The nearly-unhindered ability for American corporations to play both sides of any conflict is the single defining fact that has allowed the United States to become the dominant world power it is today.
And the Communists used to say that the capitalists would "sell us the rope to hang them".
So they did. And got rich. While the communists' economies collapsed and they eventually hung THEMselves.
Immigrants and other low-wage earners tend to live from paycheck-to-paycheck, so they don't save much money and don't really take much out of the economy. The money they spend creates jobs for somebody else - it's called the 'multiplier effect'. Higher paid jobs are good, but those individuals tend to save a greater proportion of their salary, resulting in 'leakage' and a smaller multiplier.
Sorry, not true.
Illegal immigrants tend to spend little of their earnings in the US, sending large amounts back to their families in the "old country". Any multiplier effect is felt there, not here. (By the way: "savings" also have a multipler effect - because the bank loans the money out to people who spend it, then repay it when the depostior wants to spend it himself or invest it elsewhere.)
And in the public sector: Some of them also escape taxes (often even if it's withheld - by declaring large numbers of dependents, something the fed usually doesn't check on low wage workers.) The rest are taxed at a very low rate, thanks to the "progressive" tax rates and their low wages.
Meanwhile, many bring their spouses to the US, where they rear more children than they could at home. "Child-only welfare", the extra costs of bilingual education programs, and use of emergency rooms (under "must treat, can't-ask" policies about illegals) more than consume their tax contributions, with the remainder being funded by higher health insurance and tax rates on the rest of us.
In California alone, teetering on bankruptcy (and still depressed, thanks to its high tax rates), over half the budget is for education, moch of that for K-12. Yet between a third and half the elementary school children are illegals or their children, in disproportionately expensive programs.
I'll just mention in passing the costs of the significant fraction of the illegals that are gangsters on the lam from the law in their own countries, setting up here where enforcement is so much more lax. Murders by illegal-immigrant gangsters dwarf the US deaths in Iraq, and the financial cost is staggering. (Not a ding against the NON-criminals - though being here illegally is already breaking several laws. But their costs are WAY disproportionate to their numbers.)
Then there's the coyote network of alien smugglers, providing a river of flesh across the border in which terrorists can mingle. As long the US administration allows that flood to continue, the "anti-terrorist" airport security, coastal defenses, and customs checkpoints are a joke.
Wake up call, American Corperations ALREADY decide the president! Big Oil and the Entertainment industry just take turns picking the prez and the rest of congress.;-)
Close, but no cigar. Hold onto your tinfoil hat!
The real masters of the US are organized crime. Has been so since at least the Nixon-Kennedy election, where both candidates had major mob ties. (And the winner put his brother in as Attorney General, who immediately started a "war on organized crime", using family info to turn the justice department into an enforcer for HIS family attacking its rivals. Possibly the reason both of them were hit.)
Most blatant in recent times was Clinton. I mean come ON! A former governor of Arkansas? Where the whole STATE is run by the branch of the mob that cooled off there from NY whenever things got too hot in the Apple? You don't GET to be governor there unless you're a high boss. Drug running in Mena just for starters. Selling jail-derived blood products to Canada (profiting while spreading AIDS). Turning state police into mistress recruiters. An AMAZING series of inconvenient people dying in airplane crashes. And look at the level of disrespect for all aspects of law-n-order (and suspicious deaths) at all levels of the administration once they went national.
The main effect of the Drug War is to provide price supports and upstart suppression to the large, organized, drug cartels. Gun control (starting with the Sullivan Act) provides victim disarmament, while leaving the crooks armed. Especially convenient for the drug gangs, who don't lose as many of their customers while they're out collecting the cost of the next doses.
Of course that doesn't mean we're that far apart. The entertainment industry, like the casino gambling industry (which they now run, by the way) both arose out of organized crime. The RIAA connection grew from the jukebox protection rackets, and first showed in broadcast during the payola scandals. Meanwhile, lots of mob organizations have laundered their gains and hopped into legitimate business endeavors (often corrupting them in the process. Old habits die hard, and criminal behavior can give a company a competitive edge.)
Thus the RICO act - a dismal failure - attempting to go after the ill-gotten gains laundered into non-criminal enterprise. But RICO was also turned. Now it provides a corrupting influence on the police - giving them a financial incentive to ignore crime and turn to oppression-for-profit, and giving gang-corrupted police departments a weapon to use against rival gangs.
(See? My hat provides better shielding than yours. B-) )
Mod this down. This isn't "interesting" it's flamebait.
I agree that "interesting" was wrong, but not that "flamebate" is appropriate. To me it looks like a "funny" - and the emoticon suggests that's what the author intended.
and they dont count underemployment. I know alot of engineers who are flipping burgers and selling stereos burdened by student loans (which survive bankrupcy!).
Bingo!
The central planners talk of "jobs" as if they were all equal.
Even assuming the numbers claimed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' talking head are true, what good does it do to replace one lost 6-figure engineering position with eleven minimum-wage, no health plan, burger-flipper slots?
Especially if, say, eight of them will be filled by illegal immigrants, two by engin-school grads who never got to engineer, and the eleventh by a former member of the (NON-minimum-wage, WITH health plan) burger-flipper's union, leaving the engineer still unemployed?
Salaried employees are also normally expected to have no outside work to compete for their time and attention, and this will be in the contract as well.
Put THAT in writing in California. I *DARE* you.
The last several companies I've worked for (all in California) put that in their contracts. It's boilerplate.
I have been asked to sign an agreement that states in part that I am to disclose to the company anything that I create wether or not during company time, and wether or not it relates to the company. I also must agree that these same creations or inventions become the sole property of the company.
This is typical for any technical employee.
I would like to change the wording to only include those creations, inventions and other Intellectual Property that is the direct result of work performed for the company, involved use of company property, and/or was created or invented during paid hours spen working for the company.
If you're salaried you won't get that, period. Salaried employees who are paid to think do not have limited thinking-hours.
Salaried employees are also normally expected to have no outside work to compete for their time and attention, and this will be in the contract as well.
What you MIGHT get is explicit acknowledgement of, and permission to continue, your existing business. IP related to it is another matter.
In Claifornia, state law makes an explicit limit on inventions, something like this. If:
- You didn't use company property, facilities, materials.
- You didn't invent it on company site.
- You didn't do it during normal working hours.
