Some Western companies do indeed cooperate with the Chinese government
in helping it to commit gross human-rights violations, but the West
is not the only accomplice. The biggest accomplice is Taiwan.
During and after the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989, the Taiwanese
accelerated investments into China while Western nations curtailed
investments in an attempt to punish Beijing. Taiwanese backstabbing
completely thwarted the economic sanctions imposed by Western governments.
Another point is that some Western companies do act responsibly. They
include both Reebok and Nike . Reebok is a major supporter of Amnesty International. Of course, the best example is all the American companies (except one, Marathon) which
signed the Sullivan Principles. The Sullivan Principles is an agreement to treat all employees in South Africa equally, regardless of skin color.
Westerners and Western companies are far more responsible than any Taiwanese company.
A part of Islam is acceptable. Irshad Manji represents that part of Islam. She is a Muslim who explicitly rejects parts of the Koran and embraces modern Western values: forgiveness, love, etc. She fully and openly supports Africans, homosexuals, transvestites, etc.
Traditional Muslims condemn her and have issued death threats against her. Most Muslims today tolerate or condone mass murder in the name of Allah.
Comparisons between Christianity and Islam are flawed. Such comparisons always involving comparing elements (e.g. burning witches or waging the Crusades) of ancient Christianity and elements (e.g. deliberate use of rape to punish women and indiscriminate slaughter of children in the London subway by a noon-day explosive) of modern-day Islam.
The proper comparison is between modern-day Christianity and modern-day Islam. Mainstream modern-day Christianity is not much of a religion and comes close to resembling deism, which deletes or ignores all Biblical verses that are inconsistent with Jesus' teaching or with modern science. Most people in Europe are correctly called "Deists".
So, too is Irshad Manji. She is a Deist, who rejects all Koran verses that are inconsistent with total love or with modern science.
Therein lies the solution to today's problem with terrorism. We should Westernize the world. The process of Westernization will convert violent religions like Islam into Deism.
The first step in this direction begins at the immigration office. Applications for immigration into the USA will be screened extensively. Muslims who think along the lines of Irshad Manji will be welcomed into the USA. Muslims who embrace anti-Western values (i.e. who threaten lovely people like Irshad Manji) will be denied entry into the USA. These rules also apply to Muslims who apply for an educational visa to enroll at an American college or university.
All those anti-Western Muslims whom we have all met, at the university, in the guise of professors or students will be denied entry into the USA. Our universities will again become places of enlightenment, not hotbeds of Islamic sleeper cells. So, help me Buddha!
The market for information-technology (IT) jobs does not operate according to the laws of economics. Allow me to explain. A shortage of labor is a normal market force, and government should not intervene to counteract this force. Two of the effects of a shortage is (1) to boost wages and (2) improve working conditions.
However, whenever a shortage of labor occurs in the IT market, the government consistently intervenes by importing H-1B workers to fix this shortage. As a result, the growth in wages is damaged. Working conditions (like working 60+ hours per week) do not improve.
Any perceived shortage in the market for IT labor is illusory. If this shortage were real, it would be short-lived, due to government intervention.
By the way, we see the same phenomenon in the market for unskilled labor: e.g. picking vegetables and fruits. The government fixes this shortage by allowing illegal aliens to flood this market for unskilled labor. As a result, wages (hovering around $5.00 per hour for fruit-picking in Southern California) never rise. Working conditions (like standing for more than 9 hours per day in the strawberry fields) never improve.
The rub is that politicians do not care about Washington's gross tampering in and bludgeoning of a (relatively) free market like the USA. Washington is eager to fix shortages of labor. However, Washington rarely fixes shortages of jobs by, for example, creating more government jobs. The interests of Washington are not aligned with the hopes and aspirations of middle America.
We should close the American market to (relatively) non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. Further, the American market should be flung wide open to (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. Free trade is good -- only when we are trading with other societies that maintain (relatively) free markets.
Visit a unique web site maintained by an engineer at NASA. He discusses the reality and practicality of various technologies mentioned in "Star Trek".
Unfortunately, the problem for humankind is not the lack of power. Rather, the problem is overpopulation. It seriously destroys the environment. Each person contributes a bit of pollution. Multiply that person by 6 billion, and you have some serious damage to the ecosystem.
Antimatter purports to solve the alleged energy shortage. However, what is the solution to lack of breathable air, drinkable water, etc.?
Comparisons between Islam and Christianity are flawed because agitators try to focus on Christianity in the second century. We should focus on Christianity in the 21st century since Christianity has changed considerably over 1900 years.
The problem with modern-day Islam is that it has many of the barbaric beliefs that Christianity had in the second century.
Yet, a better Islam is arising. Consider Irshad Manji. She embraces love for all: women, homosexuals, Africans, etc. She rejects all the barbarism of Islam and, in so doing, has created a sort of Deistic Islam. She is a Deistic Muslim. There are other Deistic Muslims, and they all live in the West. In the Middle East, Deistic Muslims are shot and hung by the neck until dead.
Mainstream Muslims hate her and want to kill her. Unfortunately for Islam, she is a minority and is not typical of most Muslims. Most Muslims support or tolerate mass murder.
Let's do something really interesting with this grid technology. Instead of participating in SETI, let's use this grid to design the first GNU jet fighter (GJF). Our target performance would be the Phantom F-4J, modified with a gattling cannon. We could design and test the GJF entirely in cyberspace.
