A spokesman for the consortium of Japanese car manufacturers along with his special-interest counterpart in Washington issued a report on 78million new U.S. jobs that will be created by outsourcing the manufacturing of automobile parts from the major U.S. auto manufacturers to the ultra-efficient manufacturing centers of Japan.
I also believe that we should open up the H1b program BIG-TIME. The Bush administration has really gone protectionist with H1bs which has accelerated and confounded the outsourcing problem.
Under the Clinton administration, the philosophy was to bring the best brains in the world here and give them a chance to earn citizenship - an approach that both grew our home-tech-corridors and helped keep wages down at a time when hyper-wage-inflation was a real threat. I would much rather bring all the bright Indians (and Russians and Asians and...) here and let them compete for jobs with us, with the same standards and costs of living than shovel the money and hemorrhage the jobs to the business owners in Bangalore. At least America is still doing the knowledge work, even if we have to open up the H1bs to the point where we are paying the guys minimum wage, it still works better for us in the long run.
We have a real problem, and you are absolutely right - we need to get the word out. High-tech companies are more progressive and faster to mobilize than traditional businesses, so it makes sense that they did this first. But if it is possible to export a process as complicated as software development, or chip design, it is definitely possible to export accounting and financial research and....
It is only a matter of time...
I am seriously thinking of moving to Shanghai where money is flowing through the streets and the growth rate is in the double digits... Staying and watching the slow decline of America just seems too depressing...
Apparently you need to do some research, the U.S. granted the Philippine Islands commonwealth status (similar to present-day Puerto Rico) in 1935. The Republic of the Philippines was granted full independance on July 4, 1946.
I concede, my memory failed me by 4 years. Sorry about that. The commonwealth status was a precursor to statehood, which was rejected by corrupt politicians in the Philippines. This is something that you will not get a clear view of in the U.S., because it is somewhat embarassing.
Interestingly, there is still quite a bit of activity revolving around statehood for the Philippines. It could still happen, but it wouldn't be terribly soon. The U.S. would need to place them back into commonwealth status first, yady-yah... see this link... Politics...
Work ethic ? Education ? Jeez, don't get me started; just let me say you have limited experiences.
My limited experiences include getting engaged to a Filipina, spending months in the Philippines on business and getting to know my future family, learning Tagalog and emersing myself in the culture to better understand what I was getting myself into. This on top of a long string of business relationships which led to me meeting my finacee in the first place.
Education: who's on top?
IT Manager looking to outsource? Try these guys: link
There is only one national language and it's Tagalog. Why Filipinos are very good in English, whether written or spoken, is the fact that it's the medium of instruction taught in public/private schools, and institutions.
Do your own research. Perhaps you can prove you have by telling me the source of the following:
Section 7. For purposes of communication and instruction, the official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and, until otherwise provided by law, English.
It's Filipina.. And it's Filipino.. It's Filipinos
Well, bub, make up your mind. The country is the Philippines (yes, two p's). While in common language the usage of Filipina and Filipino is used to denote Female and Male members of the Philippines, respectively, "Philippinos" is used to denote all members of the Philippines... Although your mileage may vary, as even the Philippinos themselves seem to argue about shifting the "Ph" to an "F" and the "pp" to a "p". Sloppiness in spelling is my right. If you want to teach english (or Tagalog), be my guest, but do it somewhere else and just give me an "F" please.
Since you know so much about their language (I speak it, btw), pehaps you can check the spelling of, and translate for our readers, the following: Bastos ka tanga at mabaho
BTW: I am sticking up for you, you mahilig makipagtalong pinoy
I will take the middle-ground on this issue. I work in I.T., and have seen the market collapse, nonetheless. Uncertainty lies ahead, and we must be willing to conquer these issues as workers, families, and corporations -- but protectionist legislation is not the answer.
I disagree. I am generally not in favor of protectionist policies. But when it comes to outsourcing knowledge jobs, I think we have a different situation on our hands.
This "outsourcing" is also a key source of income for the people and families of India, who also need food, drinking water, healthcare, etc. If we continue to live in excess while the poorest nations are not given a hands-up, this will only lead to further class strife and conflict.
Then let them innovate. No one is stopping them from using their own money to invest in their own businesses that build products to compete in the American market. I am all in favor of honest competition. What is happening is *not* competition. It is an economic hemmorage that will eventually eliminate our middle class, if allowed to continue.
We are in the process of training knowledge workers in other countries to compete, giving them the foundation technology to do it and paying them for that favor while unplugging some of the hardest-working, most competent individuals in the United States from any hope of making a decent living in their field. Another side-effect is that it does not help steer American students into Science and Engineering to hear that they cannot get jobs, or cannot get a decent paying job, yet they have to make it through academics that are significantly more difficult than any other field of study.
What's next? No more scientists in America? After all, it would be cheaper to outsource basic scientific research to China.
Do you want to live in *that* United States?
Make no mistake about it, this is a threat to America and the most important role of a government is to protect itself against threats. Every high-paying knowledge job that is exported represents a significant tax-income loss for the government. Perhaps, besides examining tarrifs, the government should examine tax cuts or waivers for those sectors that have been the hardest hit. If technology professionals could pay 10% taxes instead of 45% taxes, companies could employ them cheaper, at least until a long-term solution to outsourcing is worked out. It would be better for everyone if the government collected a lower tax for a while, keeping more jobs in the U.S. and lowering the long-term threat to America's competitiveness (both because of educational choices of young Americans and third-world technology corridors that become super-charged through outsource funding).