- It's not derivative of proprietary information (company secrets or other company's secrets made available to you through the company's alliances and under non-disclosure),
- (and the biggie): It's not something in any of the company's own business lines or contemplated business lines. then it's yours.
(IMHO this is THE reason high-tek is clustered in silicon valley: If you invent something outside your company's immediage and near-future plans you can drop out, create a new startup, and develop it.)
If you're not in CA, and they want you bad enough, they might be willing to include the language of the CA law as an amendment to the contract.
Regardless of whether you're in CA or not, be sure to:
- Report any inventions you've ALREADY made (with enough description to identify them but not enough to give away the farm) in the form provided, to be sure they don't try to claim those later.
- If you intend to continue your outside business, get permission added to the contract as an amendment. (You'll almost certainly have to put limits on it, too.)
- And if you can't get the CA-style exception, but DO get permission to continue the outside business, get an IP exception giving you your outside-biz IP, and drawing a clear line on which ideas are yours and which are the company's.
Recognize that, while you and they can agree on riders, and some companies WILL do that, riders like this decrease your value and increase your cost to the company. If you go too far, even if the company is willing to flex, you'll price yoursef above some other applicant and remain unemployed. You need to get a good read on the company's politics to guess how far to push, and be prepared to be dumped if you goof and push too hard.
Legal disclaimer: IANAL, your mileage may vary, etc.
I'll vote for the first president who promises to fund research in Lofstrom Loops or the like...
If I understand them correctly, Lofstrom Loops are active systems. If the ground station control (or power) fails, the circulating mass impacts in the vicinity of the ground station (i.e. the spaceport) over the period of one loop cycle. Something between a large bomb and an extinction event, depending on the size of the device. Damage can be mitigated somewhat by dumping the upbound part of the mass into space, but the downbound part is already going to toast somebody. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
I prefer the Rotovator - though I prefer the form where it only dips into the stratosphere to rendevous with an aircraft. Much less mass, and only an ill-timed cable break dumps any of it on an earth-intersection orbit. Total control failure just means the orbit starts to decay very slowly, and I think you can arrange it so the decay takes the device UP rather than impacting the atmosphere and or ground.
My understanding was that SCO had to specifically ask for those additional transfers, they had to specifically state it was necessary in order for them to exercise their previous rights. Since SCO did not in fact state this, they didn't get the additional rights.
I didn't find anything to that effect in the document. I provided the link. If anyone can find something that says they have to ask for additional permission, please point out the section number.
This reading of the document says that they now own the unix source code and that they now also own exactly the minimum set of copyrights necessary to enforce that ownership. No further transfers needed. (The other exclusions seem to be for things like Novell products, rights Novell didn't have in the first place, or rights it already contracted away.)
Which is exactly what SCO is claiming. So what will matter, with respect to the copyright issue, is whether the judge will read it this way.
And (if I, a non-laywer, understand this correctly) with Novell saying they didn't get the copyrights and SCO saying they did, the judge will probably decide it on one of two bases.
1) If the judge decides that the text is clear, she will decide according to the clear meaning.
2) If the judge decides that the text is ambiguous, she will determine WHO WROTE the text, and decide in favor of THE OTHER PARTY.
We need to prepare for the possiblity that the judge decides in favor of SCO on this issue - either because the text seems (to a lawyer) to clearly transfer enough copyright to SCO for them to go after IBM (and other Linux distributors), or because Novell wrote it, so any ambiguities are their fault and must be decided in SCO's favor.
So lets have a plan B available to defend our turf.
There's lots of ammo, and for any particular piece of code you only need ONE shot to defend it.
- Portions of UNIX code released into public domain or under other licenses by SCO or one of its previous owners, or an owner of enough rights to do this. (Let's try to do this without resorting to SCO's distribution of Linux. They might get away with their claim that their ignorance of the inclusion of their code by others exempts it from the GPL, while their continued distribution of the REST of the code, now that they actually shipped some, is actually required for a while longer by the GPL.)
- Stuff freed by the BSD case.
- Stuff tracably separately written.
- Court decisions about recycling interface definitions for interoperability being fair use.
You'd think they'd have to ask Novell's permission before they go sue IBM for Novell's copyrights.;)
Much as I hate the idea, I can see how the SCO execs could read the Asset Purchase Agreement to mean that they DID buy the copyrights:
Schedule 1.1(a) Assets
1. All rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare and Auxiliary Products, including but not limited to all versions of UNIX and UnixWare and Auxiliary Products [...] including source code, [...]
Schedule 1.1(b) Excluded Assets
V. Intellectual Property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the [...] copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies.
SCO could easily read this as "You now own the source code. That includes (as an explicit exception to the copyright exclusion) all of Novell's copyrights on the source code that you need to enforce your ownership of the source code."
Another poster (in a previous article) wrote:
Novell has claimed in the past that SCO has asked them to transfer the copyrights, but they (Novell) refused. If they can bring hard evidence of this out (and I would bet they can) then that proves SCO knew Novell retained the copyrights.
But SCO can argue that this was just a request for confirmation of what they believed the contract meant, in preparation for their suit to enforce their copyrights. Then they could argue that Novell's refusal to give that "confirmation" was just Novell trying to back out the deal once they discovered they'd given away the store to someone who was actually going to KEEP it.
(None of which, even if the court upholds SCO's interpretation, in any way releases them from promptly identifying the alleged infringing code in Linux, so the open source community can expunge it, end the alleged infringement, and minimize the alleged damages.)
The real worry is when you start having government funded virus writers. When someone from china or russia or the middle east are writing virus to shut down systems or create havok for the intent to kill, or bring down defenses for an invasion or terrorist act.
They already exist. (The China army's information warfare department, among others, has already been the subject of slashdot articles.)
Interestingly, Microsoft gave these guys access to their source code. They were trying to head off the move by various governments to mandate open-source software. One of the arguments was the security of the code against malware. So MS made the code available to various governments on request, inviting the governments' security experts to examine it to see for them selves how secure it was. (China, and a number of the other usual suspect govenments, took them up on the offer.)
Now what department do you think government software security experts, specializing in malware vulnerabilities, work in when they're not examining a software vendor's code for exploitable holes WITH the permission and assistance of the vendor? B-)
All of this discussion of anti-counterfeiting misses a significant point: ALL US currency is counterfeit. Has been for decades.
The US once printed "Silver Certificates". These were a promise to hand over, on demand, N dollars (defined as a particular weight of silver) in exchange for the certificates.