The design would be freely available to any foreign country.
Could we really do this stunt? I see no reason why we could not. Dassault has done it.
The F-2 is the new Japanese frontline fighter and employs stealth technology developed by Japanese engineers. The F-2 is distinctly inferior to the American F-22 but is a source of pride for the Japanese military.
In about 5 years, Tokyo will deploy the new F-2 Super Kai, an improved version of the F-2. The Japanese military has already released pictures of a preliminary model. It should be quite effective an slaying Godzilla or the Chinese military.
The pictures of the F-2 Super Kai are awesome. What's this? I'm salivating.
Blaming violent games for the violence in American society has very limited merit. Violent games are simply one stimulus among an array of pro-aggression stimuli that floods the American child as he grows into adulthood.
In Japan, many kids play violent video games and see softporn pictures on the television. You will commonly see bared breats during the prime time on the television. Yet, the rate of violent crime, including violence (i.e. rape) against women, is much lower than that rate in the USA.
Similar comments apply to Western Europe. (I do not have statistics for Eastern Europe.)
What in American society is spurring the violence? American society encourages competition. It, in itself, is a form of aggression. In American society, if you lose your job, you just might suffer malnutrition because welfare-based food stamps have a finite duration. If you cannot find a job during that duration or before the expiration of unemployment benefits, you are screwed.
The Europeans take a kindler, gentler approach. They accept a lower standard of living in exchange for lowering the level of aggressive competition. The Europeans give cradle-to-grave entitlements to anyone with European citizenship.
Japan appears on the surface to be pure capitalism, but the Japanese also practice European-style paternalism. Companies are not allowed to fail, thus throwing millions out of work. Banks continue to lend money even to companies that surely should go bankrupt. Major companies in Japan avoid laying off workers. All this paternalism breeds inefficiency. The average Japanese worker is, in fact, less productive than the aggressive American worker. There are some exceptions: e.g. Toyota blue-collar workers.
Which society is best? Less aggressive society with a lower standard of living or a more aggressive society with a higher standard of living? There is no clearcut answer. The choice is one of tradeoffs.
As I drive to my brokerage to check on the high return of my mutual funds and other investments, I always pass by a prison. America has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. America is one of the few industrialized nations to continue to liberally practice capital punishment.
In Silicon Valley, if you refuse to work 13 hours per day on minimal pay, the American multinational conglomerate or startup will fire you and hire an H-1B worker from China or India. You either compete or die.
Technology is analogous to the fruit on a tree. Humankind has already picked off most of the low-hanging fruit. It is the stuff that is readily comprehended or computed.
Pick up a textbook about digital signal processing or communication theory. The concepts are straightforward to understand because they involve linear systems. When systems are not linear, we try to linearize them because linear systems are more easily grasped by the human mind than non-linear systems.
We have already picked off all the fruits of linear systems. The next step, nonlinear systems, is a tad more difficult. So, innovation will slow.
I presume that other endeavors outside of signal processing face a similar situation.
As a last example, consider physics. Newtonian physics was the low-hanging fruit. We can see its application in almost everything from cars to buildings to aeroplanes. Beyond Newtonian physics is a very difficult, non-intuitive step: quantum physics.
As integrated circuits become so small that quantum effects appear, humankind will face a brick wall, and innovation will slow to a crawl. Of course, there will be bright ideas. Science-fiction writers also have brilliant ideas, but implementing them will not be feasible.
In order for technology to be developed efficiently, it must be framed in a way that is intuitive to the mind. This intuition gives brilliant people a way to reason about a problem and to find a neat solution. Linear systems and newtonian physics are intuitive and fit well within the mental framework of the human mind. Nonlinear systems and quantum physics are quite the opposite.
NASA should take a leaf from the bidding manual of the United States Air Force (USAF) and open up bidding for the next shuttle to both American and Japanese companies. All such companies would submit a proposal for the next shuttle and would use their own finances to build a prototype. Then, all the prototypes compete in aggressive endurance tests.
The group of companies submitting the winning prototype will receive the bulk of the funding to build a fleet of shuttles.
However, the group of companies submitting the losing prototype will be given some limited funding to build parts for the winning prototype. The aim is for the losing group of companies to recoup the loss in building their losing prototype.
The USAF and the rest of the American military is already collaborating with the Japanese government, the Japanese military, and Mitsubishi in building the next-generation anti-missile weapon. There should be no problem in opening the NASA bidding process to Japanese companies.
This competition will ensure quality. The F-16 and other jet fighters are damned reliable due to the competitive bidding process used by the USAF. In fact, the F-16 is so reliable that it serves as the baseline model from which the Japanese government derived its next-generation stealth fighter, the F-2.
When a company sells a product below cost, such behavior is consistent with free-market principles except in 2 situations: government subsidy or monopoly. When Korean companies like Hynix sell their memory chips at very low prices (or at prices below cost) in the USA, Hynix is receiving financial support from Seoul so that Hynix can afford to sell at a loss or at no profit. Such financial distortions (which are common in Korea) materially impact the American economy because Washington opens the American economy to "free" trade with Korea.
The other situation that is prohibited is for a monopoly to sell a product at a price below cost in order to destroy the competition. In such situations, the monopoly aims to destroy the competition so that the monopoly can, at a later point in time, dramatically raise the price of the product to reap monopoly profits. Such actions also hurt the American economy.