Disagreement to the parent aside, isn't it the greed of the US companies that are giving the jobs to India? The workers over there are happy to take the work they are offered and get what is considered decent pay there. The US companies are offering, it's not necessarily the Indians 'stealing' the jobs.
I think what the original poster was saying was that the technology economy was an American invention, that lack of measures to HEAVILY tax/tarrif outsourcing of science/engineering jobs related to technology has resulted in a hole in the economy (that is hemmoraging money and jobs), that companies will always exploit these holes to their own advantage (regardless of consequences) and it is the duty of the government to plug these holes when they appear.
I tend to agree.
Technology, specifically the Internet, has made this type of outsourcing possible. Economies have never before had to cope with the problem of exporting their most elite jobs to third-world countries. It was unthinkable for a very large number of reasons, but unthinkable wouldn't stop it from happening - greed would have still made it happen. It was impossible because of logistics. The Internet has changed "impossible" into "viable". It is now time that we take a good look at our economy and ask ourselves some difficult questions for the first time in history. We need to ask ourselves if we are willing to let our megacorps become more profitable by exporting the cream of our economy to third-world nations, decimating our middle-class in the process.
Don't let yourself believe that it stops at IT jobs and call-centers either. Those are just the easiest to do. You can also outsource accounting, actuarial services, risk management, investment/brokerage research, etc. etc. etc.
All knowledge jobs are subject to export and will eventually, in fact, be exported, unless governmental measures are taken.
We will be left with a completely first-person service economy and a bunch of doctors (first-person) and lawyers (god knows, they will figure out a way to ensure that the legal profession is not outsourcable). Anyone care to guess the US GDP after this acquiesces?
The Phillipines apparently works at half of what he was being quoted for India contracts. Granted, the English is a bit better in India, but when price is king, India's better quality product didn't matter. (India... hope you've enjoyed your 15 minutes!)
Actually, the english is better in the Philippines. There are two national languages in the Philippines; English and Tagolog. America actually occupied the Phillipines from the time of the Spanish-American war until the 1950s, when it was offered Statehood. The Philippines declined and became a sovereign nation, but still had American bases until the 1990s. During this time, English became as widely spooken in business as Tagolog and it is considered a pre-requisit to get a job.
I have visited the Philippines twice and my fiancee is Filippina. I have also done business with Philippino companies and have directly witnessed their work ethic. I have been working in the Silicon Valley for 12 years and also have experience with Indian workers and Indian companies. I can tell you with full certainty: Philippinos have better work ethic, are generally smarter and have a higher degree of education, speak english more fluently and work cheaper than Indians. The one downside is that, since this is not well recognized, there are not as many companies doing outsourcing in the Philippines. Yet.
Competition to India is coming. And it is not just the Philippines. Asia cranks out more engineers than any other part of the world. These guys are smart, ambitious and will work for nothing.
For my dollar, however, I would still rather outsource to Russian firms. They have the best engineers in the world (outside of the Silicon Valley itself).
ut they might find themselves sadly out of luck because of high "cost to exit". See, the capital involved in IT is the knowledge, therefore, the people. Companies are irrelevant. Trying to change the outsourcing provider means discarding currently invested capital and starting from scratch.
The reason this is not yet evident is because we're not through the first wave of excitement over outsourcing, and not too many companies have tried to switch over to "cheaper" outsourcing provider. But when the realization comes, the hangover will be bitter.
This fact is very well understood, because any company that engaged in outsourcing went through it when they moved projects from inside them company to outside the company. Don't make the mistake of feeling confident because of an illusion that the company needs you.
If it were that important (critical) to the client company, they would never have outsourced in the first place. If they did outsource something critical, it is only a matter of time before they realize their mistake and bring it back inside.
Either way, you are a commodity service and you will be replaced by the lowest bidder. The knoweldge lock-in that you talk about is an illusion. The moment a outsource firm tries to pull knowledge-lock-in extortion games is the moment the project moves from development/maintance phase to full documentation phase.
Unfortunately, this write-up is totally screwed up. The intended emulator is QEMU, which can already be used on PPC/Linux to run Wine at speeds aproaching native speeds. I posted a link to the forum where this is discussed elsewhere, but here it is again.
QEMU is a dynamic translator that decompiles x86 executables and recompiles them into PPC, caching the results. You can find the qemu project here.
Not only will this work, but it will work FAST. In fact, it will probably even be possible to drop windows DLLs onto your mac in the same way that you drop them onto Linux in order to get Wine to work better (using native windows DLLs instead of Wine clean-room versions). Remember, QEMU is a dynamic translator.
We have something new here folks. It is brilliant, powerful and I am dizzy considering the ramifications.
What these guys have done is effectively created a distributed wetware network of human problem solvers that are rewarded by porn for solving problems in realtime. This is like SETI@HOME, except you have highly motivated nodes utilizing human brains instead of piddly little silicon chips.
What other types of problems might they throw at this network? Decoding images is brilliant, but let's think of other uses?
How about categorization? Google could contract out to this network the categorization of images for image searching.
In an attempt to think about uses, my brain is overheating. This is an absolutely incredible idea. Porn sites could even stop charging (users) and instead start leasing out their "borg clusters" to data processors that need to do highly complex data processing. You could achieve results in realtime for problems that could never before be solved with computers! Computer vision, language processing,...