In reaction to the banking crisis around the crash of '29 and the depression of the '30s, the government established the Federal Reserve System. Silver Certificates (exchangable for actual money, in the form of a useful and valuable metal) were gradually replaced by Federal Reserve Notes (backed only by the government's threat to use force to require that everyone accept them as payment of debts).
The government can arrange to have as many of these printed as it wishes, injecting them into circulation as loans (in competition with private investors) to lower the interest rate. Sometimes it wishes to print a lot of them. This is the cause of inflation.
So by the definition of money as a valuable commodity or something exchangable for one, US paper currency has been counterfeit since the retirement of the Silver Certificates. B-)
You said: With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want.... It doesn't make sense. An illegal immigrant got twenty licenses?
No. He got twenty-something voter registrations.
The (federal) motor-voter law requires that voter registration forms be conveniently available in certain public offices - including especially secretary of state's drivers' license offices. In California, at least, (I don't know if THIS is mandated) the implementation also promotes people taking stacks of forms and making them available elsewhere (i've found them at supermarkets for instance), or setting up tables in public places for people to register and mailing the forms for them.
The idea was to ease voter registration - in reaction to a perceived bias against working people in states where a visit to the county clerk's office during working hours was necessary to register to vote.
The effect was to make stacks of mail-in, create-a-voter-free-no-ID, forms available to anybody who wanted to stuff ballot boxes.
- - - - -
By the way: The flap about drivers licenses for illegal aliens in California is also about illegal alien voting. In those few instances where it is even legal to ask for ID for voting, a driver's license is adequate ID. (Also federal law, I believe.) The proposed drivers licenses would not have any indication that the licensed individual was an illegal alien, ineligible to vote, who got it by presenting a certificate from a foreign government's consulate (or a forged version of one).
Well-designed CISC instruction sets (like PDP11, VAX, and 68k)
Okay, you had me up to that sentence. It's my understanding from people I know who actually used VAX assembly, that it was a bear. Especially if you had to decode the assembly by hand. It had variable length opcodes, which if I remember right, a single instruction could extend to be upwards of 60 bytes. Oh, and that's not to mention, the 11 different addressing modes, which could be mixed and matched on all three operands (dest, left data, right data). Because all instructions could store directly back to memory, it was a bestie to create.
Call me crazy, but somehow that much mixing and matching just doesn't sound like [fun].
I didn't actually use the VAX instruction set - though I did use the PDP11's - both writing and reverse-engineering. They were both designed by the same guy (Gordon Bell) or teams he lead. I'm prepared to defer to people who actually dealt with it that the VAX instruction set was difficult.
But in the case of the PDP11 (where the few-instructions, lots-of-address-modes style came into its own), the plethora of modes actually simplified the job of the assembly programmer (and the reverse engineer). I can tell you this from experience.
Multiple address modes shrank the job of understanding the instruction set by splitting it into two parts - the much smaller set of base instructions than you'd need without the symmetry, and the small set of addressing modes. Rather than having an explosion of special purpose instructions with their own addressing modes, you have an explosion of combinations of the members of two small sets. Once you learned the two sets, the proper combination to achieve the result you wanted was obvious.
The tricks were few - and brilliant.
- The indirect-increment and indirect-decrement modes let you use any register as a stack pointer or index register, for instance. The "official" stack pointer was just the one that was implied by certain other features: interrupt and subroutine calls, primarily.
- With the program counter as one of the general registers, applying indirect-auto-increment to it gave you inline constants.
- The indirect and indirect increment/decrement addressing modes made any register a pointer. (They also led directly to the ++, --, +=, and -= operators of the C language.)
- The register+offset mode and base/offset duality gets you to particular elements of an argument array, or index into a fixed-location array.
and so on.
If you understand a few things about C (Array/pointer duality, walking arrays with auto-increment, etc.), you have exactly the understanding you need to grok the modes of the PDP11 instruction set. (Which is hardly surprising: I understand that much of C was inspired by that instruction set.)
It's bad enough that the internet was going to be used to count votes outside the country. How much worse would it be with all those illegals voting online here inside the U.S. borders?
They do that already.
With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want. (There's an illegal immigrant on my street who brags about how he goes from precinct to precinct on election day and shows off his >20 registrations. His reaction to questions about whether this is right: "They don't care. If they cared they'd do something to check.")
Don't expect any respect for law from people who grew up in a country where the government is totally corrupt (let alone the subset that then broke OUR laws to even BE here, rather than going through proper channels.) It's not their fault they grew up in that environment. But now that their opinions are formed you'll need to do more than set an example, if you want to get their attention and change their behavior. And you're not going to do that while it's ILLEGAL to review their elegibility, or even check their ID.
(Now think about how the "drug war" and the 55 MPH speed limit have similarly affected the Boomer generation's respect for law and established institutions.)
Think it's hard? Think they do any checking? Heck. *I*ve been double-registered twice in the last few years. (Changed my party affiliation - which is done on the same form - and had my name typoed and the form misprocessed as a new registration. I STILL get double jury-duty notices from the last instance.)
To motor-voter add no-excuse absentee ballots. Now anyone can:
- pick up a stack of forms in any government office,
- crank out fake voters as fast as he can fill them out and drop them in a mailbox,
- file for absentee voting as fast as he can check a box on the registration notice postcards and drop THOSE in a mailbox, and
- never have to show his face at a polling place.
There was one address in Berkeley that had over 4,000 absentee ballots in a recent election. (Tried to claim that they were a mail drop for some street people. 4,000 of em? Yeah, right!)
Then there are the ballot boxes that are found floating in the San Francisco Bay when there's an election in San Francisco.
And cheating on mechanical and electronic vote-counting, without audit trails, is nothing new. You've all heard about Diebold's touchscreens. But the vote counting a few decades back was done on minicomputers, by proprietary software, where you could pause the program and tweak a register from the front panel switches (and election officials were sometimes seen to do that).
Even mechanical voting machines had opportunities for cheating: It was common to find little stickers in the bottom with "0000" on them - the trace of a voting scam. The wheels would be set to a non-zero value and covered with a sticker. Lock the machine, let the official certify it's zeroed, put it into service. One vote for the stickered candidates knocks the stickers off.
Internet voting isn't necessary for election corruption. It just simplifies automating it.
