Well its a subject for heated debate whether the constitution does assure you a right to privacy and what the bounds of that right are. When telephones came in to common use in the early twentieth century it was routine for the police to listen in on suspected criminals or maybe anyone they wanted to find some dirt on.
The first Supreme Court case tested wire taps in 1928 in fact found in favor of wire tapping, because... wait for it... the police were not entering the persons home so they were not invading the privacy of their home. Here is a good link on the history of the right to privacy.
Here is a particularly important part on wire tapping. Justice Louis D. Brandeis was writing in the dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928). His view would ultimately prevail years later and is now in grievous danger of being overturned again by a rising tide of Fascism in the U.S. :
"Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them on any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard. . . . The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the one most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment."
Its important to read this stuff these days. The right to privacy was the cornerstone of the confirmation hearing of our new Chief Justice Roberts, names like Olmstead and Griswold. There is a suspicion Judge Roberts appointment is designed to overturn all the cases affirming right to privacy, a right to not have your phone tapped, a right to abortions, a right to access birth control.
Religious fundamentalists banned birth control in Connecticut in the 19th century. When this law was challenged in 1965 in Griswold.vs. Connecticut it laid the foundation for much of our modern right to privacy, in this case it was an individuals right to practice birth control without state intervention. This evolved in to the right to an abortion in Roe v Wade.
J. Edgar Hoover used wire taps and his control of the FBI to accumulate vast amounts of dirt on anyone and everyone, and insured he held an iron grip on the helm of the FBI and in fact the U.S. in general for decades. No one would challenge him because he had dirt on everyone. He was the ultimate defiler of the right to privacy. With modern techology and the collapse of our right to privacy thanks to fear mongering politicians the potential is great for the rise of new J. Edgars who are even more powerful and more dangerous. A leading candidate is George W's new National Intelligen Director, John Negroponte. He doesn't control the FBI he controls the CIA, the NSA and every spying resource the U.S. has now. Negroponte was infamous for supporting right wing death squads in Central America that did Fascism proud.
Well as I said ATM's and evoting are different problems.
If Diebold's ATM machines started charging peoples accounts for withdrawls larger than they got cash for, or started handing out money without debiting their accounts it would be instantly obvious to either the bank, the customer or the both. This is regardless of whether there is a receipt. If the customer is screwed having the receipt is of high value in proving their case but its not really mandatory. Even without it a track record of wrong transactions would eventually lead to revolt by bank or customer. If customers got screwed once, and it wasn't fixed they would change banks or the bank would fire Diebold the first time their machines didn't balance and they couldn't explain and resolve it. Balancing books is much easier and more transparent than counting votes where you have no idea of what the result should be.
There may be malevolence on the part of Diebold here, but I suspect the larger problem is people in America at some point made the mistaken assumption that ATM's and evoting are the same thing, since we use ATM's we should vote the same way. That was the fatal mistake. ATM transactions are really easy to audit and to detect error. With evoting there is an endless number of places the system can be compromised and they are impossible to catch without a paper trail.
If you are leaving a paper trail and relying on it for the integrity of the vote there is an open question as to why you need the expensive computers in the first place. The only rationale I can see is to prevent voter error or to give access to the disabled. For anyone that can put an X in the box next to the name of their candidate, paper and pen still appears to be the best system imaginable, as long as the ballots are secured, monitored and counted by multiple adversarial representatives.
From a market perspective I could see why evoting vendors don't want a paper trail. They want to sell their expensive electronics. If people figure out the paper part is the only trustworthy part of the system there is a chance they would deduce they are mostly wasting money buying the computers, and should go back to pen and paper. They also run the risk that their machines will in fact make mistakes and if there is a paper trail which constantly highlights these failures people would lose trust in them, would turn on them and stop buying them again, or lay charges against them for vote rigging, even if it was due to incompetence. Its a lot better for them like it is now, because its impossible to prove the machines are wrong. Whether it be due to malevolence or incompetence these companies don't want to be proved wrong by a paper trail.
"It's only going to get worse as the pace of change continues to accelerate."
Its not a given the pace of change will accelerate in technology.
Just look at the space program. With the rate of change in the 60's you would figure we would be have a permanent presence on Mars and be heading to Jupiter. Instead we are struggling to just preserve the ability to get people to LEO in tin cans and maybe back to bounding around on the moon for a week, things we did 35-40 years ago.
Advancement is driven by need.
One field where there seems to be a never ending need for progress is in developing new and better ways to kill each other.
In computing we are reaching the point most people don't need computers faster than the ones they have. Most of their processing power sits unused most of the time. Faster computers aren't of much value unless you have applications that make effective use of them. 3D gaming is one of the few areas that can push the performance envelope indefinitely, unfortunately those are a counterproductive, not a productive pastime at present. The quality of the simulation, and need for horsepower, can grow indefinitely, but the real creativity in them doesn't, nor do they contribute much of any real value on a social or individual level.
I imagine people will always want more bandwidth, maybe that will drive some innovation for a while.
At this point PC's are in fact a boring, atrophying platform. They are increasingly just refining decades old concepts.
The web being the newest concept, and which caused a massive burst of change but now everything about the web is starting to be old. The worst thing about the web is every idea, every concept, every point of view is being whipped to death. Its nearly impossible to do anything really "new" any more, try to think of a truly new and worthwhile software application at this point that hasn't already been done about 100 times. Try to think of anything new, and then spend a few minutes in Google and discover its already been whipped to death.
Lots of people think all the innovation will be in cell phones, I'm personally not sure thats even really true. About all I see is all the capabilities we have in PC's will end up on a platform with an inadequate screen and input devices. The one innovative thing you see is to make things like maps, yellow pages and other things people need when on the move instantly available. It will be great for awareness of some new place you are in, though as a trade off it will create people who are totally addicted to the presence of a computer and a telephone in their pocket. The only real innovation there is if someone manages to produce a display device and input methods that would make cell phones really competitive with a desktop machine, or even a laptop, for example a display device that goes straight to your eyes with high resolution and apparent screen size, and maybe a projected, full size keyboard on any surface.
History is filled with civilizations who were evolving at a high rate, only to hit a point where their rate of innovation stalled and their civilizations entered in to decline.
The new twist we have today, thanks to globalization, is that when dominant civilization hits a wall for one reason or another, will there be a new fresh civilization, with fresh minds and new ideas, tucked away in a corner to start fresh and take up the reins. Our homogenization of cultures could lead to a situation where if the dominant civilizations hits a wall the whole world hits a wall for a long, long time.
Good post. I know about Brian Reynolds and his crucial role in the early success of this franchise. I was mostly just launching a veiled jab at the sorry state of the Civlization dev team at least as evident in Civ 3.
I'm guessing from all the talk about extensibility in Civ 4 they realized they can't develop a decent game in house so they are hoping moders will do it for them.
I'm just amazed people around Slashdot, for example, keep worshipping at the Civilization alter like it still has significance in the gaming world since the franchise cratered with Civ 3.
- Is it they do other critical transactions so they must be good at it.
- Or is it that their ATM machines might be bad too.
If its the later, ATM machines are completely different problem from voting machines.
ATM machines have to have printers and provide a receipt at least as an option. Most of Diebold's machines have no printer and no option to get a receipt.
If Diebold's ATM machines start doing wrong transactions it would become immediately apparent to the bank and any customer who has a bookkeeping system.
ATM machines and bank transactions don't have to maintain anonymity of the user, voting systems do. It really complicates validation of the transaction.
A paper receipt, verifiable by the voter, deposited in a lock box and subjet to very random recounts would solve most of the uncertainty in electronic voting.
All in all open source would be better than closed source for electronic voting machines but it would provide zero certainty that the election still isn't being rigged electronically. The only two good ways to insure good elections are:
- paper ballets marked with a pencil, watch and counted like a hawk by multiple adverserial observers which works great in just about every country but America.
- if you have to do evoting, you have to have a printer, and a human verifiable receipt going in to a lockbox and hand recounted by adverserial.
Why don't you do a new version of Alpha Centauri? It was hands down better than any version of Civilization I've ever played. Civilization III was IMHO terrible. I recall some game ranking sight that still shows Alpha Centauri in the top 20 all time though it is ancient and hard to find now. If you could retain all the brilliance of the original, improve the AI's, add the ability to do mods, and get a new online community going it would return to being one of my favorite games to sink hours in to.