I can even imagine new video compression algorithms that take advantage of the ability of humans to exactly identify objects that are moving between frames. The trick is just to decompose the problem so that the humans could easily "click click click" the hard computer vision part of the problem away...
Someone should start a company to leverage this idea. Here is to PORN!!! The bringer of all tech revolutions!!!!
1. Javascript problem presenter to access porn
2. Lots of porn
3. Sell borg processing time
4. Profit!
Editorialists have decried these losses of privacy, as if it were the most sacred of human rights. But just what is the value of privacy? Do we really need it? And, indeed, can we afford it? After all, everything from your son's shoplifting to the destruction of the towers at the World Trade Center could have been prevented if we had less of an ability to do things in secret.
There are thousands of years of history that show, without exception, that power breeds corruption and abuse. The right to privacy should be considered a counterbalance to power. If those in power obliterate privacy, they do not have to fear the repercussions of their abuse of that power, because they will know where and who may resist them and how they will go about it.
"... God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty....And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787
What would Thomas Jefferson say to your comment? We actually have a problem in America today; Many Americans have lately fallen victim to the idea that they should sacrifice their privacy and other essential human rights (primarily those that Jefferson was so proud of) so that the Government can more effectively protect them from terrorists and other such nonsense. The only real effect is that the Government constructs much stronger defenses against it's own people than it had previously.
History has shown that it is significantly more difficult to acquire basic human rights than it is to give them up. History also shows that regardless of the reason for sacrificing them, once sacrificed, they will be exploited for other reasons. These reasons may seem rational at the time, and each new exploitation may be just a small step from the last one. But over time, the civil liberties of a people are chipped away into oblivion with this mindset.
Not only do I disagree with your post, but I believe that because of the growth of information technology combined with our current privacy crisis, America is closing in on an inevitable, new type of rebellion; Today, corporations that manage data and services that are very private to individuals are regulated and controlled with many consequences. One of those consequences is that the Government may tap into the private information flow of it's citizens, be them voice communications, auto-theft gps services, financial records or whatnot. Eventually, ad-hoc, encrypted networks that contain no Government accessible back-doors will spring up. It is even likely that communities such as Slashdot will be where such movements start, and therfore may one day be considered an enemy of the State.. Interesting thought, huh?
Projects such as freenet represent a blow across the bow of this fight for basic privacy rights. I expect that it will eventually become messy, as frustration at not being able to penetrate these networks sweeps through agencies such as the FBI, NSA, IRS, etc.. The Government will probably even try to make such networks illegal at some point and it could take years or decades before the basic rights to privacy return to our lives. But equilibrium will eventually be restored and we will have the ability to be untrackabl
Since Verisign recently was awarded the contract for the EPC/RFID registry, there has been activity on their yahoo message board about RFID. Some of it is pretty interesting, although I think the general discourse here is more intelligent (imagine!).
Here is a link to get you started if you are interested in talking about RFID with people that invest in Verisign: link here
If the U.S. govt would ask a University Comp-Sci department (any University) to initiate an open-source secure electronic voting system, this problem would solve itself very rapidly.
Why do these things continue to go out to bid instead of being handled in academia where they should be?
After reading this, my initial thought was "AHA! Excellent idea." Upon reflection, though, one reason the DNS system works so well is because the task of maintaining records falls on the owner of the domain. i.e. Yahoo is responsible to make sure yahoo.com maps to the correct IP.
Would you trust the spammers to set their own "status" to "revoked"? Kinda reminds me of the evil bit.
Actually, I was suggesting something a little different; A Certificate status namespace that was administered by a single organization (or by many organizations that are accredited and using a similar process). The idea would be to have certificate status on a non-domain-name namespace, using the DNS infrastructure.
Most of your reasons are in fact why signed email WON'T work.
Let's talk about this. Interesting subject.
B. CRLs don't scale. Period. There's a reason why PKIs hardly ever get past 100K users.
CRLs as currently formulated are indeed pretty nasty. They need to evolve. Let's assume that VRSN does run the CRL, for instance... Couldn't they create domain records for checking on the revocation status of certificates? It seems to me that by having a namespace in the DNS registry devoted to certificate "status" would effectively solve this problem.
Ah yes, this is new... But what I am saying to you is that I agree and disagree. Yes, existing CRL schemes will not scale. Yes, they can be made to scale with a little creativity and existing infrastructure.
C. Someone to sue...only in the US is that an attractive feature.
The point is that someone is responsible. Sue them or just make fun of them in public, whatever... At least you know "who".
D. Sure, but most users are unlikely to get savvy enough to understand the distinction. The proposed scheme takes that decision out of the user's hand.
Well, I would think that the purpose of being able to throw away unsigned email is self evident. If a few big ISPs standardized on this, it wouldn't take long for email software to be updated and the "basic memes of avoiding SPAM" to become common knowledge.
E. Sure, for that.001% of transactions where conventional forms of contract aren't good enough. Most people wouldn't sign a binding contract without legal advice, at which point they have access to a notary, etc., and the signature feature on email has no value.
Add the disclosure "discussion, not legally binding" like you would in a written and hand-signed correspondence. Esign makes things easier and quicker for commerce - it returns us, in some ways, to the world before email.
My take is that this is a problem that is hard enough to address even partially---adding the burden of a massive worldwide PKI deployment would make it impossible. Verisign or Thawte would love it.
Eventually, like it or not, there will be a worldwide PKI. It is inevitable. It has to start somewhere, and stopping SPAM seems like a good place to start.
Yea, lots of issues at first. But the benefits will be abundant. And who's to say VRSN has to control it?
