Malaria is one of the things protecting natural habitat from destruction in Africa.
It's all well and good to care about people but at some point you have to start taking responsibility for the environmental consequences of the additional population pressures you create.
I don't see Gates doing that. He's not doing anything to really increase the carrying capacity.
Both Dawkins and I meant it the same way Darwin meant it when he originated the phrase "artificial selection" to contrast it with "natural selection": intentional breeding toward desired characteristics.
During a speech at Stanford University about 10 years ago, Richard Dawkins felt it necessary to assert that there had never been any artificial selection applied to humans. The fact that slave owning societies have existed for several millenia -- in conjunction with the domestication of both plants and animals seemed to him unconvincing that such selection might have occurred to some extent.
Now I don't mean to just single out Dawkins here since this sort of idiocy pervades much of the humanist movement but it is precisely this sort of idiocy that leads to "debates" like the one over Intelligent Design.
Before the high priests of "science" try preaching at the preachers of other religions they should try getting their own house in order. I doubt they'll do this, because just as the Christian Right has their hidden agenda, so the humanists have their hidden agenda -- which is to deny responsibility for possible dysgenic influences of technological civilization.
They removed his faculty page from mit.edu but it is still avaiable at archive.org.
Re:And they're increasing H-1b's by 50% now.
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
Incidentally, this latest H1-B increase was apparently caused by a huge lobbying effort by Microsoft, and Congressional staffers have referred to it as the Bill Gates Act.
Don't you think this warrants a/. story?
Put something together and submit it. Let me know how the submission goes.
Re:Report sponsored by The Programmer's Guild
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
And does anybody REALLY have any doubt that guest worker programs are just ways to lower wages in a given industry?
Well apparently the law enforcement agencies have their doubts otherwise there would be a shitload of corporate executives doing time for fraud.
And they're increasing H-1b's by 50% now.
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
A spending measure approved on Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee will boost the number of H-1B visas for highly skilled guest workers by about half--from 65,000 to 95,000.
The LSPA of 1990 gave NASA the option of using the shuttle for missions requiring it but the testimony was clear that the direction should be toward missions designed to use commercial services and to promote the development of more commercial capacity.
When NASA initiates a new launch vehicle development program costing years and tens of billions of dollars without first specifying what payloads it wants to launch and when it wants to launch them it is a far cry from NASA ceasing manned launches 15 years ago.
NASA was given a chance to clean up its act with The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 which required them to procure all launch services from commercial sources.
They decided they wanted to continue to try to drive capital away from commercial launch services so they could continue to keep a strangle hold on access to space.
Time was when I would have supported NASA's science missions, supported by a commercial launch infrastructure. However, now its clear they just use their science missions as an excuse to block anyone from competing for their monopoly position.
There is absolutely nothing in the US Constitution that deals with "non-subsistence property rights".
Yes it does.
As I already pointed out, the government could simply not exist at all, and people would still have the "right" to "keep and bear arms", to "free speech" etc. All the bill of rights does is delineate areas of subsistence rights that the government is most likely to usurp once it is taken over by an oligarchy or tyrant. The entirety of the rest of the Constitution has to do with powers of the government to guarantee other rights. "Common defense and general welfare" can even be interpreted in a manner consistent with communism, and the citizens are still enjoying the property right of citizenship itself, which has benefits to which they are entitled as citizens.
The incursions of barbaricpastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).
The day Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, et al pay the cost of protecting their property rights is the day I'll consider respecting those property rights. Until then, everything they own is fair game.
Since the primary function of government is the protection of
non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for
those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point
here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from
confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are
subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence
properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is
sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property
rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools
of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes
sense to define "non-subsistence" in some dollar value of assets.
Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20
arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house
on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level,
they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own
above subsistence.
Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only
would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market
value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the
occupant.
Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue
neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed
at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted
from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in
civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the
ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient
times.
The FTC should have been requiring M$ to publish its API from the first day IBM shipped MSDOS with the 4.77MHz 8088 PC.
It should require M$ to publish all of its APIs now and verify that all M$ applications are written to those published APIs. Moreover, it should require that all communications between the application development portion of M$ and the operating system portion of M$ are public domain.
