All of the CA winners were apparently from India originally. Look at the TopCoders and tell me if you see one guy who looks like he is from India (at least originally).
Now it might make sense that there was a somewhat different distribution for the two contests but be real... this demands an explanation.
One of the areas where this stuff will become very useful is rocket engines. High thermal conductivity at a high specific strength is a rocket scientist's classic "unobtanium".
Through genetic selection and
modification, we will be soon be able to transform human
nature, for better . . . or worse.
Some find this exciting. I find it
mostly alarming.
The good news: we still have time to
figure out what the physical, psychological, and social
impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be -
by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.
Genetic engineering, and associated
technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two
new books.
Microsoft programmer
Ramez Naam, author of
More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological
Enhancement, never seems to have met an
idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't
like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't
share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of
fact in his book saps confidence in his overall
reliability.
(The inaptly named Joy strikes me
as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic
catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense
to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for
two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine,
from which, if the worst were to happen, they could
eventually re-emerge like
Noah's family to repopulate the planet.)
What Naam and Garreau can agree
upon is that the post-human age will be here
Real Soon Now.
I'm not so certain.
Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure
that that it's time to start getting serious about
whether we want it or not.
The situation oddly resembles the
political impact of immigration. When I first started
writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that
the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that
it was political suicide to try to cut back on
immigration. Yet closer study showed this was
far from true.
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other
operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could
have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of
them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the
owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates
of laissez-faire capitalism, as
Milton
Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax
revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to
the abandonment of the principles of Henry George
-- Gates was given state support as he imposed a
horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a
consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
So now he, like the rest of the loons running the software
industry, think having more fingers writing more code is the way to
create good code -- and he's salivating over the virtually endless
supply of fingers that can type out so many lines of code that no one
will be able to figure out what is going on with the damn OS anymore.
Rent-seeking is a really old game so we should be unsurprized when old world cultures, much more specialized at this sort of thing, smell a nice free-from-risk annuity stream such as the one Gates has and, via the Boeing 747's of the world, and descend upon it like flies laying their eggs in shit.
The result is almost any aspect of that annuity stream will be sucked up and sent overseas (or captured via more robust ethnic nepotism of the older cultures as they rip through the naively individualistic cultures of the new world).
The lesson for Linux is that the government subsidizes rent-seekers so if it wants to benefit from such an annuity stream in such a way that it isn't simply captured by the most sociopathic culture out there -- it must do 2 things:
It must find a niche in a new hardware/software regime that makes it a de facto standard.
It must make that de facto standard be tied to nontradable services (and if possible goods but this is less critical for subsistences of the technologists that are from high-cost of family formation societies).
One opportunity to do this is to come up with a different business model for home computing based on the opportunity presented by broadband deployment.
The business model basically involves taking advantage of the fact that most people just want a single unified service where they don't have to worry about their computer/broadband connection so much. The opportunity here is to take something like a wireless mesh solution for Linux and deploy it via a good desktop, easily maintained Linux distro like Ubuntu. Then provide computer/broadband service modeled on an HMO (Information Service Maintanence Organization?) providing some minimal co-pay for service calls. The mesh can suck up bandwidth from virtually any source but the ISMO could provide a feed from the annuity stream.
Given the jobs crunch there are more than enough technologists out there who are under-employed who could use a subsistence, non-tradable service job.
arguing that representatives should essentially collate the votes of their voters and follow them...there are quite reasonable grounds for not having representatives do this.
So you're saying the outcome of proxy voting is essentially the same as direct democracy.
But then you say:
you still see overly cozy relationships between board members and executives, for instance, and it's very rare for a shareholder revolt to actually succeed. Hence boards, though nominally reflective of their shareholders, not infrequently act against shareholder interest in such things as approving excessive compensation for CEOs and similar positions.
So then you are saying that proxy voting has all the bad characteristics of representative voting and none of the good characteristics of participatory democracy.
The Electoral Corruption Killer (TECK) is a publicly verifiable proxy voting system
designed to stop the on-going betrayals of the public by Congress such as occurred
with the 1998 expansion of H-1b visas when Congress
overwhelmingly
opposed the will of 82% of the public, at the behest of hundreds of
millions of dollars of campaign contributions from industry lobbies.
Under TECK, constituents contact their local office and, with
call-back or in-person authentication, vote for bills and/or proxy
their votes for bills before congress or state legislatures. Their
representative is elected on the Open Proxy Party's political platform
which has one plank: Their representative will vote the way the
constituents say via their open proxies.
