"The Chinese leadership is fighting a losing battle and I believe they know this."
Excepting that the Chinese people, at least in the cities, are seeing a rapid improvement in their standard of living, and the country as a whole is an economic juggernaut. Regimes seldom have problems when they are delivering economic prosperity and the Chinese Communist party knows it, so thats whey they are pursuing a policy of prosperity at all costs. The Nazi's were far more brutal and repressive than the Chinese but they also produced an economic miracle and so were quite popular until they led their country to ruin through war.
Repression and Capitalism actually work quite well together, its pretty much what Fascism was all about. Fascism suffered a tactical defeat in World war II but appears poised for strategic victory through China in the 21st century. Its very profitable to have a subservient work force where someone gets out of line the party hammers them. Managers like it when they don't have to worry about malcontents interfering with production.
It will be interesting to see if, now that both the Democratic and Republican parties have led the U.S. to ruin, if the American people have enough backbone left to stand up and say enough is enough, now that American prosperity is disappearing. Repression like China's is bad but incompetence, corruption and selling your country down the river for a few million from lobbyists has a new place in my book as the number one reason for ridding yourself of a regime. Flipping between Democrats and Republicans and pretending it makes a difference or is "change" doesn't cut it any more.
I often wonder where your real motivations lie Miguel. Between your efforts on Gnome and Mono you seem to be a one man wrecking ball designed to destroy Linux on the desktop. In particular you were a prime mover in creating the fissure between KDE and GNOME, which has so fragmented the Linux desktop world its unlikely to ever compete against Windows and the Mac on the desktop. I've certainly given up on it ever mattering as a desktop OS, Now you are trying to infect Linux and Gnome with Microsoft patented technology which seems to be an even more overt and blatant attempt to wreck Linux to Microsoft's benefit.
In my attempt to fathom your motivations the only answers I come up with:
A. You actually think pushing.NET and C# in to Linux is a good idea, and you actually think Microsoft is a nice company. If so you are either naive or just not very bright because Microsoft has always been and still is one of the most ruthless of tech companies and its prime directive is and always has been to destroy all its competitors. Linux is a competitor, not their friend..NET and C# are quite interesting technologies but no one with any sense would think they are appropriate to introduce as a core technology in Linux.
or
B. Sometime ago you actually started working for Microsoft under the table and you have been working to destroy Linux from within, at their behest, by pretending to be a member of the open source community while you've pushed one agenda and then another designed to complete wreck Linux as a desktop OS.
Now its kind of tin foil hat to go with B) but when you think about it, Microsoft was faced with an existential threat from Linux and they couldn't use the same tactics to destroy it they used on more traditional incorporated competitors. Bill Gates is, if nothing else, smart with a heavy dose of ruthless, and to be honest Miguel, your whole agenda for years seems to be a perfect fit for the role of a mole Microsoft planted in the Linux community to destroy it from within. Planting a high profile mole is, when you think about it, the ideal strategy for a company like Microsoft to use to sabotage a community based threat like Linux.
Stallman is kind of abrasive and his religious purity can be annoying to no end, but I can be sure he is what he appears to be, his heart and mind are relatively pure and he does have a great track record for spotting snakes in the grass. By contrast I don't think I would ever trust your motives. It is impossible to tell where your heart really is and seem to bear a striking resemblance to one of those snakes in the grass Stallman is so good at spotting.
Don't think tonnage is a particularly good way to judge the effectiveness of how you spent hundreds of billions of dollars. Since the Russians built the core of ISS using Mir as the proof of concept its not like ISS was breaking much ground in a lot of areas. I'll credit NASA with their efforts on gyros for attitude control, for the massive power systems and the Canadians for their work on robotics, but those were all incremental acheivements, nothing groundbreaking. All in all ISS is just a colossal failure as a program. Worse than the squandered billions is the squandered decades NASA has been marching in place, going no where.
About 30 years ago someone should have noticed that there wasn't actually anything about the ISS that had a point or was actually worth the time or money. Instead, for some unfathomable reason NASA chose to justify the Shuttle as a mean to service the ISS and they justified the ISS as a place for the Shuttle to go and forgot to notice there was no actual point to either.
"The reduced gravity of the planet mars probably means that it is unsuitable for human reproduction and child rearing"
And exactly what actual science do you have to leap to this conclusion, URL please....
Until you actually try to reproduce and raise children in 1/3 G you simply wont know for sure, and even more so you will need to test with humans who have been living in and have acclimated to 1/3 G for an extended period. Experiments on small mammals in centrifuges on ISS or on humans in 0G for brief periods aren't acceptable science for the conclusion you are leaping to.
... or the U.S. could have spent 10 billion and finished the super conducting supercollider and not squandered its leadership position in nuclear physics to the EU.
"engineering is sound to built a habitat in space"
The Russians already proved that for a LOT less money with Mir.
If the pinnacle of achievement of the ISS is a study on bacteria in zero G we pretty much squandered $150 billion dollars on nothing. Though hey... we squander that much in Iraq in a couple months so many its all relative. Still NASA should have been put that money to a lot better use building launch capability that doesn't suck, more robotic, science and observatories or getting to Mars. Instead they pretty much did a high tech jobs program for a couple decades
"But you probably haven't had a 100k salary being taxed at CA's tax levels."
And California's state taxes are high why? Because you made prisons your leading industry with three strikes.... and you pay your prison guards a hundred thousand fracking dollars a year for one of the world's least productive, least skilled jobs. You apparently don't recognize a vicious circle when you see one....
"Want to pick up the cheap real estate? Sure. Welcome to some shitty commute times and high fuel prices."
With the possible exception of San Quentin I think most prisons are located in shit holes with relatively cheap real estate. You dont generally put them in upscale neighborhoods.
The only reason California's real estate is expensive is because you started another vicious circle with a housing bubble where people kept charging more for real estate only because people were willing to pay it and everyone started flipping real estate to get rich quick and get money for nothing.... For every Californian who complains about the price of their real estate is one who made a ridiculous amount of money selling California real estate in one of the longer running real estate bubbles of all time. The only divider is if you bought 20 years ago or 2 years ago. If you bough 2 years ago you got screwed like all late arrivers to bubbles and Ponzi schemes. California in particular and America in general has turning in to a semi continuous Ponzi scheme generating money out of fantasy and you can only generate money out of thin air for so long.
As I recall part of the problem with California's prison costs is guards often make $100K or better. $100K is a lot for a no skill job. Gray Davis in particular gave them a 30+% raise just because they were a huge campaign supporter.