Except for these two problems, there is no issue with companies using selling-at-a-loss to gain market share. IBM sells its server hardware at zero profit or at a small loss in order to reap the profits from a service contract. Sony sells its Playstation at a loss in order to reap the profits from software sales.
Neither IBM nor Sony is a monopoly. Further, neither IBM nor Sony (unlike Korean companies) are being subsidized by either the American or Japanese governments.
The article... [gives] the first real warning of Steve Jobs' least-productive tendency: pre-emptive and often arbitrary constraint of end-user options.
Unfortunately for Apple, that trait is not Jobs' least-productive tendency. The worst trait of Jobs is that he does not understand technology trends.
His forte is that he understands fashion trends. The multi-colored iMacs were a smashing success. So, too are the stylish iPods. Peak inside of a Mac store, and you will see excellent styling.
As for technology trends, Jobs just stumbles. His single biggest mistake is not porting the MacOS to x86 back in 1984 so that IBM PC users could run the operating system.
More than 20 years later, he admitted that he was wrong. Jobs recently announced that the Mac would use the x86 and would become little more than a glorified IBM PC clone. Of course, he will put some tweaks into the Mac so that x86-MacOS can run only on the Mac. However, clever hackers will figure out a way to run x86-MacOS on the IBM PC clones as well; "it" is merely a question of time.
If Jobs had selected the 80286 for the Mac and loaded it with x86-MacOS back in 1984 and if he had sold an alternate version of x86-MacOS for the IBM PC clones, then Apple would have become what Microsoft actually became -- an immensely profitable company that is the object of scorn by Slashdotters. MacOS would have 90% of the OS market and would earn monopoly profits year after year. Better yet, Bill Gates would have become some dweeb hacker working at Seattle Computer Products since his startup, Microsoft, went bankrupt due to relentless competition from Apple.
What NASA needs most is a good dose of competition. It worked wonders for Detroit. Ford, GM, and Chrysler produced shoddy vehicles for nearly a decade until Toyota, Nissan, and Honda drove the American companies to the verge of bankruptcy. Then, they transformed themselves into competitive powerhouses that producing outstanding products.
The quality of American autos now approaches that of Japanese autos. (American cars continue to lose marketshare to Japanese cars due to poor ergonomics and ride feel, not due to quality.)
So, who or what could serve as competitors to American companies bidding on NASA-funded projects? The answer is Japanese companies that build Japan's rockets and satellites. In the future, NASA should open up future missions to competitive bidding among both Japanese companies and American companies. NASA maintains a hands-off approach. Future missions will be mostly private ventures run by private companies but subsidized by government funding.
The mostly-private approach also involves one additional element: lawsuits. If future space mishaps occur, the company running the space mission or building hardware for the mission will be subject to lawsuits by the families of the victims.
Private companies will bear the responsibility for the success of the mission. NASA acts only as the funder. Competition and lawsuits can do wonders in producing a reliable product. Just look at American automobiles with their high quality and vast arsenal of safety features: air bags, crumple zones, etc.
Amtrak is the inter-state railway system in the USA and is supposed to be equivalent to the inter-prefecture system in Japan. Yet, why does Amtrak refuse to use bullet trains? Amtrak uses the regular trains that travel 100 kph, at best. Typically, the speed is closer to 80 kph. The result is that traveling between states usually takes several days. Imagine trying to spend several days locked in a train.
Given the fact that Amtrak is supposed to compete against airplanes and that Amtrak is covering great distances, it should be using bullet trains exclusively.
Amtrak has been a money-losing operation since day #1. For some reason, the American politicians just cannot determine why Amtrak remains unprofitable. How can anyone be so ignorant that he cannot see the reason? No one wants to ride a train for 2 or 3 days when you can take an airplane for equivalent cost to the same destination in less than a day.
Does any American politician even know the phrase, "Japanese bullet train"? The answer to Amtrak's problems is staring the American government in the face, and no one is adovating the right solution. I almost think that the lobbyists for the commercial aviation industry (i.e. Boeing & Airbus) want to ensure that Amtrak is not allowed to use bullet trains.
Although some American companies are completely unethical, the overwhelming majority abide by some minimal standards of decency. Back in the days of apartheid in South Africa, all American companies (except one) doing business there agreed to abide by the Sullivan Principles, which pledged fair treatment to South Africa's blacks.
We need to take the same moral fortitude in dealing with both Iran and China (including Taiwan province). When we slap sanctions against he Beijing government, we should also slap sanctions against the Taipei government. Taiwan and mainland China are one in the same, as far as morality is concerned. When American companies curtailed investments in China just after the Tiananmen Square Incident, Taiwanese companies actually accelerated investments into mainland China, leading to today's massive cumulative Taiwanese investment of $100 billion into mainland China.
If the spammer is living in China (i.e., mainland China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong) and if this spammer sends e-mail notes to the e-mail address of an American children, how do the authorities plan to enforce this law. There is no extradition treaty between China and the USA.
National Archives and Records Administration is expecting to have as much a 347 petabytes to deal with by 2022. Are we destined for a "digital dark age"?"
Perhaps, the answer is compression.
Does anyone know whether there is an upper limit to text compression?
In signal processing, there is a limit called the Shannon Capacity theorem, which gives the maximum amount of information that can be transmitted on a channel. In text compression, is there a similar limit?