Anyone with experience with these standardization bodies knows that all of the complaining has to do with who's ideas win and who's name ends up on the standards documents. It's a particularly virulent form of academic arrogance. Solutions for signed email to stop SPAM are almost as old as email. Trust me, nothing is ever going to happen if one of the big guys doesn't put their ass on the line.
While the guys at the IETF fight for who has the biggest, ahem..., pen, the known email universe is collapsing under the weight of SPAM.
Let Yahoo hack and slash their way to a solution that works and then the standardization megalomaniacs can claim credit for inventing that idea 15 years ago while undergraduates at Stanford, Cambridge and MIT...
Nothing new needs to be invented here. What we should all be pushing for is signed email. There are many advantages to signed email, but here are the most relevant:
(A) Signed email signs not just the message headers, but also the message body. No chance of header substitution.
(B) Signed email associates signatures with some certificate chain and, presumably, a CRL (Certificate Revocation List). Abuses can lead to certificates being revoked.
(C) Because of the certificate chain, there is a chain of trust. There is always SOMEONE to sue!
(D) It is a simple measure to simply throw out any email that is not signed.
(E) Because of esign legislation, signed emails can be considered legally binding. In other words, lies, misrepresentations, libel, etc... in signed emails provides you with grounds for prosecution in courts of law - as if the signer wrote you the document and signed his name at the bottom (and yes, they can also be used for legally binding contracts and whatnot).
There is an issue with "Crossing the chasm" with signed email, of course. It would require a body such as AOL and/or Yahoo rising up and providing signature filters on incoming email to force such a solution into the mainstream. But once this is done, SPAM will practically dissappear. And any SPAM that comes in through signed channels can be dealt with in a satisfactory way.
I do not believe this harms any of us, btw...
You want privacy? The same techniques that allow you to sign email also allows you to encrypt email to your destination.
Worried about anonymity? Certificates can be issued that authenticate an email address without full disclosure of the owner of that address (but this may not be satisfactory for stopping abuses). Anonymity and stopping SPAM may, unfortunately, be mutually exclusive goals.... Any thoughts?
Want to sell a good or service in the US? Require that all folks involved in its growth/manufacture/transport/assembly/management meet US requirements for wage, working conditions, etc. Of course, this requirement would violate nearly every World Trade Agreement and is therefore infeasible under current legislation, but interesting nonetheless.*
How about imposing a tarrif, derived from the difference between the target company's sweat-shop labor rates and minimum wage, on all goods and services imported into the U.S.? One could, for simplicities sake, use an average sweat-shop rate for the source country and allow sourcing companies to submit audits to change their tarrif rates.
Easy way to avoid the tarrif? Proove that all of your company's employees meet the minimum wage requirements.
If this is going to happen, then it should not be just for the record industry. There should be a non-profit that monitors statistics regarding copyrighted material being distributed on the Internet. These statistics should then be used to distribute the "copyright tax" that is levied.
In other words, the collected money should be distributed according to statistics to *all* copyright owners, not just the RIAA. Authors, Video-Game publishers (and other software), Independent music and film producers, etc..
Who does the RIAA think they are to get better protection than other copyright owners?
The idea is absurd. How on earth would you patent an XML Schema?
I think MSFT would find it a little difficult to fight that court battle.
Besides, it would be super easy to get around the problem even if their patent turned out to be enforcable. A program like Open Office would simply need to have it's own XML schema and an XSLT save filter. Allow thrid-party XSLT to be loaded in and selected at save time.
Open Office could be distributed without violating the suggested patent. The XSLT could be bolted on dynamically (e.g. suck it down over the network straight from the save dialog). For those that don't know, XSLT is a transformation language used to trasform XML of one schema to XML of another schema. See the spec for more details.
I have been designing (architecturally, i.e. in my head) a system for distribution of royalties and bounties for some time now.
I believe that such a system could revolutionize not only open-source development, but many hertofore altruistic creative/intellectual property creation related tasks.
The basic idea behind a royalty server is to slowly collect dependencies between intellectual properties and attempt to draw commercial distributors (through public guilt and ridicule, if neccessary) into sharing their profits with the server. Other techniques would, of course, also be used, including bounties, donations and general marketing. The collected funds would be distributed according to a dependency graph to the community that created the target properties.
I am actually interested in finding some people who would like to work on this with me. I think the system could become self-sustaining reasonably fast (a portion of all collected moneys would be directed at the company running the server). But the really exciting part about this is that contributors could, theoretically, collect a check for as long as their contributions are in use in the wild.
Why is Gartner saying not to disclose Linux deployments?
It seems to me that disclosing Linux deployments is irrelevant. SCO lawsuits win or loose, anyone who has Linux installed will meet the same destiny, regardless of whether they discuss it... The only party that gains from not disclosing Linux deployments is, ahem... Microsoft...
you assume that the outer space settlers, goldminers, and cowboys (call them as you like) never come back to earth, and thus will never be responsible for their actions (therefore=chaos and "wild west" situation). But they're bound to come back, and therefore face trial when they come back.
Kinda like Europeans having to return to Europe and face trial for their misdeeds in the new world, a few hundred years back?
Nope... You only have to assume that these "spacers" know how to hide their activities in space... Not so tough, me thinks... Beyond that, and more than likely, there will be permanent settlements with the real "spacers" that earth laws barely touch that run contraband (and front for) "earthlings" that are bound by our legal system.