People who know assembly produce better code by almost any measurement except "object-oriented-ness", which assembly makes difficult to an extreme.
Actually, they don't.
A study was done, some decades ago, on the issue of whether compilers were approaching the abilities of a good assembly programmer. The results were surprising:
While a good assembly programmer could usually beat the compiler if he really hunkered down and applied himself to the particular piece of code, on the average his code would be worse - because he didn't maintain that focus on every line of every program.
The programmer might know all the tricks. But the compiler knew MOST of the tricks, and applied them EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME.
Potentially the programmer could still beat the compiler in reasonable time by focusing on the code that gets most of the execution. But the second part of Knuth's Law applies: "95% of the processor time is spent in 5% of the code - and it's NOT the 5% you THOUGHT it was." You have to do extra tuning passes AFTER the code is working to find and improve the REAL critical 5%. This typically was unnecessary in applications (though it would sometimes get done in OSes and some servers).
This discovery lead directly to two things:
1) Because a programmer can get so much more done and working right with a given time and effort using a compiler than using an assembler, and the compiler was emitting better assembly on the average, assember was abandoned for anything where it wasn't really necessary. That typically means:
- A little bit in the kernel where it can't be avoided (typically bootup, the very start of the interrupt handling, and maybe context switching). (Unix System 6 kernel was 10k lines, of which 1.5k was assembler - and the assembly fraction got squeezed down from then on.)
- A little bit in the libraries (typically the very start of a program and the system call subroutines)
- Maybe a few tiny bits embedded in compiler code, to optimize the core of something slow.
2) The replacement of microcoded CISC processors (i.e. PDP11, VAX, 68K) with RISC processors (i.e. SPARC, MIPS). (x86 was CISC but hung in there due to initera and cheapness.)
Who cares if it takes three instructions instead of one to do some complex function, or if execution near jumps isn't straightforward? The compiler will crank out the three instructions and keep track of the funny execution sequence. Meanwhile you can shrink the processor and run the instructions at the microcode engine's speed - which can be increased further by reducing the nubmer of gates and length of wiring, and end up with a smaller chip (which means higher yeilds, which means making use of the next, faster, FAB technology sooner.)
CISC pushed RISK out of general purpose processors again once the die sizes got big: You can use those extra gates for pipelining, branch prediction, and other stuff that lets you gain back more by parallelism than you lost by expanding the execution units. But it's still alive and well in embedded cores (where you need SOME crunch but want to use most of the silicon for other stuff) and in systems that don't need the absolute cutting-edge of speed or DO need a very low power-per-computation figure.
The compiler advantage over an assembly programmer is extreme both with RISC and with a poorly-designed CISC instruction set (like the early x86es). Well-designed CISC instruction sets (like PDP11, VAX, and 68k) are tuned to simplify the compilers' work - which makes them understandable enough that the tricks are fewer and good code is easier for a human to write. This puts an assembly programmer back in the running. But on the average the compiler still wins.
(But understanding how assembly instruction sets work, and how compilers work, are both useful for writing better code at the compiler level. Less so now that optimizers are really good - but the understanding is still helpful.)
Crash exploit uaually means root exploit possible.
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Remotely Crash OpenBSD
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· Score: 1
While possibly not a direct security threat, remote crash exploits are obviously highly disruptive and in today's networked economy, highly costly in terms of lost productivity.
While a crash exploit doesn't guarantee it, it usually means that a root exploit is possible.
Think about it: You got the machine to execute code it shouldn't have executed (or overwrite something 'way important it shouldn't have overwritten, or with a value it shouldn't have written.) This usually means you changed the program coutner to some random value. That typically happens as a result of overwriting a return address by a buffer-in-the-stack overflow. Now if you can just get the program counter to point to code you supplied in the same packet, and put the right code there, you're in.
There are other ways this can happen (for instance: overwriting an index into a function table with an illegal value). But many of these similarly lead to root exploits.
A crash means you killed, not just a task, but the whole system. In a system as robust as BSD this usually means that the code that was corrupted by the exploit was running at a kernel permission level. So if you can take it over you can get it to give you any permission you want.
Let's end this: a speaker magnet from the average 15" woofer will readily destroy a credit card (first hand experience) so why not a drivers license?
When they first started putting mag stripes on the licenses, California CLAIMED that they didn't use ferrite, but a higher-coercivity material that requires a much higher flux density to be affected. This is to keep it from being accidentally or deliberately erased, or modified by off-the-shelf mag stripe card writers.
Of course that just means you would need a STRONGER magnet to erase it than you would for a normal credit card. (And that's assuming they weren't just lying.)
As we know, the WWW was invented in order for high-energy physicists to share data throughout the world, so not only does it not make sense for these machines to be cut off from the internet, it is an essential part of scientific research.
In fact, enabling data sharing among academics, especially researchers, was one of the initial goals of the invention of the Internet itself. (The other big one: researching fault-tolerant data communication with military-grade reliability.)
(All this spam and pr0n got tacked on after Al Gore legalized commercial use. B-) )
who really cares if a phone has feature x or feature y? why complain, just get the free phone if you don't want to pay.
First solid rule of economics: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
The cost of those phones, plus a whopping profit, are built into your cell phone rates. You bought that phone, by locking yourself into an overpriced contract. Then you bought it again, and again, and again.
Fortunately, once the design work is done MOST of the features of the phone have very low per-unit incremental cost. (Just a little more ROM, for instance.) Cameras are an exception, of course.
If you work for the Department of Defense on a military installation, you are not allowed to bring a camera phone onto the facility. A friend of mine did, and they fired him on the spot.
I thought the whole POINT of the cameras was to get people used to them so they could be used for spying, detective work, etc.
Like the stereotype of the japanese tourist with the camera. They were ALL OVER the US starting soon after WWII, taking pictures of everything.
Turns out it wasn't just that one of the first non-junk manufacturing industries they got going was mass-produced cameras. A lot of it was industrial espionage. They went back and cloned auto plants, cerial factories, etc. right down to the layout of the machines.
(That's why it's so much harder to get tours of manufacturing plants these days. Kelloggs, for instance, used to give plant tours all the time. Was a regular tourist attraction. But they stopped them entirely after the Japanese cloned the rice crispies machine.)
Slashdot Mirror
The nearly-unhindered ability for American corporations to play both sides of any conflict is the single defining fact that has allowed the United States to become the dominant world power it is today.