TECK is the seed technology for what is to become the US third-party
that succeeds in dramatically decentralizing, reducing and changing
politics for the better:
The Open Proxy Party.
The Open Proxy Party's honesty is assured in the most obvious manner
imaginable: everyone can see how everyone is voting at any point in
time. The current votes and proxies are published on a web page
generated by an open-source computer program. Currently this program
consists of around 120
lines of Perl code (not counting preformatted
text like this) to tally and present the proxies for the public.
Electoral corruption is an opportunity for Open Proxy candidates to
win against incumbents. Electoral corruption has alienated the vast
majority of the voters from the political process. With foreign labor
displacing hundreds of thousands of middle aged technical workers in
the United States, who have now redispersed to lower-cost-of-living
districts, there is a pool of potential candidates who are more than
capable of operating the TECK websites, more than motivated to clean up
the electoral process and more than available to work for the modest
salaries paid to representatives in State legislatures. Moreover, the
majority of voters are more than ready for a reform of the political
process.
Installation
Just for the heck of it you might have a campaign kick-off party and
invite all the un/der-employed computer people you can find to join the
fun of doing the TECK installation. An under-employed live band with
pot-luck can't hurt either and will keep expenses down.
Set
up a website for your future office. This website must be able to run
Perl CGI scripts that require as much as a CPU second on a modern
processor and 100M of RAM. This website will be used only for
publishing the current votes and proxies -- not for data entry.
Obtain
a dedicated computer system with an amount of RAM at least equal to 32M
plus 1K for each voter in your district. This system will be used only
for data-entry.
Copy
the CGI script(s) to the CGI directory of your data-entry system.
Make
the database writable for the data-entry system: To do so, in the CGI
directory where it is installed, execute the shell command: 'touch
proxy_writable'
The CGI
directory must be writable by the web server because the database is
automatically created and stored there.
Start
entering votes and proxies for the attendees of the party, just to
demonstrate how it works. (It is recommended that voter-ids be 10-digit
phone numbers so they correspond to their call-back numbers.)
You may want to send your guests home with a campaign statement
along the following lines:
"82% of the public opposed expansion of the H-1b visa
Since the fear is that somehow people are going to be able to put together information that lets them commit terrorist acts there is no reason to let people have any of the equipment that lets them commit terrorist acts. Perhaps the simplest solution is to lobotomize everyone so no one can think.
Dissidents frequently hate their oppressors. You are attempting to assist these haters. You should be put into prison and raped by ethnic gangs until you are cured of your sympathies for hate groups.
The evidence is that there is a runaway positive feedback loop running at the federal level in which those who identify with and participate in the federal system are able to, by virtue of the resources they acquire from the rest of the country, more effectively influence the policies the federal government imposes on the rest of the country.
This positive feedback system has only one outcome.
There is no constitutional requirement that the people of the US be subjected to international human traffic. There _is_ a constitutional requirement that the people of the US be free from the sort of subjugation implied by a national security state that views residents of the US with so much suspicion that they must prove their citizenship.
Hasn't Gates done enough damage with his shit software without creating yet another bad software foundation for the industry to adapt to? I mean his thing about waiting for the hardware to catch up with his "powerful software" is just the same old crap of trying to make things work better by making things more complicated.
It reminds me of how NASA was always so proud of the fact that the Space Shuttle is "the most complicated machine ever built by mankind".
If the guvvies didn't worship international human traffic as a sacred cow (to which we would willingly sacrifice civilization itself in the event of a serious pandemic) the "national id card" would never have become an issue.
Fundamentally, there is no constitutional requirement that the people of the US be subjected to international human traffic. There _is_ a constitutional requirement that the people of the US be free from the sort of subjugation implied by a national security state that views residents of the US with so much suspicion that they must prove their citizenship.
Anyone who's looked at what Microsoft has tried to do in the area of natural language interfaces can see they are completely out to lunch. They may not be as bad as Cyc, but really that is hardly a compliment.
They'll end up with another one of those cutsey icons that pops up and winks at you when you tell it to get the fuck out of your face.
First of all, the reason the commies lost the moon race to the US was because the US's civilian space program was being run as though its life depended on success -- which it did. This was more akin to a military conflict where bureaucratic life or death could ensue. Moreover, the NASA bureaucracy was very young and was still drawing on a relatively uncorrupted private sector for its strength to build the Apollo era infrastructure.