"marketers have defended the practice by insisting it gives Americans what they want: advertisements and other forms of content that are as relevant to their lives as possible"
I'm pretty sure most Americans want no ads at all, so its a little disingenuous if they actually said they are giving us what we want with targeted ads. But hey they are marketeers, so its not suprising they try to spin something that sucks and we don't want as something awesome by comparing it to other alternatives which also suck.
The times I've seen ads that were obviously targeting me, and targeting me across multiple web sites, it mostly just creeped me out and made me want to hunt down Google or whomever was responsible and cut them out of my life. I did cut the company off who was paying for the targeted ads.
Yea that approach has worked really well getting Linux adopted on the desktop......
FOSS programmers do some things REALLY well, they tend to do things involving a GUI somewhere between mediocre and just bad. FOSS just hasn't for whatever reason, been successful in doing awesome UI and good, consistent workflows. One problem is about 20 different UI toolkits, all mediocre, 10 different audio standards, a hundred different window managers. The Mac and iPhone are very successful because there is more or less one very well executed set of libraries to code to in Cocoa, one good multimedia framework and Apple works pretty hard to compel developers and apps to be consistent and predictable.
I predict a FOSS mobile device will have an awesome core and the GUI will suck and when you are talking mobile devices the GUI and application work flows are probably THE most import things.
Its also a plague on FOSS that things get done really well if someone good wants to do them well and is willing to invest a LOT of time for free and love. The problem starts when you hit a problem no one wants to solve and since no one is being paid, and they will all tell you that, it often never gets done or gets done badly.
And then of course in FOSS you can count on there being a fork every time there is clash of personalities or some other dispute. Forks are good when it kills off bad branches. They are horrible when they result in a jungle of competing branches squandering and diluting resources reinventing the same wheels and fragmenting the user base so none of the branches/distros end up as good as they would have been if all the wood was behind one arrow.
"the insurance industry as a whole is contributing to."
Max Baucus unsurprisingly is one of their largest beneficiaries. I think he's racked up something like $2.7 million in contributions from the health and insurance industry if Matt Taibbi's last article on him was correct. I also recall hearing he has an annual event in his home state of Montana consisting of horse back riding, fly fishing and an orgy of campaign contributing by the health and insurance corporations. I predict if Baucus rams this bill through he will retire to a multimillion dollar annual salary with some health care lobbying group, just like Billy Tauzin did after he rammed through Medicare-D for big pharma. Its pretty much criminal and has to stop.
It is completely unconstitutional for the Federal government to force people to buy anything from private corporations. The States might have the power to do it, and car insurance is different because you can opt out if you don't drive on public roads. You cant opt out of these health insurance mandates and for a lot of people they will be equivalent to a second mortgage or rent payment and everyone who gets hammered with this new tax is sure to turn against the people who vote for it in the next election. I'm betting the Dems will lose the House in 2010 unless the Republican completely self destruct.
You only need to look to Massachusetts since its the model for these individual mandates. They have the most expensive insurance in the WORLD, premiums are going up 7-12% next year, double the national average. Individual mandates are a complete disaster for controlling insurance costs, they just give the insurance companies a captive customer base who have to pay whatever they want to charge, and you have more people paying huge premiums who will run up their insurance billx go get their money's worth for the $8-10K premiums. Mass. used the claim the uninsured going to emergency rooms were the reaosn for high health care costs. The costs for their new mandates are now dwarfing the former costs of the uninsured.
Big Pharma also are making out like bandits since they Obama and assorted other Dems caved behind closed doors and the goverment isn't going to use its huge buying power to negotiate prices for Medicare D. They agreed to some billions of cost reductions but if they government doesn't negotiate prices they will save with one hand and steal everyone blind with the other. As soon as this happened big Pharma started running a $150 million dollar ad campaign support this "health care reform" which is in fact a giant theft from the American people.
If the Dems pass health care reform with individual mandates forcing me to buy private insurance not only will I NEVER vote for them again, I will actively campaign for the Republicans as much as I hate them until they have enough power to gridlock Washington.
This country desperately news a new political party with pretty much one plank, it needs to be for the middle class, against corporations and the rich and have no position on hot button social issues like abortion and gun control. These issues are being used by the two incumbent parties to sucker people in to voting for them, and then both parties screw the people on stuff the issues thate really matter.... economic issues... so they can line the pockets of their special interests.
"I agree with most of Joel's post."..excepting that:
A. He plugged a book to the point you start to suspect either he has a financial interest in it, or he has friends who do, I'm guessing the latter. B. He went so over the top hero worshiping Zawinski he further damaged his credibility. Zawinski is just a guy and just a programmer whose main claim to fame is he got in to Netscape at the right time and profited off it mightily and has been milking it ever since. Netscape wasn't exactly ground breaking. The World Wide Web and Mosaic were ground breaking, Netscape just tried to profit off them before anyone else did, and they were quickly destroyed by Microsoft, though most of them got rich first thanks to the first phase of the internet bubble. Firefox is pretty much only thing that survived out of it and its several generations removed. Netscape was in most respects a team ripping off Mosaic so they could profit off it..... C. He suffered from a classic case of generalizations
In particular claiming you should NEVER use C++ or threads is purely silly. Yes you can abuse C++ and threads.
C++ is like most languages, you can use it well or you can abuse it. It has more power tools so it is easier to abuse it. I've seen plenty of horrible C code abuse over the years, some it makes your eyes hurt, and if the project/code base gets very big C++ actually helps keep and restore order as long as someone architects it well and enough and not too much.
Threads certainly can be a reliability curse but there are most definitely places where they are the RIGHT tool to use and if you don't the consequences can be bad in their own right. For example when you end up with a program that is sluggish because its letting some task that should be running in a background thread hogging the foreground and UI.
I wont argue that multiple inheritance is USUALLY bad though it can be used to good effect in some cases, you just need someone who knows when a case arises where it should be used. Since OO languages like Java get by without it you probably can too.
I wont argue that templates are OFTEN bad because people overly proud of their ability to write obfuscated code abuse them and create unreadable garbage. I usually avoid STL because it is ugly, hard to debug code. Same can be said for overriding operators. But there are some instances where they are very useful.
COM being bad, probably no argument from me. Microsoft got mileage out of it but the down sides pretty much compensate for its successes.
