The domains move at about 100 m/s. Light moves through an optical fiber at about 200,000,000 m/s. Assuming that your scheme was possible, it would represent a 2-million-fold increase in latency (at the physical layer). It would take a packet 12 hours to get from New York to Los Angeles, giving a round-trip time of about a day.
Aside from the fact that it would be completely useless, it's also impossible. The internet is packet switched, not circuit based. There's almost never a complete, continuous "track" between a sender and a destination, although the sending to the loopback address is a significant exception.
The big advantage is that there are only 26 letters used in English which can each be written in upper or lower case and print or script. Two days is ample time to learn how to read and write letters.
There are tens of thousands of characters with varying stroke order and stroke placement. Each character may have many variant forms and there are many different styles of written characters. What percentage of those characters might someone conceivably memorize and learn to write correctly in two days? Is two days even enough time to learn how to hold a brush correctly?
This comment is a bit ridiculous. Most Japanese people living in urban apartments don't have both a washing machine and a clothes dryer. The only available place is one's veranda. That's where everyone hangs their clothes. That's where she hung her clothes. It's definitely on the small side, but there are actually apartments with as little floor space as two tatami (3.64m x 1.82m), so sometimes just buying a dryer isn't an option.
From the original article in the Mainichi Shinbun, "It seems that someone posted the picture of her underwear on the internet.[...] She said, "If it had been an exterior view of the apartment that's understandable, but that a photo of my underwear drying on the veranda should appear is strange no matter how you look at it."
Again, this isn't just a case of something weird showing up on Streetview, according to the woman in question. Her paranoia is a little more understandable considering that she claims someone took a picture of her underwear and went to the trouble of posting it where she would likely find it. Being concerned about harassment or stalking isn't completely unreasonable.
Some other details that were left out of the English article include that the woman in question is from Fukuoka City in Fukuoka, that she's in her twenties, that she was fired from the hospital were she was working, that she lived alone at the time of the incident, that she found the photo this Spring, that she filed suit in November in Fukuoka District Court and that opening arguments were heard on December 15th. As of December 15th, Google was hurrying to verify the facts of the case.
There was a 2channel thread about the story that referred to it as "MyPantyView," but unfortunately Slashdot's Japanese counterparts had no comment on the matter.
There was a large Korean population in Japan during the last years of the Japanese Empire. Many of them stayed in Japan after the conclusion of Pacific war and after the Korean War, the resident Koreans were allowed to register as citizens of Korea, but open affiliation with North Korea was made illegal. Despite this, approximately a quarter of resident Koreans have ties to pro-DPRK organizations, in particular Chongryon. Among other things, Chongryon operates pachinko parlors that generate revenue for the DPRK and it runs the 60 schools that teach DPRK ideology to Korean students in Japan. Chongryon's presence in Japan is effectively an extension of North Korea into a first world country, so its importance to the DPRK would be hard to overstate.
There are probably more web developers among the approximately 150,000 pro-DPRK Koreans in Japan than there are North Koreans with any access to the internet, so it shouldn't be too surprising that such websites are hosted and maintained in Japan.
Fuel isn't explosive and the capacitors only store at most enough energy for one round at a time, and, during a cycle of firing and charging with a fixed amount of power, will store less than half of that on average. Compare that to a traditional ship's magazine, which holds all the rounds that the ship might need in the period between being resupplied. On top of that, instead of storing high explosive warheads, the ship can store completely inert penetrators.
Sure, you wouldn't want to be near the capacitors when they decide not to be capacitors anymore, but an explosion in the magazine makes that look trivial in comparison.
Using a gamma burst for lipstick is like using buckshot for mouthwash. One estimate for the energy released in a gamma burst is 10^44 Joules, which is about 1000 times greater than the gravitational binding energy of the Sun.
Doesn't the solar system look so pretty now?
It might win a Kurt Cobain lookalike contest, but I don't think it's going to be winning any beauty pageants.
