Borders and fences do not stop desperate people (who are often literally hungry due to lack of nourishment) from fleeing to the United States. An even bigger joke than fences is the immigration "reform" bill that appears periodically on Capitol Hill and that is supposed to permanently fix the "problem" of uncontrolled illegal immigration. This "problem" is often described as an American problem for us Americans to fix.
That is just politically correct propaganda. The "problem" is not an American problem.
What is the problem? Mexicans hate to live in a society created by their culture. It cannot generate sufficient wealth. Mexicans lack the ability to build a modern society. That is the problem. For political reasons, no one will state this obvious problem.
Building a modern, properous society is not rocket science. Look at Eastern Europe. Within about 1 year of liberation (in about 1990) from Soviet oppression, the Eastern Europeans laid the foundation of a genuine democratic government and a free market. Today, the Eastern Europeans are comfortable, have enough to eat, and have a decent live. Many Eastern Europeans do emigrate to, say, England for better economic opportunities, but they are not doing so out of desperation.
Now look at Mexico. It is blessed with plenty of natural resources: vast regions that are ideal for agriculture, oil, etc. Yet, despite having more than 50 years to build a prosperous society, the Mexicans did not do so. They turned a bounty of natural resources into stinking poverty, infested with drug gangs. No one -- not the Soviet Union of the old days nor any other external power -- imposed or is imposing this rotten society on the Mexicans. The Mexicans themselves created it. They are solely responsible for it.
By stark contrast, Japan has almost no natural resources, but the Japanese people turned their barren rock into the 2nd wealthiest nation in the world. Furthermore, Japan is a liberal Western democracy.
What do the Japanese and the Eastern Europeans have but Mexicans lack?
Washington should explore the possibility of a colonial approach to dealing with Mexico. If the Mexicans lack the ability to build a prosperous society, then we Americans should take effective control of the Mexican government and run Mexico as a de-facto colony of the USA. We in the West know how to build a prosperous society, and we should impose the process of Westernization onto Mexico.
We Americans should not allow desperate illegal aliens to suppress the wages of the American underclass. We have an obligation to help our own citizens first. Americans in the unskilled labor market are American citizens. We have an obligation to help them, not the Mexicans.
What is destroying the newspapers is competition. Before the age of the Internet, the typical newspaper was a monopoly and enjoyed monopoly profits. For example, the city of Boston had only 1 major paper: the "Boston Globe". If you wanted insightful reports and commentary about the agreement signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, you must buy a copy of the "Boston Globe". The newspaper was the only game in town. (You could go to the library to read competing newspapers, but going to the library just to read newspapers is a hassle.)
Today, a citizen of Boston can use the Internet to read news from a variety of sources: "New York Times", "The Washington Post", "San Francisco Chronicle", etc. He is not forced to buy only today's editon of the "Boston Globe".
Just as any standard economics textbook states, if you destroy the monopoly by introducing competiton, monopoly profits also disappear. So, the "Boston Globe" is bleeding money.
Yet, is this competiton good? Maybe not.
Monopoly profits enable a newspaper to fund long-term investigations for stories that benefit society. For example, Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein spent months in investigating the "Watergate" scandal. That investigation cost money.
In much the same way, the monopoly profts of the old AT&T, a telephone monopoly, funded breakthrough research at Bell Laboratories. It gave us the transistor.
A research environment -- for either newspaper-investigative research or scientific research -- is ideal for allowing dedicated individuals the freedom to pursue their interests for the betterment of humankind. Competition -- with its profit-reducing mechanisms -- precludes such an environment.
What can we do? There are 3 options.
1. Go with a Public-Broadcasting Service model. Turn the newspapers into non-profit organizations that hold pledge drives to raise money. The government provides matching funds. The government, essentially acts, as the sugar mama. There is 1 potential problem. The government might try to control the news. If the investigative reports by a government-funded "Washington Post" reveal terrible things about a liberal politician, will a liberal-party-dominated government try to reduce funding to the "Washington Post"?
2. Go with an endowment model. A rich philanthropist sets up a non-profit newspaper funded by the interest of a billion-dollar endowment. The salaries of the entire staff is paid by that endowment. In this model, the newspaper is free of external meddling.
3. Go with a public-service model in which a major non-profit organization (e. g., a university or a church) maintains a newspaper division. The best example of this model is the Christian Science Monitor.
I think that choice #2 is best.
Regardless of which model is best, we must continue to have newspapers in our society. Newspapers are the bulk of the 4th branch of government. They are our eyes and ears in keeping us informed about our government. An uninformed electorate is the first step toward creating an authoritarian society.
Everyone who supports free speech at places like Slashdot should be alarmed. The bill covers all online media -- including Slashdot.
Take a peek at one particular thread of discussion on Slashdot. Such discussions could lead to criminal prosecution because a few bigots who tend to tag articles as "trolls" (or make false cries of "racism" on reflex) can now file charges against the writers of articles that they dislike. In the event that this bill becomes an actual law, if a bigot does not like what you say in a Slashdot article, that bigot could do far more than (1) falsely call you a racist or (2) tag your article as a troll. The bigot could report you to the police for criminal prosecution. The bigot can claim that he was "hurt" or "injured" by your mere words in the Slashdot article.