Secondly, once we got past the destruction of the resource of private sector strength by the Apollo program, the Soviets were spending far less money on their space program than the US.
You can try to accent the value of planetary probes and discounte the value of manned spaceflight but the end result is simply an argument over priorities.
The Soviets vastly outstripped the US in terms of manned spaceflight and launch vehicle economy.
If there is anywhere the government is justified in owning and operating space transportation systems, it is the military, not civilian, space programs. Military infrastructure needs to be independent of potential conflicts with suppliers of key equipment and services and in civilian systems it is frequently difficult to ferret out exactly what countries a particular system is critically dependent on (ie: how hard would it be to replace the parts/services if they were suddenly shut off due to conflict with a country?).
However, we see the Air Force has historically been the first to promote use of commercial launch services over governmentally owned and operated launch services. How ironic...
But there is a good explanation:
The reason the Soviet space program was so much more efficient than the US space program was because both space programs were run as commie bureaucracies, and the Soviets were better at being commies than the US. For example, the Soviets would frequently take corrupt bureaucrats out and shoot them in the parking lot -- literally. This is what it takes to get commies to do their jobs. NASA commies frequently deserved to be taken out and shot but none ever were. The Air Force knew it had to fly missions for national security and that people on the ground would die if those missions were not flown. So when NASA tried to get Congress to force the Air Force to use its Shuttle infrastructure for all of its mission-critical launches, the Air Force resisted. They mothballed the Vandenberg Shuttle launch complex as soon as they could and reinstated use of the far more commercially produced Titan launch vehicle as soon as they could after the Challenger blew up.
Fundamentally the Air Force knew they lived in a society with a commie public sector and was worse at being commies than the Soviet sector precisely because the US public sector commies had a strong private sector to leach off of. This is, by the way, one of the reasons multinationalism for private companies is such a severe national security risk: the private sector is the sector that actuall works and must be relied upon for national security.
there is no danger of NASA killing the human spirit; only irresolute citzens can accomplish that.
You're half wrong because of the fact that government regulation can kill even the most resolute investment in private space launch capability.
As to the other half, I'll say that at the end of my political activism, I held your belief -- that NASA had demonstrated so clearly its incompetence that there really was no problem with NASA competing with the private sector. The question then became:
Why is private capital so "irresolute"?
to use your qualifier.
Its then that I came to understand the structural problem with modern capitalism: capital welfare.
Basically, capital concentrations are given free protection by the government while capital creation is taxed. That's when I wrote up my last legislative proposal, a net asset tax with citizen's dividend to replace other taxes and government programs -- passing it around for a feedback from various interest groups.
The reaction convinced me that there was no hope, short of the collapse of civilization, or pioneering escape from socioeconomic ossification, of correcting the character flaw of investors created by capital welfare. That left just one option: Try to get NASA to stop scaring off character-flawed capital concentrations created by entrenched economic policy.
The fact that there are capital concentrations such as Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, et al, now providing funding for private spece activities is significant consolation but it is far from enough to counter the damage caused by capital welfare. We're way behind the curve.
Malcolm Baldridge established the Office of Commercial Space in response to
difficulties he had with NASA accepting private overtures at a Commercially Developed Space Facility (CDSF) aka the Industrial Space Facility (ISF)
-- a man-tended orbital laboratory, entirely
financed by private capital -- which would have been in orbit in the
late 1980s if NASA had merely signed on as an "anchor tenant" --
procuring space on the laboratory as a customer -- as would have been
allowed by Reagan policy and later law.
NASA won't let anyone else develop privately created technologies so how do you think Bigelow was supposed to get his hands on the inflatable space station technology?
NASA has to give token support to companies like Bigelowe's and companies like Bigelowe's have to maintain a friendly relationship with NASA. But when NASA gets a chance to stab them in the back due to widespread corrupt views such as you espouse here -- eg: characterizing those who point out ethical conflicts of interest and actual lapses among the powerful and unaccountable as "conspiracy theorists" (connotation: insane) -- they very likely do it. You don't understand that the effect of this likelihood is to drive private capital out since it is already dealing with enough technical risk and any addition political risk renders the investment nonviable. Or perhaps you do understand and you are working for NASA.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice, please that one of the winning CA teams was in New York and they were originally from India.
There are lots of Indian programmers in the US and none are Topcoders.
The top 5 top coders country of residence:
Now it might make sense that there was a somewhat different distribution for the two contests but be real... this demands an explanation.