Bottom line to me is duct tape programmers aren't inherently better than any other kind of programmer. Only thing that matters at the end of the day is if they got the job done, and done well. I'm pretty sure there are more structured programmers who are just as successful if not more so than many duct tape programmers, and if the application is inherently going to be big and relatively complex someone with some structure, some, not to much, will probably fare better. If its a one man team... use whatever works for ya.
The important thing isn't really what kind of programmer you are, its whether you make the right decisions at the right time in order to succeed. People who make knee jerk generalizations about tools and refuse to use them are just increasing their chances of not making the right decision.
I use the menu bar in a browser for maybe one thing on a regular basis... organize bookmarks. I very seldom use the context menu. The only things I really care about in a browser is a tool bar with bookmark icons. On the Mac I had to download a GUI addon for Firefox to even get those, which was a little annoying, though I sure appreciate Firefox allowing it at all. Don't think Safari supports bookmark icons at all which is why I'm not using it. Only way I load web pages I look at every day is by the pretty little icons on the tool bar. Safari with its grizzly black on dark gray space wasting text completely sucks by comparison. Best thing any GUI engineer can do to a browser as far as I'm concerned is make the bookmark toolbar with icons(no text please) ROCK.
It must be lost on the Firefox GUI engineers with too much time on their hands that the menus ain't broke, so don't "fix" them. I'm serious, leave it alone. People don't use menus in a browser enough for them to be worth bothering with. The tool bars are the only thing that matter. In a word processor you use the menus a LOT so work flow matters. Menu work flow in a browser is nearly irrelevant. Anything resembling eye candy around the edges is also a foolish waste of time and bandwidth. People just want their browser to render the browser page... FAST. Mr. Browser... this ain't about you... its about the content so do your best to be light, fast and stay out of the way, and refrain from becoming a giant steaming pile of bloat, THANKS.
"I'm just curious...why are tax revenues so bad in the state where a company like MS is employing what I could guess is a good number of people and what I would guess were pretty good salaries/bill rates?"
Because Washington has no income tax which is a major reason Microsoft is based there and Bill Gates lives there. They depend on property taxes among other things, which are probably having a substantial shortfall in a crashing real estate market.
Corporate taxes are a lot like the Internet, no one wants to pay for anything, they just want a lot of cool things for free, you know like highways, schools, universities, prisons(so there isn't so much crime). Not sure if they still do but there was a time Microsoft was using prisoners as ultra cheap labor to pack products.
Not versed on tax law enough to say if Microsoft is breaking the law but its a given they are bending it to the absolute limit if they aren't out right breaking it, like most big corporations. They want the middle class working people to pay all the taxes.
I'd seriously like to see Washington put the smack down on them and see Microsoft pull up stakes and move to the nice repressive one party dictatorship that is China and see how Microsoft's execs really like it there if they actually have to live and work there. Or move to India and live in a tiny high tech pocket of affluence in a country with otherwise grinding poverty, serious ethnic and religious tensions and a near perpetual state of war with Pakistan.
This would be the same USA that is currently occupying Afghanistan, where in the recent Presidential election the incumbent, Hamid Karzai who was originally installed by the U.S., engaged in massive ballot box stuffing and also stole an election just like Iran. The U.N., E.U and U.S. all know he stole the election but they are mostly sitting their wringing their hands and doing nothing about it because as much as sucks as a puppet... he is their only puppet.
This is the same Hamid Karzai whose brother is one of the countries major opium traffickers and has a bevy of warlords in his government who are also opium traffickers and guilty of various war crimes. This is a government so corrupt and despised by its citizens many want the Taliban back which is why the Taliban insurgency is doing so well.
It is extremely difficult for the the U.S. or E.U. to get all holier than thou at Iran when their puppet government just did EXACTLY the same thing the Iranian government did. It is pretty hypocritical for Westerners to be ranting about Iran's government stealing an election. It would be interesting to know if the Afghans stole the election on their own or if the CIA did it because the CIA has been rigging elections pretty much since it came in to existence at the end of World War II.
It seriously takes balls for the U.S. to lecture the world about human rights and civil liberties when it has in recent years openly tortured people, snatched people, often innocent people, from inside sovereign countries and rendered them to secret prisons to be tortured, rigged elections, staged coups, carpet bomb civilians(World War II and Vietnam) installed and supported ruthless oppressive dictators, etc.
The U.S. simply isn't the shining beacon of freedom to the world so many people keep saying it is. Its delusional... stop it. The U.S. either needs to stop screwing over other countries and peoples, or stop lecturing everyone else like they are pure as the driven snow. Some basic "Practice What You Preach" is in order or the U.S. should just STFU.
Well.... Atlas and Marvell usually treated Kirby pretty badly. During his golden age at Marvel he pretty much saved the company and created some of its greatest franchises. He never was compensated fairly for the creation of characters that are now raking in billions of dollars. He also turned over the rights to Captain America under unusual circumstances during a copyright dispute with co creator Joe Simon who renewed the copyright in his own name only.
When he started with Atlas(precursor to Marvel) he was working 12-14 hour days just to survive churning out pages for which he was paid next to nothing.
In this case where Marvel is making a killing selling Kirby's characters its not entire unreasonable for his heirs to want to get compensation Kirby never really got when he was alive for his creative work that is bigger now than ever.
Not sure if its another motivation but his heirs or maybe even Kirby wouldn't have wanted his characters transferred to Disney. Some people don't really.... like..... Disney.
I'm wondering if Symantec will be closing down their China Development Center in Bejing since Symantec has been developing security software in China for a few years now. Don't know how you reconcile these draconian security concerns with having a major development center in said country... developing security software for use in the west.
It is interesting how the Obama administration seems to be much less accommodating to the Chinese than the Bush administration was. The Bush administration bent over backwards for China and all the multinationals that wanted to move all their operations, R&D, jobs, capital and IP in to the hands of the Chinese though the Chinese government is still basically the same one which was an bitter adversary 30-40 years ago and against whom the U.S. and U.N. waged a never concluded war in Korea.
Its amazing how all the Chinese had to do was create a free economic zone on their southern coast, declare profit and capitalism OK there, and use the flashing dollar signs as a snare to get the west to unilaterally capitulate economically and politically without a shot being fired.
Its delusional to think you are going to get 90% of the people in the U.S. or the world to care about science beyond novelty news items.
The extremely important thing is you need to nurture the 5-10% who have a passion for science and math. You need to insure they get an abundance of educational opportunities when young, and funding for research and development when they are older.
