Although generally US people seem quite friendly - as long as you avoid mentioning politics or religion or accidentally straying onto private land - US officials have been basically hostile to foreign visitors for about as long as I can remember. On my first visit I was rather suprised at the aggressive reaction of an immigration agent when a child made the mistake of putting its foot over the line on the floor. A couple of visits later, a local cop had stationed himself by a crosswalk to the rental car parking lot and was ticketing everyone who crossed against the pedestrian signal, most of whom were no doubt unaware that the US is quite so anal about its control of those to dare to walk rather than drive. I nearly got deported on a third occasion for saying I intended to stay "a fortnight", a word that the immigration agent apparently hadn't heard of and automatically assumed meant "indefinitely and for the purposes of overthrowing the government".
I gave up visiting the US entirely when fingerprinting started and the admission fee that is now charged for the privilege of being abused is hardly likely to tempt me back. Still, I'm sure all those Russian sleepers feel right at home.
Despite the Data Protection Act in the UK which generally requires disclosure and correction of personal information, financial institutions routinely refuse to give out information on things like decisions to turn down credit applications on the grounds that the proprietary algorithms they use to crunch your data are trade secrets. This even extends to the data sources they have consulted in addition to the personal information you provided them.
I was on one occasion turned down for a credit card because of suspected fraud. The financial institution concerned refused to divulge the information that led them to that conclusion and the Information Commissioner sided with them because disclosing the source of the information would permit other people to circumvent their fraud checking in future and disclose part of the "proprietary algorithm" used for credit checking. Not only am I unable to correct the apparently erroneous information they have on file, but since it relates to suspected fraud, they're free to share that incorrect information with other financial institutions without telling me what it is.
The more critical the personal information someone has about you, the less likely you are to get your hands on it...
Because Apple is already, depending on the day of the week, the largest company by market cap in the world and plenty of people would argue that valuation is out of whack with its actual economic significance - that the growth in the company (however spectacular) does not justify the growth in the share price. If the share price is simply being bid up in order to make a return in the absence of dividends and if that price is not related to the company's real worth then you just have a bubble and for the last people in a "taxable event" is the last thing they'll be concerned about. Dividends at least relate (roughly) to the actual performance of the company rather than its imagined future performance.
Apple is also sitting on a huge pile of cash (which it has amassed largely by *not* having paid dividends) and the stockholders are going to want to get their hands on it if Apple has no apparent other use for it. Taxable or otherwise, they'll want it in their banks rather than in Apple's. That would arguably be much easier to arrange without causing instability in the share price if the company had a history of dividend payments.
... why people continue to buy the stock when Apple pays no dividend. Apple's stock price *has* to rise indefinitely at a rate that produces a useful return as a consequence. That's not sustainable for ever and arguably Apple's stock is significantly overvalued because the only way to make money from it is to turn a blind eye to that sustainability. Apple, I imagine, will eventually pay a dividend and its stock price will adjust as a consequence without significantly altering the return to its stockholders. Which raises the question of what indices based on share price usefully measure.
Actually, you don't need a complex tax regime, all you have to do is insist that:
a) Traders are required to have ownership of the stocks they are trading b) They hold them for a minimum of 30 days after acquisition
Governments won't of course do this as taxation on investment collected by private interests (which is what speculative share-trading actually is) can be recycled into political donations whereas state taxation can't (or at least not very efficiently).
I'm not sure, though, why corporations don't have more restrictions on the buying and selling of their shares - they only ever make money on the first share issue (or subsequent rights issues) and the current market value of their stock doesn't have any influence on the funds they have available to do business.
And it's worth adding that when I started at Cambridge, CS was only a one-year course that had to be combined with other subjects or taken on a postgrad basis as there wasn't actually considered to be enough of it to make up a worthwhile undergraduate degree.
There hasn't actually been much more CS invented since then (off the top of my head, digital signal processing, object-oriented programming and public key encryption are about it), despite appearances to the contrary.
I'm not sure making a 3-year undergraduate course exclusively out of CS is necessarily a good thing - throwing in a year of business studies, engineering or law might actually benefit both undergrads and future employers.