Everyone who cares about free speech should immediately contact Senator Joseph Lieberman (and other decent politicians) and tell him to oppose this bill.
Sometimes, the "Democratic Party" and the "Republican Party" seem like 2 different names for the same censorship-prone party.
Seriously speaking, innovation comes from the individual, not the government. Take the case of Japan, which was once touted as the best example of government intervention. The Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) set industrial policy that nudged Japan into the electronics industry but, importantly, stopped short of specifying the design of specific products. The transistor radio came from Sony engineers, not MITI bureaucrats. The DRAM chips came from NEC engineers, not MITI bureacrats. MITI provided the environment for fostering creativity, but individual engineers produced the creativity and the products.
The Kremlin is wrong to think that the government can pick a winning operating system (OS) and then guide its develop.
The best thing that the Kremlin can do is the following.
Enforce intellectual property rights.
Allow freedom of expression (an important part of human rights), thus fostering creativity. Freedom of culture expression (e. g., criticism of government) is just as important as freedom of scientific expression. Both types of expression are part of the same human mind. Scientists -- like Andrei Sakharov -- have been some of the strongest advocates of democracy and human rights. If you suppress one form of expression, then you will damage the other form.
Eliminate corruption and legal nihilism.
Heavily fund research projects at Russian universities. Japan's MITI did not heavily fund univerisites and but did heavily fund research consortiums or national research projects, both being staffed by employees from Japanese companies. MITI also steered low-interest loans (from key banks) toward Japanese companies doing research and development of various key technologies. This Japanese approach had the same effect as heavily funding universities.
Protect Western culture by, for example, strictly regulating immigration. (Japan has strict immigration policies.)
In short, create a liberal Western society and a truly free market. Within this environment, Russian engineers will, for reasons of greed or personal achievement, create the best OS that meets the needs of Russian society. If the Japanese can achieve such technological success, I am certain that the Russians can do the same.
Anything that creates an addiction is bound to be profitable.
Consider drugs, pornography, video games, etc.
Most of us have known people who play video games for hours. Their obsession drives them to buy new graphics cards, new games, etc. They simply cannot stop themselves. Their whole lives revolve around creating the best video-gaming experience in the world.
Combining this face-recognition software with age-advancement software should produce the ideal software for locating missing children.
Most of us have seen the pictures of children who have gone missing. These pictures appear at Walmart, in the 1040 publication from the IRS, etc. Many such pictures contain the faces that have been advanced in age by computer software.
However, the reach of such pictures is limited. Few people pay attention to such pictures. Of the people who care enough to notice, they are not constantly looking for the missing children in order to report them to the police.
How can this new face-recognition software help? Most restaurants (like McDonalds), most movie theatres, and the like already have cameras that film everyone entering and leaving the premises. The government should feed these image streams into a cluster of supercomputers owned by the FBI and running this new face-recognition software. It will then match faces (in the crowds) against the age-advanced images of the missing children. Such a supercomputers could run 24 hours for 7 days per week and scan images that are fed from millions of locations across the USA.
In such a scenario, the chances of finding the missing children would be greatly improved.
If you love financial mathematics, then you should definitely study that subject. Do what you love. Life is short. Enjoy your time on earth.
Do not be concerned about "restricting" your future options. The applied mathematics in financial mathematics involves all areas of probability, random variables, and stochastic processes. These topics in applied mathematics have wide application in many diverse areas: digital image processing, gambling (e. g., card-counting techniques in the casinos of Las Vegas), computer simulations of warfare outcomes, etc. A degree in financial mathematics will enable you to work in many fields outside finance.
Mathematics, in general, does not restrict anyone's options -- if you are smart and hardworking. Just ask William Perry. He received graduate degrees in "only" mathematics and eventually became Secretary of Defense of the United States. His most recent accomplishment was authoring an essay published in "The Washington Post". In the essay, he advocates using military force to destroy North-Korean military facilities. Mr. Perry is a smart person with the right solution for dealing with North Korea.
Ballmer at Microsoft need not regret that he lost the chance to buy Sun. $7.4 billion is too much for a company like Sun. The only reason that Ellison at Oracle would shell out that kind of money is that McNealy at Sun is his personal friend.
Allow me to explain.
The bulk of Sun's revenue comes from SPARC-based servers. Sun simply cannot afford to develop further SPARC processors -- including the so-called chip-multiprocessor ones like Niagara. Why? Sun lost the workstation market on the desktop to Intel. The last SPARC-based workstation used the UltraSPARC III, and sales of this workstation were discontinued after 2007. Look at Sun's web site. The sales of SPARC-based workstations are finished.
Without the economies of scale from selling hundreds of thousands of SPARC chips in hundreds of thousands of workstations, Sun cannot afford to develop the SPARC processor any more.
Without SPARC processors, most Sun's servers would disappear, and so would the bulk of its revenue. Sun could continue selling Fujitsu-designed SPARC systems, but Sun's profit margins on those are small.
Basically, Oracle will terminate the hardware business at Sun. In other words, Oracle paid $7.4 billion only for the software business of Sun. $7.4 billion is too much for such a miniscule part of Sun. Software brings little revenue (or profits) to Sun.
