Convergence is the development that has been "just around the corner" for about 20 years. It won't happen until humans are re-engineered to solve the ergonomic problems.
That's odd, 'cause I use my PS2 to play UK DVDs, and my Mac to play US DVDs, listen to the radio and watch TV over the net. Oh yeah, and I play video games and browse the web on my Treo, as well as for phone calls, emails and SMS.
Guess that means I've been re-engineered in my sleep....
Then go buy a computer. This is about a video games console.
do you really think consoles are going to remain somehow immune from the trends of convergence and virtualisation that characterise other platforms?
I guess it could happen, as e.g. cellphones also rely on signed apps to maintain a (somewhat flimsy) quality standard for their s/w. however, it seems much more like a blip to me.
So how does this single narrative affect how Episodes IV-VI should be viewed?
spoiler...
For me, the main plot surprise of Ep VI was the path to immortality
as discovered Qi-Gonn (related by Yoda)... this explains what Obi-wan
was doing on Tattooine all those years, and contrasts very nicely
with Palpatine's claims that the dark side leads to immortality (Darth Plagus etc.)
Also explains how Obi-wan was able to say to Vader "strike me down and I'll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine", without Vader understanding what he meant.
that to me, as a Force junkie, was worth the price of, um, my DSL connection
...scientists will always have the option of emigrating to the U.S. using the old, permanent channels, so your argument that this lousy H1-B program is necessary is an empty one.
Notice how there are 5 syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. This is the norm for haikus, at least the simple ones that get play outside of Japan.
it's a GOOD thing that immigration is difficult [...]
who cares if a conference is held somewhere else?
Obviously not you, 'cause you don't give a toss about science or education or international competitiveness. But, you do seem to be enjoying your wet dream about being part of a superpower. Hope that keeps working out for you. May you never wake up!
Threw the "racist" bomb, didn't you? But of course you did, even though we are both likely white. You're an idiot.
Race can mean nationality, fool.
As for your weirdo comments about "science", if it's necessary to bring in foreigners for temporary research purposes, I'm pretty sure a special visa can be created for that without throwing you in with the H1-Bs.
H1-B's were created for professional visitors like me. Get a clue and come back here when your ad hominems are more sharply honed, and I'll be happy to roast you some more.
Yes, you are a crypto-slaver if you support H1-B's. Once a foreign worker gets to the US, they are locked to their employer for their right to remain here. That means as long as that employee wants to stay in the US, they have to do whatever their employer wants.
It's not that I support H-1Bs, but that I think we need to concentrate on exactly these issues of universal rights, rather than complaining about the lost jobs. Please see my latest
reply to AKAImBatman
for a fuller discussion of this.
In the case of H1-Bs, workers are often placed in situations for
which local workers *do* exist. Companies get around the illegalness of
this practice by crafting resumes to meet only the skills of the H1-B
they want to hire. Then they pay the H1-B less than he's worth by
claiming a lower skillset, and work him longer hours because he can't
switch jobs. This is cruel to the H1-B worker, and is an abuse of a
system designed for international cooperation.
...
Now do you want to tell me that this picture is all rosy? Or are
you willing to open your eyes and note that there may be issues here?
No, of course there are issues here. For example, effective
indentured servitude is indeed an abuse of the H-1B system. I personally
can't imagine how you think American visas are "designed for
international co-operation"; anyone who's spent hours in the "non-US
Citizens" line at a US airport (even pre-2001) knows better, but never
mind this.
What I am trying to do is cast a different light on the issues.
Let's step back, for a moment, from this tricky question of who's projecting onto whom, and consider some history.
The history of race relations in the US can be viewed in these
terms: exploitative bosses using race as a divide-and-conquer tactic.
The writings of Ronald Takaki on
this subject make a good read, and he's a Berkeley local:-)
Now, to me, the fundamental problem here is not that the Chinese
were prepared to work for less than the Irish, but that the Irish labor
union failed to build an effective dialogue with the Chinese. Indeed,
they lacked a clear ideological underpinning for such a dialogue.
Presumably (and now I freely admit I may be projecting) it was quite
hard for them to separate the issue of "the Chinese should have the same
rights as us" with the issue of "the Chinese shouldn't be taking our
jobs".
I see the same confusion in the present dialogue. To use two
examples from your post: The fact that local, qualified workers exist is
not a huge issue to me. The fact that the foreign workers aren't getting the
same rights as the local workers (such as free movement from employer to
employer) is an issue.
I'm not accusing you of hating immigrants (honest), nor am I looking
through rose-colored glasses and saying no problem exists. I'm simply
suggesting that we need to disentangle these two issues, and reduce the
emphasis on "American jobs". Otherwise, we'll end up like the Irish
shoemakers of St Crispin, unable to talk to the Chinese.
Perhaps you feel exactly the same way. If so, I apologise for the
redundancy.
As for your discussion of outsourcing, I'm unable to comment on the
quality of coders from Bangalore. Otherwise, it just seems to me like
the same thing on a global scale. Good question: how can we build a
dialogue with these workers, to create global standards and rights? Bad question: how can we stop
low-skilled hacks stealing our jobs?