And the Communists used to say that the capitalists would "sell us the rope to hang them".
So they did. And got rich. While the communists' economies collapsed and they eventually hung THEMselves.
Amazing how that works.
Immigrants and other low-wage earners tend to live from paycheck-to-paycheck, so they don't save much money and don't really take much out of the economy. The money they spend creates jobs for somebody else - it's called the 'multiplier effect'. Higher paid jobs are good, but those individuals tend to save a greater proportion of their salary, resulting in 'leakage' and a smaller multiplier.
Sorry, not true.
Illegal immigrants tend to spend little of their earnings in the US, sending large amounts back to their families in the "old country". Any multiplier effect is felt there, not here. (By the way: "savings" also have a multipler effect - because the bank loans the money out to people who spend it, then repay it when the depostior wants to spend it himself or invest it elsewhere.)
And in the public sector: Some of them also escape taxes (often even if it's withheld - by declaring large numbers of dependents, something the fed usually doesn't check on low wage workers.) The rest are taxed at a very low rate, thanks to the "progressive" tax rates and their low wages.
Meanwhile, many bring their spouses to the US, where they rear more children than they could at home. "Child-only welfare", the extra costs of bilingual education programs, and use of emergency rooms (under "must treat, can't-ask" policies about illegals) more than consume their tax contributions, with the remainder being funded by higher health insurance and tax rates on the rest of us.
In California alone, teetering on bankruptcy (and still depressed, thanks to its high tax rates), over half the budget is for education, moch of that for K-12. Yet between a third and half the elementary school children are illegals or their children, in disproportionately expensive programs.
I'll just mention in passing the costs of the significant fraction of the illegals that are gangsters on the lam from the law in their own countries, setting up here where enforcement is so much more lax. Murders by illegal-immigrant gangsters dwarf the US deaths in Iraq, and the financial cost is staggering. (Not a ding against the NON-criminals - though being here illegally is already breaking several laws. But their costs are WAY disproportionate to their numbers.)
Then there's the coyote network of alien smugglers, providing a river of flesh across the border in which terrorists can mingle. As long the US administration allows that flood to continue, the "anti-terrorist" airport security, coastal defenses, and customs checkpoints are a joke.
Great for the ruling class. Hell for the workers.
Then we should be asking ourselves how do we become a ruling class?
Thus making it worse.
The trick is not to escape slavery by becoming a slaveowner. The trick is to end slavery.
Wake up call, American Corperations ALREADY decide the president! Big Oil and the Entertainment industry just take turns picking the prez and the rest of congress. ;-)
Close, but no cigar. Hold onto your tinfoil hat!
The real masters of the US are organized crime. Has been so since at least the Nixon-Kennedy election, where both candidates had major mob ties. (And the winner put his brother in as Attorney General, who immediately started a "war on organized crime", using family info to turn the justice department into an enforcer for HIS family attacking its rivals. Possibly the reason both of them were hit.)
Most blatant in recent times was Clinton. I mean come ON! A former governor of Arkansas? Where the whole STATE is run by the branch of the mob that cooled off there from NY whenever things got too hot in the Apple? You don't GET to be governor there unless you're a high boss. Drug running in Mena just for starters. Selling jail-derived blood products to Canada (profiting while spreading AIDS). Turning state police into mistress recruiters. An AMAZING series of inconvenient people dying in airplane crashes. And look at the level of disrespect for all aspects of law-n-order (and suspicious deaths) at all levels of the administration once they went national.
The main effect of the Drug War is to provide price supports and upstart suppression to the large, organized, drug cartels. Gun control (starting with the Sullivan Act) provides victim disarmament, while leaving the crooks armed. Especially convenient for the drug gangs, who don't lose as many of their customers while they're out collecting the cost of the next doses.
Of course that doesn't mean we're that far apart. The entertainment industry, like the casino gambling industry (which they now run, by the way) both arose out of organized crime. The RIAA connection grew from the jukebox protection rackets, and first showed in broadcast during the payola scandals. Meanwhile, lots of mob organizations have laundered their gains and hopped into legitimate business endeavors (often corrupting them in the process. Old habits die hard, and criminal behavior can give a company a competitive edge.)
Thus the RICO act - a dismal failure - attempting to go after the ill-gotten gains laundered into non-criminal enterprise. But RICO was also turned. Now it provides a corrupting influence on the police - giving them a financial incentive to ignore crime and turn to oppression-for-profit, and giving gang-corrupted police departments a weapon to use against rival gangs.
(See? My hat provides better shielding than yours. B-) )
Mod this down. This isn't "interesting" it's flamebait.
I agree that "interesting" was wrong, but not that "flamebate" is appropriate. To me it looks like a "funny" - and the emoticon suggests that's what the author intended.
and they dont count underemployment. I know alot of engineers who are flipping burgers and selling stereos burdened by student loans (which survive bankrupcy!).
Bingo!
The central planners talk of "jobs" as if they were all equal.
Even assuming the numbers claimed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' talking head are true, what good does it do to replace one lost 6-figure engineering position with eleven minimum-wage, no health plan, burger-flipper slots?
Especially if, say, eight of them will be filled by illegal immigrants, two by engin-school grads who never got to engineer, and the eleventh by a former member of the (NON-minimum-wage, WITH health plan) burger-flipper's union, leaving the engineer still unemployed?
Now multiply by two million.
Great for the ruling class. Hell for the workers.
Salaried employees are also normally expected to have no outside work to compete for their time and attention, and this will be in the contract as well.
Put THAT in writing in California. I *DARE* you.
The last several companies I've worked for (all in California) put that in their contracts. It's boilerplate.
I have been asked to sign an agreement that states in part that I am to disclose to the company anything that I create wether or not during company time, and wether or not it relates to the company. I also must agree that these same creations or inventions become the sole property of the company.
This is typical for any technical employee.
I would like to change the wording to only include those creations, inventions and other Intellectual Property that is the direct result of work performed for the company, involved use of company property, and/or was created or invented during paid hours spen working for the company.
If you're salaried you won't get that, period. Salaried employees who are paid to think do not have limited thinking-hours.
Salaried employees are also normally expected to have no outside work to compete for their time and attention, and this will be in the contract as well.
What you MIGHT get is explicit acknowledgement of, and permission to continue, your existing business. IP related to it is another matter.
In Claifornia, state law makes an explicit limit on inventions, something like this. If:
- You didn't use company property, facilities, materials.