Note that the Shannon Capacity theorem does not tell you how to reach that limit. The theorem merely tells you what the limit is. For decades, we knew that maximum limit on a normal telephone twisted pair is about 56,000 bits per second, according to the theorem. However, we did not know how to reach it until Trellis coding was discovered, according to an electronic communications colleague at the institute where I work.
If we can calculate a similar limit for text compression, then we can know whether further research to find better text compression algorithms would be potentially fruitful. If we are already at the limit, then we should spend the money on finding denser storage media.
This sudden generosity by Google and Yahoo! smells like using goodwill to avert the eyes of the good, kindhearted folks from some rotten behavior exhibited by the same companies. What rotten behavior has occurred?
OVERKILL: Great Movie != Great Animation
on
Lucas's New HQ
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· Score: 1, Interesting
("Star Wars" must be the #1 movie saga of geeks because, during the last 5 weeks surrounding the debut of "Star Wars III", Slashdot has featured at least 1 "Star Wars"-related topic per week. )
Lucas and his crew have already done a great job with animation. He spurred the growth of an entire industry that generates computer images: special effects, animation, etc. We have already reached a point where we can economically fill an entire movie with head-turning animation. Consider "Shrek II" and the latest episode of "Star Wars" (SW).
Yet, such a feat does not necessarily translate into a great movie. Consider SW I & II.
SW IV had limited special effects and no animated characters, due to the limits of economical computer-image generation, yet SW IV is far superior in the pace (adequately slow) and the depth of its plot, compared to SW I. The limited computer-image generation forced the writer and the director to focus on the story.
SW I and II are precisely what can go wrong when computer-image generation overwhelms the story. Did you ever notice how, in SW I and II, Yoda's interaction in a 3-way conversation (i.e. with 2 human actors) is awkward and weird? Yoda does not enter and exit a conversation with the same naturalness that a human being (i.e. not computer-generated image) would. His facial expressions are also unnatural. The human actors cannot produce the right facial expressions when they are looking in his direction. When the human actor do look in his direction, they do not seem to be looking straight at him.
Of course, the wonderful "Shrek" saga is an exception to my thesis.
I am sitting here, pondering the future of Windows, as I watch the operating system slowly boot up and struggle along. I suspect that operating systems and web clients have now reached the point where they offer much more features than I need and actually use.
Has anyone suggested that Microsoft create 2 parallel operating systems: slimware version and bloatware version? I want a slimmed down version of Windows that includes just a little more than a true pre-emptively multi-tasked kernel I also want a slimmed down web client that lacks support for ActiveX and anything else that is not strictly necessary for accessing the secure website run by my bank.
I need little more. I suspect that this barebones configuration meets the need of most Americans, who are not tech savy.
You might find the story on the "Time Magazine" website to be interesting. Apparently, "Time Magazine" had selected the AbioCor artificial heart (produced by AbioMed) to be the 2001 invention of the year.
Nonetheless, the real answer to the organ replacement problem is goading adult stem cells into growing a human heart. It would not suffer the negative effects of rejection (caused by donor hearts) and blood clots (caused by mechanical hearts).
When a (relatively) free market like the USA interacts with a (relatively) non-free market like India by the trading of goods and services (including labor), the free market becomes non-free. The government regulations and corruption that damages the Indian market now affects the American market. The normal market forces in the USA are now influenced/destroyed by Indian government policies that have obliterated the economic opportunities and standard of living in India.
Similar arguments apply to illegal aliens from Mexico. Under the aegis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), illegal aliens flood into the USA and have essentially destroyed the wages in the market for unskilled labor. The normal market forces in the USA are now influenced/destroyed by Mexican government policies that have obliterated the economic opportunities and standard of living in Mexico.
Without illegal aliens, the Americans working as unskilled labor would enjoy a sudden and dramatic boost in their wages, enabling them to actually buy medical insurance.
When American politicians tout free trade and claim that the American market remains a free market, they completely ignore the non-free market which is interacting with our free market and which is destroying the normal market forces in a (our) free market. The rub is that no one seems to care.
Free trade advances free markets in only one scenario: (relatively) free markets like the USA interact with other (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. To maintain genuine free trade, we should close our markets (including the market for services like labor) to India, China, and their ilk until those nations establish free markets. We lose nothing by championing genuine free trade.
"Using data from IP flows passing through routers and reverse-engineering tools to peek under the hood of new Trojans, Thompson said the researchers are able to figure out how the botnet owner sends instructions to the compromised machines."
When the security "experts" are busy looking at all the data passing through routers, who is busy ensuring that the "experts" will not violate my privacy by reading the personal but sensitive e-mail notes that I send to my friends and associates?
In other words, when the "experts" are protecting me from the hackers, who is protecting me from the "experts"?
The future of Linux in the server market is secure simply because IBM has invested in Linux on the server. IBM never abandons rich customers who have purchased legacy (which, in this case, is Linux servers) from IBM.
However, the desktop is where Linux will die before it is even established. Apple will not drive a stake into the heart of Linux, but rather, the hordes of hackers and Taiwanese-run peripheral factories in China will kill Linux on the desktop. There are 3 scenarios. First, the hackers write a patch that will enable Mac OS X to run on conventional x86-based IBM PC clones. Second, the Taiwanese engineers will violate scores of American patents and build a cheap (possibly, $10.00) hardware plug-in card that will enable OS X to run on conventional IBM PC clones. The 3rd possibility is a combination of the first two.