Problem 1 is the "No Child Left Behind" education system is fixated on elevating low achievers to a minimally functional level with vast expenditure of resources and priorities, nearly to the exclusion of all else. Bad idea, really bad idea. For global competitiveness in science and engineering the REALLY important thing is to invest in the top 5% who are going to be making the breakthroughs. The current U.S. education system, unless you go to private schools, fails miserably nurturing the geeks and high achievers. There is a ray of hope because even if the educational system fails them, at least they have the Internet now so if they are self motivating they can self teach which was a LOT harder to do when I was young (pre Internet). Just hope they don't spend all their time on porn and WoW instead of becoming the next Feynman. Even harder you need to figure out a way for them to survive high school with their self esteem in tact, and still motivated for a career in science, in an educational and social system designed to destroy exactly that.
Problem 2, it is usually very financially unappealing to choose a career in hard science. Working in a lab or as a university professor pretty much sucks financially. Not sure there is hard data but I gather its widely thought the staggering increases in compensation for people on Wall Street over the last 30 years has caused a huge brain drain from many other more meaningful and useful professions to brokers, bankers, quants, etc. Its quite likely that the massive imbalance in compensation on Wall Street for doing nothing useful except gambling in a multi trillion dollar casino(Wall Street) may have severely hurt competitiveness in all the other career paths which actually count for something, like invention, theoretical and applied science. One of the talking heads on CNBC's early show started life as a biochemist but switched to Wall Street when he saw where all the money was.
Problem 3, the U.S. Congress, Presidency and political parties are completely dysfunctional. If private industry wont fund research which they do less and less, your only other hope is government. Unfortunately from everything I've seen in Congressional hearings in recent years most of our Congressmen are complete morons. Our financial system is in ruins partially because the Congressmen in our financial committees seem to either have no clue what they are doing, or if they do they've been bought out by corporate interests. I doubt its likely you will find any Congressmen who have even a passing clue about the importance of basic research or which programs are likely to pay off and which aren't. They mostly just seem to pour funds in to the coffers of which every big corporations did the best job buying them off with well placed, relatively tiny, campaign contributions. Killing the super conducting super collider in Texas is a case in point. It could have been built for what we blow in Iraq in a month and since we didn't the U.S. probably ceded leadership in physics to CERN. Our presidency isn't much better. It appears every time the Presidency changes hands he kills off all his predecessors programs, after sinking billions in them and before they yield any results. He then starts all his pet projects, all of which will be killed by his successor. This is a key reason our space program is a shambles. Kennedy did a smart thing throwing down a gauntlet on Apollo, Johnson and Nixon couldn't kill.
I just wish they would put out a Touch that is an iPhone without the phone, and the ATT contract. In particular I want GPS. Still or video camera would be nice but I want GPS. Did I say I want GPS? Today's event was pretty disappointing on the Touch front.
Unfortunately there are enough Senators in the United States Senate from coal producing states they can destroy any sane new energy policy simply to protect the big coal producers and the coal mining jobs in their states. This is already happening in the current cap and trade energy bill. We could rapidly decommission a bunch of dirty coal plants and replace them with natural gas. Its not perfect on the CO2 front but they are better than coal and easy to do. The U.S. and the world is now sitting on a glut of natural gas and prices are plummeting thanks to new drilling techniques tapping huge new reservoirs under shale that was previously difficult to drill.
The senators are saying the same thing the Bush administration said for eight years, and it appears Obama is saying now, having just pumped $3 billion more in to clean coal pilots. They say they are going to have clean coal and CO2 sequestration any day now and "clean" coal will solve all our problems. It just happens most of the clean coal pilots have failed miserably, if it ever does happen it will be expensive, a little dangerous and still put out large quantities of other pollutants. "Clean coal" is just political smoke screen to con the public in to thinking coal is "clean" because the TV said so when in fact its the dirtiest fuel there is.
Much of this is a tribute to how broken the U.S. Senate is and how perfectly designed it is to protect powerful corporate special interests. An industry just needs to buy a handful of Senators and they can completely frustrate any rational new policy direction, pretty much exactly the same thing happening to health care reform.
Its a little sad how obsessed that report is with international partnering ISS, Shuttle, etc. It is way to much looking back and not enough looking forward. Not sure I'm surprised considering the makeup of the group that wrote it. They are a bunch of status quo people, still cowering in the shadow of the Shuttle accidents to the point they couldn't do anything bold if their lives depended on it. They needed a Richard Feynman, Robert Zubrin, Isaac Asimov, Kelly Johnson, Burt Rutan, Elon Musk, or Robert Bigelow. Instead they got a bunch of bureaucrats, trying to figure out what is wrong with a bureaucracy, like that is gonna work....
Its nice sounding to say how space exploration should be international and global and you do gain some resources and expertise partnering with the Russians, Europeans, Asians etc. But you also start with one organization drowning in its own bureaucracy, NASA, and multiply it by 10 more bureaucracies drowning in red tape all fighting for different agendas. By the time you build consensus you end up with a program to no where, and compromised by compromise. I could be wrong but I think the international cooperation part of ISS is a key reason it ended up another 10 years late and devoid of anything resembling a point. My impression is the Russians want nothing to do with NASA again after ISS.
Only way you are likely to get to Mars is to find a nation/organization with a laser focus, a visionary leader, the right people with the right skills and most importantly willingness to invest the resources in doing something bold and adventurous instead of wallowing in wars, weapons and socialism. I kind of doubt that would be the U.S. at this point. You figure China and India are probably the only two with the potential. India has too many problems, too much poverty and an obsession with fighting wars with Pakistan. China might be the one but its not like that country exactly has its ideals in order, question whether a corrupt bureaucracy can pull it off thanks to one party dictatorship.
No doubt someone will say we should spend it all at home until there is no hunger, poverty, disease etc.... The problem with that is its a bottomless pit. You can spend an infinite amount of money on it and make little progress, especially until we stop making so many babies.
This world seriously needs people breaking through frontiers and doing things that are hard or we will turn in to more of a miserable treadmill planet than we already are, full of people going nowhere.
"sets up a VPN, and copies their data from our U.S. servers to the laptop in France."
You seem to be assuming the NSA or their French counterparts haven't cracked VPN because if they have they are reading all your data when you transfer it over the network.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Chinese leadership is fighting a losing battle and I believe they know this."