It's your misguided opinion that copyright is a right. Copyright is in no sense a natural right. You can claim that it's a right because current law grants certain privileges to authors, but that amounts to simply reciting the current state of U.S. law.
If I said your rights should be abridged (not only copyright, but any rights)
Comparing natural freedoms to commercial monopolies was clever. It seems to have fooled a few mods.
Conventional wisdom has once again survived the onslaught of someone with just enough information to draw the wrong conclusion. You seem to have discovered that ordinary soap doesn't kill bacteria. Great, but that's not what soap is used for.
Pathogens are typically transmitted in droplets of fluid or on the surface of small particles. (Soap won't help with a direct exchange of fluids, either with parasites or members of the same species.) Washing removes pathogens by removing the foreign matter in which they are present on the surface of the skin. Further, only the skin's outermost layer of dead, keratinized cells and oil is directly exposed to bacteria. Ordinary washing with ordinary soap removes a portion of these dead skin cells and sebum, taking a percentage of surface bacteria with it.
You're "magically clean" after washing because there are less bacteria present. It's not necessary to kill that which can be easily removed.
There are few ideas that are unqualifiedly bad. The fifth commandment actually says
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
A reason is specified for honoring one's parents. It's implied that doing so will result in long life. While it is possible to interpret this as God requiring action and threatening divine enforcement, it is also possible to see this text as an implication that long life is a natural result of honoring one's parents. Assuming that, God is merely exhorting this behavior for the benefit of the reader.
Is it reasonable that honoring one's father and mother would result in a long life? In an often polygamous, highly patriarchal society with wealth concentrated among few older males, parental affection was a child's only practical hope for survival, let alone prosperity.
There's no mention of abuse in the original, but considering the text in that context lends it a pleasantly fatalistic tone. Even if it's one's fate to suffer at the hands of one's parents, premature death is the only alternative to honoring them.
It's not democracy if you have to pay to elect the candidates.
In your system, anyone or anything with currency convertible to dollars can influence elections. Why do we even bother with voting? We can just let whoever collects the most money win! Oh, and since the candidates can spend their own money, let's skip the collecting part. Let's just automatically elect the candidate with the largest bank balance.
Or, maybe, each eligible voter could be given one vote that has the same importance as every other vote.
Have you tried going to an importer (like Meijiya), or an honest-to-God cheese shop? The best piece of Cheddar I've ever had was made in England and purchased at a cheese shop in Kobe.
The department store at my station had a cheese shop with a large variety of cheeses, all imported from Europe. Most grocers have some imported cheese. You just need to look near the imported wine instead of near the milk.
Just write a compiler back-end that outputs JavaScript in a form that's easily optimized by whatever browser(s) you're targeting. Expose canvas, audio and local storage as libraries that are general enough to fit your planned usage. Then you can write simple front-ends that translate your preferred languages to a neat and tidy intermediate language. You could even write your compiler in Javascript, but I guess it's not necessary, since you could just bootstrap it...
Money and many other goods are traded in discrete quantities, so their utility functions are not concave, by definition. (Concavity is a property of the derivative.)
Your so-called "concavity" is just a result of some assumptions about the behavior of the utility function as quantity increases without bound. Carefully review the derivation of the "law of diminishing returns" to see why. (I'm sick of making obvious counter-examples, but imagine a safe that requires three sticks of dynamite to blast open. Anything less than that has no value to the task at hand.)
Elementary results typically make the many assumptions for clarity or in order to render calculations tractable. Don't bring them into a discussion unless you understand what assumptions were made and why.
The error that you're making is basically saying that 50c has a zero value to you. It doesn't, it has a value of 50c to you.
This is the arrogance that I mentioned. You're trying to tell me what $0.50 is worth to me.