An interesting side effect of these efforts will be taking marketshare from Windows XP and successors. In the server market, Linux has taken market share from UNIX instead of Windows. However, on the x86 desktop market, there is no 3rd OS to compete against MAC OS X. There are only 2 OSes: Windows and OS X on x86. They will compete head-on, against each other.
Although I would rather that Apple have picked another processor (e.g. ARM), I would be pleased to see Apple crush Windows on x86. Apple has a good chance of winning this matchup since the goodwill of open-source developers is on the side of Apple.
Apple's team: million-person army of open-source developers + freeBSD + most-consumer-friendly (i.e. idiot proof) OS called OS X
Microsoft's team: couple thousand paid but possibly disgruntled slaves (including) H-1Bs + consumer-unfriendly OS[1]. "It" is no contest. Apple wins by 70% marketshare.
side note
---------
1. Windows 98 requires daily reboots in order to be stable. Windows XP requires weekly reboots in order to be stable.
If Lucas would not sue, then we'd make a movie.
on
Star Wars 3D And TV
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· Score: 1
But if you're asking him to stop making movies his way and make them the way you want to see them, he'll tell you what any artist would tell you: go make your own movie.
Whenever SlashDot posts a "Star Wars" (SW) topic in this forum, participants soon push the number of submitted articles to about 1000. There are many fans who are committed to the original myth in original SW trilogy, not the new myth in the new trilogy.
I would also bet that, among those devoted fans, are some rich folks who have the financial means to write and film a much better prequel than what Lucas botched (except possibly for SW III). If Lucas would just agree to license his characters from the original trilogy so that others could develop an alternative prequel, then I am sure that others would make their "own [damn] movie".
The introduction of midichlorians bothers me to no end. That wonderful message that the force is available to anyone committed to the nobel ideals (compassion, honesty, etc.) of the Jedi disappeared into a flushed toilet when Lucas introduced "midichlorians". The Jedi knights went from a nobel, egalitarian group to a snobbish group whose members are determined by blood.
Slashdot Mirror
Another point is that some Western companies do act responsibly. They include both Reebok and Nike . Reebok is a major supporter of Amnesty International. Of course, the best example is all the American companies (except one, Marathon) which signed the Sullivan Principles. The Sullivan Principles is an agreement to treat all employees in South Africa equally, regardless of skin color.
Westerners and Western companies are far more responsible than any Taiwanese company.
Now, consider Stanford University. It recently divested investments in 4 companies doing business in Darfur, where the worst government-sponsored genocide has occurred. What is clear is that much of Western society believes that business and human rights should not be separated although some (like some writers in SlashDot) in Western society believe otherwise.
Nonetheless, contrast the attitudes and behavior of Americans and Taiwanese. The difference is stark.
Traditional Muslims condemn her and have issued death threats against her. Most Muslims today tolerate or condone mass murder in the name of Allah.
Comparisons between Christianity and Islam are flawed. Such comparisons always involving comparing elements (e.g. burning witches or waging the Crusades) of ancient Christianity and elements (e.g. deliberate use of rape to punish women and indiscriminate slaughter of children in the London subway by a noon-day explosive) of modern-day Islam.
The proper comparison is between modern-day Christianity and modern-day Islam. Mainstream modern-day Christianity is not much of a religion and comes close to resembling deism, which deletes or ignores all Biblical verses that are inconsistent with Jesus' teaching or with modern science. Most people in Europe are correctly called "Deists".
So, too is Irshad Manji. She is a Deist, who rejects all Koran verses that are inconsistent with total love or with modern science.
Therein lies the solution to today's problem with terrorism. We should Westernize the world. The process of Westernization will convert violent religions like Islam into Deism.
The first step in this direction begins at the immigration office. Applications for immigration into the USA will be screened extensively. Muslims who think along the lines of Irshad Manji will be welcomed into the USA. Muslims who embrace anti-Western values (i.e. who threaten lovely people like Irshad Manji) will be denied entry into the USA. These rules also apply to Muslims who apply for an educational visa to enroll at an American college or university.
All those anti-Western Muslims whom we have all met, at the university, in the guise of professors or students will be denied entry into the USA. Our universities will again become places of enlightenment, not hotbeds of Islamic sleeper cells. So, help me Buddha!
However, whenever a shortage of labor occurs in the IT market, the government consistently intervenes by importing H-1B workers to fix this shortage. As a result, the growth in wages is damaged. Working conditions (like working 60+ hours per week) do not improve.
Any perceived shortage in the market for IT labor is illusory. If this shortage were real, it would be short-lived, due to government intervention.
By the way, we see the same phenomenon in the market for unskilled labor: e.g. picking vegetables and fruits. The government fixes this shortage by allowing illegal aliens to flood this market for unskilled labor. As a result, wages (hovering around $5.00 per hour for fruit-picking in Southern California) never rise. Working conditions (like standing for more than 9 hours per day in the strawberry fields) never improve.
The rub is that politicians do not care about Washington's gross tampering in and bludgeoning of a (relatively) free market like the USA. Washington is eager to fix shortages of labor. However, Washington rarely fixes shortages of jobs by, for example, creating more government jobs. The interests of Washington are not aligned with the hopes and aspirations of middle America.