Or, alternatively, these "spacers" could base their "earthly" operations somewhere less litigious than the U.S.
As the article says about lawyers, it 'turns out you can't leave Earth without them.'
In space, no one can hear a lawyer scream...
Seriously, though, when we do get our collective asses off this planet, we will go through a period of wild west in space. Unless space is being policed by a government body (highly improbable for a LONG LONG time), property rights will be unenforcable. Physical access to celestial bodies will be all that is required to make claims. And claims will be impossible to enforce if that physical presence changes.
Lawyers? They only make a difference if there are LAWS backed by POLICE. Take those two things away and a lawyer becomes a big mouth without teeth...
Slashdot Mirror
A spokesman for the consortium of Japanese car manufacturers along with his special-interest counterpart in Washington issued a report on 78million new U.S. jobs that will be created by outsourcing the manufacturing of automobile parts from the major U.S. auto manufacturers to the ultra-efficient manufacturing centers of Japan.
I think we are in agreement.
...) here and let them compete for jobs with us, with the same standards and costs of living than shovel the money and hemorrhage the jobs to the business owners in Bangalore. At least America is still doing the knowledge work, even if we have to open up the H1bs to the point where we are paying the guys minimum wage, it still works better for us in the long run.
....
I also believe that we should open up the H1b program BIG-TIME. The Bush administration has really gone protectionist with H1bs which has accelerated and confounded the outsourcing problem.
Under the Clinton administration, the philosophy was to bring the best brains in the world here and give them a chance to earn citizenship - an approach that both grew our home-tech-corridors and helped keep wages down at a time when hyper-wage-inflation was a real threat. I would much rather bring all the bright Indians (and Russians and Asians and
We have a real problem, and you are absolutely right - we need to get the word out. High-tech companies are more progressive and faster to mobilize than traditional businesses, so it makes sense that they did this first. But if it is possible to export a process as complicated as software development, or chip design, it is definitely possible to export accounting and financial research and
It is only a matter of time...
I am seriously thinking of moving to Shanghai where money is flowing through the streets and the growth rate is in the double digits... Staying and watching the slow decline of America just seems too depressing...
Apparently you need to do some research, the U.S. granted the Philippine Islands commonwealth status (similar to present-day Puerto Rico) in 1935. The Republic of the Philippines was granted full independance on July 4, 1946.
... Politics...
I concede, my memory failed me by 4 years. Sorry about that. The commonwealth status was a precursor to statehood, which was rejected by corrupt politicians in the Philippines. This is something that you will not get a clear view of in the U.S., because it is somewhat embarassing.
Interestingly, there is still quite a bit of activity revolving around statehood for the Philippines. It could still happen, but it wouldn't be terribly soon. The U.S. would need to place them back into commonwealth status first, yady-yah... see this link
Work ethic ? Education ? Jeez, don't get me started; just let me say you have limited experiences.
My limited experiences include getting engaged to a Filipina, spending months in the Philippines on business and getting to know my future family, learning Tagalog and emersing myself in the culture to better understand what I was getting myself into. This on top of a long string of business relationships which led to me meeting my finacee in the first place.
Education: who's on top? IT Manager looking to outsource? Try these guys: link
Do your own research. Perhaps you can prove you have by telling me the source of the following: It's Filipina
Well, bub, make up your mind. The country is the Philippines (yes, two p's). While in common language the usage of Filipina and Filipino is used to denote Female and Male members of the Philippines, respectively, "Philippinos" is used to denote all members of the Philippines... Although your mileage may vary, as even the Philippinos themselves seem to argue about shifting the "Ph" to an "F" and the "pp" to a "p". Sloppiness in spelling is my right. If you want to teach english (or Tagalog), be my guest, but do it somewhere else and just give me an "F" please.
Since you know so much about their language (I speak it, btw), pehaps you can check the spelling of, and translate for our readers, the following: Bastos ka tanga at mabaho
BTW: I am sticking up for you, you mahilig makipagtalong pinoy
I will take the middle-ground on this issue. I work in I.T., and have seen the market collapse, nonetheless. Uncertainty lies ahead, and we must be willing to conquer these issues as workers, families, and corporations -- but protectionist legislation is not the answer.
I disagree. I am generally not in favor of protectionist policies. But when it comes to outsourcing knowledge jobs, I think we have a different situation on our hands.
This "outsourcing" is also a key source of income for the people and families of India, who also need food, drinking water, healthcare, etc. If we continue to live in excess while the poorest nations are not given a hands-up, this will only lead to further class strife and conflict.
Then let them innovate. No one is stopping them from using their own money to invest in their own businesses that build products to compete in the American market. I am all in favor of honest competition. What is happening is *not* competition. It is an economic hemmorage that will eventually eliminate our middle class, if allowed to continue.
We are in the process of training knowledge workers in other countries to compete, giving them the foundation technology to do it and paying them for that favor while unplugging some of the hardest-working, most competent individuals in the United States from any hope of making a decent living in their field. Another side-effect is that it does not help steer American students into Science and Engineering to hear that they cannot get jobs, or cannot get a decent paying job, yet they have to make it through academics that are significantly more difficult than any other field of study.
What's next? No more scientists in America? After all, it would be cheaper to outsource basic scientific research to China.
Do you want to live in *that* United States?