Excepting that the Chinese people, at least in the cities, are seeing a rapid improvement in their standard of living, and the country as a whole is an economic juggernaut. Regimes seldom have problems when they are delivering economic prosperity and the Chinese Communist party knows it, so thats whey they are pursuing a policy of prosperity at all costs. The Nazi's were far more brutal and repressive than the Chinese but they also produced an economic miracle and so were quite popular until they led their country to ruin through war.
Repression and Capitalism actually work quite well together, its pretty much what Fascism was all about. Fascism suffered a tactical defeat in World war II but appears poised for strategic victory through China in the 21st century. Its very profitable to have a subservient work force where someone gets out of line the party hammers them. Managers like it when they don't have to worry about malcontents interfering with production.
It will be interesting to see if, now that both the Democratic and Republican parties have led the U.S. to ruin, if the American people have enough backbone left to stand up and say enough is enough, now that American prosperity is disappearing. Repression like China's is bad but incompetence, corruption and selling your country down the river for a few million from lobbyists has a new place in my book as the number one reason for ridding yourself of a regime. Flipping between Democrats and Republicans and pretending it makes a difference or is "change" doesn't cut it any more.
"Instead you build up a carefully honed lie designed to impress the interviewer. There is no benefit to this for anyone involved."
On the contrary this is promoting the one skill most essential to success in the corporate world.
"I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing"
Will Riker, is that you? I wondered what happened to you after Next Gen.
I often wonder where your real motivations lie Miguel. Between your efforts on Gnome and Mono you seem to be a one man wrecking ball designed to destroy Linux on the desktop. In particular you were a prime mover in creating the fissure between KDE and GNOME, which has so fragmented the Linux desktop world its unlikely to ever compete against Windows and the Mac on the desktop. I've certainly given up on it ever mattering as a desktop OS, Now you are trying to infect Linux and Gnome with Microsoft patented technology which seems to be an even more overt and blatant attempt to wreck Linux to Microsoft's benefit.
In my attempt to fathom your motivations the only answers I come up with:
A. You actually think pushing .NET and C# in to Linux is a good idea, and you actually think Microsoft is a nice company. If so you are either naive or just not very bright because Microsoft has always been and still is one of the most ruthless of tech companies and its prime directive is and always has been to destroy all its competitors. Linux is a competitor, not their friend. .NET and C# are quite interesting technologies but no one with any sense would think they are appropriate to introduce as a core technology in Linux.
or
B. Sometime ago you actually started working for Microsoft under the table and you have been working to destroy Linux from within, at their behest, by pretending to be a member of the open source community while you've pushed one agenda and then another designed to complete wreck Linux as a desktop OS.
Now its kind of tin foil hat to go with B) but when you think about it, Microsoft was faced with an existential threat from Linux and they couldn't use the same tactics to destroy it they used on more traditional incorporated competitors. Bill Gates is, if nothing else, smart with a heavy dose of ruthless, and to be honest Miguel, your whole agenda for years seems to be a perfect fit for the role of a mole Microsoft planted in the Linux community to destroy it from within. Planting a high profile mole is, when you think about it, the ideal strategy for a company like Microsoft to use to sabotage a community based threat like Linux.
Stallman is kind of abrasive and his religious purity can be annoying to no end, but I can be sure he is what he appears to be, his heart and mind are relatively pure and he does have a great track record for spotting snakes in the grass. By contrast I don't think I would ever trust your motives. It is impossible to tell where your heart really is and seem to bear a striking resemblance to one of those snakes in the grass Stallman is so good at spotting.
Don't think tonnage is a particularly good way to judge the effectiveness of how you spent hundreds of billions of dollars. Since the Russians built the core of ISS using Mir as the proof of concept its not like ISS was breaking much ground in a lot of areas. I'll credit NASA with their efforts on gyros for attitude control, for the massive power systems and the Canadians for their work on robotics, but those were all incremental acheivements, nothing groundbreaking. All in all ISS is just a colossal failure as a program. Worse than the squandered billions is the squandered decades NASA has been marching in place, going no where.
About 30 years ago someone should have noticed that there wasn't actually anything about the ISS that had a point or was actually worth the time or money. Instead, for some unfathomable reason NASA chose to justify the Shuttle as a mean to service the ISS and they justified the ISS as a place for the Shuttle to go and forgot to notice there was no actual point to either.
"The reduced gravity of the planet mars probably means that it is unsuitable for human reproduction and child rearing"
And exactly what actual science do you have to leap to this conclusion, URL please....
Until you actually try to reproduce and raise children in 1/3 G you simply wont know for sure, and even more so you will need to test with humans who have been living in and have acclimated to 1/3 G for an extended period. Experiments on small mammals in centrifuges on ISS or on humans in 0G for brief periods aren't acceptable science for the conclusion you are leaping to.
... or the U.S. could have spent 10 billion and finished the super conducting supercollider and not squandered its leadership position in nuclear physics to the EU.
"engineering is sound to built a habitat in space"
The Russians already proved that for a LOT less money with Mir.
If the pinnacle of achievement of the ISS is a study on bacteria in zero G we pretty much squandered $150 billion dollars on nothing. Though hey... we squander that much in Iraq in a couple months so many its all relative. Still NASA should have been put that money to a lot better use building launch capability that doesn't suck, more robotic, science and observatories or getting to Mars. Instead they pretty much did a high tech jobs program for a couple decades
"But you probably haven't had a 100k salary being taxed at CA's tax levels."
And California's state taxes are high why? Because you made prisons your leading industry with three strikes.... and you pay your prison guards a hundred thousand fracking dollars a year for one of the world's least productive, least skilled jobs. You apparently don't recognize a vicious circle when you see one....
"Want to pick up the cheap real estate? Sure. Welcome to some shitty commute times and high fuel prices."
With the possible exception of San Quentin I think most prisons are located in shit holes with relatively cheap real estate. You dont generally put them in upscale neighborhoods.
The only reason California's real estate is expensive is because you started another vicious circle with a housing bubble where people kept charging more for real estate only because people were willing to pay it and everyone started flipping real estate to get rich quick and get money for nothing.... For every Californian who complains about the price of their real estate is one who made a ridiculous amount of money selling California real estate in one of the longer running real estate bubbles of all time. The only divider is if you bought 20 years ago or 2 years ago. If you bough 2 years ago you got screwed like all late arrivers to bubbles and Ponzi schemes. California in particular and America in general has turning in to a semi continuous Ponzi scheme generating money out of fantasy and you can only generate money out of thin air for so long.