You can't possibly know the value of money to others. There are real world scenarios where your assumption doesn't hold. Suppose my life long goal is to own an ice cream parlor. I have enough money to pay my bills and exactly one extra dollar left at the end of the month. I would die before $12 per year was enough to start a business and I have enough money to meet my immediate needs, so a net change of $0.50 really is worthless to me. On the other hand, gambling allows me to have a miniscule, but real chance of getting the capital that I need.
It's exactly these scenarios in which, depending on a person's values, needs and income, gambling can be rational.
If you think that $0.01 is worth something to everyone everywhere, try handing out pennies and see how it goes. I await your report.
It stings a little that you're telling me to consider the problem mathematically. I posted reasonable formulas for some hypothetical expectations and you've simply posted an anecdote.
Your claim of diminishing returns is an incorrect generalization.
Suppose you have a terminal illness and the treatment costs exactly $1 million. You have $50,000 in the bank, but the clinic only takes cash and you will die before you can earn enough money.
P.S. The phrase "any reasonable" doesn't belong in the same statement as "QED." Besides the immaturity belied by your name-calling, it's obvious that you don't have much formal training in mathematics. Perhaps more mathematics education is necessary, at least in your case.
It's ironic that, in order to actually believe your statement, one must not have a very firm grasp of probability.
The important value isn't the expected value of one's net winnings (perhaps -$0.50 for the lottery player and $0 for the abstainer), but the expectation of the utility of one's net winnings (for example, u(0-1)*(1-1/2000000)+u(1000000-1)*1/2000000 versus u(0) ).
The arrogance inherent in your statement becomes glaringly obvious in these terms. Implicitly, you are claiming knowledge of the utility of money to lottery players, while simultaneously denying such knowledge to the lottery players themselves.
Capture from multiple sources and check for differences. It should be easy enough to find watermarks and not terribly difficult to edit them out automatically. If there's a unique identifier, it can't be in two sources.
Besides which, making imperceptible watermarks than can survive arbitrary lossy compression techniques is hard. If a person can't see a certain detail, a good video compression algorithm should throw it out. Just saying.
The intentional abuse of legal authority by police officers, prosecutors and judges should be a capital crime. No other crime so greatly and directly injures the rights of the public as a whole while simultaneously destroying the ability of the people to defend those rights through legal recourse.
The small risk of danger to fellow citizens and property damage caused by a single instance of speeding is routinely used to justify everything from excessive fines up to felony charges of reckless endangerment. In contrast, the irreparable damage inevitably done to both individual and public well-being, rights and liberty caused by a single act police or judicial corruption certainly merits more severe punishment of those responsible, but in practice is almost entirely unpunished.
Though there are exceptions, even serial killers rarely have more than 15 victims. Over the course of a career, how many criminal cases does one judge try, for how many indictments is one prosecutor responsible, and how many arrests does one police officer make? In total, how many life-times of imprisonment, deprivation and suffering does each of those represent? Of course this is in addition to the actual loss of life due to beatings, cases of positional asphyxia, shootings and tasings administered by police and lethal injections administered by court order.
Further, such acts demonstrate that the offender does not respect the rights of other citizens, which is the fundamental compromise upon which cooperative, mutually beneficial societies are constructed. Persistently ignoring and willfully violating others' rights is the essential core of antisocial personality disorder—a condition for which there is no treatment. Barring major advances in psychiatry, rehabilitation is simply impossible.
There exists no graver crime. There exists no criminal with less hope of reintegration into society. If capital punishment is ever justifiable, it is justifiable in such cases.
Deallocated blocks will have content that's far from random, but still high entropy.
In addition to encrypted data, any compressed data should also have high entropy. Pieces of pictures (PNG, JPEG), documents (MS Office, Open Office), audio files (MP3), and video files (MPEG, AVI) will almost all be compressed. Most file formats that are intended to store large amounts of data will employ compression and if that compression is near to optimal, random pieces of files in those formats will have high entropy.