Make no mistake about it, this is a threat to America and the most important role of a government is to protect itself against threats. Every high-paying knowledge job that is exported represents a significant tax-income loss for the government. Perhaps, besides examining tarrifs, the government should examine tax cuts or waivers for those sectors that have been the hardest hit. If technology professionals could pay 10% taxes instead of 45% taxes, companies could employ them cheaper, at least until a long-term solution to outsourcing is worked out. It would be better for everyone if the government collected a lower tax for a while, keeping more jobs in the U.S. and lowering the long-term threat to America's competitiveness (both because of educational choices of young Americans and third-world technology corridors that become super-charged through outsource funding).
Disagreement to the parent aside, isn't it the greed of the US companies that are giving the jobs to India? The workers over there are happy to take the work they are offered and get what is considered decent pay there. The US companies are offering, it's not necessarily the Indians 'stealing' the jobs.
I think what the original poster was saying was that the technology economy was an American invention, that lack of measures to HEAVILY tax/tarrif outsourcing of science/engineering jobs related to technology has resulted in a hole in the economy (that is hemmoraging money and jobs), that companies will always exploit these holes to their own advantage (regardless of consequences) and it is the duty of the government to plug these holes when they appear.
I tend to agree.
Technology, specifically the Internet, has made this type of outsourcing possible. Economies have never before had to cope with the problem of exporting their most elite jobs to third-world countries. It was unthinkable for a very large number of reasons, but unthinkable wouldn't stop it from happening - greed would have still made it happen. It was impossible because of logistics. The Internet has changed "impossible" into "viable". It is now time that we take a good look at our economy and ask ourselves some difficult questions for the first time in history. We need to ask ourselves if we are willing to let our megacorps become more profitable by exporting the cream of our economy to third-world nations, decimating our middle-class in the process.
Don't let yourself believe that it stops at IT jobs and call-centers either. Those are just the easiest to do. You can also outsource accounting, actuarial services, risk management, investment/brokerage research, etc. etc. etc.
All knowledge jobs are subject to export and will eventually, in fact, be exported, unless governmental measures are taken.
We will be left with a completely first-person service economy and a bunch of doctors (first-person) and lawyers (god knows, they will figure out a way to ensure that the legal profession is not outsourcable). Anyone care to guess the US GDP after this acquiesces?
The Phillipines apparently works at half of what he was being quoted for India contracts. Granted, the English is a bit better in India, but when price is king, India's better quality product didn't matter. (India... hope you've enjoyed your 15 minutes!)
Actually, the english is better in the Philippines. There are two national languages in the Philippines; English and Tagolog. America actually occupied the Phillipines from the time of the Spanish-American war until the 1950s, when it was offered Statehood. The Philippines declined and became a sovereign nation, but still had American bases until the 1990s. During this time, English became as widely spooken in business as Tagolog and it is considered a pre-requisit to get a job.
I have visited the Philippines twice and my fiancee is Filippina. I have also done business with Philippino companies and have directly witnessed their work ethic. I have been working in the Silicon Valley for 12 years and also have experience with Indian workers and Indian companies. I can tell you with full certainty: Philippinos have better work ethic, are generally smarter and have a higher degree of education, speak english more fluently and work cheaper than Indians. The one downside is that, since this is not well recognized, there are not as many companies doing outsourcing in the Philippines. Yet.
Competition to India is coming. And it is not just the Philippines. Asia cranks out more engineers than any other part of the world. These guys are smart, ambitious and will work for nothing.
For my dollar, however, I would still rather outsource to Russian firms. They have the best engineers in the world (outside of the Silicon Valley itself).
ut they might find themselves sadly out of luck because of high "cost to exit". See, the capital involved in IT is the knowledge, therefore, the people. Companies are irrelevant. Trying to change the outsourcing provider means discarding currently invested capital and starting from scratch.
The reason this is not yet evident is because we're not through the first wave of excitement over outsourcing, and not too many companies have tried to switch over to "cheaper" outsourcing provider. But when the realization comes, the hangover will be bitter.
This fact is very well understood, because any company that engaged in outsourcing went through it when they moved projects from inside them company to outside the company. Don't make the mistake of feeling confident because of an illusion that the company needs you.
If it were that important (critical) to the client company, they would never have outsourced in the first place. If they did outsource something critical, it is only a matter of time before they realize their mistake and bring it back inside.
Either way, you are a commodity service and you will be replaced by the lowest bidder. The knoweldge lock-in that you talk about is an illusion. The moment a outsource firm tries to pull knowledge-lock-in extortion games is the moment the project moves from development/maintance phase to full documentation phase.
Unfortunately, this write-up is totally screwed up. The intended emulator is QEMU, which can already be used on PPC/Linux to run Wine at speeds aproaching native speeds. I posted a link to the forum where this is discussed elsewhere, but here it is again.
QEMU is a dynamic translator that decompiles x86 executables and recompiles them into PPC, caching the results. You can find the qemu project here.
Not only will this work, but it will work FAST. In fact, it will probably even be possible to drop windows DLLs onto your mac in the same way that you drop them onto Linux in order to get Wine to work better (using native windows DLLs instead of Wine clean-room versions). Remember, QEMU is a dynamic translator.
Take a look at their forums where this question was asked: qemu, not bochs
What these guys have done is effectively created a distributed wetware network of human problem solvers that are rewarded by porn for solving problems in realtime. This is like SETI@HOME, except you have highly motivated nodes utilizing human brains instead of piddly little silicon chips.
What other types of problems might they throw at this network? Decoding images is brilliant, but let's think of other uses?
How about categorization? Google could contract out to this network the categorization of images for image searching.