As I recall part of the problem with California's prison costs is guards often make $100K or better. $100K is a lot for a no skill job. Gray Davis in particular gave them a 30+% raise just because they were a huge campaign supporter.
"marketers have defended the practice by insisting it gives Americans what they want: advertisements and other forms of content that are as relevant to their lives as possible"
I'm pretty sure most Americans want no ads at all, so its a little disingenuous if they actually said they are giving us what we want with targeted ads. But hey they are marketeers, so its not suprising they try to spin something that sucks and we don't want as something awesome by comparing it to other alternatives which also suck.
The times I've seen ads that were obviously targeting me, and targeting me across multiple web sites, it mostly just creeped me out and made me want to hunt down Google or whomever was responsible and cut them out of my life. I did cut the company off who was paying for the targeted ads.
Yea that approach has worked really well getting Linux adopted on the desktop......
FOSS programmers do some things REALLY well, they tend to do things involving a GUI somewhere between mediocre and just bad. FOSS just hasn't for whatever reason, been successful in doing awesome UI and good, consistent workflows. One problem is about 20 different UI toolkits, all mediocre, 10 different audio standards, a hundred different window managers. The Mac and iPhone are very successful because there is more or less one very well executed set of libraries to code to in Cocoa, one good multimedia framework and Apple works pretty hard to compel developers and apps to be consistent and predictable.
I predict a FOSS mobile device will have an awesome core and the GUI will suck and when you are talking mobile devices the GUI and application work flows are probably THE most import things.
Its also a plague on FOSS that things get done really well if someone good wants to do them well and is willing to invest a LOT of time for free and love. The problem starts when you hit a problem no one wants to solve and since no one is being paid, and they will all tell you that, it often never gets done or gets done badly.
And then of course in FOSS you can count on there being a fork every time there is clash of personalities or some other dispute. Forks are good when it kills off bad branches. They are horrible when they result in a jungle of competing branches squandering and diluting resources reinventing the same wheels and fragmenting the user base so none of the branches/distros end up as good as they would have been if all the wood was behind one arrow.
"the insurance industry as a whole is contributing to."
Max Baucus unsurprisingly is one of their largest beneficiaries. I think he's racked up something like $2.7 million in contributions from the health and insurance industry if Matt Taibbi's last article on him was correct. I also recall hearing he has an annual event in his home state of Montana consisting of horse back riding, fly fishing and an orgy of campaign contributing by the health and insurance corporations. I predict if Baucus rams this bill through he will retire to a multimillion dollar annual salary with some health care lobbying group, just like Billy Tauzin did after he rammed through Medicare-D for big pharma. Its pretty much criminal and has to stop.
It is completely unconstitutional for the Federal government to force people to buy anything from private corporations. The States might have the power to do it, and car insurance is different because you can opt out if you don't drive on public roads. You cant opt out of these health insurance mandates and for a lot of people they will be equivalent to a second mortgage or rent payment and everyone who gets hammered with this new tax is sure to turn against the people who vote for it in the next election. I'm betting the Dems will lose the House in 2010 unless the Republican completely self destruct.
You only need to look to Massachusetts since its the model for these individual mandates. They have the most expensive insurance in the WORLD, premiums are going up 7-12% next year, double the national average. Individual mandates are a complete disaster for controlling insurance costs, they just give the insurance companies a captive customer base who have to pay whatever they want to charge, and you have more people paying huge premiums who will run up their insurance billx go get their money's worth for the $8-10K premiums. Mass. used the claim the uninsured going to emergency rooms were the reaosn for high health care costs. The costs for their new mandates are now dwarfing the former costs of the uninsured.
Big Pharma also are making out like bandits since they Obama and assorted other Dems caved behind closed doors and the goverment isn't going to use its huge buying power to negotiate prices for Medicare D. They agreed to some billions of cost reductions but if they government doesn't negotiate prices they will save with one hand and steal everyone blind with the other. As soon as this happened big Pharma started running a $150 million dollar ad campaign support this "health care reform" which is in fact a giant theft from the American people.
If the Dems pass health care reform with individual mandates forcing me to buy private insurance not only will I NEVER vote for them again, I will actively campaign for the Republicans as much as I hate them until they have enough power to gridlock Washington.
This country desperately news a new political party with pretty much one plank, it needs to be for the middle class, against corporations and the rich and have no position on hot button social issues like abortion and gun control. These issues are being used by the two incumbent parties to sucker people in to voting for them, and then both parties screw the people on stuff the issues thate really matter.... economic issues... so they can line the pockets of their special interests.
"I agree with most of Joel's post." ..excepting that:
A. He plugged a book to the point you start to suspect either he has a financial interest in it, or he has friends who do, I'm guessing the latter.
B. He went so over the top hero worshiping Zawinski he further damaged his credibility. Zawinski is just a guy and just a programmer whose main claim to fame is he got in to Netscape at the right time and profited off it mightily and has been milking it ever since. Netscape wasn't exactly ground breaking. The World Wide Web and Mosaic were ground breaking, Netscape just tried to profit off them before anyone else did, and they were quickly destroyed by Microsoft, though most of them got rich first thanks to the first phase of the internet bubble. Firefox is pretty much only thing that survived out of it and its several generations removed. Netscape was in most respects a team ripping off Mosaic so they could profit off it.....
C. He suffered from a classic case of generalizations
In particular claiming you should NEVER use C++ or threads is purely silly. Yes you can abuse C++ and threads.
C++ is like most languages, you can use it well or you can abuse it. It has more power tools so it is easier to abuse it. I've seen plenty of horrible C code abuse over the years, some it makes your eyes hurt, and if the project/code base gets very big C++ actually helps keep and restore order as long as someone architects it well and enough and not too much.
Threads certainly can be a reliability curse but there are most definitely places where they are the RIGHT tool to use and if you don't the consequences can be bad in their own right. For example when you end up with a program that is sluggish because its letting some task that should be running in a background thread hogging the foreground and UI.
I wont argue that multiple inheritance is USUALLY bad though it can be used to good effect in some cases, you just need someone who knows when a case arises where it should be used. Since OO languages like Java get by without it you probably can too.
I wont argue that templates are OFTEN bad because people overly proud of their ability to write obfuscated code abuse them and create unreadable garbage. I usually avoid STL because it is ugly, hard to debug code. Same can be said for overriding operators. But there are some instances where they are very useful.
COM being bad, probably no argument from me. Microsoft got mileage out of it but the down sides pretty much compensate for its successes.