Luckily, my problem wasn't in the U.S.,* but the country where I was living at the time has similarly strict immigration policy and not dissimilar popular sentiment about immigration. However, in that culture, there was never an African-American Civil Rights Movement or an analog of it, due to the racial homogeneity that is common in many old, stable countries. Accordingly, there still exist unchallenged popular views on race that would have already been considered antiquated and bigoted in the U.S. of the 1970s.
My status change was related to a change in my family structure, which is by some accounts the duty of the visa-holder to report. I heard different interpretations on the legality of such visas, but I didn't overstay the expiration date of the visa itself and only one source (though one within the immigration department) told me that I needed to file for a new visa immediately. I was certainly paying income, residence and sales taxes for the entire duration of my residence, not to mention that I was providing partial financial support for three citizens.
My efforts to comply with foreign immigration law on my own behalf and like efforts to comply with domestic immigration law on behalf of my foreign family members certainly provided me with a new perspective on immigration-related issues. I still believe that control of immigration and citizenship is a significant aspect of national sovereignty as an extension of the rights of citizens to decide who will be their fellow residents and citizens, but I have questions about the baroque, arbitrary and seemingly punitive procedures that must be followed by those who have already been deemed beneficial residents or citizens by the law. I don't see any benefit to making life miserable for legal immigrants, save as a consolation to those who only grudgingly accept non-zero immigration rates.
As an aside, I always appreciate your thoughtful, informative and thought-provoking posts. (I seldom appreciate your thoughtless, redundant and dull posts.;-)
*There are some details I would rather not post explicitly, since it might be seen as an admission of wrong-doing that could potentially affect my future visa and citizenship applications.
Gahhh! It seems that Steve and Larry really are close friends. Now I have to question the assumptions I've made about CEOs' personalities based on rumors, anecdotes and my personal feelings for their companies and products.
Thanks for disturbing my comfortable ignorance, jerk!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The domains move at about 100 m/s. Light moves through an optical fiber at about 200,000,000 m/s. Assuming that your scheme was possible, it would represent a 2-million-fold increase in latency (at the physical layer). It would take a packet 12 hours to get from New York to Los Angeles, giving a round-trip time of about a day.
Aside from the fact that it would be completely useless, it's also impossible. The internet is packet switched, not circuit based. There's almost never a complete, continuous "track" between a sender and a destination, although the sending to the loopback address is a significant exception.
The big advantage is that there are only 26 letters used in English which can each be written in upper or lower case and print or script. Two days is ample time to learn how to read and write letters.
There are tens of thousands of characters with varying stroke order and stroke placement. Each character may have many variant forms and there are many different styles of written characters. What percentage of those characters might someone conceivably memorize and learn to write correctly in two days? Is two days even enough time to learn how to hold a brush correctly?
This comment is a bit ridiculous. Most Japanese people living in urban apartments don't have both a washing machine and a clothes dryer. The only available place is one's veranda. That's where everyone hangs their clothes. That's where she hung her clothes. It's definitely on the small side, but there are actually apartments with as little floor space as two tatami (3.64m x 1.82m), so sometimes just buying a dryer isn't an option.
Someone took a picture of her underwear and posted it on Google Streetview...
Here's the original article.
From the original article in the Mainichi Shinbun, "It seems that someone posted the picture of her underwear on the internet.[...] She said, "If it had been an exterior view of the apartment that's understandable, but that a photo of my underwear drying on the veranda should appear is strange no matter how you look at it."
Again, this isn't just a case of something weird showing up on Streetview, according to the woman in question. Her paranoia is a little more understandable considering that she claims someone took a picture of her underwear and went to the trouble of posting it where she would likely find it. Being concerned about harassment or stalking isn't completely unreasonable.
Some other details that were left out of the English article include that the woman in question is from Fukuoka City in Fukuoka, that she's in her twenties, that she was fired from the hospital were she was working, that she lived alone at the time of the incident, that she found the photo this Spring, that she filed suit in November in Fukuoka District Court and that opening arguments were heard on December 15th. As of December 15th, Google was hurrying to verify the facts of the case.