There is a fair chance the Russians would have either kept patching together the MIR or they would have done MIR 2 without the U.S. MIR was well past its prime but the Russians sure didn't want to deorbit it. They were forced to as condition for joining ISS. It takes enormous time, money and effort to get stuff in to space. Throwing away stuff that still worked was stupid.
MIR 2 would have been a challenge for the Russinas from a funding perspective a few years ago but thanks to soaring oil and natural gas prices Russia actually has a lot of money to burn these days. They are one of the world's larger oil and gas exporters. Siberia almost certainly still harbors vast unexplored reserves of fossil fuels, its one of the few poorly explored land masses left.
Zvezda and Zarya which form the core of the ISS were essentially designed for MIR 2.
I think its safe to say the Russians would have maintained their decades long presence in space stations with or without the U.S. I'm not sure NASA would have ever managed a space station on their own. They have suffered a huge erosion in capability since the Apollo days. When the Russians came on board they had proven designs for a space station. NASA hadn't flown any station hardware since Skylab.
On the plus side for the Russians the ISS infused a lot of money in to their space program at a key juncture in the post U.S.S.R economuc turmoil. On the down side I'm pretty sure they are completely fed up with having to partner with NASA at this point.
I think the grandparent was a little to one extreme in saying that no useful research takes place on the ISS. Certainly some useful research is being done there.
However the parent kind of swings to the other extreme, just because there is some useful research going on there doesn't mean the staggering expenditures on the ISS were justified. You have to ask how much of this research could have been done on unmanned satellites or on 2 week shuttle missions. Though shuttle missions are so staggering expensive its hard to justify them for somewhat esoteric research either.
Griffin has previously said that the ISS and Shuttle have value, its just they've never come close to having enough value to justify the price tag.
To put it another way the Russians have had manned space stations for decades, and also done this same kind of research. They did it for a dramatically lower price tag.
If you.... gasp.... looking at if from a business perspective there is this thing called Return on Investment and that is where both the ISS and Shuttle were dramatic and staggering failures. If you had put the same quarter of a trillion dollars in to well managed and well designed programs with clear goals you could easily have gotten ten times the ROI which I think is what Griffin is saying.
" while also bringing up the ability of the 'normals' (for lack of a better word)."
I think the key problem here is you can't make people learn or want to learn. Fact is some kids are gonna drop out, they are going to be stuck on welfare or minimum wage jobs. "No child left behind" was designed by the Bush administration to make public schools fail by making them teach kids who don't want to learn, and when the can't, they defund the public schools, and give kids vouchers for private schools. most of the private schools will be religious schools and they get what they want, bible lessons and prayer in schools funded by Federal dollars. All the kids private schools wont take still get left behind.
The only way Houston succeeded, which was the "model" for no child left behind, was they encouraged all the underachievers to drop out and forged all the records to make them look like transfers. Lo and behold Houston was a miracle success, when in fact it was a fraud leaving kids behind all over the place. Now this broken system has been inflicted on the entire nation. I predict the only schools that succeed are the ones that do what Houston did and force out all the kids who can't pass the test and forge their records. This is a lesson in why Federal government involvement in things like education is bad, because if they screw up they screw up EVERYTHING.
Public schools would be better off offering underachievers vocational tracks if they want them, which is what many countries do. Fact is a significant percentage of kids see no value in English, math, science or history, and never will. If they don't want to learn and don't want job skills then they need to be introduced early on to poverty without a net. Welfare is good for people who have disabilities, it is insane to give it to able bodied people, because you eliminate any incentive for them to get an education or job skills.
I grew up in the glory days of Apollo and I'm usually about as pro space exploration as they come, though I'm more pro Transformational and Rutan than NASA. But lately I really have switched to the camp that there are a lot better things to be doing with the money now.
In the 60's the U.S. was on top of the world economically and it could afford Apollo, though Apollo + Vietnam did severely tax the nation. Today the U.S. is about to top $8 trillion in debt and its current account deficit, which is all the money the U.S. borrows for both trade and budget deficits, is going out of sight under George W. Its around 6% of GDP which is far to high to be healthy.
Today the U.S. has managed to transfer much of its affluence to China so it follows China will be the one with the money to go to the moon in a decade or two.
Now given the choice between going to the Moon for $100 billion or squandering $500 billion in Iraq I'd take the Moon, or better yet a permanent colony on Mars for $500 billion. Unfortunately the morons in the White House have already squandered half of that money in Iraq and at present have no good way forward and no good way out.
I am nearly certain that if the U.S. does go back to the moon it will realize again when it gets there that there isn't really anything worthwhile to do there. A permanent Mars colony might have more point but the costs will be prohibitive in the current regime.
I'd come down firmly on the side of focusing all the attention and money in 3 other areas:
- Energy independence, especially from fossil fuels. It would make the world a lot better place period, whether global warming is real or not. It would sure help the U.S. economy especially when oil gets really tight. Unfortunately the auto, oil and coal companies have vast power in the U.S. and will frustrate any change that would deprive them of the status quo, just like they always have. There is also a problem of picking the right path to take.
- Fix the broken American education system. One thing that is needed is to identify all the best and brightest who have the skills this country needs and get them out of the medicore public schools and in to places where they can be nurtured in to top flight engineers and scientists. Teachers are underpaid and we cant give them all raises. We do need to hook all the best and brightest students up with all the best teachers, either in boarding schools or virtually, and pay THOSE teachers really well. Mediocre underpaid teachers are fine for mediocre, under motivated students. Its elitist but its a fact we can't focus all out attention on "No child left behind" and bringing up the worst students to barely tolerable when we should be focusing on getting all the best students to excel. Unfortunately there are a myriad of camps in the education system which will also frustrate fixing it.
- Improve economic competitiveness. First off completely eliminate all the pork barrel spending in the Federal government, and unfortunately that includes NASA's manned space program, and a lot of DOD spending, and just money being squandered everywhere. Of course when that is done there will be a severe recession because then we will realize how completely dependent our economy is on the government spending borrowed money. It would be great to get both taxes and deficits down so this country isn't at the mercy of Japan and China to keep it afloat. Unfortunately beyond that its a near impossibility to salvage the U.S. economy in a globalized world. American workers are expensive, poorly educated and poorly motivated and that is a bad combination in a globalized world.
Rebuilding the gulf coast isn't on the list. Why because that is certain to turn in to massive corruption, cronyism and greed. Its also a case of rebuilding a coastal region that will just get wiped again every few year by new hurricanes. In the era before air conditioning no one lived on the gulf. We forgot it wasn't just because it was hot and humid, it was also becaus
Kind of sounds more like they are just recruiting new party members from among businessmen that managed to succeed without being party members. I would suspect, and it sure sounds like, rather than indicating increased openness they are try to cement even greater control over their so called "free" enterprises.
The businessmen involved probably gain power and "favors" from the state by joining the party, but in turn they give the party even greater control over their business.
This is just really, really blatant Fascism at work. The party will let small and insignificant enterprises go their own way for the most part, but chances are any "Fortune 500" company is going to be blessed with massive party and state intervention just like Nazi Germany.
"Heck, they recently changed the rules so capitialists can join the Chinese Communist Party."
What "recent" change are you talking about? Most of China's leading "capitalists" are members of the Communist party, and the leading ones are members of its Central Committtee, and always have been, at least since they started their market reforms around 1984. If they aren't top party members they are relatives of prominent party members. Most of its big "captialist" companies are still partly or wholly stated owned.
Zhang Rumin is one example. He is CEO of Haier, China's largest appliance maker, which recently attempted a takeover of Maytag. He was a key party official managing factories in China before he turned in to a "capitalist" and gained control of a multi billion dollar corporation.
Lenovo, now owner of IBM's PC division, was originally founded by China's Academy of Sciences, a state owned enterprise.
CNOOC the Chinese oil company that attempted the takeover of Unocal, and which is buying up oil reserves around the world is also largely a front for the Chinese government.
Starting around 1984 when China began its market reforms, its pretty much transitioned from Socialism to Fascism. This transition had a couple key benefits:
- Western business and governments wouldn't touch China with a 10 foot pool as long as they didn't allow private ownership of Capital. Now they are rushing to transfer all their capital, factories, IP, and markets to Chinese control
- The top members of the Communist party were constrained in how much wealth they could accumulate without violating the sham that was Communism there. Under the new system they can use their political power to accumulate vast fortunes pretty much over night.