In an attempt to think about uses, my brain is overheating. This is an absolutely incredible idea. Porn sites could even stop charging (users) and instead start leasing out their "borg clusters" to data processors that need to do highly complex data processing. You could achieve results in realtime for problems that could never before be solved with computers! Computer vision, language processing,
I can even imagine new video compression algorithms that take advantage of the ability of humans to exactly identify objects that are moving between frames. The trick is just to decompose the problem so that the humans could easily "click click click" the hard computer vision part of the problem away
Someone should start a company to leverage this idea. Here is to PORN!!! The bringer of all tech revolutions!!!!
There are thousands of years of history that show, without exception, that power breeds corruption and abuse. The right to privacy should be considered a counterbalance to power. If those in power obliterate privacy, they do not have to fear the repercussions of their abuse of that power, because they will know where and who may resist them and how they will go about it.
What would Thomas Jefferson say to your comment? We actually have a problem in America today; Many Americans have lately fallen victim to the idea that they should sacrifice their privacy and other essential human rights (primarily those that Jefferson was so proud of) so that the Government can more effectively protect them from terrorists and other such nonsense. The only real effect is that the Government constructs much stronger defenses against it's own people than it had previously.
History has shown that it is significantly more difficult to acquire basic human rights than it is to give them up. History also shows that regardless of the reason for sacrificing them, once sacrificed, they will be exploited for other reasons. These reasons may seem rational at the time, and each new exploitation may be just a small step from the last one. But over time, the civil liberties of a people are chipped away into oblivion with this mindset.
Not only do I disagree with your post, but I believe that because of the growth of information technology combined with our current privacy crisis, America is closing in on an inevitable, new type of rebellion; Today, corporations that manage data and services that are very private to individuals are regulated and controlled with many consequences. One of those consequences is that the Government may tap into the private information flow of it's citizens, be them voice communications, auto-theft gps services, financial records or whatnot. Eventually, ad-hoc, encrypted networks that contain no Government accessible back-doors will spring up. It is even likely that communities such as Slashdot will be where such movements start, and therfore may one day be considered an enemy of the State.. Interesting thought, huh?
Projects such as freenet represent a blow across the bow of this fight for basic privacy rights. I expect that it will eventually become messy, as frustration at not being able to penetrate these networks sweeps through agencies such as the FBI, NSA, IRS, etc.. The Government will probably even try to make such networks illegal at some point and it could take years or decades before the basic rights to privacy return to our lives. But equilibrium will eventually be restored and we will have the ability to be untrackabl
Since Verisign recently was awarded the contract for the EPC/RFID registry, there has been activity on their yahoo message board about RFID. Some of it is pretty interesting, although I think the general discourse here is more intelligent (imagine!).
Here is a link to get you started if you are interested in talking about RFID with people that invest in Verisign: link here
If the U.S. govt would ask a University Comp-Sci department (any University) to initiate an open-source secure electronic voting system, this problem would solve itself very rapidly.
Why do these things continue to go out to bid instead of being handled in academia where they should be?
Most of your reasons are in fact why signed email WON'T work.
.001% of transactions where conventional forms of contract aren't good enough. Most people wouldn't sign a binding contract without legal advice, at which point they have access to a notary, etc., and the signature feature on email has no value.
Let's talk about this. Interesting subject.
B. CRLs don't scale. Period. There's a reason why PKIs hardly ever get past 100K users.
CRLs as currently formulated are indeed pretty nasty. They need to evolve. Let's assume that VRSN does run the CRL, for instance... Couldn't they create domain records for checking on the revocation status of certificates? It seems to me that by having a namespace in the DNS registry devoted to certificate "status" would effectively solve this problem.
Ah yes, this is new... But what I am saying to you is that I agree and disagree. Yes, existing CRL schemes will not scale. Yes, they can be made to scale with a little creativity and existing infrastructure.
C. Someone to sue...only in the US is that an attractive feature.
The point is that someone is responsible. Sue them or just make fun of them in public, whatever... At least you know "who".
D. Sure, but most users are unlikely to get savvy enough to understand the distinction. The proposed scheme takes that decision out of the user's hand.
Well, I would think that the purpose of being able to throw away unsigned email is self evident. If a few big ISPs standardized on this, it wouldn't take long for email software to be updated and the "basic memes of avoiding SPAM" to become common knowledge.
E. Sure, for that
Add the disclosure "discussion, not legally binding" like you would in a written and hand-signed correspondence. Esign makes things easier and quicker for commerce - it returns us, in some ways, to the world before email.
My take is that this is a problem that is hard enough to address even partially---adding the burden of a massive worldwide PKI deployment would make it impossible. Verisign or Thawte would love it.
Eventually, like it or not, there will be a worldwide PKI. It is inevitable. It has to start somewhere, and stopping SPAM seems like a good place to start.
Yea, lots of issues at first. But the benefits will be abundant. And who's to say VRSN has to control it?
Anyone with experience with these standardization bodies knows that all of the complaining has to do with who's ideas win and who's name ends up on the standards documents. It's a particularly virulent form of academic arrogance. Solutions for signed email to stop SPAM are almost as old as email. Trust me, nothing is ever going to happen if one of the big guys doesn't put their ass on the line.
While the guys at the IETF fight for who has the biggest, ahem..., pen, the known email universe is collapsing under the weight of SPAM.
Let Yahoo hack and slash their way to a solution that works and then the standardization megalomaniacs can claim credit for inventing that idea 15 years ago while undergraduates at Stanford, Cambridge and MIT...