I think the problem, at least in the UK, is that present CS courses are neither prepartion for "designing and building systems" nor for "maintenance" (and while the latter may be unglamorous, it actually would benefit from a much greater degree of skill than is typically employed).
Perhaps surprisingly those who did traditional CS courses many years ago are *not* - at least in my experience - having the same problem getting work - most of the people of advancing years I know in the field have weathered the recession and the IT booms and busts very well.
A lot of previously-academic CS courses have been refocussed on market-based "skills" which means they're more product-oriented - this is partly as a result of pressure from employers wanting people who can be productive more quickly and partly from potential graduate who think this will improve their employment prospects. Unfortunately, in my view, the result is graduates who fall between two stools - they're neither sufficiently well-versed in CS-principles to survive the rapid changes in IT which will occur over their lifetime nor any more practically-skilled than someone with a less formal qualification. In a poor economic environment these are precisely the people will be squeezed out by us oldsters who have the fundamental experience to be adaptable and by cheaper youngsters coming out of FE colleges who have equivalent or better practical skills.
... doesn't have to be much, but it has to be actual land. And if you want to claim some sort of exclusive economic rights over the surrounding seas the land has to be habitable (look up Okinotori Islands). A perpetually floating house is a ship even if it used to be moored on solid ground. And it can't be registered in a country that doesn't exist because it's underwater.
But I don't suppose your lack of statehood would be your most pressing concern.
You'd think there'd have been some really significant discounting in the channels if there were a million sitting in warehouses. There were some brief offers on the original Tab, but there was no fire sale. Presumably Samsung would have an interest in getting them in people's hands rather than simply scrapping them. It would be an expensive - and unimaginative - way to protect brand reputation.
It cultural in the sense that people see themselves (and their colleagues) as "C" programmers or "COBOL" programmers or "Web developers" at "IBM shops" or "Microsoft shops" or whatever rather than as people with core skills using the best available technology to solve current problems. This leads people to overvalue their transient functional knowledge (like familiarity with Visual Studio or Eclipse or a programming language) and for new entrants to emphasise "skills" which will yield a temporary premium salary. It's really not hard to learn a new programming language or paradigm - it's self-deluding for both employees and employers to believe it is. It also leads to extremely inappropriate solutions when people insist on applying the screwdriver they happen to have to the nail they've been asked to drive home.
Of course there will likely be an age gap in terms of social interests between older and younger staff but you need your employees to be engaged inside the workplace not outside of it and managers who can't see there's a difference deserve to feel the full effects of the recession regardless of their age.
Evan Davis of the BBC made an interesting series recently on manufacturing in the UK (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0125v5h). He's been one of the few people in the UK consistently to point out that the VALUE of manufacturing to the enconomy continues to increase even as the number of JOBS continues to decrease, so it's not all doom and gloom.
People are still making stuff, it's just that the stuff they make is increasingly complicated and valuable. In that respect, it's fine if assembly and easily-replicated technology go overseas. In some respects, it doesn't actually matter if high technology manufacturing processes go overseas - if they're economically important then they'll be taken by espionage if not by way of commerce so you might as well make some money on the deal.
The real problems are that (a) you end up without any jobs at home that underskilled workers can reasonably undertake causing social cohesion to break down and (b) you lose the critical mass of both talent and investment that comes from having a nexus of inter-related manufacturing skills nearby.
One of the problems I find I encounter more these days than in the past is that there the coder is increasingly at the mercy of more and more layers of underlying code which is more or less impervious to reasonable debugging.
The performance of your application code was in the past pretty deterministic - not usually very much between the OS and your code and the OS usually had a closely-defined role and if it failed the consequences were usually obvious. It was also exhaustively documented so there was little to take you by surprise.
These days your code may be on top of a bunch of middleware running on top of an intermediate language environment on top of a virtualised machine and OS with networked storage. When these things don't behave as you expect, good luck with finding anyone who knows about all of the various internals enough to help you solve the problem.
And, indeed, good luck with writing your application. Half the stuff the middleware provides to you will only be documented in someone's blog somewhere. If you're really lucky, the Release Notes will be accurate in its report of the stuff that doesn't actually work as documented. Some part of it will assume a model of resource allocation that is unhelpful to your specific use case but you won't find that out until halfway through your project.