Bottom line to me is duct tape programmers aren't inherently better than any other kind of programmer. Only thing that matters at the end of the day is if they got the job done, and done well. I'm pretty sure there are more structured programmers who are just as successful if not more so than many duct tape programmers, and if the application is inherently going to be big and relatively complex someone with some structure, some, not to much, will probably fare better. If its a one man team... use whatever works for ya.
The important thing isn't really what kind of programmer you are, its whether you make the right decisions at the right time in order to succeed. People who make knee jerk generalizations about tools and refuse to use them are just increasing their chances of not making the right decision.
I use the menu bar in a browser for maybe one thing on a regular basis... organize bookmarks. I very seldom use the context menu. The only things I really care about in a browser is a tool bar with bookmark icons. On the Mac I had to download a GUI addon for Firefox to even get those, which was a little annoying, though I sure appreciate Firefox allowing it at all. Don't think Safari supports bookmark icons at all which is why I'm not using it. Only way I load web pages I look at every day is by the pretty little icons on the tool bar. Safari with its grizzly black on dark gray space wasting text completely sucks by comparison. Best thing any GUI engineer can do to a browser as far as I'm concerned is make the bookmark toolbar with icons(no text please) ROCK.
It must be lost on the Firefox GUI engineers with too much time on their hands that the menus ain't broke, so don't "fix" them. I'm serious, leave it alone. People don't use menus in a browser enough for them to be worth bothering with. The tool bars are the only thing that matter. In a word processor you use the menus a LOT so work flow matters. Menu work flow in a browser is nearly irrelevant. Anything resembling eye candy around the edges is also a foolish waste of time and bandwidth. People just want their browser to render the browser page... FAST. Mr. Browser... this ain't about you... its about the content so do your best to be light, fast and stay out of the way, and refrain from becoming a giant steaming pile of bloat, THANKS.
"I'm just curious...why are tax revenues so bad in the state where a company like MS is employing what I could guess is a good number of people and what I would guess were pretty good salaries/bill rates?"
Because Washington has no income tax which is a major reason Microsoft is based there and Bill Gates lives there. They depend on property taxes among other things, which are probably having a substantial shortfall in a crashing real estate market.
Corporate taxes are a lot like the Internet, no one wants to pay for anything, they just want a lot of cool things for free, you know like highways, schools, universities, prisons(so there isn't so much crime). Not sure if they still do but there was a time Microsoft was using prisoners as ultra cheap labor to pack products.
Not versed on tax law enough to say if Microsoft is breaking the law but its a given they are bending it to the absolute limit if they aren't out right breaking it, like most big corporations. They want the middle class working people to pay all the taxes.
I'd seriously like to see Washington put the smack down on them and see Microsoft pull up stakes and move to the nice repressive one party dictatorship that is China and see how Microsoft's execs really like it there if they actually have to live and work there. Or move to India and live in a tiny high tech pocket of affluence in a country with otherwise grinding poverty, serious ethnic and religious tensions and a near perpetual state of war with Pakistan.
This would be the same USA that is currently occupying Afghanistan, where in the recent Presidential election the incumbent, Hamid Karzai who was originally installed by the U.S., engaged in massive ballot box stuffing and also stole an election just like Iran. The U.N., E.U and U.S. all know he stole the election but they are mostly sitting their wringing their hands and doing nothing about it because as much as sucks as a puppet... he is their only puppet.
This is the same Hamid Karzai whose brother is one of the countries major opium traffickers and has a bevy of warlords in his government who are also opium traffickers and guilty of various war crimes. This is a government so corrupt and despised by its citizens many want the Taliban back which is why the Taliban insurgency is doing so well.
It is extremely difficult for the the U.S. or E.U. to get all holier than thou at Iran when their puppet government just did EXACTLY the same thing the Iranian government did. It is pretty hypocritical for Westerners to be ranting about Iran's government stealing an election. It would be interesting to know if the Afghans stole the election on their own or if the CIA did it because the CIA has been rigging elections pretty much since it came in to existence at the end of World War II.
It seriously takes balls for the U.S. to lecture the world about human rights and civil liberties when it has in recent years openly tortured people, snatched people, often innocent people, from inside sovereign countries and rendered them to secret prisons to be tortured, rigged elections, staged coups, carpet bomb civilians(World War II and Vietnam) installed and supported ruthless oppressive dictators, etc.
The U.S. simply isn't the shining beacon of freedom to the world so many people keep saying it is. Its delusional... stop it. The U.S. either needs to stop screwing over other countries and peoples, or stop lecturing everyone else like they are pure as the driven snow. Some basic "Practice What You Preach" is in order or the U.S. should just STFU.
Well.... Atlas and Marvell usually treated Kirby pretty badly. During his golden age at Marvel he pretty much saved the company and created some of its greatest franchises. He never was compensated fairly for the creation of characters that are now raking in billions of dollars. He also turned over the rights to Captain America under unusual circumstances during a copyright dispute with co creator Joe Simon who renewed the copyright in his own name only.
When he started with Atlas(precursor to Marvel) he was working 12-14 hour days just to survive churning out pages for which he was paid next to nothing.
In this case where Marvel is making a killing selling Kirby's characters its not entire unreasonable for his heirs to want to get compensation Kirby never really got when he was alive for his creative work that is bigger now than ever.
Not sure if its another motivation but his heirs or maybe even Kirby wouldn't have wanted his characters transferred to Disney. Some people don't really .... like ..... Disney.
Yea... where is the squeezably soft nanotube toilet paper.
I'm wondering if Symantec will be closing down their China Development Center in Bejing since Symantec has been developing security software in China for a few years now. Don't know how you reconcile these draconian security concerns with having a major development center in said country... developing security software for use in the west.
It is interesting how the Obama administration seems to be much less accommodating to the Chinese than the Bush administration was. The Bush administration bent over backwards for China and all the multinationals that wanted to move all their operations, R&D, jobs, capital and IP in to the hands of the Chinese though the Chinese government is still basically the same one which was an bitter adversary 30-40 years ago and against whom the U.S. and U.N. waged a never concluded war in Korea.
Its amazing how all the Chinese had to do was create a free economic zone on their southern coast, declare profit and capitalism OK there, and use the flashing dollar signs as a snare to get the west to unilaterally capitulate economically and politically without a shot being fired.
Basically agree.
Its delusional to think you are going to get 90% of the people in the U.S. or the world to care about science beyond novelty news items.