In the meantime, maybe we can have some peace...
Nothing new needs to be invented here. What we should all be pushing for is signed email. There are many advantages to signed email, but here are the most relevant:
(A) Signed email signs not just the message headers, but also the message body. No chance of header substitution.
(B) Signed email associates signatures with some certificate chain and, presumably, a CRL (Certificate Revocation List). Abuses can lead to certificates being revoked.
(C) Because of the certificate chain, there is a chain of trust. There is always SOMEONE to sue!
(D) It is a simple measure to simply throw out any email that is not signed.
(E) Because of esign legislation, signed emails can be considered legally binding. In other words, lies, misrepresentations, libel, etc... in signed emails provides you with grounds for prosecution in courts of law - as if the signer wrote you the document and signed his name at the bottom (and yes, they can also be used for legally binding contracts and whatnot).
There is an issue with "Crossing the chasm" with signed email, of course. It would require a body such as AOL and/or Yahoo rising up and providing signature filters on incoming email to force such a solution into the mainstream. But once this is done, SPAM will practically dissappear. And any SPAM that comes in through signed channels can be dealt with in a satisfactory way.
I do not believe this harms any of us, btw...
You want privacy? The same techniques that allow you to sign email also allows you to encrypt email to your destination.
Worried about anonymity? Certificates can be issued that authenticate an email address without full disclosure of the owner of that address (but this may not be satisfactory for stopping abuses). Anonymity and stopping SPAM may, unfortunately, be mutually exclusive goals.... Any thoughts?
Want to sell a good or service in the US? Require that all folks involved in its growth/manufacture/transport/assembly/management meet US requirements for wage, working conditions, etc. Of course, this requirement would violate nearly every World Trade Agreement and is therefore infeasible under current legislation, but interesting nonetheless.*
How about imposing a tarrif, derived from the difference between the target company's sweat-shop labor rates and minimum wage, on all goods and services imported into the U.S.? One could, for simplicities sake, use an average sweat-shop rate for the source country and allow sourcing companies to submit audits to change their tarrif rates.
Easy way to avoid the tarrif? Proove that all of your company's employees meet the minimum wage requirements.
If this is going to happen, then it should not be just for the record industry. There should be a non-profit that monitors statistics regarding copyrighted material being distributed on the Internet. These statistics should then be used to distribute the "copyright tax" that is levied.
In other words, the collected money should be distributed according to statistics to *all* copyright owners, not just the RIAA. Authors, Video-Game publishers (and other software), Independent music and film producers, etc..
Who does the RIAA think they are to get better protection than other copyright owners?
The idea is absurd. How on earth would you patent an XML Schema?
I think MSFT would find it a little difficult to fight that court battle.
Besides, it would be super easy to get around the problem even if their patent turned out to be enforcable. A program like Open Office would simply need to have it's own XML schema and an XSLT save filter. Allow thrid-party XSLT to be loaded in and selected at save time.
Open Office could be distributed without violating the suggested patent. The XSLT could be bolted on dynamically (e.g. suck it down over the network straight from the save dialog). For those that don't know, XSLT is a transformation language used to trasform XML of one schema to XML of another schema. See the spec for more details.
I have been designing (architecturally, i.e. in my head) a system for distribution of royalties and bounties for some time now. I believe that such a system could revolutionize not only open-source development, but many hertofore altruistic creative/intellectual property creation related tasks.
The basic idea behind a royalty server is to slowly collect dependencies between intellectual properties and attempt to draw commercial distributors (through public guilt and ridicule, if neccessary) into sharing their profits with the server. Other techniques would, of course, also be used, including bounties, donations and general marketing. The collected funds would be distributed according to a dependency graph to the community that created the target properties.
I am actually interested in finding some people who would like to work on this with me. I think the system could become self-sustaining reasonably fast (a portion of all collected moneys would be directed at the company running the server). But the really exciting part about this is that contributors could, theoretically, collect a check for as long as their contributions are in use in the wild.
Why is Gartner saying not to disclose Linux deployments?
It seems to me that disclosing Linux deployments is irrelevant. SCO lawsuits win or loose, anyone who has Linux installed will meet the same destiny, regardless of whether they discuss it... The only party that gains from not disclosing Linux deployments is, ahem... Microsoft...
you assume that the outer space settlers, goldminers, and cowboys (call them as you like) never come back to earth, and thus will never be responsible for their actions (therefore=chaos and "wild west" situation). But they're bound to come back, and therefore face trial when they come back.
Kinda like Europeans having to return to Europe and face trial for their misdeeds in the new world, a few hundred years back?
Nope... You only have to assume that these "spacers" know how to hide their activities in space... Not so tough, me thinks... Beyond that, and more than likely, there will be permanent settlements with the real "spacers" that earth laws barely touch that run contraband (and front for) "earthlings" that are bound by our legal system.
Or, alternatively, these "spacers" could base their "earthly" operations somewhere less litigious than the U.S.
As the article says about lawyers, it 'turns out you can't leave Earth without them.'
In space, no one can hear a lawyer scream...
Seriously, though, when we do get our collective asses off this planet, we will go through a period of wild west in space. Unless space is being policed by a government body (highly improbable for a LONG LONG time), property rights will be unenforcable. Physical access to celestial bodies will be all that is required to make claims. And claims will be impossible to enforce if that physical presence changes.
Lawyers? They only make a difference if there are LAWS backed by POLICE. Take those two things away and a lawyer becomes a big mouth without teeth...