There was a 2channel thread about the story that referred to it as "MyPantyView," but unfortunately Slashdot's Japanese counterparts had no comment on the matter.
There was a large Korean population in Japan during the last years of the Japanese Empire. Many of them stayed in Japan after the conclusion of Pacific war and after the Korean War, the resident Koreans were allowed to register as citizens of Korea, but open affiliation with North Korea was made illegal. Despite this, approximately a quarter of resident Koreans have ties to pro-DPRK organizations, in particular Chongryon. Among other things, Chongryon operates pachinko parlors that generate revenue for the DPRK and it runs the 60 schools that teach DPRK ideology to Korean students in Japan. Chongryon's presence in Japan is effectively an extension of North Korea into a first world country, so its importance to the DPRK would be hard to overstate.
There are probably more web developers among the approximately 150,000 pro-DPRK Koreans in Japan than there are North Koreans with any access to the internet, so it shouldn't be too surprising that such websites are hosted and maintained in Japan.
Fuel isn't explosive and the capacitors only store at most enough energy for one round at a time, and, during a cycle of firing and charging with a fixed amount of power, will store less than half of that on average. Compare that to a traditional ship's magazine, which holds all the rounds that the ship might need in the period between being resupplied. On top of that, instead of storing high explosive warheads, the ship can store completely inert penetrators.
Sure, you wouldn't want to be near the capacitors when they decide not to be capacitors anymore, but an explosion in the magazine makes that look trivial in comparison.
Using a gamma burst for lipstick is like using buckshot for mouthwash. One estimate for the energy released in a gamma burst is 10^44 Joules, which is about 1000 times greater than the gravitational binding energy of the Sun.
Doesn't the solar system look so pretty now?
It might win a Kurt Cobain lookalike contest, but I don't think it's going to be winning any beauty pageants.
It's your misguided opinion that copyright is a right. Copyright is in no sense a natural right. You can claim that it's a right because current law grants certain privileges to authors, but that amounts to simply reciting the current state of U.S. law.
If I said your rights should be abridged (not only copyright, but any rights)
Comparing natural freedoms to commercial monopolies was clever. It seems to have fooled a few mods.
Conventional wisdom has once again survived the onslaught of someone with just enough information to draw the wrong conclusion. You seem to have discovered that ordinary soap doesn't kill bacteria. Great, but that's not what soap is used for.
Pathogens are typically transmitted in droplets of fluid or on the surface of small particles. (Soap won't help with a direct exchange of fluids, either with parasites or members of the same species.) Washing removes pathogens by removing the foreign matter in which they are present on the surface of the skin. Further, only the skin's outermost layer of dead, keratinized cells and oil is directly exposed to bacteria. Ordinary washing with ordinary soap removes a portion of these dead skin cells and sebum, taking a percentage of surface bacteria with it.
You're "magically clean" after washing because there are less bacteria present. It's not necessary to kill that which can be easily removed.
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
A reason is specified for honoring one's parents. It's implied that doing so will result in long life. While it is possible to interpret this as God requiring action and threatening divine enforcement, it is also possible to see this text as an implication that long life is a natural result of honoring one's parents. Assuming that, God is merely exhorting this behavior for the benefit of the reader.
Is it reasonable that honoring one's father and mother would result in a long life? In an often polygamous, highly patriarchal society with wealth concentrated among few older males, parental affection was a child's only practical hope for survival, let alone prosperity.
There's no mention of abuse in the original, but considering the text in that context lends it a pleasantly fatalistic tone. Even if it's one's fate to suffer at the hands of one's parents, premature death is the only alternative to honoring them.
It's not democracy if you have to pay to elect the candidates.
In your system, anyone or anything with currency convertible to dollars can influence elections. Why do we even bother with voting? We can just let whoever collects the most money win! Oh, and since the candidates can spend their own money, let's skip the collecting part. Let's just automatically elect the candidate with the largest bank balance.