Do not underestimate the cleverness of American-intelligence procedures.
Note that Chinese intruders succeeded in numerous attempts at downloading information related to the F-35 jet fighter. After the 1st such attempt, American intelligence would have become aware of the incident.
If you were a smart intelligence officer, what would you do after the 1st attempt?
You would not publicly announce the breach of security. Rather, you would plant false data into the same computer which was compromised. When the Chinese hacker returns to it to download even more information, then he would get gigabytes of fake data.
The aim is for the Chinese military to develop countermeasures against F-35 performance characteristics that does not exist. When the actual F-35 is deployed, it will defeat those countermeasures and deliver its nuclear payload to Beijing -- on time and on target.
Western nuclear technology is safe, for if it were not safe, then anyone harmed by it can sue the manufacturer for restitution.
Such is not the case with Chinese nuclear technology. Read a shocking report about what happened to the victims maimed by Chinese nuclear experiments.
According to "The TimesOnline", "The nuclear test grounds in the wastes of the Gobi desert have fallen silent but veterans of those lonely places are speaking out for the first time about the terrible price exacted by China's zealous pursuit of the atomic bomb.
They talk of picking up radioactive debris with their bare hands, of sluicing down bombers that had flown through mushroom clouds, of soldiers dying before their time of strange and rare diseases, and children born with mysterious cancers.
These were the men and women of Unit 8023, a special detachment charged with conducting atomic tests at Lop Nur in Xinjiang province, a place of utter desolation and - until now - complete secrecy.
'I was a member of Unit 8023 for 23 years,' said one old soldier in an interview. 'My job was to go into the blast zone to retrieve test objects and monitoring equipment after the explosion.
'When my daughter was born she was diagnosed with a huge tumour on her spinal cord. The doctors blame nuclear fallout. She's had two major operations and has lived a life of indescribable hardship. And all we get from the government is 130 yuan [£13] a month.'"
HP is just executing the IBM plan for profits: (1) sell services and (2) sell hardware/software at a loss (or for free) to sell even more services.
After Lou Gerstner assumed the helm at IBM in the early 1990s, he re-organized the company to focus on services. He shutdown the division manufacturing desktops. He embraced open-source software like Linux. He turned IBM Semiconductor into a contract manufacturer of ASICs. Today, the bulk of both revenue and profits at IBM are due to services. Gerstner's successor came directly from IBM Global Services.
HP followed in the footsteps of IBM and purchased EDS. Just like IBM, HP fired thousands of employees to eliminate redundancies.
Both HP and IBM remain profitable during this ghastly recession. Sun Microsystems, which failed to significantly grow its services division, may not survive as an independent company.
As others have noted, companies have only a finite amount of money, so they must be judicious in funding efforts to defend the open-source community from patent trolls. Doubtless, the most valuable open-source application is Linux. It is an operating system and is the heart of a computer. Linux is the #1 application on which most programmers develop open-source programs. Typically, open-source work is done first on Linux and, only later, is migrated to Windows.
So, Linux deserves most of the resources for defending against patent trolls.
Here, again, we see the steady hand of IBM. It has been the central company in bringing Linux into the mainstream.
Before IBM announced its decision to deploy Linux on IBM servers, Linux was just a niche application used by brilliant scientists and engineers. In 2000, IBM changed the computing landscape by officially supporting Linux and deploying it across its entire range of servers. If IBM backed Linux, then the business community would try it. IBM was willing to sign contracts guaranteeing the reliability of Linux.
Linux is now the only Unix-ish operating system in many financial and engineering firms.
A more fundamental problem is a general lack of interest in science. Consider the news stories about American celebrities. Regardless of whether such news is postive or negative, the public loves reading about the lives of celebrities. "People" magazine is one of the most popular magazines in America. The circulation of, say, "Scientific American" pales by comparison.
Consider the story about the dangers of germ-free environments. Specifically, excessive attempts to elminate germs can, in addition to creating super-bugs, cause our immune system to malfunction. Without the constant exercisng of our immune system by germs, our immune system goes into overdrive by generating an immune response to things (e.g., pollen) that are not germs.
The above story appeared for a brief moment in the news and then disappeared. Meanwhile, the quantity of advertisements for anti-bacterial products (containing triclosan) has exploded. The public prefers to watch pseudo-science commericials instead of genuine-science news stories.
The anti-science public does not care about science. If the public did care about science, it would have dramatically reduced its purchases of anti-bacterial products (thus protecting the health and lives of Americans). So, when the public does not care about science, science-related stories appear briefly in the news media and then quickly fade away in favor of stories about, say, Paris Hilton.
The most interesting aspect of the neoconservative movement is its fraudulent claim to support the free market. When George Bush and his colleagues campaigned in the 2000 election, they repeatedly demanded that the USA abide by the principles of the free market -- no government intervention, no way, no how.
The first sign that the words of neoconservatives differ markedly from their actions was the incident involving Creekstone Farms. In 2004, its management intended to perform mad-cow testing on 100% of the beef that it sold to consumers. Yet, the Bush administration blocked this comprehensive testing, interfering in the private business transaction between a private business and its customers. If a company wants to over-test its product, why does the government have a right to stop such testing?