If you're going to make individual programmers liable then you should also make corporations liable because corporations are legal persons as well. Legal persons are called "legal" precisely because they can be sued. Indeed the whole purporse of the creation of the corporation originally was to have a place where liability for engineering projects could be absorbed from individual investors. So I agree and disagree with both Schmidt and Wired' magazine's Bruce Schneier, the former focusing on persons and the latter focusing on corporations.
But the real source of the problem here isn't with the programmers or vendors of software. The real problem is the protected nature of the insurance industry. The insurance industry is structured to prevent competition from technically savvy upstarts that would be capable of underwriting warranties. Consumers aren't averse to signing end user license agreements with strong warranties. Nor are vendors averse to consulting contracts where the consultant's code quality is underwritten and guaranteed. The problem is basically the way capital is concentrated by the laws of the society. Those laws determine what kind of people have decision-making authority. Right now those laws are biased toward subsidizing wealth concentration which means we're systematically taking wealth out of the hands of the technically savvy and giving it to those who are wealthy.
The result is all manner of market failures impacting the high tech industry, including a failure of insurance underwriting for software.
What with all the hype about anything that we used to call "chemistry" or perhaps more precisely "surface chemistry" being portrayed as "nanotechnology", its refreshing to see something that actually fills the bill being demonstrated.
And it demonstrates the problems predicted by skeptics: The system had to be heated to the point that the carbon would debond from the gold so it could roll. I suspect it was a very bumpy roll. This sort of problem isn't likely to go away easily.
Yes, I've been on reservations and indeed once visited Chief Dan Evanheema, the Hopi elder, when he was near death. I did so precisely because he was a living link to the authentic heritage of the Hopi made possible by the reservation system. You yourself point out, entirely ignoring my point about the value of reservations, that the problem isn't "loss of land" but "rather the assimilation with regular Chinese". That's my entire point. The US system of reservations, for all their inadequacies as a refuge from outside influences, has provided far better protections than are being afforded the Tibetans in Tibet. The main thing that is protecting Tibetans in diaspora is the social status afforded them, which allows the young people to be proud of their identity and respect those who most embody its living traditions but that is only good so long as the Tibetan cause is a popular cause. They need and are entitled to as a basic human right -- their own territory.
First of all, the population of north Amerindians is the same as it was at the introduction of smallpox by the Spanish. They recovered their numbers because:
The Protestant settlers increased the carrying capacity of the land through agricultural techniques.
The system of reservations allows the portions of their population that would otherwise have lost their identity to retain their identity.
Sure, Tibet is an entire country but the real question is:
Do Tibetans have any territory set aside exclusively for them the way the US set aside reservations?
Is the increase in carrying capacity being shared in a way that keeps the number of Tibetans from dwindling along with their identity?
When the Chinese come in and start appointing reincarnations of Tibentan religious authorities, it is pretty obvious they are treating the Tibetans worse than the Inuit are being treated by the US authorities.
If there is any payoff to the destruction of US industrial might by moving it to China, their greater space activity is it. They are to be congratulated for a positive application of their growth and I hope they put the US to shame for the failure of its pioneer heritage. But the railroad, for all of its engineering prowess, is just another nail in the coffin of Tibetan self-determination. There are things more important than economic development.
The basic problem is with the term "fuel". This doesn't do anything about energy efficiency of fuel use. It merely does something about "fuel" as raw reaction mass. You still have to get the energy into the reaction mass somehow and for that you don't have any good solutions other than the existing solutions. It remains the bottleneck for most all space activities.
...When I left Sun to go to NeXT, I thought Objective-C was the coolest thing since sliced bread, and I hated C++. So, naturally when I stayed to start the (eventually) Java project, Obj-C had a big influence. James Gosling, being much older than I was, he had lots of experience with SmallTalk and Simula68, which we also borrowed from liberally.
The other influence, was that we had lots of friends working at NeXT at the time, whose faith in the black cube was flagging. Bruce Martin was working on the NeXTStep 486 port, Peter King, Mike Demoney, and John Seamons were working on the mysterious (and never shipped) NRW (NeXT RISC Workstation, 88110???). They all joined us in late '92 - early '93 after we had written the first version of Oak. I'm pretty sure that Java's 'interface' is a direct rip-off of Obj-C's 'protocol' which was largely designed by these ex-NeXT'ers... Many of those strange primitive wrapper classes, like Integer and Number came from Lee Boynton, one of the early NeXT Obj-C class library guys who hated 'int' and 'float' types.