All in all it is complete insanity for the West to have anything to do with China. Its "free market" is anything but free. Western corporations are forbidden from having a controlling interest in any Chinese corporation. To gain access to Chinese markets, which is what pretty much what every greedy Western businessmen wants, the Chinese government is compelling them to transfer massive amounts of wealth, capital, market presence and IP to China, as IBM did in the Lenovo deal.
The Chinese government apparently actively dictates to Cisco how much of business will be transfered to China, both manufacturing and R&D, to stay in favor with the Chinese government so they can sell in to their markets. Cisco's CEO wasn't kidding when he said Cisco is becoming a "Chinese company".
Its just an unfortunate trait of Western businessmen and politicians, that they have no scruples about dealing with Fascists regimes, while they seek to snuff out Socialist ones, though they are so similar in things like repression. Only difference, Fascism allows private ownership of Capital and Communism doesn't. Western business was eager to invest in Nazi Germany throughout the '30's just as they are investing in China now. In the first case they helped create a monster, and chances are they are doing the same in the latter. Of course China and the U.S. are starting to converge in to pretty similar political and economic models, authoritarian, some private ownership of capital, massive intervention in the economy by the government to benefit favored members of the party in power.
"thru US comm sats. over the horizon navigation of a drone in a war is impossible using radio."
Global Hawk doesn't need to be piloted at all. It can be preprogrammed with way points and just flies the mission autonomously though I'm sure its using GPS for nav and satellites to communicate the data in real-time. As long as you don't need the data in real-time you could just as easily store it and retrieve it when it lands. I sure hope it has inertial or DEM navigation as a fallback to GPS, otherwise it will be rendered useless if someone jams GPS.
In a regional war like Iraq, EVERYTHING is in the range of land or air based comm. You can use high altitude aircraft or ballons to significantly extend the reach of comm links in a tactical theater.
Not arguing that satellites aren't useful but the U.S. military is screwed if it can't operate effectively without them.
The Space Command is screwed because EVERY new satellite program they are developing is way behind schedule and way over budget. Some Congressmen are on the verge of gutting them out of disgust which is key reason Space Command types like Air Force dude are campaigning for how indispensable they are.
Simple fact is in the face of assymetric threats like Al Qaeda and the insurgency in Iraq satellites are increasingly useless (as long as insurgents aren't so foolish to cell phones or radios in the clear). Encrypted internet traffic is way better.
Its been widely recognized in the wake of 9/11 that the U.S. has put all its eggs in one space basket and that it desperately needs a lot more conventional human intelligence sources. Spy satellites are great in a cold war standoff with the Soviet Union where you are counting bombers, tanks and planes. They are increasingly useless today.
"Here's a great interview with an airforce dude on why space weapons are the must-have accessory for all modern militaries."
Airforce dude is campaigning to maximize the billions of dollars tax payers pay for his toys. He has a conflict of interest.
It is certainly true GPS is helpful to modern militaries, of course its also increasingly essential to many forms of non military navigation, emergency location and surveying.
It is unfortunate for Airforce dude that other nations and commercial entities have the ability to take pictures from space or to to guide their ships and airplane with GPS or its European counterpart.
All in all its just the height of arrogance for Airforce dude to leap to the conclusion that the U.S. has an inherent right to these kinds of technologies and has the right to deny access to same to anyone they feel like whenever they feel like it.
From the original article:
"You can't go to war and win without space."
This is a statement distinctly open to debate. Chances are high the U.S. would win any conflict even without its space assets. If the U.S. military has reached the point it would lose if it lost those assets then Pentagon has screwed up in a huge way. Space assets are vulnerable, always will be, everyone knows where they are and what they do. If the U.S. military has lost the ability to win a war without them then they've just told an enemy what to do to beat them.
Recon satellites are MUCH less important than they used to be. The advent of long range RPV's like Global Hawk and tactical RPV's like Predator seriously degraded the importance of recon satellites. RPV's are cheaper, configurable, more flexible, less vulnerable and can be massed produced, so if you lose one you just send another. You lose many satellites by comparison you increasingly go blind.
For communications I'd think again aircraft and blimps could provide most of the theater comm capability. There are also fiber optics all over, though I'm sure the U.S. military is planning to slice them at will too. Could you communicate to the Pentagon on the other side of the planet without satelites or fiber, no, but chances are cutting the Pentagon out of the tactical loop would be a plus for theater commanders. I've read some article on the two wars in Iraq that suggest theater commanders are better off having local control of their recon assets, which they have with RPV's instead of having a long, slow vulnerable chain of command through the U.S. and where multiple commanders are fighting for control of satellite resources.
Sure it would be a hit to lose GPS but I sure hope the military still mandates and trains all forces to navigate by alternate means. If they've become completely dependent on GPS to navigate there is again a single point of vulnerability. If you jam or destroy GPS and the U.S. military gets lost they have a problem.
GPS guided weapons are certainly powerful but again if the military hasn't retained laser guided weapons and DEM guided cruise missile the military has again created a single point of vulnerability.
Bottomline is I think I'm saying space assets are a resource, one of many, and the only people who are going to say they are indispensable are mostly probably people in the Air Force Space Command trying to maximize their budget and power.
For this to be really effective RIAA just needs to take the next step, which I hear they are working on, and Clearchannelize P2P.
- Filter out all the innovative, creative interesting tracks leaving only Britaany, Celine and the boy band of the month
- Create some sort of graft system to reward file sharers who only share the crap they want to make people listen to, you know free tennis shoes if you fill your sight with nothing but Jessica Simpson
- Monopolize the P2P airwaves by monopolizing all the servers and snuffing out or buying out all the independent file sharers
- Loading all the tracks with bad DJ's, weather and traffic reports, and LOTS and LOTS of commercials.
"Of if the KDE developers had all given up on KDE and supported Gnome instead."
Uh, because the Gnome kids are the one that started the fork. You are talking about KDE kids giving up work they'd already done and something that was already in existence, and that was quite good but for the licensing problem. It has also always been way stronger in application consistency because of its object oriented foundation.
The Gnome people, with Miguel in the lead, are the ones that said abandon all your work and appoint me desktop king or screw you. Its also a simple fact desktop apps should be written in an object oriented language, not C and the horrible foundation that is GTK. C is great for kernels but it doesn't belong in a GUI. Lord knows I've used GTK plenty but man it is a half assed UI toolkit.
Well you see this is more an indicator of a problem he created rather than solved. It was bad that Trolltech didn't license Qt under the GPL early but the fact the Miguel almost single handedly created the GNOME/KDE fork is just a basic indicator of bad judgment. Sure it pressured Trolltech to change their license and some competition is good, but this fork has nearly doomed Linux on the desktop.
Fragmentation in your desktop standard is just really, really bad. Geeks don't mind because they need their 100 window managers as religious war canon fodder. If you want to get companies, government organizations and home users to use your desktop, they just want a consistent user interface which all applications use consistently, and for which there are a lot of applications they need.
They don't much want to have to install two huge, memory wasting desktop environments, because some applications use one and other applications use the other.
Just as importantly you want all application developers to have one target to work towards. Its just a pain to write an app on the Linux desktop because you have two targets, not one. The whole Linux desktop market is so small most developers, are reluctant to develop for it in the first place. You then split it in half and expect them to support and test for two main desktops. In so doing you just further insure application developers will have nothing to do with it.
The third problem is, like Mono the GTK/KDE fork is a huge sink of man power, with two sets of people reinventing the same wheel twice, their wheels have different hub caps but they are both doing exactly the same thing. People in the open source world are just way to eager to say all this competition is just purely good and healthy, some of it is but when you have such massive duplication of effort you have effort being squandered that would better be spent moving forward, and doing things that need done, and developing apps your potential customers want and need, but there isn't enough man power to do. You also fragment testing and security work so you end up with two projects which are buggier and less secure than if everyone was focused on one goal. This same argument applies to people who think create yet another Linux distro is somehow a good thing. They are a massive waste of time and resource.
Using 20/20 hindsight Linux would be way ahead of where it is if Miguel could have marshalled corprate Linux backers like IBM or Novell to throw money at Trolltech, get Qt out under pure LGPL and held the Linux desktop together instead of blowing it to smithereens which is what he actually did.
Its somewhat worse than that, Miguel has not only wasted his time, but he's suckered a large number of others developers in to expending massive effort on Mono. It is interesting and all, but it was as nearly as I can tell a complete waste of time, that could have been better spent on Java or standards not completely dominated by Microsoft. Now if there were interesting.NET web sites all over the Internet I wanted to use and had to have Mono to use on any non Windows platform then yes it would serve its purpose, I just don't think I've encountered such a web site. Are there any?