The second sign that the words of neoconservatives differ markedly from their actions was the incident involving the troubled-asset-relief program (TARP) demanded by the Bush administration and authorized by Congress (at Bush's insistence). TARP is a program for using government money to buy toxic assets (and now to take an equity stake in banks) -- to rescue the people who deliberately and knowingly bought more house than they could afford and to rescue the fast-talking frauds who loaned the money to the house buyers.
The third sign that the words of neoconservatives differ markedly from their actions is the incident involving the allocation of $25 billion in government loans to the car companies. If they cannot build the cars that people want to buy, then they should be allowed to fail. That is how a free market works. The companies go into bankruptcy and possibly shutdown permanently. Why should the free-market advocating neoconservatives try to save these companies?
Why would neoconservatives act in this way? In case #1, the cattle industry regularly makes political donations to neoconservatives. In case #2, the financial industry regularly makes political donations to the neoconservatives. In case #3, the auto industry regularly makes political donations to the neoconservatives.
Case #3 is particularly egregious. Via collective bargaining, auto workers enjoy generous company-funded medical insurance. In order to maintain such private medical benefits, the same auto workers have opposed implementing federally guaranteed medical care (like that in Europe and Japan).
Here's the punch line. Let's condemn the neoconservatives for being liars. Let's condemn the auto workers for being hypocrites. Let's oppose any bailout for the auto companies, forcing them into bankruptcy and forcing millions of auto workers to lose their private medical insurance. The out-of-work auto workers can then "enjoy" the same lack of medical insurance that millions of unemployed workers have enjoyed in the absence of federally guaranteed medical care.
According to a report just issued by "The Washington Post" (TWP), the Russian police under direct orders from the Kremlin arrested Magomed Yevloyev, the owner of an anti-Kremlin Web site (Ingushetiya.ru), and then shot him in the head during his ride in the police car. The police then dumped his corpse onto the road near a hospital. According to the TWP, "Ingushetiya.ru has been one of the few sources of independent information about [a low-grade Islamist insurgency in the province of Ingushetia]".
For additional information about this heinous crime, read the report just issued by the "Daily Telegraph" (DT). According to the DT, "Mr Yevloyev is the most prominent anti-Kremlin journalist to be killed since Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in October 2006.... Russia is considered to be one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists."
The "Wall Street Journal" provides more information about this and other suspicious deaths of well-known journalists. According to the WSJ, "Mr. Yevloyev was the latest in a series of Russian journalists to have died in suspicious circumstances. The death of Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot in October 2006 at her Moscow apartment, highlighted the dangers faced by Russia's independent press. Ms. Politkovskaya was a lead reporter at Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow-based newspaper that specializes in muckraking and probes of government corruption. She was the third journalist at the paper to die under mysterious circumstances. Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was shot on a Moscow street in July 2004."
After I read these news articles, I could think of only 4 words: God damn the Kremlin!
The author insightfully wrote, "We could walk away from [savage Russian brutality against Western nations], hoping for things to cool off, and let the Russians impose sway over the lower Caucasus for now. But no one will fail to notice our weakness. If we don't draw the line here, it doesn't get easier down the road with any other border or country. We would be risking the future of Afghanistan, and the stability of Iraq, on the good will of Moscow and the mullahs in Tehran. This is how the game of grand strategy is played, whether we like it or not."
Despite the tone of the preceding comments, the conflict between Georgia and Russia is deadly serious. Please read "Vladimir Bonaparte" by the full editorial board of the "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ).
The WSJ editorial board wrote, "No matter who fired the first shot last week in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, Moscow is using the separatist issue as an excuse to demolish Georgia's military and, if possible, depose its democratically elected government. Russian forces moved ever deeper into Georgia proper Monday. They launched a second front in the west from another breakaway province, Abkhazia, and took the central city of Gori, which lies 40 miles from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. These moves slice the country in half and isolate its ports, most of which Russia has bombed or blockaded. Moscow dismissed a cease-fire drawn up by European nations and signed by Georgia.
Russian bombers have also hit residential and industrial areas, making a mockery of Moscow's charge that Georgia is the party indiscriminately killing civilians. Russian claims of Georgian ethnic cleansing now look like well-rehearsed propaganda lines to justify a well-prepared invasion. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks, ships and warplanes were waiting for Mr. Putin's command."
The Kremlin is now issuing official statements accusing the Georgians of committing genocide. The Russians are using this lie to justify invading Georgia and seizing it.
To understand how Russian "justice" works, read the shocking story published by "The Washington Post" (TWP). Natalia Trufanova was driving a Zhiguli (a lightweight Russian car) with her family in Moscow in September of 2007. She was minding her own business and dutifully obeying the traffic laws. Then, suddenly, a motorcade carrying Supreme Court President Vyacheslav Lebedev and coming from the opposite direction entered the wrong lane -- the lane in which Trufanova was driving. A vehicle in the motorcade smashed into the Zhiguli, killing Trufanova and her family. The Russian police wrote a false report, claiming that Trufanov drove into the wrong lane.
TWP notes, "When angry witnesses started posting video on the Web clearly showing that it was the motorcade that was driving in the wrong lane, the lead investigator looking into the accident said that he didn't have access to the Internet."