(And no, I'm not claiming you said either one of these; they're just illustrative.)
Viewed from this perspective of workers' rights, I think the idea
that H-1Bs are "bad for the economy" is a bit of a distraction, though yes, you could probably phrase it in these terms. Oh, and
by the way, regarding your opinion of higher ed: sounds pretty bad down your neck of the woods.
Please, encourage your kids to come to Berkeley. I for one try not to
turn out "degreed idiots". HTH
An A/C made the reasonable point that the H1-B program *could* lead to actual immigration, which *could* lead to a positive result. However, I disagree (and will do so politely, because I respect the poster's point of view, even though I disagree with it):
First of all, we already have programs for handling permanent immigration. People can apply for a green card and get admitted; it happens all the time and is how things are SUPPOSED to work. There are quotas, and a certain number of people are admitted, naturally -- you can't admit EVERYONE or half the rest of the world will be depopulated and this country will be an overcrowded hellhole.
I'm glad that you're being so polite now crazyphilman, though I do miss your entertaining "SO FUCK OFF foriegner" haikus.
I suggest that you actually go and talk to some people who've immigrated to America. Your opinions are basically out of touch with reality. Many people do go from an H-1B to permanent residency (a green card). It's substantially harder to get a green card when you're trying to come from overseas.
America is not as friendly to immigrants as you might think.
The Bush administration, in particular, has made things very difficult for visitors, especially short-duration visitors. As a result several international scientific conferences, formerly based in America, have moved overseas (e.g. the protein structure prediction competition, CASP). This is a bad thing for America, which traditionally recruits heavily from abroad, especially in science. Yep, I know you don't like it, but it's true.
Forget it. You're obviously stuck on the silly idea that I see immigration and all that goes with it as "bad". H1-Bs are not immigration, neither is outsourcing. There are very real issues with these systems that *will* result in further economic crashes if left uncorrected, but feel free to think it's about protectionism and anti-immigration stances.
Well, I'm getting that it's guest workers that many people don't like, rather than immigrants. However, while the visa system may (at a high level) be broken, I think the distinction between the two "types" of worker (at a low level) is virtually impossible to make. In my case, and in the case of many others I know, I am on an H-1B and have been for some time; many of us came over on H visas and then decided to stay, so forgive me if I don't quite get your point.
Basically, and I realise you're being relatively polite so excuse my bluntness, but you're just focussing on the wrong thing. You say that further economic crashes are likely due to "these systems", which is fair enough, but you're fixated on this one aspect of the system that concerns your nationality and the sanctity of your borders. Rather than, for example, social/democratic aspects of the system, such as international workers' rights.
I'm still waiting to hear truly positive suggestions about all this. Change some of those H-1B visas to immigrant visas? Sure! Insist that these other countries have a similar social contract to the US, and pay similar taxes? All for it! Stabilise the global economy? Wonderful! Trouble is, I'm not hearing any of that. I'm just hearing "those damn H-1Bs" and, now, "but, hey, don't get me wrong; I'm not anti-immigration".
As someone whose national heritage includes the White Australia Policy and Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, I'm just telling you, I think you're looking at the wrong thing here.
1. If you're an H1-B, you're NOT an immigrant, you're a guest worker. You don't belong here, and the only reason you ARE here is lobbying by high-tech companies and their greedhead owners. SO FUCK OFF.
2. American universities should hire their own U.S. grads, not arrogant foriegn fucks who have the nerve to talk shit on Slashdot about their situation. SO FUCK OFF.
3. What, weren't there any jobs in Australia? People down there find you as annoying as we do? Why come here, why not just work in your own fucking country? FUCK OFF.
I think that about covers it.
Yeah, I think it about does. The bits I put in bold are what I think are the most telling lines in your post.
I'm reposting what you wrote in full, not to play flame games (got tired of those in grad school) but to illustrate how thin this veneer of protectionism really is, and what lies underneath it: pure racism.
I'm sorry you think I'm arrogant. I think you are either afraid (perhaps because you've been out of work for a while) or just immature. You certainly don't have a clue about how science works, which IMO makes your Slashdot activity more inappropriate than me. Regardless of the fact that I am "foriegn" (LOL)
People are not trade goods. Keeping foreign workers out of the US is not protectionism. Insinuating that they are trade goods harkins back to the slave period.
ROTFL
So now I'm a crypto-slaver because I think free movement of labor should be a corollary of freedom of markets.
Absolute classic, Vicissidude, I salute you.
BTW, wikipedia's discussion of protectionism includes explicit discussion of outsourcing.
So, you may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
Some day I hope you'll join us, and the world will slave as one.
Dude, you're preaching to the choir here. And if you read the article, the author would seem to agree with you. The real problem transcends the issues of foreigners vs. local workers, and goes into the failure of corporations to do actual business, and a corruption of the universities that are supposed to serve the public.