This is just part of the IT hiccup that occurred with the advent of the microprocessor - Computer Science was forgotten and painfully relearned over a period of about 30 years. Unfortunately, it's rather stagnated in the interim and the problem is not so much that people have forgotten the lessons of the past, they haven't actually developed the new tools to deal with the staggeringly more complex environment in which software now lives and is developed.
Most of the "routers" (which are really a cross between transport-level and application-level gateways) supplied to domestic customers aren't even capable of the full gamut of IPv4 features: no real hope of extending TCP, transport protocols other than TCP or IPv6.
TCP/IPv4 is now a living fossil and will persist in its present form as an ISP access protocol, ironically filling exactly the same function that X.25 (so much derided by Internet professionals at the time because it wasn't end-to-end) was designed to provide. Big ISPs have the same business model as the old telcos (and indeed may be the same business) and they need to control access to their network and bill for it. They can't do that without "middleboxes" of some kind. End-to-end was only ever really feasible for closed-user-group networks paid for by third parties.
On the plus side, a more capable "middlebox" would allow you to negotiate classes of service with your ISP which might obviate the need for the ISP to randomly traffic shape in ways that suit noone.
From outside the US, it doesn't actually appear that as much has changed as you think.
Most of the debt built up under Reagan and Bushes 1 and 2. Shortly after came a huge economic shock which required major financial support for the banks and major financial injection into the economy: that's precisely the time the US actually needed to borrow money and wasn't really in a position to start repaying debt, never mind dealing with the diminishing tax returns from a depressed economy. Net effect: borrowing increases. Not surprising.
Everything Obama said is and remains true. He's just stuck with having to deal with "events, dear boy, events" (as Macmillan said). He's perfectly willing to raise taxes to try to meet US spending profligacy. It's hardly his fault that the House won't let him. He just picked the wrong time to be president.
The US, collectively, needs to re-evaluate the transparency of its economic policy. Taxation needs to be seen to be more fairly distributed and more directly connected to spending programmes that benefit the many rather than the few. If there isn't shortly more common consent to the basic principles on which US fiscal policy is run, the country is going to see some very ugly consequences.
Trading modest convenience for the a greatly increased risk of service disruption.
Of course, while you're all worried about that, no-one is talking about the modest convenience of Google+ being able to hide your drunken weekend party photos from your boss being traded for the risk that the Big G gets to know everything about you and track your current whereabouts via your phone.
In this case, stupidity is probably your friend. In the amount of time these devices have been operating it would be most suprising that cancers would have developed in detectable clusters as a result of any escaping radiation. However, the emotional response to personal tales of "cancer" and "radiation" means that the great unwashed are much more likely to clamour for the withdrawal of the scanners on the basis of anecdotal evidence than on any genuine scientific exposition of unfitness for the alleged purpose.
And I remember, back in the day, when "High Level Languages" were the new panacea that would ensure you were no longer tied to a single computer vendor. Yes, that long ago.
I don't think Java is doomed any more than COBOL is doomed - it's deeply embedded in so many back office systems that it is going to be around in perpetuity regardless of whether the language and its associated environment has any further development..Net/CLR is indeed a better "Java" than Java but it isn't as entrenched, still basically dependent on the Windows platform and Microsoft itself seems to be going cool on the whole project so I'd say it was the more likely candidate for ultimate doom than Java, even though it is technically superior in many respects. The CLR has a lot of "cloud" potential, but whether Microsoft would dervie any benefit from letting it sufficiently loose is questionable.
Oracle essentially has to shift Sun iron in order to make money out of Java; Microsoft has to shift Windows licences to get money out of.Net. It's hard to see how either can continue indefinitely to develop a product whose funding is contingent on selling something only peripherally related.
... owing to the test site being accessible only by means of a long and winding tunnel housing an 8ft gauge railway on which massively long engines haul tiny carriages.
Slashdot Mirror
More heat, more sweat!