In the long run, the only readily available sources of energy are renewable sources: solar energy and terrestrial energy (e.g., wind and waves). Each person consumes a minimum amount of energy to live, and the aggregate amount consumed by the entire population cannot exceed some fraction of total renewable energy. The reason for the fraction is that no conversion process (for, say, transforming solar energy into electrical energy) is 100% efficient. (A while ago, some genius in the SlashDot forums gave an explicit number for the "fraction".)
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources. If we do not make a conscientious effort to control population growth, then nature will impose a solution on us. That solution will be poverty and likely starvation. If you doubt what I say, consider the huge amounts of energy that is needed to grow and to transport food.
Right now, I suspect that our population is unsustainably large due to the fact that we still have plentiful supplies of non-renewable sources (e.g., oil and uranium). So, our energy consumption = (1) usuable energy from non-renewable sources + (2) usuable energy from renewable sources. After #1 is depleted by roughly 2100 (?), a global world war for resources will dwarf the calamity of World War II. (By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
Will humankind wake up to the problem of overpopulation? In the USA, political correctness prevents us from dealing with the problem. The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Jim Gray, the leading authority on databases and fault tolerance, disappeared long before Steve Fossett disappeared. Yet, Gray's wife is not in a rush to declare that her husband is dead although he probably is dead.
Why is Fossett's wife in a rush to declare that her husband is dead?
The map indicates that the USA, China, and Russia are "endemic surveillance societies" in 2007. Did the current ruler in Washington contribute to achieving this dubious distinction? Does anyone have information on how the USA scored in 2000 (before the current ruler took control of the executive branch)?
Note that the European Union seems to have protected its citizens (from terrorism) without abridging basic civil rights.
There was no need to force stores to stop selling incandescent light bulbs. The free market, by itself, would have switched the USA from incandescent light bulbs to high-efficiency light bulbs.
To understand why the free market will fix the lighting problem, look at the automotive market. When gas prices rose steeply, Americans switched to smaller, more fuel efficient cars. As the sales of SUVs plummeted, Ford, GM, and Chrysler suffered massive losses. Toyota with its arsenal of fuel-efficient vehicles is about to become the #1 automotive company in the world. These delightful events occurred before Congress raised fuel-economy standards in a recent bill.
Similarly, as electricity prices skyrocket, the American consumer will haul his ass to Walmart to buy the super-efficient light bulbs.
Legislation is simply not necessary to fix the problem. The free market will fix the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
That is just politically correct propaganda. The "problem" is not an American problem.
What is the problem? Mexicans hate to live in a society created by their culture. It cannot generate sufficient wealth. Mexicans lack the ability to build a modern society. That is the problem. For political reasons, no one will state this obvious problem.
Building a modern, properous society is not rocket science. Look at Eastern Europe. Within about 1 year of liberation (in about 1990) from Soviet oppression, the Eastern Europeans laid the foundation of a genuine democratic government and a free market. Today, the Eastern Europeans are comfortable, have enough to eat, and have a decent live. Many Eastern Europeans do emigrate to, say, England for better economic opportunities, but they are not doing so out of desperation.
Now look at Mexico. It is blessed with plenty of natural resources: vast regions that are ideal for agriculture, oil, etc. Yet, despite having more than 50 years to build a prosperous society, the Mexicans did not do so. They turned a bounty of natural resources into stinking poverty, infested with drug gangs. No one -- not the Soviet Union of the old days nor any other external power -- imposed or is imposing this rotten society on the Mexicans. The Mexicans themselves created it. They are solely responsible for it.
By stark contrast, Japan has almost no natural resources, but the Japanese people turned their barren rock into the 2nd wealthiest nation in the world. Furthermore, Japan is a liberal Western democracy.
What do the Japanese and the Eastern Europeans have but Mexicans lack?
Washington should explore the possibility of a colonial approach to dealing with Mexico. If the Mexicans lack the ability to build a prosperous society, then we Americans should take effective control of the Mexican government and run Mexico as a de-facto colony of the USA. We in the West know how to build a prosperous society, and we should impose the process of Westernization onto Mexico.
We Americans should not allow desperate illegal aliens to suppress the wages of the American underclass. We have an obligation to help our own citizens first. Americans in the unskilled labor market are American citizens. We have an obligation to help them, not the Mexicans.
Today, a citizen of Boston can use the Internet to read news from a variety of sources: "New York Times", "The Washington Post", "San Francisco Chronicle", etc. He is not forced to buy only today's editon of the "Boston Globe".
Just as any standard economics textbook states, if you destroy the monopoly by introducing competiton, monopoly profits also disappear. So, the "Boston Globe" is bleeding money.
Yet, is this competiton good? Maybe not.
Monopoly profits enable a newspaper to fund long-term investigations for stories that benefit society. For example, Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein spent months in investigating the "Watergate" scandal. That investigation cost money.
In much the same way, the monopoly profts of the old AT&T, a telephone monopoly, funded breakthrough research at Bell Laboratories. It gave us the transistor.
A research environment -- for either newspaper-investigative research or scientific research -- is ideal for allowing dedicated individuals the freedom to pursue their interests for the betterment of humankind. Competition -- with its profit-reducing mechanisms -- precludes such an environment.
What can we do? There are 3 options.
