande in 1998. The only thing that has gotten addressed is some floating point issues.
In any case, the overall point remains: C# delivers all the major points that Sun has promised but not delivered: standardization, full open source implementations (no thanks to Microsoft, however), and decent support for numerical programs (operators, subscripting, iteration, value classes). Furthermore, we know that the core of C#/CLR is not covered by Microsoft patents, while the core of Java/JVM is covered by some Sun patents. I think if openness and features are primary issues, the choice is clear.
I still use Java instead of C# for now, but only because we have a lot of Java legacy code and because the Mono implementation isn't quite up to snuff. In a year or so, I see nothing keeping me with Java.
And what's your point? H-1Bs are temporary visas. Of course, if the people can't stay, they'll take their jobs with them. If you don't like that, the solution would be to increase immigrant visas, not decrease H-1B visas.
Guess who was in charge in India? Right. The very same Indians who had quickly risen into management positions. These guys had (apparently) been hired to learn the business and then to export it to some place where the workforce is cheaper
Of course. I don't see anything wrong with that. At least they learn US business and engineering practices, which are generally pretty good. They also make business contacts here.
What do you think is going to happen if you don't let them come here? Are you naive enough to think that they'll take up farming instead?
The US is far from having a monopoly on successful business practices or engineering methods. If you don't let them come here, they'll go to Europe or Japan, or trainers will just go directly to India. They'll make business contacts there. They'll adopt European or Japanese standards and business practices. That's worse for the US.
and there aren't all those pesky EPA and OSHA types to deal with.
US educated and trained engineers going back to India will be much more sympathetic to introducing EPA and OSHA regulations there. In the long run, that will bring India up to our levels of costs and standards, and it will make us more competitive. If you don't let the people come here and experience life in the US, things will change much more slowly in India and other developing nations.
Idiot
You don't have an argument, that's why you need to resort to insults. I'm sorry if you think your job is threatened, but the reality is that engineers are just facing the same globalization issues that farmers, garment workers, and many others have faced before.
Our best approach for dealing with that is openness: we need to make the whole globe reasonably wealthy and decrease poverty. Then, we don't have to worry about losing our jobs to some third world nation because they can cut costs.
In my experience, most programmers are the equivalent of assembly line workers, trained to do a few specific steps on specific machinery without any deeper understanding of what is going on. And most of them probably don't want to continue programming into their 40's or 50's anyway, they want to move up into management, design, and other non-programming jobs. Think of the career path of most programmers as that of MacDonald's cooks: their job is not about the food, and you wouldn't expect them to be gourmet chefs in their 40's or 50's, you'd expect them to move up in management or go into other professions.
People who are dedicated to programming as a life-long profession and who are skilled enough to pull it of are far and few between.
Overall, I just fail to see a problem there.
If you take out the H-1Bs, the jobs won't go to US engineers, they will simply move to sites in India, China, and Europe. That can happen on a moment's notice, since big companies already have R&D centers there. The main reason why companies bring engineers to the US is because the engineers themselves prefer it; it's a kind of perk.w
If the US forces those jobs to move overseas by reducing H-1B quotas, the US will lose the tax revenue, production and know-how will move abroad, and the trade deficit will increase. The net result is much worse for the US.
H-1Bs are a wonderful deal for the US: other countries pay for decades of child care, schooling, medical care, and social services, and the US reaps the most productive years of those individuals. The countries who ought to be upset about it is the countries where foreign engineers are coming from, not the US. And, in fact, European and Asian countries would love nothing more than if the US closed its borders--it would be a shot in the arm for their own industries.
Whatever. I gave other examples. The point is: companies aren't people. Companies generally cannot be relied on to keep promises. If they aren't willing to commit to something in writing, don't rely on it.
Never assign to ill faith what can be explained by incompetence (Napoleon). But what do you have in mind?
I don't ascribe it to anything in particular. I don't care why they behave the way they do. I don't even care whether they have "good reasons" (Sun may well find some "good reason" to sue open source implementations of Java off the face of this planet). I just note that I can't rely on them to keep their promises. For example, Sun has dropped out of two standardization processes, they weaseled out of early open source promises, they have failed to deliver things like VM sharing and value classes for Java, they have failed to keep the VM competitive across platforms (the X11 version of Java2D sucks, and that's Suns fault), and they promised to make Java a platform for portable client applications but instead put most of their efforts into server-side applications, to name just a few Java-related issues.hae
Imagine a programmer trying to fix a huge piece of software that has been developed over a long time with little modularity. The programmer has only a marginal understanding of how it work. The programmer is kept awake by Jolt and deadlines. I think it's a fair guess that they are going to be making lots of avoidable mistakes. Well, welcome to the world of medicine.
Given the quality of porn on the Internet, it's perhaps not surprising that there isn't much moaning.
No, I'm not. It's just that you have trouble reading carefully.
IBM has two jvm's. They have the Hursley JVM which is a port/licensed jvm based on Sun's source base. However, IBM also own's OTI and OTI has j9, which is a totally clean-room jvm that recently got full certification. So IBM does in fact have it's own JVM.
A "JVM" isn't a "Java" implementation. Furthermore, IBM is a Java licensee, so no matter what they implement, they are not an example of Sun allowing independent third party implementation.
Whatever the reason, it means that Java is not free, and it means that any open source effort that "pollutes" the language might end up in Sun's cross-hairs as well.
There are ton's of JVMs out there, many of the opensource or done by small groups of individuals. I doubt ( but I can't be sure ) that they all have agreements with Sun. http://java-virtual-machine.net/other.html
Yup, there are many JVMs, but those are not independent Java implementations. A Java implementation consists of JVMs together with a complete set of libraries.
There might be independent J2ME implementations somewhere from some small outfit, but there don't seem to be independent J2SE or J2EE implementations, either open source or commercial.