We should close the American market to (relatively) non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. Further, the American market should be flung wide open to (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. Free trade is good -- only when we are trading with other societies that maintain (relatively) free markets.
Unfortunately, the problem for humankind is not the lack of power. Rather, the problem is overpopulation. It seriously destroys the environment. Each person contributes a bit of pollution. Multiply that person by 6 billion, and you have some serious damage to the ecosystem.
Antimatter purports to solve the alleged energy shortage. However, what is the solution to lack of breathable air, drinkable water, etc.?
The problem with modern-day Islam is that it has many of the barbaric beliefs that Christianity had in the second century.
Yet, a better Islam is arising. Consider Irshad Manji. She embraces love for all: women, homosexuals, Africans, etc. She rejects all the barbarism of Islam and, in so doing, has created a sort of Deistic Islam. She is a Deistic Muslim. There are other Deistic Muslims, and they all live in the West. In the Middle East, Deistic Muslims are shot and hung by the neck until dead.
Mainstream Muslims hate her and want to kill her. Unfortunately for Islam, she is a minority and is not typical of most Muslims. Most Muslims support or tolerate mass murder.
Ms. Manji practices love.
Could we really do this stunt? I see no reason why we could not. Dassault has done it.
Dassault, a French company, designed and tested its new Falcon 7X entirely in a virtual reality. The company did not create a physical prototype. Rather, the first build is destined for sale to the customer.
The F-2 is the new Japanese frontline fighter and employs stealth technology developed by Japanese engineers. The F-2 is distinctly inferior to the American F-22 but is a source of pride for the Japanese military.
In about 5 years, Tokyo will deploy the new F-2 Super Kai, an improved version of the F-2. The Japanese military has already released pictures of a preliminary model. It should be quite effective an slaying Godzilla or the Chinese military.
The pictures of the F-2 Super Kai are awesome. What's this? I'm salivating.
In Japan, many kids play violent video games and see softporn pictures on the television. You will commonly see bared breats during the prime time on the television. Yet, the rate of violent crime, including violence (i.e. rape) against women, is much lower than that rate in the USA.
Similar comments apply to Western Europe. (I do not have statistics for Eastern Europe.)
What in American society is spurring the violence? American society encourages competition. It, in itself, is a form of aggression. In American society, if you lose your job, you just might suffer malnutrition because welfare-based food stamps have a finite duration. If you cannot find a job during that duration or before the expiration of unemployment benefits, you are screwed.
The Europeans take a kindler, gentler approach. They accept a lower standard of living in exchange for lowering the level of aggressive competition. The Europeans give cradle-to-grave entitlements to anyone with European citizenship.
Japan appears on the surface to be pure capitalism, but the Japanese also practice European-style paternalism. Companies are not allowed to fail, thus throwing millions out of work. Banks continue to lend money even to companies that surely should go bankrupt. Major companies in Japan avoid laying off workers. All this paternalism breeds inefficiency. The average Japanese worker is, in fact, less productive than the aggressive American worker. There are some exceptions: e.g. Toyota blue-collar workers.
Which society is best? Less aggressive society with a lower standard of living or a more aggressive society with a higher standard of living? There is no clearcut answer. The choice is one of tradeoffs.
As I drive to my brokerage to check on the high return of my mutual funds and other investments, I always pass by a prison. America has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. America is one of the few industrialized nations to continue to liberally practice capital punishment.
In Silicon Valley, if you refuse to work 13 hours per day on minimal pay, the American multinational conglomerate or startup will fire you and hire an H-1B worker from China or India. You either compete or die.
Pick up a textbook about digital signal processing or communication theory. The concepts are straightforward to understand because they involve linear systems. When systems are not linear, we try to linearize them because linear systems are more easily grasped by the human mind than non-linear systems.
We have already picked off all the fruits of linear systems. The next step, nonlinear systems, is a tad more difficult. So, innovation will slow.
I presume that other endeavors outside of signal processing face a similar situation.
As a last example, consider physics. Newtonian physics was the low-hanging fruit. We can see its application in almost everything from cars to buildings to aeroplanes. Beyond Newtonian physics is a very difficult, non-intuitive step: quantum physics.
As integrated circuits become so small that quantum effects appear, humankind will face a brick wall, and innovation will slow to a crawl. Of course, there will be bright ideas. Science-fiction writers also have brilliant ideas, but implementing them will not be feasible.
In order for technology to be developed efficiently, it must be framed in a way that is intuitive to the mind. This intuition gives brilliant people a way to reason about a problem and to find a neat solution. Linear systems and newtonian physics are intuitive and fit well within the mental framework of the human mind. Nonlinear systems and quantum physics are quite the opposite.
The group of companies submitting the winning prototype will receive the bulk of the funding to build a fleet of shuttles. However, the group of companies submitting the losing prototype will be given some limited funding to build parts for the winning prototype. The aim is for the losing group of companies to recoup the loss in building their losing prototype.
The USAF and the rest of the American military is already collaborating with the Japanese government, the Japanese military, and Mitsubishi in building the next-generation anti-missile weapon. There should be no problem in opening the NASA bidding process to Japanese companies.
This competition will ensure quality. The F-16 and other jet fighters are damned reliable due to the competitive bidding process used by the USAF. In fact, the F-16 is so reliable that it serves as the baseline model from which the Japanese government derived its next-generation stealth fighter, the F-2.