1. Go with a Public-Broadcasting Service model. Turn the newspapers into non-profit organizations that hold pledge drives to raise money. The government provides matching funds. The government, essentially acts, as the sugar mama. There is 1 potential problem. The government might try to control the news. If the investigative reports by a government-funded "Washington Post" reveal terrible things about a liberal politician, will a liberal-party-dominated government try to reduce funding to the "Washington Post"?
2. Go with an endowment model. A rich philanthropist sets up a non-profit newspaper funded by the interest of a billion-dollar endowment. The salaries of the entire staff is paid by that endowment. In this model, the newspaper is free of external meddling.
3. Go with a public-service model in which a major non-profit organization (e. g., a university or a church) maintains a newspaper division. The best example of this model is the Christian Science Monitor.
I think that choice #2 is best.
Regardless of which model is best, we must continue to have newspapers in our society. Newspapers are the bulk of the 4th branch of government. They are our eyes and ears in keeping us informed about our government. An uninformed electorate is the first step toward creating an authoritarian society.
Then, upon seeing this Slashdot article, I finally understand. The ostrich is a very distant relative of the dinosaurs.
One ostrich egg could probably provide 10 servings of scrambled eggs -- and enough cholesterol to kill a gorilla.
Take a peek at one particular thread of discussion on Slashdot. Such discussions could lead to criminal prosecution because a few bigots who tend to tag articles as "trolls" (or make false cries of "racism" on reflex) can now file charges against the writers of articles that they dislike. In the event that this bill becomes an actual law, if a bigot does not like what you say in a Slashdot article, that bigot could do far more than (1) falsely call you a racist or (2) tag your article as a troll. The bigot could report you to the police for criminal prosecution. The bigot can claim that he was "hurt" or "injured" by your mere words in the Slashdot article.
Everyone who cares about free speech should immediately contact Senator Joseph Lieberman (and other decent politicians) and tell him to oppose this bill.
Sometimes, the "Democratic Party" and the "Republican Party" seem like 2 different names for the same censorship-prone party.
The Kremlin is wrong to think that the government can pick a winning operating system (OS) and then guide its develop.
The best thing that the Kremlin can do is the following.
In short, create a liberal Western society and a truly free market. Within this environment, Russian engineers will, for reasons of greed or personal achievement, create the best OS that meets the needs of Russian society. If the Japanese can achieve such technological success, I am certain that the Russians can do the same.
Consider drugs, pornography, video games, etc.
Most of us have known people who play video games for hours. Their obsession drives them to buy new graphics cards, new games, etc. They simply cannot stop themselves. Their whole lives revolve around creating the best video-gaming experience in the world.
Most of us have seen the pictures of children who have gone missing. These pictures appear at Walmart, in the 1040 publication from the IRS, etc. Many such pictures contain the faces that have been advanced in age by computer software.
However, the reach of such pictures is limited. Few people pay attention to such pictures. Of the people who care enough to notice, they are not constantly looking for the missing children in order to report them to the police.
How can this new face-recognition software help? Most restaurants (like McDonalds), most movie theatres, and the like already have cameras that film everyone entering and leaving the premises. The government should feed these image streams into a cluster of supercomputers owned by the FBI and running this new face-recognition software. It will then match faces (in the crowds) against the age-advanced images of the missing children. Such a supercomputers could run 24 hours for 7 days per week and scan images that are fed from millions of locations across the USA.
In such a scenario, the chances of finding the missing children would be greatly improved.
Do not be concerned about "restricting" your future options. The applied mathematics in financial mathematics involves all areas of probability, random variables, and stochastic processes. These topics in applied mathematics have wide application in many diverse areas: digital image processing, gambling (e. g., card-counting techniques in the casinos of Las Vegas), computer simulations of warfare outcomes, etc. A degree in financial mathematics will enable you to work in many fields outside finance.
Mathematics, in general, does not restrict anyone's options -- if you are smart and hardworking. Just ask William Perry. He received graduate degrees in "only" mathematics and eventually became Secretary of Defense of the United States. His most recent accomplishment was authoring an essay published in "The Washington Post". In the essay, he advocates using military force to destroy North-Korean military facilities. Mr. Perry is a smart person with the right solution for dealing with North Korea.
Allow me to explain.
The bulk of Sun's revenue comes from SPARC-based servers. Sun simply cannot afford to develop further SPARC processors -- including the so-called chip-multiprocessor ones like Niagara. Why? Sun lost the workstation market on the desktop to Intel. The last SPARC-based workstation used the UltraSPARC III, and sales of this workstation were discontinued after 2007. Look at Sun's web site. The sales of SPARC-based workstations are finished.
Without the economies of scale from selling hundreds of thousands of SPARC chips in hundreds of thousands of workstations, Sun cannot afford to develop the SPARC processor any more.
Without SPARC processors, most Sun's servers would disappear, and so would the bulk of its revenue. Sun could continue selling Fujitsu-designed SPARC systems, but Sun's profit margins on those are small.
Basically, Oracle will terminate the hardware business at Sun. In other words, Oracle paid $7.4 billion only for the software business of Sun. $7.4 billion is too much for such a miniscule part of Sun. Software brings little revenue (or profits) to Sun.