Not sure I grok why Miguel has such icon status in the open source world, he doesn't seem to have very good judgment.
"Some of us see the game with perfect clarity but simply don't care"
Thats great and as long as your happy thats all that matters. Its should be noted that people that do see the game and live to play it LOVE people like you, because you are:
A. One less competitor B. If they are in your team they can use you to advance their own wealth and power
There is job security for content geeks who don't play the game, because you are less of threat to the people who are playing it so you get fewer daggers in the back. People playing the game will still screw you if they see advantage in it though.
"As for the problems described in that article, I think that is more a factor of company size and age than a capitalism thing."
Maybe the tendency is worse in bigger companies but I assure you all these motivations are inherent in the system and they can and do exist in small companies. Is partially just the more people you have the more climbers you have and their is an exponentially increasing number of possible relationships between the climbers.
A small company with cool laid back managers who are working as a team maybe not, but you can just as easily have executives in a small company who are using their employees and are out to make a killing and will screw their employees everytime its to their benefit.
If a small company is heading to a lucrative IPO I assure you people are going to maneuver to maximize their options. They come from a limited pool, the more you take the less there is for other people. That is one of the most vicious games there is.
I never heard how it came out but I recall Google fired someone for being to old and not fitting in with the youthful culture, and it happened at a perfect time for him to lose all his options and they did with 100% certainty end up in someone else's pocket as a windfall profit.
I've heard countless stories over the years of people being screwed out of options in small companies heading to lucrative IPO's.
Dude why don't you save your efforts at snap amateur psychoanalyze for yourself and Doctor Phil.
This is just Office Politics 101. If they can get away with it middle managers:
- take as much credit as they can for everything they can - inflate the degree of success of everything they and their team does - duck blame for everything - minimize the extent of failures
A good managers objective is to make it appear that he and his team are always successful even when they are not. Managers that appear successful get money and power.
Maybe in rare instances it wins a manager karma points for taking responsibility for failure and falling on your sword, or for not taking credit for some else's achievement even if you can get away with it. Its simply not a way to climb in a corporation most of the time, nor is it a way to maximize your wealth.
"I don't see it as a Capitalist problem per se because I can imagine companies structured in a way that might discourage these sorts of problems. I.e the company would make *more* money, not less if these problems were solved."
I think maybe the point you are missing is you think Capitalism is just a company versus company game. It is just as much, and inherently a person versus person game. You have to apply the same competitive angst there is between Microsoft and Google and extrapolate it to the managers of all the teams in your office who are competing for market(mind) share within the company with the executives above them who are the customers. You have to apply it to the engineers on a team who are competing for a larger share of the options, bonuses, raises and plum assignments. The engineers are totally at the bottom of the heap and a lot less adept at and prone to play the game than you will find among everyone who has made the jump on to the rungs of the management ladder and also EVERY salesperson in the organization. If you want to see competition at its most vicious just look at how salespeople think and work.
"So maybe it's more of a corporate America thing/large company thing, than a Microsoft thing."
Its more just a capitalism thing. Its just a basic fact of life that people want to make money. Most people want to make the most money they can. The way you make the most money you can in a corporation is to one way or another surpass your coworkers, to get the credit for successes weather you deserve it or not, and shift blame for failure away from you even if you deserve it.
If you are good at playing this game you get promoted, you get more stock, you get bigger bonuses. There is just a vast difference in compensation between working people and those at VP and above. Top executives used to make 30X what workers did in the 80's, they now make 400x. VP is similar though not quite as big a multiple.
Idealist geeks don't play this game well. They are just glad to get a paycheck and if someone lets them sit at their computer in peace. Its a key reason the people in marketing and sales tend to rocket in to upper management, that and geeks tend to lack social skills to survive in management.
The best way to make money in a company is everyone works together and make great products and everyone makes lots of money and then there is a lot to spread around, Microsoft used to be like this when the stock just kept going up and everyone got rich on it even if you got less than others. Google is like this now. That is a "dream" company, everything is going right and everyone is making a lot of money.
The problem sets in when it starts getting hard to make your killing. If all of a sudden stock options don't mean certain riches, raises are harder to come by and offshoring is in full swing political infighting and morale problems are just the inevitable result.
If there is a limited pool of wealth the motivated and greedy opt out of working together and team success, instead they start playing politics to insure they climb and if necessary they do it over the bodies of the people around them, most of whom end up laying on the floor with a knife in their back. Competition is sometimes a great motivator but when it reaches a certain pitch inside a company it stops being a positive and turns in to pure corrosion.
Most young geeks simply don't grasp that this game is even going on around them, and its why people in their office are driving expensive sports cars while they settle for a couple percent raise a year for 80 hour work weeks.
"the other "big" knock against being a math or science teacher is that your students will fight you every step of the way unless you luck out with advanced classes (calculus, AP chem, etc)."
I would guess that in India and China there is probably somewhat more enthusiasm for math and science but I wager they have the same problem there, most people have no aptitude or interest in math and science. It is hard to learn and it is a hard career, it usually doesn't pay well unless you invent something amazing or jump to management.
The reason China and India are dominating these fields is simply that they outnumber everyone else on the planet. They have something like 8X the popultion to draw from so it follows that they will find 8X the people with the aptitude for science and math.
Of course it helps that they actively test for and find all the people with the aptitude and ability and put them on an educational fast track to nurture them in to top flight engineers and scientists and the upper classes in India set it as a life goal to nail these tests and get in the best schools. It helps that they can see what truly grinding poverty is like, because India has it at levels unimagined in the U.S. Being in close proximity to grinding poverty with no safety net is a big motivator to excel.
In the U.S. our current educational initiative, "No child Left Behind" program ironically isn't designed to nurture the best and brightest like India's. It is to completely fixated on the worst, least motivated and dumbest which is insane and why it will fail to fix the problem the U.S. has producing world class scientists and engineers.
The Bush administration has cleverly required that public schools produce vast improvement in the lowest achievers in their ranks. If they fail which most inevitably will the goal is to mark them as failed schools, slash their funding, put them out of business, and give all their students vouchers for private schools. Will private schools succeed with all the under achievers. No. Chances are they wont even take them. They will only take the motivated and able, they will shun all the worst, and they will look like a raging success. The only problem is they will not only leave children behind, they will totally abandon all the worst students which was never an option public schools were given.
As with most programs the Bush administration names, the name "No Child Left Behind" is really the exact opposite of its ultimate goal. The goal is to get all the good students in private schools, preferably religious private schools with heavy doses of prayer and bible, and totally abandon all the students that private schools wont take.
Houston was the model for this insane program and its administrator Paige was rewarded with Education Secretary in Bush's first term. The cruel twist is the only reason Houston was such a raging success is they encouraged all the worst students to drop out and hid this fact by doctored their records to make them appear to be transfers. They succeeded in "No child left behind" by leaving dropouts behind all over the place and just lying. Unfortunately public education across the country is stuck in this scam now.
Fixing the U.S. education system is trivial to outline just impossible to do in the face of all the entrenched special interests. Do what India does:
- Identify all the best students intrested in science, math, computers and other in demand careers, and get them out of mediocre schools where they are dragged down and ridiculed for being above average academically. Put them in virtual classrooms if necessary, assuming boarding schools wont generally fly in this country and that they are scattered throughout the country surrounded by mediocre peers.
- Do what many other countries do and get people with no intelligence and no motivation out of classrooms and in to vocational programs where they can learn skills that interest them, and which they can handle.
The important point you left out is the source for Firefox is available so lots of people are constantly auditing it. It is a lot easier to find vulnerabilities auditing source than it is probing for them in a binary.
Now if Microsoft has a small army auditing IE's source and reporting everything they find then maybe the two are at parity. But, chances are the only vulnerabilities Microsoft admits are the ones found by 3rd party researchers probing the binary. The ones they find in their internal source audits they probably quietly fixed without telling any one.
These numbers are an apples to oranges comparison because Firefox, being in clear view of the public is reporting every vulnerability. Microsoft is probably only reporting the ones they have to because an outside auditor found it and will eventually announce it to get credit for their discovery.
It is a disadvantage for Firefox that its source is available because it makes it easier for a black hats to find exploits doing their own audits, but this is countered by the fact there are a lot of white hats doing the same thing. Its a race.