- You didn't invent it on company site.
- You didn't do it during normal working hours.
- It's not derivative of proprietary information (company secrets or other company's secrets made available to you through the company's alliances and under non-disclosure),
- (and the biggie): It's not something in any of the company's own business lines or contemplated business lines.
then it's yours.
(IMHO this is THE reason high-tek is clustered in silicon valley: If you invent something outside your company's immediage and near-future plans you can drop out, create a new startup, and develop it.)
If you're not in CA, and they want you bad enough, they might be willing to include the language of the CA law as an amendment to the contract.
Regardless of whether you're in CA or not, be sure to:
- Report any inventions you've ALREADY made (with enough description to identify them but not enough to give away the farm) in the form provided, to be sure they don't try to claim those later.
- If you intend to continue your outside business, get permission added to the contract as an amendment. (You'll almost certainly have to put limits on it, too.)
- And if you can't get the CA-style exception, but DO get permission to continue the outside business, get an IP exception giving you your outside-biz IP, and drawing a clear line on which ideas are yours and which are the company's.
Recognize that, while you and they can agree on riders, and some companies WILL do that, riders like this decrease your value and increase your cost to the company. If you go too far, even if the company is willing to flex, you'll price yoursef above some other applicant and remain unemployed. You need to get a good read on the company's politics to guess how far to push, and be prepared to be dumped if you goof and push too hard.
Legal disclaimer: IANAL, your mileage may vary, etc.
Try this:
Rotovator
I'll vote for the first president who promises to fund research in Lofstrom Loops or the like...
If I understand them correctly, Lofstrom Loops are active systems. If the ground station control (or power) fails, the circulating mass impacts in the vicinity of the ground station (i.e. the spaceport) over the period of one loop cycle. Something between a large bomb and an extinction event, depending on the size of the device. Damage can be mitigated somewhat by dumping the upbound part of the mass into space, but the downbound part is already going to toast somebody. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
I prefer the Rotovator - though I prefer the form where it only dips into the stratosphere to rendevous with an aircraft. Much less mass, and only an ill-timed cable break dumps any of it on an earth-intersection orbit. Total control failure just means the orbit starts to decay very slowly, and I think you can arrange it so the decay takes the device UP rather than impacting the atmosphere and or ground.
My understanding was that SCO had to specifically ask for those additional transfers, they had to specifically state it was necessary in order for them to exercise their previous rights. Since SCO did not in fact state this, they didn't get the additional rights.
I didn't find anything to that effect in the document. I provided the link. If anyone can find something that says they have to ask for additional permission, please point out the section number.
This reading of the document says that they now own the unix source code and that they now also own exactly the minimum set of copyrights necessary to enforce that ownership. No further transfers needed. (The other exclusions seem to be for things like Novell products, rights Novell didn't have in the first place, or rights it already contracted away.)
Which is exactly what SCO is claiming. So what will matter, with respect to the copyright issue, is whether the judge will read it this way.
And (if I, a non-laywer, understand this correctly) with Novell saying they didn't get the copyrights and SCO saying they did, the judge will probably decide it on one of two bases.
1) If the judge decides that the text is clear, she will decide according to the clear meaning.
2) If the judge decides that the text is ambiguous, she will determine WHO WROTE the text, and decide in favor of THE OTHER PARTY.
We need to prepare for the possiblity that the judge decides in favor of SCO on this issue - either because the text seems (to a lawyer) to clearly transfer enough copyright to SCO for them to go after IBM (and other Linux distributors), or because Novell wrote it, so any ambiguities are their fault and must be decided in SCO's favor.
So lets have a plan B available to defend our turf.
There's lots of ammo, and for any particular piece of code you only need ONE shot to defend it.
- Portions of UNIX code released into public domain or under other licenses by SCO or one of its previous owners, or an owner of enough rights to do this. (Let's try to do this without resorting to SCO's distribution of Linux. They might get away with their claim that their ignorance of the inclusion of their code by others exempts it from the GPL, while their continued distribution of the REST of the code, now that they actually shipped some, is actually required for a while longer by the GPL.)
- Stuff freed by the BSD case.
- Stuff tracably separately written.
- Court decisions about recycling interface definitions for interoperability being fair use.
And I'm sure there are others.
Much as I hate the idea, I can see how the SCO execs could read the Asset Purchase Agreement to mean that they DID buy the copyrights:
SCO could easily read this as "You now own the source code. That includes (as an explicit exception to the copyright exclusion) all of Novell's copyrights on the source code that you need to enforce your ownership of the source code."
Another poster (in a previous article) wrote:
Novell has claimed in the past that SCO has asked them to transfer the copyrights, but they (Novell) refused. If they can bring hard evidence of this out (and I would bet they can) then that proves SCO knew Novell retained the copyrights.
But SCO can argue that this was just a request for confirmation of what they believed the contract meant, in preparation for their suit to enforce their copyrights. Then they could argue that Novell's refusal to give that "confirmation" was just Novell trying to back out the deal once they discovered they'd given away the store to someone who was actually going to KEEP it.
(None of which, even if the court upholds SCO's interpretation, in any way releases them from promptly identifying the alleged infringing code in Linux, so the open source community can expunge it, end the alleged infringement, and minimize the alleged damages.)
The real worry is when you start having government funded virus writers. When someone from china or russia or the middle east are writing virus to shut down systems or create havok for the intent to kill, or bring down defenses for an invasion or terrorist act.
They already exist. (The China army's information warfare department, among others, has already been the subject of slashdot articles.)
Interestingly, Microsoft gave these guys access to their source code. They were trying to head off the move by various governments to mandate open-source software. One of the arguments was the security of the code against malware. So MS made the code available to various governments on request, inviting the governments' security experts to examine it to see for them selves how secure it was. (China, and a number of the other usual suspect govenments, took them up on the offer.)
Now what department do you think government software security experts, specializing in malware vulnerabilities, work in when they're not examining a software vendor's code for exploitable holes WITH the permission and assistance of the vendor? B-)
I said:
In reaction to the banking crisis around the crash of '29 and the depression of the '30s, the government established the Federal Reserve System.
Actually it was established in 1913. (Gotta keep my banking crises sorted out...)
All of this discussion of anti-counterfeiting misses a significant point: ALL US currency is counterfeit. Has been for decades.