Note that Chinese intruders succeeded in numerous attempts at downloading information related to the F-35 jet fighter. After the 1st such attempt, American intelligence would have become aware of the incident.
If you were a smart intelligence officer, what would you do after the 1st attempt?
You would not publicly announce the breach of security. Rather, you would plant false data into the same computer which was compromised. When the Chinese hacker returns to it to download even more information, then he would get gigabytes of fake data.
The aim is for the Chinese military to develop countermeasures against F-35 performance characteristics that does not exist. When the actual F-35 is deployed, it will defeat those countermeasures and deliver its nuclear payload to Beijing -- on time and on target.
Such is not the case with Chinese nuclear technology. Read a shocking report about what happened to the victims maimed by Chinese nuclear experiments.
According to "The TimesOnline", "The nuclear test grounds in the wastes of the Gobi desert have fallen silent but veterans of those lonely places are speaking out for the first time about the terrible price exacted by China's zealous pursuit of the atomic bomb.
They talk of picking up radioactive debris with their bare hands, of sluicing down bombers that had flown through mushroom clouds, of soldiers dying before their time of strange and rare diseases, and children born with mysterious cancers.
These were the men and women of Unit 8023, a special detachment charged with conducting atomic tests at Lop Nur in Xinjiang province, a place of utter desolation and - until now - complete secrecy.
'I was a member of Unit 8023 for 23 years,' said one old soldier in an interview. 'My job was to go into the blast zone to retrieve test objects and monitoring equipment after the explosion.
'When my daughter was born she was diagnosed with a huge tumour on her spinal cord. The doctors blame nuclear fallout. She's had two major operations and has lived a life of indescribable hardship. And all we get from the government is 130 yuan [£13] a month.'"
After Lou Gerstner assumed the helm at IBM in the early 1990s, he re-organized the company to focus on services. He shutdown the division manufacturing desktops. He embraced open-source software like Linux. He turned IBM Semiconductor into a contract manufacturer of ASICs. Today, the bulk of both revenue and profits at IBM are due to services. Gerstner's successor came directly from IBM Global Services.
HP followed in the footsteps of IBM and purchased EDS. Just like IBM, HP fired thousands of employees to eliminate redundancies.
Both HP and IBM remain profitable during this ghastly recession. Sun Microsystems, which failed to significantly grow its services division, may not survive as an independent company.
So, Linux deserves most of the resources for defending against patent trolls.
Here, again, we see the steady hand of IBM. It has been the central company in bringing Linux into the mainstream.
Before IBM announced its decision to deploy Linux on IBM servers, Linux was just a niche application used by brilliant scientists and engineers. In 2000, IBM changed the computing landscape by officially supporting Linux and deploying it across its entire range of servers. If IBM backed Linux, then the business community would try it. IBM was willing to sign contracts guaranteeing the reliability of Linux.
Linux is now the only Unix-ish operating system in many financial and engineering firms.
Consider the story about the dangers of germ-free environments. Specifically, excessive attempts to elminate germs can, in addition to creating super-bugs, cause our immune system to malfunction. Without the constant exercisng of our immune system by germs, our immune system goes into overdrive by generating an immune response to things (e.g., pollen) that are not germs.
The above story appeared for a brief moment in the news and then disappeared. Meanwhile, the quantity of advertisements for anti-bacterial products (containing triclosan) has exploded. The public prefers to watch pseudo-science commericials instead of genuine-science news stories.
The anti-science public does not care about science. If the public did care about science, it would have dramatically reduced its purchases of anti-bacterial products (thus protecting the health and lives of Americans). So, when the public does not care about science, science-related stories appear briefly in the news media and then quickly fade away in favor of stories about, say, Paris Hilton.
In the 1980s, I made the following call, which changed my career -- and my life. call -151
On November 4, engineers and scientists throughout NASA and academia scratched their collective heads and asked, "Which Obama is the real Obama?"
Now, we have the answer. Obama recently returned to the idea of sacrificing NASA programs in favor of his political agenda.
As Obama dismantles the American space program, perhaps we Americans should look to Japan for leadership in the peaceful development of space.
The first sign that the words of neoconservatives differ markedly from their actions was the incident involving Creekstone Farms. In 2004, its management intended to perform mad-cow testing on 100% of the beef that it sold to consumers. Yet, the Bush administration blocked this comprehensive testing, interfering in the private business transaction between a private business and its customers. If a company wants to over-test its product, why does the government have a right to stop such testing?
The second sign that the words of neoconservatives differ markedly from their actions was the incident involving the troubled-asset-relief program (TARP) demanded by the Bush administration and authorized by Congress (at Bush's insistence). TARP is a program for using government money to buy toxic assets (and now to take an equity stake in banks) -- to rescue the people who deliberately and knowingly bought more house than they could afford and to rescue the fast-talking frauds who loaned the money to the house buyers.
The third sign that the words of neoconservatives differ markedly from their actions is the incident involving the allocation of $25 billion in government loans to the car companies. If they cannot build the cars that people want to buy, then they should be allowed to fail. That is how a free market works. The companies go into bankruptcy and possibly shutdown permanently. Why should the free-market advocating neoconservatives try to save these companies?