Although generally US people seem quite friendly - as long as you avoid mentioning politics or religion or accidentally straying onto private land - US officials have been basically hostile to foreign visitors for about as long as I can remember. On my first visit I was rather suprised at the aggressive reaction of an immigration agent when a child made the mistake of putting its foot over the line on the floor. A couple of visits later, a local cop had stationed himself by a crosswalk to the rental car parking lot and was ticketing everyone who crossed against the pedestrian signal, most of whom were no doubt unaware that the US is quite so anal about its control of those to dare to walk rather than drive. I nearly got deported on a third occasion for saying I intended to stay "a fortnight", a word that the immigration agent apparently hadn't heard of and automatically assumed meant "indefinitely and for the purposes of overthrowing the government".
I gave up visiting the US entirely when fingerprinting started and the admission fee that is now charged for the privilege of being abused is hardly likely to tempt me back. Still, I'm sure all those Russian sleepers feel right at home.
Despite the Data Protection Act in the UK which generally requires disclosure and correction of personal information, financial institutions routinely refuse to give out information on things like decisions to turn down credit applications on the grounds that the proprietary algorithms they use to crunch your data are trade secrets. This even extends to the data sources they have consulted in addition to the personal information you provided them.
I was on one occasion turned down for a credit card because of suspected fraud. The financial institution concerned refused to divulge the information that led them to that conclusion and the Information Commissioner sided with them because disclosing the source of the information would permit other people to circumvent their fraud checking in future and disclose part of the "proprietary algorithm" used for credit checking. Not only am I unable to correct the apparently erroneous information they have on file, but since it relates to suspected fraud, they're free to share that incorrect information with other financial institutions without telling me what it is.
The more critical the personal information someone has about you, the less likely you are to get your hands on it...
He might have meant "wives/cousins", depending on his location...
Because Apple is already, depending on the day of the week, the largest company by market cap in the world and plenty of people would argue that valuation is out of whack with its actual economic significance - that the growth in the company (however spectacular) does not justify the growth in the share price. If the share price is simply being bid up in order to make a return in the absence of dividends and if that price is not related to the company's real worth then you just have a bubble and for the last people in a "taxable event" is the last thing they'll be concerned about. Dividends at least relate (roughly) to the actual performance of the company rather than its imagined future performance.
Apple is also sitting on a huge pile of cash (which it has amassed largely by *not* having paid dividends) and the stockholders are going to want to get their hands on it if Apple has no apparent other use for it. Taxable or otherwise, they'll want it in their banks rather than in Apple's. That would arguably be much easier to arrange without causing instability in the share price if the company had a history of dividend payments.
The biggest problem of oversold bandwidth is latency. The technology is irrelevant.
... why people continue to buy the stock when Apple pays no dividend. Apple's stock price *has* to rise indefinitely at a rate that produces a useful return as a consequence. That's not sustainable for ever and arguably Apple's stock is significantly overvalued because the only way to make money from it is to turn a blind eye to that sustainability. Apple, I imagine, will eventually pay a dividend and its stock price will adjust as a consequence without significantly altering the return to its stockholders. Which raises the question of what indices based on share price usefully measure.
Actually, you don't need a complex tax regime, all you have to do is insist that:
a) Traders are required to have ownership of the stocks they are trading
b) They hold them for a minimum of 30 days after acquisition
Governments won't of course do this as taxation on investment collected by private interests (which is what speculative share-trading actually is) can be recycled into political donations whereas state taxation can't (or at least not very efficiently).
I'm not sure, though, why corporations don't have more restrictions on the buying and selling of their shares - they only ever make money on the first share issue (or subsequent rights issues) and the current market value of their stock doesn't have any influence on the funds they have available to do business.
And it's worth adding that when I started at Cambridge, CS was only a one-year course that had to be combined with other subjects or taken on a postgrad basis as there wasn't actually considered to be enough of it to make up a worthwhile undergraduate degree.
There hasn't actually been much more CS invented since then (off the top of my head, digital signal processing, object-oriented programming and public key encryption are about it), despite appearances to the contrary.
I'm not sure making a 3-year undergraduate course exclusively out of CS is necessarily a good thing - throwing in a year of business studies, engineering or law might actually benefit both undergrads and future employers.
I think the problem, at least in the UK, is that present CS courses are neither prepartion for "designing and building systems" nor for "maintenance" (and while the latter may be unglamorous, it actually would benefit from a much greater degree of skill than is typically employed).