One of the areas where this stuff will become very useful is rocket engines. High thermal conductivity at a high specific strength is a rocket scientist's classic "unobtanium".
If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"?
By Steve Sailer
Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.
Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.
The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.
The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.
Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two new books.
Microsoft programmer Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement , never seems to have met an idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his overall reliability.
In contrast, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau - known to VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative The Nine Nations Of North America - can't seem to make up his mind in his upcoming Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.
Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who fears that genetically manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity.
(The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like Noah's family to repopulate the planet.)
What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will be here Real Soon Now.
I'm not so certain. Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure that that it's time to start getting serious about whether we want it or not.
The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration. When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study showed this was far from true.
For example, in the overall
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, as Milton Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
So now he, like the rest of the loons running the software industry, think having more fingers writing more code is the way to create good code -- and he's salivating over the virtually endless supply of fingers that can type out so many lines of code that no one will be able to figure out what is going on with the damn OS anymore.
Rent-seeking is a really old game so we should be unsurprized when old world cultures, much more specialized at this sort of thing, smell a nice free-from-risk annuity stream such as the one Gates has and, via the Boeing 747's of the world, and descend upon it like flies laying their eggs in shit.
The result is almost any aspect of that annuity stream will be sucked up and sent overseas (or captured via more robust ethnic nepotism of the older cultures as they rip through the naively individualistic cultures of the new world).
The lesson for Linux is that the government subsidizes rent-seekers so if it wants to benefit from such an annuity stream in such a way that it isn't simply captured by the most sociopathic culture out there -- it must do 2 things:
One opportunity to do this is to come up with a different business model for home computing based on the opportunity presented by broadband deployment.
The business model basically involves taking advantage of the fact that most people just want a single unified service where they don't have to worry about their computer/broadband connection so much. The opportunity here is to take something like a wireless mesh solution for Linux and deploy it via a good desktop, easily maintained Linux distro like Ubuntu. Then provide computer/broadband service modeled on an HMO (Information Service Maintanence Organization?) providing some minimal co-pay for service calls. The mesh can suck up bandwidth from virtually any source but the ISMO could provide a feed from the annuity stream.
Given the jobs crunch there are more than enough technologists out there who are under-employed who could use a subsistence, non-tradable service job.
So you're saying the outcome of proxy voting is essentially the same as direct democracy.
But then you say: you still see overly cozy relationships between board members and executives, for instance, and it's very rare for a shareholder revolt to actually succeed. Hence boards, though nominally reflective of their shareholders, not infrequently act against shareholder interest in such things as approving excessive compensation for CEOs and similar positions.
So then you are saying that proxy voting has all the bad characteristics of representative voting and none of the good characteristics of participatory democracy.
Sorry, the bogometer just pegged.
Come on, you didn't even bother to read the post.
You missed the point which is that you can do this without changing any laws.
Under TECK, constituents contact their local office and, with call-back or in-person authentication, vote for bills and/or proxy their votes for bills before congress or state legislatures. Their representative is elected on the Open Proxy Party's political platform which has one plank: Their representative will vote the way the constituents say via their open proxies.
TECK is the seed technology for what is to become the US third-party that succeeds in dramatically decentralizing, reducing and changing politics for the better:
The Open Proxy Party.
The Open Proxy Party's honesty is assured in the most obvious manner imaginable: everyone can see how everyone is voting at any point in time. The current votes and proxies are published on a web page generated by an open-source computer program. Currently this program consists of around 120 lines of Perl code (not counting preformatted text like this) to tally and present the proxies for the public.
Electoral corruption is an opportunity for Open Proxy candidates to win against incumbents. Electoral corruption has alienated the vast majority of the voters from the political process. With foreign labor displacing hundreds of thousands of middle aged technical workers in the United States, who have now redispersed to lower-cost-of-living districts, there is a pool of potential candidates who are more than capable of operating the TECK websites, more than motivated to clean up the electoral process and more than available to work for the modest salaries paid to representatives in State legislatures. Moreover, the majority of voters are more than ready for a reform of the political process.
Installation
Just for the heck of it you might have a campaign kick-off party and invite all the un/der-employed computer people you can find to join the fun of doing the TECK installation. An under-employed live band with pot-luck can't hurt either and will keep expenses down.
You may want to send your guests home with a campaign statement along the following lines:
Since the fear is that somehow people are going to be able to put together information that lets them commit terrorist acts there is no reason to let people have any of the equipment that lets them commit terrorist acts. Perhaps the simplest solution is to lobotomize everyone so no one can think.