Slashdot Mirror
Well its a subject for heated debate whether the constitution does assure you a right to privacy and what the bounds of that right are. When telephones came in to common use in the early twentieth century it was routine for the police to listen in on suspected criminals or maybe anyone they wanted to find some dirt on.
... wait for it ... the police were not entering the persons home so they were not invading the privacy of their home. Here is a good link on the history of the right to privacy.
.vs. Connecticut it laid the foundation for much of our modern right to privacy, in this case it was an individuals right to practice birth control without state intervention. This evolved in to the right to an abortion in Roe v Wade.
The first Supreme Court case tested wire taps in 1928 in fact found in favor of wire tapping, because
Here is a particularly important part on wire tapping. Justice Louis D. Brandeis was writing in the dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928). His view would ultimately prevail years later and is now in grievous danger of being overturned again by a rising tide of Fascism in the U.S. :
"Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them on any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard. . . .
The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the one most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment."
Its important to read this stuff these days. The right to privacy was the cornerstone of the confirmation hearing of our new Chief Justice Roberts, names like Olmstead and Griswold. There is a suspicion Judge Roberts appointment is designed to overturn all the cases affirming right to privacy, a right to not have your phone tapped, a right to abortions, a right to access birth control.
Religious fundamentalists banned birth control in Connecticut in the 19th century. When this law was challenged in 1965 in Griswold
J. Edgar Hoover used wire taps and his control of the FBI to accumulate vast amounts of dirt on anyone and everyone, and insured he held an iron grip on the helm of the FBI and in fact the U.S. in general for decades. No one would challenge him because he had dirt on everyone. He was the ultimate defiler of the right to privacy. With modern techology and the collapse of our right to privacy thanks to fear mongering politicians the potential is great for the rise of new J. Edgars who are even more powerful and more dangerous. A leading candidate is George W's new National Intelligen Director, John Negroponte. He doesn't control the FBI he controls the CIA, the NSA and every spying resource the U.S. has now. Negroponte was infamous for supporting right wing death squads in Central America that did Fascism proud.
Well as I said ATM's and evoting are different problems.
If Diebold's ATM machines started charging peoples accounts for withdrawls larger than they got cash for, or started handing out money without debiting their accounts it would be instantly obvious to either the bank, the customer or the both. This is regardless of whether there is a receipt. If the customer is screwed having the receipt is of high value in proving their case but its not really mandatory. Even without it a track record of wrong transactions would eventually lead to revolt by bank or customer. If customers got screwed once, and it wasn't fixed they would change banks or the bank would fire Diebold the first time their machines didn't balance and they couldn't explain and resolve it. Balancing books is much easier and more transparent than counting votes where you have no idea of what the result should be.
There may be malevolence on the part of Diebold here, but I suspect the larger problem is people in America at some point made the mistaken assumption that ATM's and evoting are the same thing, since we use ATM's we should vote the same way. That was the fatal mistake. ATM transactions are really easy to audit and to detect error. With evoting there is an endless number of places the system can be compromised and they are impossible to catch without a paper trail.
If you are leaving a paper trail and relying on it for the integrity of the vote there is an open question as to why you need the expensive computers in the first place. The only rationale I can see is to prevent voter error or to give access to the disabled. For anyone that can put an X in the box next to the name of their candidate, paper and pen still appears to be the best system imaginable, as long as the ballots are secured, monitored and counted by multiple adversarial representatives.
From a market perspective I could see why evoting vendors don't want a paper trail. They want to sell their expensive electronics. If people figure out the paper part is the only trustworthy part of the system there is a chance they would deduce they are mostly wasting money buying the computers, and should go back to pen and paper. They also run the risk that their machines will in fact make mistakes and if there is a paper trail which constantly highlights these failures people would lose trust in them, would turn on them and stop buying them again, or lay charges against them for vote rigging, even if it was due to incompetence. Its a lot better for them like it is now, because its impossible to prove the machines are wrong. Whether it be due to malevolence or incompetence these companies don't want to be proved wrong by a paper trail.
"It's only going to get worse as the pace of change continues to accelerate."
Its not a given the pace of change will accelerate in technology.
Just look at the space program. With the rate of change in the 60's you would figure we would be have a permanent presence on Mars and be heading to Jupiter. Instead we are struggling to just preserve the ability to get people to LEO in tin cans and maybe back to bounding around on the moon for a week, things we did 35-40 years ago.
Advancement is driven by need.
One field where there seems to be a never ending need for progress is in developing new and better ways to kill each other.
In computing we are reaching the point most people don't need computers faster than the ones they have. Most of their processing power sits unused most of the time. Faster computers aren't of much value unless you have applications that make effective use of them. 3D gaming is one of the few areas that can push the performance envelope indefinitely, unfortunately those are a counterproductive, not a productive pastime at present. The quality of the simulation, and need for horsepower, can grow indefinitely, but the real creativity in them doesn't, nor do they contribute much of any real value on a social or individual level.
I imagine people will always want more bandwidth, maybe that will drive some innovation for a while.
At this point PC's are in fact a boring, atrophying platform. They are increasingly just refining decades old concepts.
The web being the newest concept, and which caused a massive burst of change but now everything about the web is starting to be old. The worst thing about the web is every idea, every concept, every point of view is being whipped to death. Its nearly impossible to do anything really "new" any more, try to think of a truly new and worthwhile software application at this point that hasn't already been done about 100 times. Try to think of anything new, and then spend a few minutes in Google and discover its already been whipped to death.
Lots of people think all the innovation will be in cell phones, I'm personally not sure thats even really true. About all I see is all the capabilities we have in PC's will end up on a platform with an inadequate screen and input devices. The one innovative thing you see is to make things like maps, yellow pages and other things people need when on the move instantly available. It will be great for awareness of some new place you are in, though as a trade off it will create people who are totally addicted to the presence of a computer and a telephone in their pocket. The only real innovation there is if someone manages to produce a display device and input methods that would make cell phones really competitive with a desktop machine, or even a laptop, for example a display device that goes straight to your eyes with high resolution and apparent screen size, and maybe a projected, full size keyboard on any surface.
History is filled with civilizations who were evolving at a high rate, only to hit a point where their rate of innovation stalled and their civilizations entered in to decline.
The new twist we have today, thanks to globalization, is that when dominant civilization hits a wall for one reason or another, will there be a new fresh civilization, with fresh minds and new ideas, tucked away in a corner to start fresh and take up the reins. Our homogenization of cultures could lead to a situation where if the dominant civilizations hits a wall the whole world hits a wall for a long, long time.
Good post. I know about Brian Reynolds and his crucial role in the early success of this franchise. I was mostly just launching a veiled jab at the sorry state of the Civlization dev team at least as evident in Civ 3.
I'm guessing from all the talk about extensibility in Civ 4 they realized they can't develop a decent game in house so they are hoping moders will do it for them.
I'm just amazed people around Slashdot, for example, keep worshipping at the Civilization alter like it still has significance in the gaming world since the franchise cratered with Civ 3.
Its not clear what point you are making here.
- Is it they do other critical transactions so they must be good at it.
- Or is it that their ATM machines might be bad too.
If its the later, ATM machines are completely different problem from voting machines.
ATM machines have to have printers and provide a receipt at least as an option. Most of Diebold's machines have no printer and no option to get a receipt.
If Diebold's ATM machines start doing wrong transactions it would become immediately apparent to the bank and any customer who has a bookkeeping system.
ATM machines and bank transactions don't have to maintain anonymity of the user, voting systems do. It really complicates validation of the transaction.
A paper receipt, verifiable by the voter, deposited in a lock box and subjet to very random recounts would solve most of the uncertainty in electronic voting.
All in all open source would be better than closed source for electronic voting machines but it would provide zero certainty that the election still isn't being rigged electronically. The only two good ways to insure good elections are:
- paper ballets marked with a pencil, watch and counted like a hawk by multiple adverserial observers which works great in just about every country but America.
- if you have to do evoting, you have to have a printer, and a human verifiable receipt going in to a lockbox and hand recounted by adverserial.
Why don't you do a new version of Alpha Centauri? It was hands down better than any version of Civilization I've ever played. Civilization III was IMHO terrible. I recall some game ranking sight that still shows Alpha Centauri in the top 20 all time though it is ancient and hard to find now. If you could retain all the brilliance of the original, improve the AI's, add the ability to do mods, and get a new online community going it would return to being one of my favorite games to sink hours in to.