Perhaps surprisingly those who did traditional CS courses many years ago are *not* - at least in my experience - having the same problem getting work - most of the people of advancing years I know in the field have weathered the recession and the IT booms and busts very well.
A lot of previously-academic CS courses have been refocussed on market-based "skills" which means they're more product-oriented - this is partly as a result of pressure from employers wanting people who can be productive more quickly and partly from potential graduate who think this will improve their employment prospects. Unfortunately, in my view, the result is graduates who fall between two stools - they're neither sufficiently well-versed in CS-principles to survive the rapid changes in IT which will occur over their lifetime nor any more practically-skilled than someone with a less formal qualification. In a poor economic environment these are precisely the people will be squeezed out by us oldsters who have the fundamental experience to be adaptable and by cheaper youngsters coming out of FE colleges who have equivalent or better practical skills.
... doesn't have to be much, but it has to be actual land. And if you want to claim some sort of exclusive economic rights over the surrounding seas the land has to be habitable (look up Okinotori Islands). A perpetually floating house is a ship even if it used to be moored on solid ground. And it can't be registered in a country that doesn't exist because it's underwater.
But I don't suppose your lack of statehood would be your most pressing concern.
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Structures-Prentice-Hall-Automatic-Computation/dp/0130224189
Slightly more practical than the Knuth books (though replacing MIX with Pascal doesn't increase the opportunities for cut-and-paste coding).
And as an added bonus, no mention of the dreaded words "design pattern" in the entire text.
You'd think there'd have been some really significant discounting in the channels if there were a million sitting in warehouses. There were some brief offers on the original Tab, but there was no fire sale. Presumably Samsung would have an interest in getting them in people's hands rather than simply scrapping them. It would be an expensive - and unimaginative - way to protect brand reputation.
It cultural in the sense that people see themselves (and their colleagues) as "C" programmers or "COBOL" programmers or "Web developers" at "IBM shops" or "Microsoft shops" or whatever rather than as people with core skills using the best available technology to solve current problems. This leads people to overvalue their transient functional knowledge (like familiarity with Visual Studio or Eclipse or a programming language) and for new entrants to emphasise "skills" which will yield a temporary premium salary. It's really not hard to learn a new programming language or paradigm - it's self-deluding for both employees and employers to believe it is. It also leads to extremely inappropriate solutions when people insist on applying the screwdriver they happen to have to the nail they've been asked to drive home.
Of course there will likely be an age gap in terms of social interests between older and younger staff but you need your employees to be engaged inside the workplace not outside of it and managers who can't see there's a difference deserve to feel the full effects of the recession regardless of their age.
Evan Davis of the BBC made an interesting series recently on manufacturing in the UK (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0125v5h). He's been one of the few people in the UK consistently to point out that the VALUE of manufacturing to the enconomy continues to increase even as the number of JOBS continues to decrease, so it's not all doom and gloom.
People are still making stuff, it's just that the stuff they make is increasingly complicated and valuable. In that respect, it's fine if assembly and easily-replicated technology go overseas. In some respects, it doesn't actually matter if high technology manufacturing processes go overseas - if they're economically important then they'll be taken by espionage if not by way of commerce so you might as well make some money on the deal.
The real problems are that (a) you end up without any jobs at home that underskilled workers can reasonably undertake causing social cohesion to break down and (b) you lose the critical mass of both talent and investment that comes from having a nexus of inter-related manufacturing skills nearby.
One of the problems I find I encounter more these days than in the past is that there the coder is increasingly at the mercy of more and more layers of underlying code which is more or less impervious to reasonable debugging.
The performance of your application code was in the past pretty deterministic - not usually very much between the OS and your code and the OS usually had a closely-defined role and if it failed the consequences were usually obvious. It was also exhaustively documented so there was little to take you by surprise.
These days your code may be on top of a bunch of middleware running on top of an intermediate language environment on top of a virtualised machine and OS with networked storage. When these things don't behave as you expect, good luck with finding anyone who knows about all of the various internals enough to help you solve the problem.
And, indeed, good luck with writing your application. Half the stuff the middleware provides to you will only be documented in someone's blog somewhere. If you're really lucky, the Release Notes will be accurate in its report of the stuff that doesn't actually work as documented. Some part of it will assume a model of resource allocation that is unhelpful to your specific use case but you won't find that out until halfway through your project.