Or, maybe, each eligible voter could be given one vote that has the same importance as every other vote.
he was killed in a sword fight
That explains why he lost, since Galois died of a gunshot wound.
Have you tried going to an importer (like Meijiya), or an honest-to-God cheese shop? The best piece of Cheddar I've ever had was made in England and purchased at a cheese shop in Kobe.
The department store at my station had a cheese shop with a large variety of cheeses, all imported from Europe. Most grocers have some imported cheese. You just need to look near the imported wine instead of near the milk.
Just write a compiler back-end that outputs JavaScript in a form that's easily optimized by whatever browser(s) you're targeting. Expose canvas, audio and local storage as libraries that are general enough to fit your planned usage. Then you can write simple front-ends that translate your preferred languages to a neat and tidy intermediate language. You could even write your compiler in Javascript, but I guess it's not necessary, since you could just bootstrap it...
Money and many other goods are traded in discrete quantities, so their utility functions are not concave, by definition. (Concavity is a property of the derivative.)
Your so-called "concavity" is just a result of some assumptions about the behavior of the utility function as quantity increases without bound. Carefully review the derivation of the "law of diminishing returns" to see why. (I'm sick of making obvious counter-examples, but imagine a safe that requires three sticks of dynamite to blast open. Anything less than that has no value to the task at hand.)
Elementary results typically make the many assumptions for clarity or in order to render calculations tractable. Don't bring them into a discussion unless you understand what assumptions were made and why.
The error that you're making is basically saying that 50c has a zero value to you. It doesn't, it has a value of 50c to you.
This is the arrogance that I mentioned. You're trying to tell me what $0.50 is worth to me.
You can't possibly know the value of money to others. There are real world scenarios where your assumption doesn't hold. Suppose my life long goal is to own an ice cream parlor. I have enough money to pay my bills and exactly one extra dollar left at the end of the month. I would die before $12 per year was enough to start a business and I have enough money to meet my immediate needs, so a net change of $0.50 really is worthless to me. On the other hand, gambling allows me to have a miniscule, but real chance of getting the capital that I need.
It's exactly these scenarios in which, depending on a person's values, needs and income, gambling can be rational.
If you think that $0.01 is worth something to everyone everywhere, try handing out pennies and see how it goes. I await your report.
It stings a little that you're telling me to consider the problem mathematically. I posted reasonable formulas for some hypothetical expectations and you've simply posted an anecdote.
Your claim of diminishing returns is an incorrect generalization.
Suppose you have a terminal illness and the treatment costs exactly $1 million. You have $50,000 in the bank, but the clinic only takes cash and you will die before you can earn enough money.
P.S. The phrase "any reasonable" doesn't belong in the same statement as "QED." Besides the immaturity belied by your name-calling, it's obvious that you don't have much formal training in mathematics. Perhaps more mathematics education is necessary, at least in your case.
It's ironic that, in order to actually believe your statement, one must not have a very firm grasp of probability.
The important value isn't the expected value of one's net winnings (perhaps -$0.50 for the lottery player and $0 for the abstainer), but the expectation of the utility of one's net winnings (for example, u(0-1)*(1-1/2000000)+u(1000000-1)*1/2000000 versus u(0) ).
The arrogance inherent in your statement becomes glaringly obvious in these terms. Implicitly, you are claiming knowledge of the utility of money to lottery players, while simultaneously denying such knowledge to the lottery players themselves.
Nope, you can't use the birthday paradox. Your higher estimate of 10 developers gives a 12% chance of a shared birthday between the developers.
The probability of at least one of 10 developers having a given birthday is much lower, 1-(364/365)^10, or approximately 2.7%.
Capture from multiple sources and check for differences. It should be easy enough to find watermarks and not terribly difficult to edit them out automatically. If there's a unique identifier, it can't be in two sources.
Besides which, making imperceptible watermarks than can survive arbitrary lossy compression techniques is hard. If a person can't see a certain detail, a good video compression algorithm should throw it out. Just saying.