There is a fair chance the Russians would have either kept patching together the MIR or they would have done MIR 2 without the U.S. MIR was well past its prime but the Russians sure didn't want to deorbit it. They were forced to as condition for joining ISS. It takes enormous time, money and effort to get stuff in to space. Throwing away stuff that still worked was stupid.
MIR 2 would have been a challenge for the Russinas from a funding perspective a few years ago but thanks to soaring oil and natural gas prices Russia actually has a lot of money to burn these days. They are one of the world's larger oil and gas exporters. Siberia almost certainly still harbors vast unexplored reserves of fossil fuels, its one of the few poorly explored land masses left.
Zvezda and Zarya which form the core of the ISS were essentially designed for MIR 2.
I think its safe to say the Russians would have maintained their decades long presence in space stations with or without the U.S. I'm not sure NASA would have ever managed a space station on their own. They have suffered a huge erosion in capability since the Apollo days. When the Russians came on board they had proven designs for a space station. NASA hadn't flown any station hardware since Skylab.
On the plus side for the Russians the ISS infused a lot of money in to their space program at a key juncture in the post U.S.S.R economuc turmoil. On the down side I'm pretty sure they are completely fed up with having to partner with NASA at this point.
I think the grandparent was a little to one extreme in saying that no useful research takes place on the ISS. Certainly some useful research is being done there.
.... gasp .... looking at if from a business perspective there is this thing called Return on Investment and that is where both the ISS and Shuttle were dramatic and staggering failures. If you had put the same quarter of a trillion dollars in to well managed and well designed programs with clear goals you could easily have gotten ten times the ROI which I think is what Griffin is saying.
However the parent kind of swings to the other extreme, just because there is some useful research going on there doesn't mean the staggering expenditures on the ISS were justified. You have to ask how much of this research could have been done on unmanned satellites or on 2 week shuttle missions. Though shuttle missions are so staggering expensive its hard to justify them for somewhat esoteric research either.
Griffin has previously said that the ISS and Shuttle have value, its just they've never come close to having enough value to justify the price tag.
To put it another way the Russians have had manned space stations for decades, and also done this same kind of research. They did it for a dramatically lower price tag.
If you
" while also bringing up the ability of the 'normals' (for lack of a better word)."
I think the key problem here is you can't make people learn or want to learn. Fact is some kids are gonna drop out, they are going to be stuck on welfare or minimum wage jobs. "No child left behind" was designed by the Bush administration to make public schools fail by making them teach kids who don't want to learn, and when the can't, they defund the public schools, and give kids vouchers for private schools. most of the private schools will be religious schools and they get what they want, bible lessons and prayer in schools funded by Federal dollars. All the kids private schools wont take still get left behind.
The only way Houston succeeded, which was the "model" for no child left behind, was they encouraged all the underachievers to drop out and forged all the records to make them look like transfers. Lo and behold Houston was a miracle success, when in fact it was a fraud leaving kids behind all over the place. Now this broken system has been inflicted on the entire nation. I predict the only schools that succeed are the ones that do what Houston did and force out all the kids who can't pass the test and forge their records. This is a lesson in why Federal government involvement in things like education is bad, because if they screw up they screw up EVERYTHING.
Public schools would be better off offering underachievers vocational tracks if they want them, which is what many countries do. Fact is a significant percentage of kids see no value in English, math, science or history, and never will. If they don't want to learn and don't want job skills then they need to be introduced early on to poverty without a net. Welfare is good for people who have disabilities, it is insane to give it to able bodied people, because you eliminate any incentive for them to get an education or job skills.
I grew up in the glory days of Apollo and I'm usually about as pro space exploration as they come, though I'm more pro Transformational and Rutan than NASA. But lately I really have switched to the camp that there are a lot better things to be doing with the money now.
In the 60's the U.S. was on top of the world economically and it could afford Apollo, though Apollo + Vietnam did severely tax the nation. Today the U.S. is about to top $8 trillion in debt and its current account deficit, which is all the money the U.S. borrows for both trade and budget deficits, is going out of sight under George W. Its around 6% of GDP which is far to high to be healthy.
Today the U.S. has managed to transfer much of its affluence to China so it follows China will be the one with the money to go to the moon in a decade or two.
Now given the choice between going to the Moon for $100 billion or squandering $500 billion in Iraq I'd take the Moon, or better yet a permanent colony on Mars for $500 billion. Unfortunately the morons in the White House have already squandered half of that money in Iraq and at present have no good way forward and no good way out.
I am nearly certain that if the U.S. does go back to the moon it will realize again when it gets there that there isn't really anything worthwhile to do there. A permanent Mars colony might have more point but the costs will be prohibitive in the current regime.
I'd come down firmly on the side of focusing all the attention and money in 3 other areas:
- Energy independence, especially from fossil fuels. It would make the world a lot better place period, whether global warming is real or not. It would sure help the U.S. economy especially when oil gets really tight. Unfortunately the auto, oil and coal companies have vast power in the U.S. and will frustrate any change that would deprive them of the status quo, just like they always have. There is also a problem of picking the right path to take.
- Fix the broken American education system. One thing that is needed is to identify all the best and brightest who have the skills this country needs and get them out of the medicore public schools and in to places where they can be nurtured in to top flight engineers and scientists. Teachers are underpaid and we cant give them all raises. We do need to hook all the best and brightest students up with all the best teachers, either in boarding schools or virtually, and pay THOSE teachers really well. Mediocre underpaid teachers are fine for mediocre, under motivated students. Its elitist but its a fact we can't focus all out attention on "No child left behind" and bringing up the worst students to barely tolerable when we should be focusing on getting all the best students to excel. Unfortunately there are a myriad of camps in the education system which will also frustrate fixing it.
- Improve economic competitiveness. First off completely eliminate all the pork barrel spending in the Federal government, and unfortunately that includes NASA's manned space program, and a lot of DOD spending, and just money being squandered everywhere. Of course when that is done there will be a severe recession because then we will realize how completely dependent our economy is on the government spending borrowed money. It would be great to get both taxes and deficits down so this country isn't at the mercy of Japan and China to keep it afloat. Unfortunately beyond that its a near impossibility to salvage the U.S. economy in a globalized world. American workers are expensive, poorly educated and poorly motivated and that is a bad combination in a globalized world.
Rebuilding the gulf coast isn't on the list. Why because that is certain to turn in to massive corruption, cronyism and greed. Its also a case of rebuilding a coastal region that will just get wiped again every few year by new hurricanes. In the era before air conditioning no one lived on the gulf. We forgot it wasn't just because it was hot and humid, it was also becaus
Kind of sounds more like they are just recruiting new party members from among businessmen that managed to succeed without being party members. I would suspect, and it sure sounds like, rather than indicating increased openness they are try to cement even greater control over their so called "free" enterprises.
The businessmen involved probably gain power and "favors" from the state by joining the party, but in turn they give the party even greater control over their business.
This is just really, really blatant Fascism at work. The party will let small and insignificant enterprises go their own way for the most part, but chances are any "Fortune 500" company is going to be blessed with massive party and state intervention just like Nazi Germany.
"Heck, they recently changed the rules so capitialists can join the Chinese Communist Party."
What "recent" change are you talking about? Most of China's leading "capitalists" are members of the Communist party, and the leading ones are members of its Central Committtee, and always have been, at least since they started their market reforms around 1984. If they aren't top party members they are relatives of prominent party members. Most of its big "captialist" companies are still partly or wholly stated owned.
Zhang Rumin is one example. He is CEO of Haier, China's largest appliance maker, which recently attempted a takeover of Maytag. He was a key party official managing factories in China before he turned in to a "capitalist" and gained control of a multi billion dollar corporation.
Lenovo, now owner of IBM's PC division, was originally founded by China's Academy of Sciences, a state owned enterprise.
CNOOC the Chinese oil company that attempted the takeover of Unocal, and which is buying up oil reserves around the world is also largely a front for the Chinese government.
Starting around 1984 when China began its market reforms, its pretty much transitioned from Socialism to Fascism. This transition had a couple key benefits:
- Western business and governments wouldn't touch China with a 10 foot pool as long as they didn't allow private ownership of Capital. Now they are rushing to transfer all their capital, factories, IP, and markets to Chinese control
- The top members of the Communist party were constrained in how much wealth they could accumulate without violating the sham that was Communism there. Under the new system they can use their political power to accumulate vast fortunes pretty much over night.