The US once printed "Silver Certificates". These were a promise to hand over, on demand, N dollars (defined as a particular weight of silver) in exchange for the certificates.
In reaction to the banking crisis around the crash of '29 and the depression of the '30s, the government established the Federal Reserve System. Silver Certificates (exchangable for actual money, in the form of a useful and valuable metal) were gradually replaced by Federal Reserve Notes (backed only by the government's threat to use force to require that everyone accept them as payment of debts).
The government can arrange to have as many of these printed as it wishes, injecting them into circulation as loans (in competition with private investors) to lower the interest rate. Sometimes it wishes to print a lot of them. This is the cause of inflation.
So by the definition of money as a valuable commodity or something exchangable for one, US paper currency has been counterfeit since the retirement of the Silver Certificates. B-)
Yup, that's Dave. After Teklogix he went to work for DEC and worked on DEC-TALK and then the Alpha. ... He works for MS now
I heard that Gordon Bell also went to MS. (To the group that deals with CPU scheduling, according to the rumor.)
You said: With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want. ... It doesn't make sense. An illegal immigrant got twenty licenses?
No. He got twenty-something voter registrations.
The (federal) motor-voter law requires that voter registration forms be conveniently available in certain public offices - including especially secretary of state's drivers' license offices. In California, at least, (I don't know if THIS is mandated) the implementation also promotes people taking stacks of forms and making them available elsewhere (i've found them at supermarkets for instance), or setting up tables in public places for people to register and mailing the forms for them.
The idea was to ease voter registration - in reaction to a perceived bias against working people in states where a visit to the county clerk's office during working hours was necessary to register to vote.
The effect was to make stacks of mail-in, create-a-voter-free-no-ID, forms available to anybody who wanted to stuff ballot boxes.
- - - - -
By the way: The flap about drivers licenses for illegal aliens in California is also about illegal alien voting. In those few instances where it is even legal to ask for ID for voting, a driver's license is adequate ID. (Also federal law, I believe.) The proposed drivers licenses would not have any indication that the licensed individual was an illegal alien, ineligible to vote, who got it by presenting a certificate from a foreign government's consulate (or a forged version of one).
Well-designed CISC instruction sets (like PDP11, VAX, and 68k)
Okay, you had me up to that sentence. It's my understanding from people I know who actually used VAX assembly, that it was a bear. Especially if you had to decode the assembly by hand. It had variable length opcodes, which if I remember right, a single instruction could extend to be upwards of 60 bytes. Oh, and that's not to mention, the 11 different addressing modes, which could be mixed and matched on all three operands (dest, left data, right data). Because all instructions could store directly back to memory, it was a bestie to create.
Call me crazy, but somehow that much mixing and matching just doesn't sound like [fun].
I didn't actually use the VAX instruction set - though I did use the PDP11's - both writing and reverse-engineering. They were both designed by the same guy (Gordon Bell) or teams he lead. I'm prepared to defer to people who actually dealt with it that the VAX instruction set was difficult.
But in the case of the PDP11 (where the few-instructions, lots-of-address-modes style came into its own), the plethora of modes actually simplified the job of the assembly programmer (and the reverse engineer). I can tell you this from experience.
Multiple address modes shrank the job of understanding the instruction set by splitting it into two parts - the much smaller set of base instructions than you'd need without the symmetry, and the small set of addressing modes. Rather than having an explosion of special purpose instructions with their own addressing modes, you have an explosion of combinations of the members of two small sets. Once you learned the two sets, the proper combination to achieve the result you wanted was obvious.
The tricks were few - and brilliant.
- The indirect-increment and indirect-decrement modes let you use any register as a stack pointer or index register, for instance. The "official" stack pointer was just the one that was implied by certain other features: interrupt and subroutine calls, primarily.
- With the program counter as one of the general registers, applying indirect-auto-increment to it gave you inline constants.
- The indirect and indirect increment/decrement addressing modes made any register a pointer. (They also led directly to the ++, --, +=, and -= operators of the C language.)
- The register+offset mode and base/offset duality gets you to particular elements of an argument array, or index into a fixed-location array.
and so on.
If you understand a few things about C (Array/pointer duality, walking arrays with auto-increment, etc.), you have exactly the understanding you need to grok the modes of the PDP11 instruction set. (Which is hardly surprising: I understand that much of C was inspired by that instruction set.)
It's bad enough that the internet was going to be used to count votes outside the country. How much worse would it be with all those illegals voting online here inside the U.S. borders?
They do that already.
With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want. (There's an illegal immigrant on my street who brags about how he goes from precinct to precinct on election day and shows off his >20 registrations. His reaction to questions about whether this is right: "They don't care. If they cared they'd do something to check.")
Don't expect any respect for law from people who grew up in a country where the government is totally corrupt (let alone the subset that then broke OUR laws to even BE here, rather than going through proper channels.) It's not their fault they grew up in that environment. But now that their opinions are formed you'll need to do more than set an example, if you want to get their attention and change their behavior. And you're not going to do that while it's ILLEGAL to review their elegibility, or even check their ID.
(Now think about how the "drug war" and the 55 MPH speed limit have similarly affected the Boomer generation's respect for law and established institutions.)
Think it's hard? Think they do any checking? Heck. *I*ve been double-registered twice in the last few years. (Changed my party affiliation - which is done on the same form - and had my name typoed and the form misprocessed as a new registration. I STILL get double jury-duty notices from the last instance.)
To motor-voter add no-excuse absentee ballots. Now anyone can:
- pick up a stack of forms in any government office,
- crank out fake voters as fast as he can fill them out and drop them in a mailbox,
- file for absentee voting as fast as he can check a box on the registration notice postcards and drop THOSE in a mailbox, and
- never have to show his face at a polling place.
There was one address in Berkeley that had over 4,000 absentee ballots in a recent election. (Tried to claim that they were a mail drop for some street people. 4,000 of em? Yeah, right!)
Then there are the ballot boxes that are found floating in the San Francisco Bay when there's an election in San Francisco.
And cheating on mechanical and electronic vote-counting, without audit trails, is nothing new. You've all heard about Diebold's touchscreens. But the vote counting a few decades back was done on minicomputers, by proprietary software, where you could pause the program and tweak a register from the front panel switches (and election officials were sometimes seen to do that).