The intentional abuse of legal authority by police officers, prosecutors and judges should be a capital crime. No other crime so greatly and directly injures the rights of the public as a whole while simultaneously destroying the ability of the people to defend those rights through legal recourse.
The small risk of danger to fellow citizens and property damage caused by a single instance of speeding is routinely used to justify everything from excessive fines up to felony charges of reckless endangerment. In contrast, the irreparable damage inevitably done to both individual and public well-being, rights and liberty caused by a single act police or judicial corruption certainly merits more severe punishment of those responsible, but in practice is almost entirely unpunished.
Though there are exceptions, even serial killers rarely have more than 15 victims. Over the course of a career, how many criminal cases does one judge try, for how many indictments is one prosecutor responsible, and how many arrests does one police officer make? In total, how many life-times of imprisonment, deprivation and suffering does each of those represent? Of course this is in addition to the actual loss of life due to beatings, cases of positional asphyxia, shootings and tasings administered by police and lethal injections administered by court order.
Further, such acts demonstrate that the offender does not respect the rights of other citizens, which is the fundamental compromise upon which cooperative, mutually beneficial societies are constructed. Persistently ignoring and willfully violating others' rights is the essential core of antisocial personality disorder—a condition for which there is no treatment. Barring major advances in psychiatry, rehabilitation is simply impossible.
There exists no graver crime. There exists no criminal with less hope of reintegration into society. If capital punishment is ever justifiable, it is justifiable in such cases.
Interpol has released a late-breaking photo of the suspects.
The inspector charged with apprehending them has declined to comment.
Deallocated blocks will have content that's far from random, but still high entropy.
In addition to encrypted data, any compressed data should also have high entropy. Pieces of pictures (PNG, JPEG), documents (MS Office, Open Office), audio files (MP3), and video files (MPEG, AVI) will almost all be compressed. Most file formats that are intended to store large amounts of data will employ compression and if that compression is near to optimal, random pieces of files in those formats will have high entropy.
Luckily, my problem wasn't in the U.S.,* but the country where I was living at the time has similarly strict immigration policy and not dissimilar popular sentiment about immigration. However, in that culture, there was never an African-American Civil Rights Movement or an analog of it, due to the racial homogeneity that is common in many old, stable countries. Accordingly, there still exist unchallenged popular views on race that would have already been considered antiquated and bigoted in the U.S. of the 1970s.
;-)
My status change was related to a change in my family structure, which is by some accounts the duty of the visa-holder to report. I heard different interpretations on the legality of such visas, but I didn't overstay the expiration date of the visa itself and only one source (though one within the immigration department) told me that I needed to file for a new visa immediately. I was certainly paying income, residence and sales taxes for the entire duration of my residence, not to mention that I was providing partial financial support for three citizens.
My efforts to comply with foreign immigration law on my own behalf and like efforts to comply with domestic immigration law on behalf of my foreign family members certainly provided me with a new perspective on immigration-related issues. I still believe that control of immigration and citizenship is a significant aspect of national sovereignty as an extension of the rights of citizens to decide who will be their fellow residents and citizens, but I have questions about the baroque, arbitrary and seemingly punitive procedures that must be followed by those who have already been deemed beneficial residents or citizens by the law. I don't see any benefit to making life miserable for legal immigrants, save as a consolation to those who only grudgingly accept non-zero immigration rates.
As an aside, I always appreciate your thoughtful, informative and thought-provoking posts. (I seldom appreciate your thoughtless, redundant and dull posts.
*There are some details I would rather not post explicitly, since it might be seen as an admission of wrong-doing that could potentially affect my future visa and citizenship applications.
Gahhh! It seems that Steve and Larry really are close friends. Now I have to question the assumptions I've made about CEOs' personalities based on rumors, anecdotes and my personal feelings for their companies and products. ;-)
Thanks for disturbing my comfortable ignorance, jerk!