All in all it is complete insanity for the West to have anything to do with China. Its "free market" is anything but free. Western corporations are forbidden from having a controlling interest in any Chinese corporation. To gain access to Chinese markets, which is what pretty much what every greedy Western businessmen wants, the Chinese government is compelling them to transfer massive amounts of wealth, capital, market presence and IP to China, as IBM did in the Lenovo deal.
The Chinese government apparently actively dictates to Cisco how much of business will be transfered to China, both manufacturing and R&D, to stay in favor with the Chinese government so they can sell in to their markets. Cisco's CEO wasn't kidding when he said Cisco is becoming a "Chinese company".
Its just an unfortunate trait of Western businessmen and politicians, that they have no scruples about dealing with Fascists regimes, while they seek to snuff out Socialist ones, though they are so similar in things like repression. Only difference, Fascism allows private ownership of Capital and Communism doesn't. Western business was eager to invest in Nazi Germany throughout the '30's just as they are investing in China now. In the first case they helped create a monster, and chances are they are doing the same in the latter. Of course China and the U.S. are starting to converge in to pretty similar political and economic models, authoritarian, some private ownership of capital, massive intervention in the economy by the government to benefit favored members of the party in power.
"thru US comm sats. over the horizon navigation of a drone in a war is impossible using radio."
Global Hawk doesn't need to be piloted at all. It can be preprogrammed with way points and just flies the mission autonomously though I'm sure its using GPS for nav and satellites to communicate the data in real-time. As long as you don't need the data in real-time you could just as easily store it and retrieve it when it lands. I sure hope it has inertial or DEM navigation as a fallback to GPS, otherwise it will be rendered useless if someone jams GPS.
In a regional war like Iraq, EVERYTHING is in the range of land or air based comm. You can use high altitude aircraft or ballons to significantly extend the reach of comm links in a tactical theater.
Not arguing that satellites aren't useful but the U.S. military is screwed if it can't operate effectively without them.
The Space Command is screwed because EVERY new satellite program they are developing is way behind schedule and way over budget. Some Congressmen are on the verge of gutting them out of disgust which is key reason Space Command types like Air Force dude are campaigning for how indispensable they are.
Simple fact is in the face of assymetric threats like Al Qaeda and the insurgency in Iraq satellites are increasingly useless (as long as insurgents aren't so foolish to cell phones or radios in the clear). Encrypted internet traffic is way better.
Its been widely recognized in the wake of 9/11 that the U.S. has put all its eggs in one space basket and that it desperately needs a lot more conventional human intelligence sources. Spy satellites are great in a cold war standoff with the Soviet Union where you are counting bombers, tanks and planes. They are increasingly useless today.
"Here's a great interview with an airforce dude on why space weapons are the must-have accessory for all modern militaries."
Airforce dude is campaigning to maximize the billions of dollars tax payers pay for his toys. He has a conflict of interest.
It is certainly true GPS is helpful to modern militaries, of course its also increasingly essential to many forms of non military navigation, emergency location and surveying.
It is unfortunate for Airforce dude that other nations and commercial entities have the ability to take pictures from space or to to guide their ships and airplane with GPS or its European counterpart.
All in all its just the height of arrogance for Airforce dude to leap to the conclusion that the U.S. has an inherent right to these kinds of technologies and has the right to deny access to same to anyone they feel like whenever they feel like it.
From the original article:
"You can't go to war and win without space."
This is a statement distinctly open to debate. Chances are high the U.S. would win any conflict even without its space assets. If the U.S. military has reached the point it would lose if it lost those assets then Pentagon has screwed up in a huge way. Space assets are vulnerable, always will be, everyone knows where they are and what they do. If the U.S. military has lost the ability to win a war without them then they've just told an enemy what to do to beat them.
Recon satellites are MUCH less important than they used to be. The advent of long range RPV's like Global Hawk and tactical RPV's like Predator seriously degraded the importance of recon satellites. RPV's are cheaper, configurable, more flexible, less vulnerable and can be massed produced, so if you lose one you just send another. You lose many satellites by comparison you increasingly go blind.
For communications I'd think again aircraft and blimps could provide most of the theater comm capability. There are also fiber optics all over, though I'm sure the U.S. military is planning to slice them at will too. Could you communicate to the Pentagon on the other side of the planet without satelites or fiber, no, but chances are cutting the Pentagon out of the tactical loop would be a plus for theater commanders. I've read some article on the two wars in Iraq that suggest theater commanders are better off having local control of their recon assets, which they have with RPV's instead of having a long, slow vulnerable chain of command through the U.S. and where multiple commanders are fighting for control of satellite resources.
Sure it would be a hit to lose GPS but I sure hope the military still mandates and trains all forces to navigate by alternate means. If they've become completely dependent on GPS to navigate there is again a single point of vulnerability. If you jam or destroy GPS and the U.S. military gets lost they have a problem.
GPS guided weapons are certainly powerful but again if the military hasn't retained laser guided weapons and DEM guided cruise missile the military has again created a single point of vulnerability.
Bottomline is I think I'm saying space assets are a resource, one of many, and the only people who are going to say they are indispensable are mostly probably people in the Air Force Space Command trying to maximize their budget and power.
Now here is some quality moderation. This is just an anti global warming troll AND its not even funny.
For this to be really effective RIAA just needs to take the next step, which I hear they are working on, and Clearchannelize P2P.
- Filter out all the innovative, creative interesting tracks leaving only Britaany, Celine and the boy band of the month
- Create some sort of graft system to reward file sharers who only share the crap they want to make people listen to, you know free tennis shoes if you fill your sight with nothing but Jessica Simpson
- Monopolize the P2P airwaves by monopolizing all the servers and snuffing out or buying out all the independent file sharers
- Loading all the tracks with bad DJ's, weather and traffic reports, and LOTS and LOTS of commercials.
"Of if the KDE developers had all given up on KDE and supported Gnome instead."
Uh, because the Gnome kids are the one that started the fork. You are talking about KDE kids giving up work they'd already done and something that was already in existence, and that was quite good but for the licensing problem. It has also always been way stronger in application consistency because of its object oriented foundation.
The Gnome people, with Miguel in the lead, are the ones that said abandon all your work and appoint me desktop king or screw you. Its also a simple fact desktop apps should be written in an object oriented language, not C and the horrible foundation that is GTK. C is great for kernels but it doesn't belong in a GUI. Lord knows I've used GTK plenty but man it is a half assed UI toolkit.
"This is why."
Well you see this is more an indicator of a problem he created rather than solved. It was bad that Trolltech didn't license Qt under the GPL early but the fact the Miguel almost single handedly created the GNOME/KDE fork is just a basic indicator of bad judgment. Sure it pressured Trolltech to change their license and some competition is good, but this fork has nearly doomed Linux on the desktop.
Fragmentation in your desktop standard is just really, really bad. Geeks don't mind because they need their 100 window managers as religious war canon fodder. If you want to get companies, government organizations and home users to use your desktop, they just want a consistent user interface which all applications use consistently, and for which there are a lot of applications they need.
They don't much want to have to install two huge, memory wasting desktop environments, because some applications use one and other applications use the other.
Just as importantly you want all application developers to have one target to work towards. Its just a pain to write an app on the Linux desktop because you have two targets, not one. The whole Linux desktop market is so small most developers, are reluctant to develop for it in the first place. You then split it in half and expect them to support and test for two main desktops. In so doing you just further insure application developers will have nothing to do with it.
The third problem is, like Mono the GTK/KDE fork is a huge sink of man power, with two sets of people reinventing the same wheel twice, their wheels have different hub caps but they are both doing exactly the same thing. People in the open source world are just way to eager to say all this competition is just purely good and healthy, some of it is but when you have such massive duplication of effort you have effort being squandered that would better be spent moving forward, and doing things that need done, and developing apps your potential customers want and need, but there isn't enough man power to do. You also fragment testing and security work so you end up with two projects which are buggier and less secure than if everyone was focused on one goal. This same argument applies to people who think create yet another Linux distro is somehow a good thing. They are a massive waste of time and resource.
Using 20/20 hindsight Linux would be way ahead of where it is if Miguel could have marshalled corprate Linux backers like IBM or Novell to throw money at Trolltech, get Qt out under pure LGPL and held the Linux desktop together instead of blowing it to smithereens which is what he actually did.
Its somewhat worse than that, Miguel has not only wasted his time, but he's suckered a large number of others developers in to expending massive effort on Mono. It is interesting and all, but it was as nearly as I can tell a complete waste of time, that could have been better spent on Java or standards not completely dominated by Microsoft. Now if there were interesting .NET web sites all over the Internet I wanted to use and had to have Mono to use on any non Windows platform then yes it would serve its purpose, I just don't think I've encountered such a web site. Are there any?