Another interesting side-note, (so as not to break any rules on my first [and last]-ever posting to comp.sys.newton), John Seamons, (who happened to be Andy Bechtolsheim's roommate at Stanford and largely reponsible for the first ever port of Unix to the SUN-0) once did a port of Oak (Java) to the Newton. We were in the midst of trying to do a deal with 3DO to run as their OS/API, and we didn't have any 3DO dev systems on hand, so John took apart an Apple Newton 100 and wired it up to a bunch of logic analyzers, reverse engineered the interfaces and actually got some of the original Star7 demo to run on this machine. After the 3DO deal tubed, I think most of the code was lost to history... last I heard, John was out in Aspen working for wnj, so you never know.
Sigh... we sure knew how to have fun in those days...
Things are starting to recover a bit with "AJAX" due to Javascript's more dynamic character. However, Gates can't get the garbage collector to work properly with IE for some reason so it can't be used as an application platform. Whether this is deliberate or not it certainly has helped protect his monopoly position by preventing web browsers from being becoming a viable cross-OS platform for network service applications. We'll have to wait and see if Ray Ozzie fixes the garbage collector before passing judgement. Thus far, it appears IE7 beta's garbage collector is still shit.
While Jobs had his failure of vision in not pursing a hardware stack machine similar to Moore's Tesler also should have pushed back on Jobs harder to get some form of Smalltalk onto the Lisa even with the Motorola chip. The reason is that there are optimization techniques involving type inferencing and dynamic code generation that had been researched and to some extent exploited at PARC, and have certainly become a mainstay of the JVM today. If the software engineering resources that were to be invested in programming an abortion like Object Pascal had been instead invested in the optimization technologies already researched it is likely the Motorola chip could have performed adequately and the software industry wouldn't have been set back more than decade.
I don't mean to single Jobs out here since, of course, Gates is the guy who ultimately defected against civilization to become its richest man.
Here is the base message originating the "Jobs Didn't Get It" exchange:
When Jobs brought technology in from Xerox PARC, and Adobe, he had the keys to the kingdom handed to him on a silver platter:
1) A tokenized Forth graphics engine.
2) Smalltalk.
The Forth graphics engine was originally intended to grow from a programmable replacement of the NAPLPS videotex graphics protocol, into a silicon implementation of a stack machine upon which byte codes, compiled from Smalltalk would be executed. At least that's the direction in which I had hoped to see the Viewtron videotex terminal evolve when I originated the dynamically downloaded tokenized Forth graphics protocol as a replacement for NAPLPS in 1981 and discussed these ideas with the folks at Xerox PARC prior to the genesis of Postscript and Lisa.
If Charles Moore could produce an economical 10MIPS 16 bit Forth engine on a 10K ECL gate array on virtually zero bucks back then, why couldn't Jobs with all his resources produce a silicon Postscript engine with power enough to execute Smalltalk?
Somehow a Forth interpreter made it into the first Mac, as did Postscript, but Smalltalk just didn't.
The Motorola 68000 family just didn't have the power. It may have been better than the Intel 86 family, but that really isn't saying much, now is it?
Gutting programmer effectiveness and routing new programmers
into BASIC by a factor of at least 10 while maintaining, and even
slightly improving the GUI is a great example of "not getting it". You
can say OOP would become important in a few years and I can say the
windowing GUI would become important in a few years with or without
Jobs. But the revolution had already occured at PARC (and if you're
focused on the mouse environment -- even a decade earlier at SRI which
is where PARC, and indeed PLATO with its touch panel,
got their inspiration -- I remember sitting in meetings at CERL/PLATO
viewing the films of SRI's research in 1974 as part of PLATO's
computer-based conferencing project).
DOS applications were starting
to pick up on it despite the horrid CGA they had to work with initially
-- and it wasn't because Jobs did the Mac. The Windowing GUI was
inevitable and obvious to people with money as well as most personal
computer programmers, especially once Tesler had already popularized it
with his 1981 Byte magazine article.