The other situation that is prohibited is for a monopoly to sell a product at a price below cost in order to destroy the competition. In such situations, the monopoly aims to destroy the competition so that the monopoly can, at a later point in time, dramatically raise the price of the product to reap monopoly profits. Such actions also hurt the American economy.
Except for these two problems, there is no issue with companies using selling-at-a-loss to gain market share. IBM sells its server hardware at zero profit or at a small loss in order to reap the profits from a service contract. Sony sells its Playstation at a loss in order to reap the profits from software sales. Neither IBM nor Sony is a monopoly. Further, neither IBM nor Sony (unlike Korean companies) are being subsidized by either the American or Japanese governments.
Unfortunately for Apple, that trait is not Jobs' least-productive tendency. The worst trait of Jobs is that he does not understand technology trends.
His forte is that he understands fashion trends. The multi-colored iMacs were a smashing success. So, too are the stylish iPods. Peak inside of a Mac store, and you will see excellent styling.
As for technology trends, Jobs just stumbles. His single biggest mistake is not porting the MacOS to x86 back in 1984 so that IBM PC users could run the operating system.
More than 20 years later, he admitted that he was wrong. Jobs recently announced that the Mac would use the x86 and would become little more than a glorified IBM PC clone. Of course, he will put some tweaks into the Mac so that x86-MacOS can run only on the Mac. However, clever hackers will figure out a way to run x86-MacOS on the IBM PC clones as well; "it" is merely a question of time.
If Jobs had selected the 80286 for the Mac and loaded it with x86-MacOS back in 1984 and if he had sold an alternate version of x86-MacOS for the IBM PC clones, then Apple would have become what Microsoft actually became -- an immensely profitable company that is the object of scorn by Slashdotters. MacOS would have 90% of the OS market and would earn monopoly profits year after year. Better yet, Bill Gates would have become some dweeb hacker working at Seattle Computer Products since his startup, Microsoft, went bankrupt due to relentless competition from Apple.
So, who or what could serve as competitors to American companies bidding on NASA-funded projects? The answer is Japanese companies that build Japan's rockets and satellites. In the future, NASA should open up future missions to competitive bidding among both Japanese companies and American companies. NASA maintains a hands-off approach. Future missions will be mostly private ventures run by private companies but subsidized by government funding.
The mostly-private approach also involves one additional element: lawsuits. If future space mishaps occur, the company running the space mission or building hardware for the mission will be subject to lawsuits by the families of the victims.
Private companies will bear the responsibility for the success of the mission. NASA acts only as the funder. Competition and lawsuits can do wonders in producing a reliable product. Just look at American automobiles with their high quality and vast arsenal of safety features: air bags, crumple zones, etc.
Given the fact that Amtrak is supposed to compete against airplanes and that Amtrak is covering great distances, it should be using bullet trains exclusively.
Amtrak has been a money-losing operation since day #1. For some reason, the American politicians just cannot determine why Amtrak remains unprofitable. How can anyone be so ignorant that he cannot see the reason? No one wants to ride a train for 2 or 3 days when you can take an airplane for equivalent cost to the same destination in less than a day.
Does any American politician even know the phrase, "Japanese bullet train"? The answer to Amtrak's problems is staring the American government in the face, and no one is adovating the right solution. I almost think that the lobbyists for the commercial aviation industry (i.e. Boeing & Airbus) want to ensure that Amtrak is not allowed to use bullet trains.
Although some American companies are completely unethical, the overwhelming majority abide by some minimal standards of decency. Back in the days of apartheid in South Africa, all American companies (except one) doing business there agreed to abide by the Sullivan Principles, which pledged fair treatment to South Africa's blacks.
We need to take the same moral fortitude in dealing with both Iran and China (including Taiwan province). When we slap sanctions against he Beijing government, we should also slap sanctions against the Taipei government. Taiwan and mainland China are one in the same, as far as morality is concerned. When American companies curtailed investments in China just after the Tiananmen Square Incident, Taiwanese companies actually accelerated investments into mainland China, leading to today's massive cumulative Taiwanese investment of $100 billion into mainland China.
If the spammer is living in China (i.e., mainland China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong) and if this spammer sends e-mail notes to the e-mail address of an American children, how do the authorities plan to enforce this law. There is no extradition treaty between China and the USA.
Perhaps, the answer is compression.
Does anyone know whether there is an upper limit to text compression?
In signal processing, there is a limit called the Shannon Capacity theorem, which gives the maximum amount of information that can be transmitted on a channel. In text compression, is there a similar limit?
Note that the Shannon Capacity theorem does not tell you how to reach that limit. The theorem merely tells you what the limit is. For decades, we knew that maximum limit on a normal telephone twisted pair is about 56,000 bits per second, according to the theorem. However, we did not know how to reach it until Trellis coding was discovered, according to an electronic communications colleague at the institute where I work.
If we can calculate a similar limit for text compression, then we can know whether further research to find better text compression algorithms would be potentially fruitful. If we are already at the limit, then we should spend the money on finding denser storage media.
Consider Microsoft's recent censoring of the words "democracy", "human rights", "freedom for Tibet", and any other character strings that affront Chinese culture. As we in the SlashDot community discovered, Microsoft is not the only culprit. Both Google and Yahoo! have behaved similarly and submitted to the draconian will of Chinese society.