Not sure I grok why Miguel has such icon status in the open source world, he doesn't seem to have very good judgment.
"Some of us see the game with perfect clarity but simply don't care"
Thats great and as long as your happy thats all that matters. Its should be noted that people that do see the game and live to play it LOVE people like you, because you are:
A. One less competitor
B. If they are in your team they can use you to advance their own wealth and power
There is job security for content geeks who don't play the game, because you are less of threat to the people who are playing it so you get fewer daggers in the back. People playing the game will still screw you if they see advantage in it though.
"As for the problems described in that article, I think that is more a factor of company size and age than a capitalism thing."
Maybe the tendency is worse in bigger companies but I assure you all these motivations are inherent in the system and they can and do exist in small companies. Is partially just the more people you have the more climbers you have and their is an exponentially increasing number of possible relationships between the climbers.
A small company with cool laid back managers who are working as a team maybe not, but you can just as easily have executives in a small company who are using their employees and are out to make a killing and will screw their employees everytime its to their benefit.
If a small company is heading to a lucrative IPO I assure you people are going to maneuver to maximize their options. They come from a limited pool, the more you take the less there is for other people. That is one of the most vicious games there is.
I never heard how it came out but I recall Google fired someone for being to old and not fitting in with the youthful culture, and it happened at a perfect time for him to lose all his options and they did with 100% certainty end up in someone else's pocket as a windfall profit.
I've heard countless stories over the years of people being screwed out of options in small companies heading to lucrative IPO's.
Dude why don't you save your efforts at snap amateur psychoanalyze for yourself and Doctor Phil.
This is just Office Politics 101. If they can get away with it middle managers:
- take as much credit as they can for everything they can
- inflate the degree of success of everything they and their team does
- duck blame for everything
- minimize the extent of failures
A good managers objective is to make it appear that he and his team are always successful even when they are not. Managers that appear successful get money and power.
Maybe in rare instances it wins a manager karma points for taking responsibility for failure and falling on your sword, or for not taking credit for some else's achievement even if you can get away with it. Its simply not a way to climb in a corporation most of the time, nor is it a way to maximize your wealth.
"I don't see it as a Capitalist problem per se because I can imagine companies structured in a way that might discourage these sorts of problems. I.e the company would make *more* money, not less if these problems were solved."
I think maybe the point you are missing is you think Capitalism is just a company versus company game. It is just as much, and inherently a person versus person game. You have to apply the same competitive angst there is between Microsoft and Google and extrapolate it to the managers of all the teams in your office who are competing for market(mind) share within the company with the executives above them who are the customers. You have to apply it to the engineers on a team who are competing for a larger share of the options, bonuses, raises and plum assignments. The engineers are totally at the bottom of the heap and a lot less adept at and prone to play the game than you will find among everyone who has made the jump on to the rungs of the management ladder and also EVERY salesperson in the organization. If you want to see competition at its most vicious just look at how salespeople think and work.
"So maybe it's more of a corporate America thing/large company thing, than a Microsoft thing."
Its more just a capitalism thing. Its just a basic fact of life that people want to make money. Most people want to make the most money they can. The way you make the most money you can in a corporation is to one way or another surpass your coworkers, to get the credit for successes weather you deserve it or not, and shift blame for failure away from you even if you deserve it.
If you are good at playing this game you get promoted, you get more stock, you get bigger bonuses. There is just a vast difference in compensation between working people and those at VP and above. Top executives used to make 30X what workers did in the 80's, they now make 400x. VP is similar though not quite as big a multiple.
Idealist geeks don't play this game well. They are just glad to get a paycheck and if someone lets them sit at their computer in peace. Its a key reason the people in marketing and sales tend to rocket in to upper management, that and geeks tend to lack social skills to survive in management.
The best way to make money in a company is everyone works together and make great products and everyone makes lots of money and then there is a lot to spread around, Microsoft used to be like this when the stock just kept going up and everyone got rich on it even if you got less than others. Google is like this now. That is a "dream" company, everything is going right and everyone is making a lot of money.
The problem sets in when it starts getting hard to make your killing. If all of a sudden stock options don't mean certain riches, raises are harder to come by and offshoring is in full swing political infighting and morale problems are just the inevitable result.
If there is a limited pool of wealth the motivated and greedy opt out of working together and team success, instead they start playing politics to insure they climb and if necessary they do it over the bodies of the people around them, most of whom end up laying on the floor with a knife in their back. Competition is sometimes a great motivator but when it reaches a certain pitch inside a company it stops being a positive and turns in to pure corrosion.
Most young geeks simply don't grasp that this game is even going on around them, and its why people in their office are driving expensive sports cars while they settle for a couple percent raise a year for 80 hour work weeks.
"the other "big" knock against being a math or science teacher is that your students will fight you every step of the way unless you luck out with advanced classes (calculus, AP chem, etc)."
I would guess that in India and China there is probably somewhat more enthusiasm for math and science but I wager they have the same problem there, most people have no aptitude or interest in math and science. It is hard to learn and it is a hard career, it usually doesn't pay well unless you invent something amazing or jump to management.
The reason China and India are dominating these fields is simply that they outnumber everyone else on the planet. They have something like 8X the popultion to draw from so it follows that they will find 8X the people with the aptitude for science and math.
Of course it helps that they actively test for and find all the people with the aptitude and ability and put them on an educational fast track to nurture them in to top flight engineers and scientists and the upper classes in India set it as a life goal to nail these tests and get in the best schools. It helps that they can see what truly grinding poverty is like, because India has it at levels unimagined in the U.S. Being in close proximity to grinding poverty with no safety net is a big motivator to excel.
In the U.S. our current educational initiative, "No child Left Behind" program ironically isn't designed to nurture the best and brightest like India's. It is to completely fixated on the worst, least motivated and dumbest which is insane and why it will fail to fix the problem the U.S. has producing world class scientists and engineers.
The Bush administration has cleverly required that public schools produce vast improvement in the lowest achievers in their ranks. If they fail which most inevitably will the goal is to mark them as failed schools, slash their funding, put them out of business, and give all their students vouchers for private schools. Will private schools succeed with all the under achievers. No. Chances are they wont even take them. They will only take the motivated and able, they will shun all the worst, and they will look like a raging success. The only problem is they will not only leave children behind, they will totally abandon all the worst students which was never an option public schools were given.
As with most programs the Bush administration names, the name "No Child Left Behind" is really the exact opposite of its ultimate goal. The goal is to get all the good students in private schools, preferably religious private schools with heavy doses of prayer and bible, and totally abandon all the students that private schools wont take.
Houston was the model for this insane program and its administrator Paige was rewarded with Education Secretary in Bush's first term. The cruel twist is the only reason Houston was such a raging success is they encouraged all the worst students to drop out and hid this fact by doctored their records to make them appear to be transfers. They succeeded in "No child left behind" by leaving dropouts behind all over the place and just lying. Unfortunately public education across the country is stuck in this scam now.
Fixing the U.S. education system is trivial to outline just impossible to do in the face of all the entrenched special interests. Do what India does:
- Identify all the best students intrested in science, math, computers and other in demand careers, and get them out of mediocre schools where they are dragged down and ridiculed for being above average academically. Put them in virtual classrooms if necessary, assuming boarding schools wont generally fly in this country and that they are scattered throughout the country surrounded by mediocre peers.
- Do what many other countries do and get people with no intelligence and no motivation out of classrooms and in to vocational programs where they can learn skills that interest them, and which they can handle.
- Get the violent and disruptive
The important point you left out is the source for Firefox is available so lots of people are constantly auditing it. It is a lot easier to find vulnerabilities auditing source than it is probing for them in a binary.
Now if Microsoft has a small army auditing IE's source and reporting everything they find then maybe the two are at parity. But, chances are the only vulnerabilities Microsoft admits are the ones found by 3rd party researchers probing the binary. The ones they find in their internal source audits they probably quietly fixed without telling any one.
These numbers are an apples to oranges comparison because Firefox, being in clear view of the public is reporting every vulnerability. Microsoft is probably only reporting the ones they have to because an outside auditor found it and will eventually announce it to get credit for their discovery.
It is a disadvantage for Firefox that its source is available because it makes it easier for a black hats to find exploits doing their own audits, but this is countered by the fact there are a lot of white hats doing the same thing. Its a race.