Even mechanical voting machines had opportunities for cheating: It was common to find little stickers in the bottom with "0000" on them - the trace of a voting scam. The wheels would be set to a non-zero value and covered with a sticker. Lock the machine, let the official certify it's zeroed, put it into service. One vote for the stickered candidates knocks the stickers off.
Internet voting isn't necessary for election corruption. It just simplifies automating it.
People who know assembly produce better code by almost any measurement except "object-oriented-ness", which assembly makes difficult to an extreme.
Actually, they don't.
A study was done, some decades ago, on the issue of whether compilers were approaching the abilities of a good assembly programmer. The results were surprising:
While a good assembly programmer could usually beat the compiler if he really hunkered down and applied himself to the particular piece of code, on the average his code would be worse - because he didn't maintain that focus on every line of every program.
The programmer might know all the tricks. But the compiler knew MOST of the tricks, and applied them EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME.
Potentially the programmer could still beat the compiler in reasonable time by focusing on the code that gets most of the execution. But the second part of Knuth's Law applies: "95% of the processor time is spent in 5% of the code - and it's NOT the 5% you THOUGHT it was." You have to do extra tuning passes AFTER the code is working to find and improve the REAL critical 5%. This typically was unnecessary in applications (though it would sometimes get done in OSes and some servers).
This discovery lead directly to two things:
1) Because a programmer can get so much more done and working right with a given time and effort using a compiler than using an assembler, and the compiler was emitting better assembly on the average, assember was abandoned for anything where it wasn't really necessary. That typically means:
- A little bit in the kernel where it can't be avoided (typically bootup, the very start of the interrupt handling, and maybe context switching). (Unix System 6 kernel was 10k lines, of which 1.5k was assembler - and the assembly fraction got squeezed down from then on.)
- A little bit in the libraries (typically the very start of a program and the system call subroutines)
- Maybe a few tiny bits embedded in compiler code, to optimize the core of something slow.
2) The replacement of microcoded CISC processors (i.e. PDP11, VAX, 68K) with RISC processors (i.e. SPARC, MIPS). (x86 was CISC but hung in there due to initera and cheapness.)
Who cares if it takes three instructions instead of one to do some complex function, or if execution near jumps isn't straightforward? The compiler will crank out the three instructions and keep track of the funny execution sequence. Meanwhile you can shrink the processor and run the instructions at the microcode engine's speed - which can be increased further by reducing the nubmer of gates and length of wiring, and end up with a smaller chip (which means higher yeilds, which means making use of the next, faster, FAB technology sooner.)
CISC pushed RISK out of general purpose processors again once the die sizes got big: You can use those extra gates for pipelining, branch prediction, and other stuff that lets you gain back more by parallelism than you lost by expanding the execution units. But it's still alive and well in embedded cores (where you need SOME crunch but want to use most of the silicon for other stuff) and in systems that don't need the absolute cutting-edge of speed or DO need a very low power-per-computation figure.
The compiler advantage over an assembly programmer is extreme both with RISC and with a poorly-designed CISC instruction set (like the early x86es). Well-designed CISC instruction sets (like PDP11, VAX, and 68k) are tuned to simplify the compilers' work - which makes them understandable enough that the tricks are fewer and good code is easier for a human to write. This puts an assembly programmer back in the running. But on the average the compiler still wins.
(But understanding how assembly instruction sets work, and how compilers work, are both useful for writing better code at the compiler level. Less so now that optimizers are really good - but the understanding is still helpful.)
While possibly not a direct security threat, remote crash exploits are obviously highly disruptive and in today's networked economy, highly costly in terms of lost productivity.
While a crash exploit doesn't guarantee it, it usually means that a root exploit is possible.
Think about it: You got the machine to execute code it shouldn't have executed (or overwrite something 'way important it shouldn't have overwritten, or with a value it shouldn't have written.) This usually means you changed the program coutner to some random value. That typically happens as a result of overwriting a return address by a buffer-in-the-stack overflow. Now if you can just get the program counter to point to code you supplied in the same packet, and put the right code there, you're in.
There are other ways this can happen (for instance: overwriting an index into a function table with an illegal value). But many of these similarly lead to root exploits.
A crash means you killed, not just a task, but the whole system. In a system as robust as BSD this usually means that the code that was corrupted by the exploit was running at a kernel permission level. So if you can take it over you can get it to give you any permission you want.
Let's end this: a speaker magnet from the average 15" woofer will readily destroy a credit card (first hand experience) so why not a drivers license?
When they first started putting mag stripes on the licenses, California CLAIMED that they didn't use ferrite, but a higher-coercivity material that requires a much higher flux density to be affected. This is to keep it from being accidentally or deliberately erased, or modified by off-the-shelf mag stripe card writers.
Of course that just means you would need a STRONGER magnet to erase it than you would for a normal credit card. (And that's assuming they weren't just lying.)
As we know, the WWW was invented in order for high-energy physicists to share data throughout the world, so not only does it not make sense for these machines to be cut off from the internet, it is an essential part of scientific research.
In fact, enabling data sharing among academics, especially researchers, was one of the initial goals of the invention of the Internet itself. (The other big one: researching fault-tolerant data communication with military-grade reliability.)
(All this spam and pr0n got tacked on after Al Gore legalized commercial use. B-) )
who really cares if a phone has feature x or feature y? why complain, just get the free phone if you don't want to pay.
First solid rule of economics: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
The cost of those phones, plus a whopping profit, are built into your cell phone rates. You bought that phone, by locking yourself into an overpriced contract. Then you bought it again, and again, and again.
Fortunately, once the design work is done MOST of the features of the phone have very low per-unit incremental cost. (Just a little more ROM, for instance.) Cameras are an exception, of course.
If you work for the Department of Defense on a military installation, you are not allowed to bring a camera phone onto the facility. A friend of mine did, and they fired him on the spot.
I thought the whole POINT of the cameras was to get people used to them so they could be used for spying, detective work, etc.
Like the stereotype of the japanese tourist with the camera. They were ALL OVER the US starting soon after WWII, taking pictures of everything.
Turns out it wasn't just that one of the first non-junk manufacturing industries they got going was mass-produced cameras. A lot of it was industrial espionage. They went back and cloned auto plants, cerial factories, etc. right down to the layout of the machines.
(That's why it's so much harder to get tours of manufacturing plants these days. Kelloggs, for instance, used to give plant tours all the time. Was a regular tourist attraction. But they stopped them entirely after the Japanese cloned the rice crispies machine.)