This is just part of the IT hiccup that occurred with the advent of the microprocessor - Computer Science was forgotten and painfully relearned over a period of about 30 years. Unfortunately, it's rather stagnated in the interim and the problem is not so much that people have forgotten the lessons of the past, they haven't actually developed the new tools to deal with the staggeringly more complex environment in which software now lives and is developed.
Most of the "routers" (which are really a cross between transport-level and application-level gateways) supplied to domestic customers aren't even capable of the full gamut of IPv4 features: no real hope of extending TCP, transport protocols other than TCP or IPv6.
TCP/IPv4 is now a living fossil and will persist in its present form as an ISP access protocol, ironically filling exactly the same function that X.25 (so much derided by Internet professionals at the time because it wasn't end-to-end) was designed to provide. Big ISPs have the same business model as the old telcos (and indeed may be the same business) and they need to control access to their network and bill for it. They can't do that without "middleboxes" of some kind. End-to-end was only ever really feasible for closed-user-group networks paid for by third parties.
On the plus side, a more capable "middlebox" would allow you to negotiate classes of service with your ISP which might obviate the need for the ISP to randomly traffic shape in ways that suit noone.
From outside the US, it doesn't actually appear that as much has changed as you think.
Most of the debt built up under Reagan and Bushes 1 and 2. Shortly after came a huge economic shock which required major financial support for the banks and major financial injection into the economy: that's precisely the time the US actually needed to borrow money and wasn't really in a position to start repaying debt, never mind dealing with the diminishing tax returns from a depressed economy. Net effect: borrowing increases. Not surprising.
Everything Obama said is and remains true. He's just stuck with having to deal with "events, dear boy, events" (as Macmillan said). He's perfectly willing to raise taxes to try to meet US spending profligacy. It's hardly his fault that the House won't let him. He just picked the wrong time to be president.
The US, collectively, needs to re-evaluate the transparency of its economic policy. Taxation needs to be seen to be more fairly distributed and more directly connected to spending programmes that benefit the many rather than the few. If there isn't shortly more common consent to the basic principles on which US fiscal policy is run, the country is going to see some very ugly consequences.
Trading modest convenience for the a greatly increased risk of service disruption.
Of course, while you're all worried about that, no-one is talking about the modest convenience of Google+ being able to hide your drunken weekend party photos from your boss being traded for the risk that the Big G gets to know everything about you and track your current whereabouts via your phone.
http://lavatoryreader.typepad.com/the-lavatory-reader/page/3/
In this case, stupidity is probably your friend. In the amount of time these devices have been operating it would be most suprising that cancers would have developed in detectable clusters as a result of any escaping radiation. However, the emotional response to personal tales of "cancer" and "radiation" means that the great unwashed are much more likely to clamour for the withdrawal of the scanners on the basis of anecdotal evidence than on any genuine scientific exposition of unfitness for the alleged purpose.
And I remember, back in the day, when "High Level Languages" were the new panacea that would ensure you were no longer tied to a single computer vendor. Yes, that long ago.
Plus ca change...
I don't think Java is doomed any more than COBOL is doomed - it's deeply embedded in so many back office systems that it is going to be around in perpetuity regardless of whether the language and its associated environment has any further development. .Net/CLR is indeed a better "Java" than Java but it isn't as entrenched, still basically dependent on the Windows platform and Microsoft itself seems to be going cool on the whole project so I'd say it was the more likely candidate for ultimate doom than Java, even though it is technically superior in many respects. The CLR has a lot of "cloud" potential, but whether Microsoft would dervie any benefit from letting it sufficiently loose is questionable.
Oracle essentially has to shift Sun iron in order to make money out of Java; Microsoft has to shift Windows licences to get money out of .Net. It's hard to see how either can continue indefinitely to develop a product whose funding is contingent on selling something only peripherally related.
"I am Silverlight"
"No, I am Silverlight"
"Just the two of us, then? We're going to get crucified..."
... owing to the test site being accessible only by means of a long and winding tunnel housing an 8ft gauge railway on which massively long engines haul tiny carriages.