The motto at these companies is "Profits before democracy or human rights".
I am not buying what these mercenaries are celling are selling.
- reporter, member of Amnesty International since 1984
Lucas and his crew have already done a great job with animation. He spurred the growth of an entire industry that generates computer images: special effects, animation, etc. We have already reached a point where we can economically fill an entire movie with head-turning animation. Consider "Shrek II" and the latest episode of "Star Wars" (SW).
Yet, such a feat does not necessarily translate into a great movie. Consider SW I & II.
SW IV had limited special effects and no animated characters, due to the limits of economical computer-image generation, yet SW IV is far superior in the pace (adequately slow) and the depth of its plot, compared to SW I. The limited computer-image generation forced the writer and the director to focus on the story.
SW I and II are precisely what can go wrong when computer-image generation overwhelms the story. Did you ever notice how, in SW I and II, Yoda's interaction in a 3-way conversation (i.e. with 2 human actors) is awkward and weird? Yoda does not enter and exit a conversation with the same naturalness that a human being (i.e. not computer-generated image) would. His facial expressions are also unnatural. The human actors cannot produce the right facial expressions when they are looking in his direction. When the human actor do look in his direction, they do not seem to be looking straight at him.
Of course, the wonderful "Shrek" saga is an exception to my thesis.
Has anyone suggested that Microsoft create 2 parallel operating systems: slimware version and bloatware version? I want a slimmed down version of Windows that includes just a little more than a true pre-emptively multi-tasked kernel I also want a slimmed down web client that lacks support for ActiveX and anything else that is not strictly necessary for accessing the secure website run by my bank.
I need little more. I suspect that this barebones configuration meets the need of most Americans, who are not tech savy.
Nonetheless, the real answer to the organ replacement problem is goading adult stem cells into growing a human heart. It would not suffer the negative effects of rejection (caused by donor hearts) and blood clots (caused by mechanical hearts).
Similar arguments apply to illegal aliens from Mexico. Under the aegis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), illegal aliens flood into the USA and have essentially destroyed the wages in the market for unskilled labor. The normal market forces in the USA are now influenced/destroyed by Mexican government policies that have obliterated the economic opportunities and standard of living in Mexico. Without illegal aliens, the Americans working as unskilled labor would enjoy a sudden and dramatic boost in their wages, enabling them to actually buy medical insurance.
When American politicians tout free trade and claim that the American market remains a free market, they completely ignore the non-free market which is interacting with our free market and which is destroying the normal market forces in a (our) free market. The rub is that no one seems to care.
Free trade advances free markets in only one scenario: (relatively) free markets like the USA interact with other (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. To maintain genuine free trade, we should close our markets (including the market for services like labor) to India, China, and their ilk until those nations establish free markets. We lose nothing by championing genuine free trade.
When the security "experts" are busy looking at all the data passing through routers, who is busy ensuring that the "experts" will not violate my privacy by reading the personal but sensitive e-mail notes that I send to my friends and associates?
In other words, when the "experts" are protecting me from the hackers, who is protecting me from the "experts"?
However, the desktop is where Linux will die before it is even established. Apple will not drive a stake into the heart of Linux, but rather, the hordes of hackers and Taiwanese-run peripheral factories in China will kill Linux on the desktop. There are 3 scenarios. First, the hackers write a patch that will enable Mac OS X to run on conventional x86-based IBM PC clones. Second, the Taiwanese engineers will violate scores of American patents and build a cheap (possibly, $10.00) hardware plug-in card that will enable OS X to run on conventional IBM PC clones. The 3rd possibility is a combination of the first two.
An interesting side effect of these efforts will be taking marketshare from Windows XP and successors. In the server market, Linux has taken market share from UNIX instead of Windows. However, on the x86 desktop market, there is no 3rd OS to compete against MAC OS X. There are only 2 OSes: Windows and OS X on x86. They will compete head-on, against each other.
Although I would rather that Apple have picked another processor (e.g. ARM), I would be pleased to see Apple crush Windows on x86. Apple has a good chance of winning this matchup since the goodwill of open-source developers is on the side of Apple.
Apple's team: million-person army of open-source developers + freeBSD + most-consumer-friendly (i.e. idiot proof) OS called OS X
Microsoft's team: couple thousand paid but possibly disgruntled slaves (including) H-1Bs + consumer-unfriendly OS[1]. "It" is no contest. Apple wins by 70% marketshare.
side note
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1. Windows 98 requires daily reboots in order to be stable. Windows XP requires weekly reboots in order to be stable.
Whenever SlashDot posts a "Star Wars" (SW) topic in this forum, participants soon push the number of submitted articles to about 1000. There are many fans who are committed to the original myth in original SW trilogy, not the new myth in the new trilogy.
I would also bet that, among those devoted fans, are some rich folks who have the financial means to write and film a much better prequel than what Lucas botched (except possibly for SW III). If Lucas would just agree to license his characters from the original trilogy so that others could develop an alternative prequel, then I am sure that others would make their "own [damn] movie".
The introduction of midichlorians bothers me to no end. That wonderful message that the force is available to anyone committed to the nobel ideals (compassion, honesty, etc.) of the Jedi disappeared into a flushed toilet when Lucas introduced "midichlorians". The Jedi knights went from a nobel, egalitarian group to a snobbish group whose members are determined by blood.