Why would neoconservatives act in this way? In case #1, the cattle industry regularly makes political donations to neoconservatives. In case #2, the financial industry regularly makes political donations to the neoconservatives. In case #3, the auto industry regularly makes political donations to the neoconservatives.
Case #3 is particularly egregious. Via collective bargaining, auto workers enjoy generous company-funded medical insurance. In order to maintain such private medical benefits, the same auto workers have opposed implementing federally guaranteed medical care (like that in Europe and Japan).
Here's the punch line. Let's condemn the neoconservatives for being liars. Let's condemn the auto workers for being hypocrites. Let's oppose any bailout for the auto companies, forcing them into bankruptcy and forcing millions of auto workers to lose their private medical insurance. The out-of-work auto workers can then "enjoy" the same lack of medical insurance that millions of unemployed workers have enjoyed in the absence of federally guaranteed medical care.
For additional information about this heinous crime, read the report just issued by the "Daily Telegraph" (DT). According to the DT, "Mr Yevloyev is the most prominent anti-Kremlin journalist to be killed since Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in October 2006. ... Russia is considered to be one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists."
The "Wall Street Journal" provides more information about this and other suspicious deaths of well-known journalists. According to the WSJ, "Mr. Yevloyev was the latest in a series of Russian journalists to have died in suspicious circumstances. The death of Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot in October 2006 at her Moscow apartment, highlighted the dangers faced by Russia's independent press. Ms. Politkovskaya was a lead reporter at Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow-based newspaper that specializes in muckraking and probes of government corruption. She was the third journalist at the paper to die under mysterious circumstances. Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was shot on a Moscow street in July 2004."
After I read these news articles, I could think of only 4 words: God damn the Kremlin!
The author insightfully wrote, "We could walk away from [savage Russian brutality against Western nations], hoping for things to cool off, and let the Russians impose sway over the lower Caucasus for now. But no one will fail to notice our weakness. If we don't draw the line here, it doesn't get easier down the road with any other border or country. We would be risking the future of Afghanistan, and the stability of Iraq, on the good will of Moscow and the mullahs in Tehran. This is how the game of grand strategy is played, whether we like it or not."
The WSJ editorial board wrote, "No matter who fired the first shot last week in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, Moscow is using the separatist issue as an excuse to demolish Georgia's military and, if possible, depose its democratically elected government. Russian forces moved ever deeper into Georgia proper Monday. They launched a second front in the west from another breakaway province, Abkhazia, and took the central city of Gori, which lies 40 miles from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. These moves slice the country in half and isolate its ports, most of which Russia has bombed or blockaded. Moscow dismissed a cease-fire drawn up by European nations and signed by Georgia.
Russian bombers have also hit residential and industrial areas, making a mockery of Moscow's charge that Georgia is the party indiscriminately killing civilians. Russian claims of Georgian ethnic cleansing now look like well-rehearsed propaganda lines to justify a well-prepared invasion. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks, ships and warplanes were waiting for Mr. Putin's command."
To understand how Russian "justice" works, read the shocking story published by "The Washington Post" (TWP). Natalia Trufanova was driving a Zhiguli (a lightweight Russian car) with her family in Moscow in September of 2007. She was minding her own business and dutifully obeying the traffic laws. Then, suddenly, a motorcade carrying Supreme Court President Vyacheslav Lebedev and coming from the opposite direction entered the wrong lane -- the lane in which Trufanova was driving. A vehicle in the motorcade smashed into the Zhiguli, killing Trufanova and her family. The Russian police wrote a false report, claiming that Trufanov drove into the wrong lane.
TWP notes, "When angry witnesses started posting video on the Web clearly showing that it was the motorcade that was driving in the wrong lane, the lead investigator looking into the accident said that he didn't have access to the Internet."
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources. If we do not make a conscientious effort to control population growth, then nature will impose a solution on us. That solution will be poverty and likely starvation. If you doubt what I say, consider the huge amounts of energy that is needed to grow and to transport food.
Right now, I suspect that our population is unsustainably large due to the fact that we still have plentiful supplies of non-renewable sources (e.g., oil and uranium). So, our energy consumption = (1) usuable energy from non-renewable sources + (2) usuable energy from renewable sources. After #1 is depleted by roughly 2100 (?), a global world war for resources will dwarf the calamity of World War II. (By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
Will humankind wake up to the problem of overpopulation? In the USA, political correctness prevents us from dealing with the problem. The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Why is Fossett's wife in a rush to declare that her husband is dead?
Note that the European Union seems to have protected its citizens (from terrorism) without abridging basic civil rights.
The C.Crane company is already selling LED light bulbs. They are more efficient than even compact fluorescent bulbs.
To understand why the free market will fix the lighting problem, look at the automotive market. When gas prices rose steeply, Americans switched to smaller, more fuel efficient cars. As the sales of SUVs plummeted, Ford, GM, and Chrysler suffered massive losses. Toyota with its arsenal of fuel-efficient vehicles is about to become the #1 automotive company in the world. These delightful events occurred before Congress raised fuel-economy standards in a recent bill.
Similarly, as electricity prices skyrocket, the American consumer will haul his ass to Walmart to buy the super-efficient light bulbs.
Legislation is simply not necessary to fix the problem. The free market will fix the problem.