If you think that there are indepdent, open source Java platform implementations, please point me at the non-Sun source code for the part of the implementation that implements Swing.
I've also worked with Sun professionally, but my experience is that I've never seen them try half the stuff I see MS try to pull.
It's only "pulling" with MS because MS has a monopoly. Sun doesn't, so it's legally OK and reasonably accepted for them to do certain things. If MS had 20% of the market, little of what they have done would cause any legal problems.
I'm just saying: you can't rely on Sun's PR statements. Sun is a publically traded company, and if their prior promises were not legally binding, they can reneg on their promises. And they have, in a big way in the past, for example, with Java standardization.
In any case, I'm not saying that anything Sun has done has been wrong. I am saying, however, that you are kidding yourself if you think that you can trust Sun to stick to promises of "openness" any more than you can trust Microsoft. Sun has the same kind of lawyers, PR people, and stock holders. They will say anything that's legal, defensible, and doesn't damage their PR too badly as long as it makes more profit or gets the stock price up; that's not just common sense, it's the fiduciary duty of its officers. And, if anything, Sun has demonstrated that they can't be trusted by pulling out of standardization efforts and failing to pull through on other Java-related promises.
Oh, yes, it is.
IBM has 2 JVM implementations
And your point is what? We aren't talking about "JVM implementations" we are talking about Java platform implementations.
Furthermore, IBM is a licensee no matter what they implement it or how they implement it, so they are not an example of how Sun lets third parties implement Java freely.
That objection is irrelevant, for several reasons. First, we pretty much know what the related Microsoft's and Sun's patents are. Microsoft does not appear to hold any key patents necessary for any parts of .NET that most people would care about, and they almost certainly don't hold any patents on the core C#/CLR language and runtime. Second, since .NET is not a well-defined platform, even if small parts of it cannot be reimplemented due to patent issues, it doesn't affect much of anything.
For Sun, in contrast, we know that they hold key patents on core Java technology. Furthermore, Sun has made no legally binding commitments to letting others use those patents in their implementations. And, if you fail to implement parts of the Java 2 platform, you basically fail to implement Java.
However, Java Community Process director Onno Kluyt said: [...]
That's all a bunch of hot air, nothing legally binding. We know that Sun holds key patents on core technologies required to implement a conforming JVM. Sun has made no commitment to allowing commercial third party implementations, and even for open source implementations, it's all a bunch of inferences and promises. Anybody who actually wants to create a third party Java implementation has to get something from Sun in writing or forever live at risk of a lawsuit. And that will be true until Sun's patents enter the public domain.
It's pretty clear at this point that Microsoft holds no patents on core C#/CLR technology, and we can presume that they designed C#/CLR to avoid running afoul of any Sun patents. Whatever patents Microsoft may hold are at best tangential. Overall, that leaves us with a significantly better situation for C#/CLR than Java/JVM: with Java/JVM, we have to trust Sun's promises, with C#/CLR, we don't have to trust anybody.
- No support for value classes.
- Java generics are not type safe across compilation units.
- Java arrays require dynamic type checks.
- No iteration syntax.
- Does not have basic operator overloading (arithmetic operators).
- Does have non-operator overloading.
- Poorly thought out source file and binary file packaging conventions.
- Casts are prefix.
- No lexical closures.
- Java2D bindings to non-Windows environments are low quality.
- Some very poorly thought out core libraries: I/O, image handling, text/string.
These, and other problems with Java seriously limit its utility and scope. Java is decent for the server side hacking where it is currently popular, but it's a poor choice for things like numerical and semi-numerical algorithms. C# improves on it somewhat.- It does not have a clear cross-platform GUI (Tkinter doesn't work on OS X, wxPython isn't a standard part of the platform binary distributions).
- Many packages rely on native code in shared libraries.
- Python byte code is orders of magnitude slower than Java or C# code.
- Python does not have optional static type checking.
- It is hard to make standalone, self-contained applications out of it.
- Python does not have a well-defined language standard, nor does it have multiple independent implementations.
Python could be more of a contender if someone built a good native code compiler for it. None of the current attempts are very good or result in much speedup.The way it is, Python is good for many scripting and prototyping applications. But for a general-purpose, high-quality programming language, we still have to look elsewhere.
"Exorbitant" means "greedy" in this context, and that's why we declared it to be illegal.
And "we, the people" have nothing at all to do with deciding where ownership ends and greed begins.
We, the people, decide where ownership ends. With real property, it's a constitutional issue. With intellectual property, for the most part, it's not even that. We can change both through the democratic process.
Ownership of something is a real, legal, fact. Greed is a human emotion.
That's what I was saying. That's why music companies can both own tunes legally and still be greedy. Get it now?
It's Blackdown Java. It is not a third party implementation. Sun simply dumped their source code onto a bunch of people outside Sun who then fixed a bunch of bugs and ported it to Linux.
IBM has had it's JVM for eons now. There are lots of embedded JVMs.
IBM does not have its own Java implementation--they have a license to Sun's Java implementation, and they replace some of Sun's components with their own.
(ii) Sun has tolerated those implementations for years now.
Sun hasn't tolerated anything. As far as I can tell, anybody who is shipping anything remotely resembling a Java platform implementation has a contractual agreement with Sun. In fact, merely to claim that something is Java, you need a contractual agreement with Sun (because of their trademark).
(iii) In the past, Sun has never shown to be anti-competitive as microsoft. They don't defend or promote Solaris at any cost the way microsoft does.
I see no basis for that statement. Sun simply isn't leveraging their monopoly because they don't have one. As a 15 year Sun customer, all the indications I have seen are that Sun is worse than Microsoft when it comes to cut-throat competition and intellectual property, they are simply not as successful.