Dynamic, late-binding programming environments that highly leverage the
sparse nerd matrix out there -- like Smalltalk, Python, etc. -- are,
however _still_ struggling to make it past the concrete barriers Jobs
poured into the OO culture with the Mac.
When Jobs passed up
Smalltalk for Object Pascal, and then again, with Next, passed up
Smalltalk for Objective C, he set a pattern that continues to this day
when Sun passed up that sun-of-Smalltalk, Self and went with that son-of-Objective-C, Java.
Gutting the superstructure of technology while maintaining appearances isn't leadership.
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It's all well and good to care about people but at some point you have to start taking responsibility for the environmental consequences of the additional population pressures you create.
I don't see Gates doing that. He's not doing anything to really increase the carrying capacity.
Both Dawkins and I meant it the same way Darwin meant it when he originated the phrase "artificial selection" to contrast it with "natural selection": intentional breeding toward desired characteristics.
Now I don't mean to just single out Dawkins here since this sort of idiocy pervades much of the humanist movement but it is precisely this sort of idiocy that leads to "debates" like the one over Intelligent Design.
Before the high priests of "science" try preaching at the preachers of other religions they should try getting their own house in order. I doubt they'll do this, because just as the Christian Right has their hidden agenda, so the humanists have their hidden agenda -- which is to deny responsibility for possible dysgenic influences of technological civilization.
They removed his faculty page from mit.edu but it is still avaiable at archive.org.
Don't you think this warrants a /. story?
Put something together and submit it. Let me know how the submission goes.
Well apparently the law enforcement agencies have their doubts otherwise there would be a shitload of corporate executives doing time for fraud.
When NASA initiates a new launch vehicle development program costing years and tens of billions of dollars without first specifying what payloads it wants to launch and when it wants to launch them it is a far cry from NASA ceasing manned launches 15 years ago.
They decided they wanted to continue to try to drive capital away from commercial launch services so they could continue to keep a strangle hold on access to space.
Time was when I would have supported NASA's science missions, supported by a commercial launch infrastructure. However, now its clear they just use their science missions as an excuse to block anyone from competing for their monopoly position.
Yes it does.
As I already pointed out, the government could simply not exist at all, and people would still have the "right" to "keep and bear arms", to "free speech" etc. All the bill of rights does is delineate areas of subsistence rights that the government is most likely to usurp once it is taken over by an oligarchy or tyrant. The entirety of the rest of the Constitution has to do with powers of the government to guarantee other rights. "Common defense and general welfare" can even be interpreted in a manner consistent with communism, and the citizens are still enjoying the property right of citizenship itself, which has benefits to which they are entitled as citizens.
Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "non-subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
- The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
- The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
- The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
- Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20
arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house
on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.
Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.
It should require M$ to publish all of its APIs now and verify that all M$ applications are written to those published APIs. Moreover, it should require that all communications between the application development portion of M$ and the operating system portion of M$ are public domain.
But the real source of the problem here isn't with the programmers or vendors of software. The real problem is the protected nature of the insurance industry. The insurance industry is structured to prevent competition from technically savvy upstarts that would be capable of underwriting warranties. Consumers aren't averse to signing end user license agreements with strong warranties. Nor are vendors averse to consulting contracts where the consultant's code quality is underwritten and guaranteed. The problem is basically the way capital is concentrated by the laws of the society. Those laws determine what kind of people have decision-making authority. Right now those laws are biased toward subsidizing wealth concentration which means we're systematically taking wealth out of the hands of the technically savvy and giving it to those who are wealthy.
The result is all manner of market failures impacting the high tech industry, including a failure of insurance underwriting for software.
And it demonstrates the problems predicted by skeptics: The system had to be heated to the point that the carbon would debond from the gold so it could roll. I suspect it was a very bumpy roll. This sort of problem isn't likely to go away easily.
Yes, I've been on reservations and indeed once visited Chief Dan Evanheema, the Hopi elder, when he was near death. I did so precisely because he was a living link to the authentic heritage of the Hopi made possible by the reservation system. You yourself point out, entirely ignoring my point about the value of reservations, that the problem isn't "loss of land" but "rather the assimilation with regular Chinese". That's my entire point. The US system of reservations, for all their inadequacies as a refuge from outside influences, has provided far better protections than are being afforded the Tibetans in Tibet. The main thing that is protecting Tibetans in diaspora is the social status afforded them, which allows the young people to be proud of their identity and respect those who most embody its living traditions but that is only good so long as the Tibetan cause is a popular cause. They need and are entitled to as a basic human right -- their own territory.