The extremely important thing is you need to nurture the 5-10% who have a passion for science and math. You need to insure they get an abundance of educational opportunities when young, and funding for research and development when they are older.
Problem 1 is the "No Child Left Behind" education system is fixated on elevating low achievers to a minimally functional level with vast expenditure of resources and priorities, nearly to the exclusion of all else. Bad idea, really bad idea. For global competitiveness in science and engineering the REALLY important thing is to invest in the top 5% who are going to be making the breakthroughs. The current U.S. education system, unless you go to private schools, fails miserably nurturing the geeks and high achievers. There is a ray of hope because even if the educational system fails them, at least they have the Internet now so if they are self motivating they can self teach which was a LOT harder to do when I was young (pre Internet). Just hope they don't spend all their time on porn and WoW instead of becoming the next Feynman. Even harder you need to figure out a way for them to survive high school with their self esteem in tact, and still motivated for a career in science, in an educational and social system designed to destroy exactly that.
Problem 2, it is usually very financially unappealing to choose a career in hard science. Working in a lab or as a university professor pretty much sucks financially. Not sure there is hard data but I gather its widely thought the staggering increases in compensation for people on Wall Street over the last 30 years has caused a huge brain drain from many other more meaningful and useful professions to brokers, bankers, quants, etc. Its quite likely that the massive imbalance in compensation on Wall Street for doing nothing useful except gambling in a multi trillion dollar casino(Wall Street) may have severely hurt competitiveness in all the other career paths which actually count for something, like invention, theoretical and applied science. One of the talking heads on CNBC's early show started life as a biochemist but switched to Wall Street when he saw where all the money was.
Problem 3, the U.S. Congress, Presidency and political parties are completely dysfunctional. If private industry wont fund research which they do less and less, your only other hope is government. Unfortunately from everything I've seen in Congressional hearings in recent years most of our Congressmen are complete morons. Our financial system is in ruins partially because the Congressmen in our financial committees seem to either have no clue what they are doing, or if they do they've been bought out by corporate interests. I doubt its likely you will find any Congressmen who have even a passing clue about the importance of basic research or which programs are likely to pay off and which aren't. They mostly just seem to pour funds in to the coffers of which every big corporations did the best job buying them off with well placed, relatively tiny, campaign contributions. Killing the super conducting super collider in Texas is a case in point. It could have been built for what we blow in Iraq in a month and since we didn't the U.S. probably ceded leadership in physics to CERN. Our presidency isn't much better. It appears every time the Presidency changes hands he kills off all his predecessors programs, after sinking billions in them and before they yield any results. He then starts all his pet projects, all of which will be killed by his successor. This is a key reason our space program is a shambles. Kennedy did a smart thing throwing down a gauntlet on Apollo, Johnson and Nixon couldn't kill.
I just wish they would put out a Touch that is an iPhone without the phone, and the ATT contract. In particular I want GPS. Still or video camera would be nice but I want GPS. Did I say I want GPS? Today's event was pretty disappointing on the Touch front.
Unfortunately there are enough Senators in the United States Senate from coal producing states they can destroy any sane new energy policy simply to protect the big coal producers and the coal mining jobs in their states. This is already happening in the current cap and trade energy bill. We could rapidly decommission a bunch of dirty coal plants and replace them with natural gas. Its not perfect on the CO2 front but they are better than coal and easy to do. The U.S. and the world is now sitting on a glut of natural gas and prices are plummeting thanks to new drilling techniques tapping huge new reservoirs under shale that was previously difficult to drill.
The senators are saying the same thing the Bush administration said for eight years, and it appears Obama is saying now, having just pumped $3 billion more in to clean coal pilots. They say they are going to have clean coal and CO2 sequestration any day now and "clean" coal will solve all our problems. It just happens most of the clean coal pilots have failed miserably, if it ever does happen it will be expensive, a little dangerous and still put out large quantities of other pollutants. "Clean coal" is just political smoke screen to con the public in to thinking coal is "clean" because the TV said so when in fact its the dirtiest fuel there is.
Much of this is a tribute to how broken the U.S. Senate is and how perfectly designed it is to protect powerful corporate special interests. An industry just needs to buy a handful of Senators and they can completely frustrate any rational new policy direction, pretty much exactly the same thing happening to health care reform.
Its a little sad how obsessed that report is with international partnering ISS, Shuttle, etc. It is way to much looking back and not enough looking forward. Not sure I'm surprised considering the makeup of the group that wrote it. They are a bunch of status quo people, still cowering in the shadow of the Shuttle accidents to the point they couldn't do anything bold if their lives depended on it. They needed a Richard Feynman, Robert Zubrin, Isaac Asimov, Kelly Johnson, Burt Rutan, Elon Musk, or Robert Bigelow. Instead they got a bunch of bureaucrats, trying to figure out what is wrong with a bureaucracy, like that is gonna work....
Its nice sounding to say how space exploration should be international and global and you do gain some resources and expertise partnering with the Russians, Europeans, Asians etc. But you also start with one organization drowning in its own bureaucracy, NASA, and multiply it by 10 more bureaucracies drowning in red tape all fighting for different agendas. By the time you build consensus you end up with a program to no where, and compromised by compromise. I could be wrong but I think the international cooperation part of ISS is a key reason it ended up another 10 years late and devoid of anything resembling a point. My impression is the Russians want nothing to do with NASA again after ISS.
Only way you are likely to get to Mars is to find a nation/organization with a laser focus, a visionary leader, the right people with the right skills and most importantly willingness to invest the resources in doing something bold and adventurous instead of wallowing in wars, weapons and socialism. I kind of doubt that would be the U.S. at this point. You figure China and India are probably the only two with the potential. India has too many problems, too much poverty and an obsession with fighting wars with Pakistan. China might be the one but its not like that country exactly has its ideals in order, question whether a corrupt bureaucracy can pull it off thanks to one party dictatorship.
No doubt someone will say we should spend it all at home until there is no hunger, poverty, disease etc.... The problem with that is its a bottomless pit. You can spend an infinite amount of money on it and make little progress, especially until we stop making so many babies.
This world seriously needs people breaking through frontiers and doing things that are hard or we will turn in to more of a miserable treadmill planet than we already are, full of people going nowhere.
"sets up a VPN, and copies their data from our U.S. servers to the laptop in France."
You seem to be assuming the NSA or their French counterparts haven't cracked VPN because if they have they are reading all your data when you transfer it over the network.