Dissidents frequently hate their oppressors. You are attempting to assist these haters. You should be put into prison and raped by ethnic gangs until you are cured of your sympathies for hate groups.
Boy! Where do I buy them? How much?
The Constitution obviously has failed to protect the posterity of the framers. Its time to revisit the whole idea of the United States.
This positive feedback system has only one outcome.
Why should Johnny bother to learn to program when he can't make a living doing it?
Since the European Union may be giving up the acronym soon maybe it is time for a North American Treaty Organization.
There is no constitutional requirement that the people of the US be subjected to international human traffic. There _is_ a constitutional requirement that the people of the US be free from the sort of subjugation implied by a national security state that views residents of the US with so much suspicion that they must prove their citizenship.
It reminds me of how NASA was always so proud of the fact that the Space Shuttle is "the most complicated machine ever built by mankind".
Fundamentally, there is no constitutional requirement that the people of the US be subjected to international human traffic. There _is_ a constitutional requirement that the people of the US be free from the sort of subjugation implied by a national security state that views residents of the US with so much suspicion that they must prove their citizenship.
They'll end up with another one of those cutsey icons that pops up and winks at you when you tell it to get the fuck out of your face.
Secondly, once we got past the destruction of the resource of private sector strength by the Apollo program, the Soviets were spending far less money on their space program than the US.
You can try to accent the value of planetary probes and discounte the value of manned spaceflight but the end result is simply an argument over priorities.
The Soviets vastly outstripped the US in terms of manned spaceflight and launch vehicle economy.
However, we see the Air Force has historically been the first to promote use of commercial launch services over governmentally owned and operated launch services. How ironic...
But there is a good explanation:
The reason the Soviet space program was so much more efficient than the US space program was because both space programs were run as commie bureaucracies, and the Soviets were better at being commies than the US. For example, the Soviets would frequently take corrupt bureaucrats out and shoot them in the parking lot -- literally. This is what it takes to get commies to do their jobs. NASA commies frequently deserved to be taken out and shot but none ever were. The Air Force knew it had to fly missions for national security and that people on the ground would die if those missions were not flown. So when NASA tried to get Congress to force the Air Force to use its Shuttle infrastructure for all of its mission-critical launches, the Air Force resisted. They mothballed the Vandenberg Shuttle launch complex as soon as they could and reinstated use of the far more commercially produced Titan launch vehicle as soon as they could after the Challenger blew up.
Fundamentally the Air Force knew they lived in a society with a commie public sector and was worse at being commies than the Soviet sector precisely because the US public sector commies had a strong private sector to leach off of. This is, by the way, one of the reasons multinationalism for private companies is such a severe national security risk: the private sector is the sector that actuall works and must be relied upon for national security.
You're half wrong because of the fact that government regulation can kill even the most resolute investment in private space launch capability.
As to the other half, I'll say that at the end of my political activism, I held your belief -- that NASA had demonstrated so clearly its incompetence that there really was no problem with NASA competing with the private sector. The question then became:
to use your qualifier.Its then that I came to understand the structural problem with modern capitalism: capital welfare.
Basically, capital concentrations are given free protection by the government while capital creation is taxed. That's when I wrote up my last legislative proposal, a net asset tax with citizen's dividend to replace other taxes and government programs -- passing it around for a feedback from various interest groups.
The reaction convinced me that there was no hope, short of the collapse of civilization, or pioneering escape from socioeconomic ossification, of correcting the character flaw of investors created by capital welfare. That left just one option: Try to get NASA to stop scaring off character-flawed capital concentrations created by entrenched economic policy.
The fact that there are capital concentrations such as Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, et al, now providing funding for private spece activities is significant consolation but it is far from enough to counter the damage caused by capital welfare. We're way behind the curve.
NASA won't let anyone else develop privately created technologies so how do you think Bigelow was supposed to get his hands on the inflatable space station technology?
NASA has to give token support to companies like Bigelowe's and companies like Bigelowe's have to maintain a friendly relationship with NASA. But when NASA gets a chance to stab them in the back due to widespread corrupt views such as you espouse here -- eg: characterizing those who point out ethical conflicts of interest and actual lapses among the powerful and unaccountable as "conspiracy theorists" (connotation: insane) -- they very likely do it. You don't understand that the effect of this likelihood is to drive private capital out since it is already dealing with enough technical risk and any addition political risk renders the investment nonviable. Or perhaps you do understand and you are working for NASA.