Sure, Tibet is an entire country but the real question is:
When the Chinese come in and start appointing reincarnations of Tibentan religious authorities, it is pretty obvious they are treating the Tibetans worse than the Inuit are being treated by the US authorities.
If there is any payoff to the destruction of US industrial might by moving it to China, their greater space activity is it. They are to be congratulated for a positive application of their growth and I hope they put the US to shame for the failure of its pioneer heritage. But the railroad, for all of its engineering prowess, is just another nail in the coffin of Tibetan self-determination. There are things more important than economic development.
The basic problem is with the term "fuel". This doesn't do anything about energy efficiency of fuel use. It merely does something about "fuel" as raw reaction mass. You still have to get the energy into the reaction mass somehow and for that you don't have any good solutions other than the existing solutions. It remains the bottleneck for most all space activities.
Things are starting to recover a bit with "AJAX" due to Javascript's more dynamic character. However, Gates can't get the garbage collector to work properly with IE for some reason so it can't be used as an application platform. Whether this is deliberate or not it certainly has helped protect his monopoly position by preventing web browsers from being becoming a viable cross-OS platform for network service applications. We'll have to wait and see if Ray Ozzie fixes the garbage collector before passing judgement. Thus far, it appears IE7 beta's garbage collector is still shit.
I don't mean to single Jobs out here since, of course, Gates is the guy who ultimately defected against civilization to become its richest man.
When Jobs brought technology in from Xerox PARC, and Adobe, he had the keys to the kingdom handed to him on a silver platter:
1) A tokenized Forth graphics engine.
2) Smalltalk.
The Forth graphics engine was originally intended to grow from a programmable replacement of the NAPLPS videotex graphics protocol, into a silicon implementation of a stack machine upon which byte codes, compiled from Smalltalk would be executed. At least that's the direction in which I had hoped to see the Viewtron videotex terminal evolve when I originated the dynamically downloaded tokenized Forth graphics protocol as a replacement for NAPLPS in 1981 and discussed these ideas with the folks at Xerox PARC prior to the genesis of Postscript and Lisa.
If Charles Moore could produce an economical 10MIPS 16 bit Forth engine on a 10K ECL gate array on virtually zero bucks back then, why couldn't Jobs with all his resources produce a silicon Postscript engine with power enough to execute Smalltalk?
Somehow a Forth interpreter made it into the first Mac, as did Postscript, but Smalltalk just didn't.
The Motorola 68000 family just didn't have the power. It may have been better than the Intel 86 family, but that really isn't saying much, now is it?
Gutting programmer effectiveness and routing new programmers into BASIC by a factor of at least 10 while maintaining, and even slightly improving the GUI is a great example of "not getting it". You can say OOP would become important in a few years and I can say the windowing GUI would become important in a few years with or without Jobs. But the revolution had already occured at PARC (and if you're focused on the mouse environment -- even a decade earlier at SRI which is where PARC, and indeed PLATO with its touch panel, got their inspiration -- I remember sitting in meetings at CERL/PLATO viewing the films of SRI's research in 1974 as part of PLATO's computer-based conferencing project).
DOS applications were starting to pick up on it despite the horrid CGA they had to work with initially -- and it wasn't because Jobs did the Mac. The Windowing GUI was inevitable and obvious to people with money as well as most personal computer programmers, especially once Tesler had already popularized it with his 1981 Byte magazine article.
Dynamic, late-binding programming environments that highly leverage the sparse nerd matrix out there -- like Smalltalk, Python, etc. -- are, however _still_ struggling to make it past the concrete barriers Jobs poured into the OO culture with the Mac.
When Jobs passed up Smalltalk for Object Pascal, and then again, with Next, passed up Smalltalk for Objective C, he set a pattern that continues to this day when Sun passed up that sun-of-Smalltalk, Self and went with that son-of-Objective-C, Java.
Gutting the superstructure of technology while maintaining appearances isn't leadership.