Well, I'm still failing to see how it's "corrupt" or illegal for universities (or companies for that matter) to hire the best people they can at salaries they're willing to accept.
Universities are supposed to serve the public by hiring good researchers and teachers, not by providing cosy jobs to locals.
No-one says it's corrupt for companies to sell their products to as many people as possible, at the highest prices they can fetch.
Globalisation of trade doesn't seem to bother people, until you get to the catch: free movement of labor.
I'm entirely opposed to sweatshops and exploitative labor practises, but this shouldn't be confused with the isolationist, backward attitude that US jobs should be reserved for US workers.
See the "view from the Ivory Tower of UC Davis" comment further below: that poster makes lots of good points.
...go read the article! The author has hit the nail on the head about H1-Bs and outsourcing. He never stoops to blaming Indians for either issue, but rather points out that it's a side effect of corporations and universities trying to build tiny little empires. Then in the same breath, he points out how this sort of empire building is slowly leading the higher education system into ruins and dragging all of America's great talent with it!
I'm a UK/Australian citizen who was hired to UC Berkeley last year as a tenure-track prof in computational biology. I'm currently on an H-1B visa.
These accusations of "empire-building" are just silly. Academic departments in every university around the world have a responsibility to hire the best people that they can. The market is, and always has been, an international one.
What's really behind this clamor about "H1-Bs and outsourcing" is (IMNSHO) a protectionist mindset that harks back to the US's century or two of isolationism. So other countries are cheaper? Try some positive remedies, like devaluing the dollar, or lobbying other governments to adopt progressive labor laws, or even taking a long hard look at the consumerist values of US society or (hey, while we're at it) the way the CIA has been quietly toppling socialist governments for the past 50 years so that the IMF can march in and "restructure" their economies along more "competitive" lines.
All of the above would be better than the current, idiotic mantra of "keep them foreigners at bay until we gets our jobs back". By no means restricted to the US, I might add, but particularly ugly coming from Americans who already enjoy significant advantages over citizens of other nations, thanks in large part to their aggressive militarist foreign policy. (I might add that as a software engineer, I'm particularly distressed to hear so much of this sort of talk coming from a supposedly educated professional group.)
Don't whinge about immigration. It's pathetic.
Immigration's what makes America great. Sure, there is a huge gap between government investment in high schools and the bounties that (e.g.) U Chicago will pay for Nobel prizewinners, but capping immigration isn't the answer. For heaven's sake people, get some perspective.
It's not unlike the paradox of the principal-of-least-harm. In order to minimize the number of animals that die on account of your diet, it's best to eat nothing but large free-range ruminants. A vegetarian diet results in enormous numbers of rodents and insects being killed by threshers and harvesting machinery.
Yeah, but don't assume that all vegetarians are trying to "minimize the number of animals that die on account of their diet", rather than (say) protesting the cruelty/consumerism of the meat industry, or avoiding flesh for nutritional/health reasons, or siding against the prevaling Judaeo-Christian ideology towards animals, or making some other political point; or even just avoiding meat for purely personal, subjective reasons that they may not even advertise.
Besides, the death of the animal you're eating is something you have direct control over. The deaths of rodents/insects/etc due to industrialized agriculture, that you're referring to, are a secondary effect. Arguably this is a separate issue that could be separately addressed, e.g. by eating organic food or joining a co-op where you have more control over where your veggies come from.
Not that I'm accusing you of this specifically, but it does always surprise me how many omnivores assume they know exactly why all vegetarians choose the diet they do. Often, they start attacking your reasons for it based entirely on their prejudices. It can be pretty funny actually (on a good day).
Anyway, you're right that this is somewhat off-topic for the hunting discussion. To be honest I don't see much to discuss there. While hunting may well be a useful form of culling, hunting with remote-control robot guns is clearly lame, sick and pathetic. It distances people from nature, and encourages the view that people can use technology to lord it over animals however they please. I have absolutely no problem with government restricting this kind of activity. Same goes for hunting with packs of dogs and upper-class twits (but that's a different story for the UK crowd...)
I find the use of "natural" to be pretty unclear and really limiting - for instance, what of the study of pollution on the environment? In no way is pollution natural, so the phrase hardly fits environmental science.
Or take the study of something like Bucky Balls, which are hardly natural (though I think I do remember reading they appear somewhere naturally in very rare cases).
Basically a lot of science is going way beyond studying "natural" things and so I find that definition kind of useless.
Sure, it's "kind of useless", but now you're just criticising the existing definition without even proposing anything else.
Buckyballs and pollution may not be all that "natural", but is "adequate" any better as a description?
(In fact, I would argue that anthropogenic environmental change, just like e.g. emergent viral epidemiology, is covered by the remit of natural science. As for Buckyballs, and other eclectic synthetic chemistry projects, they might be closer to engineering than science, though the two are closely related.)
Frankly, there are as many definitions of science as there are interested parties. For example, the NIH talks in terms of medical utility, the NSF likes novelty, etc. Plenty of scientists still think in terms of the "natural world" and I don't think it's a bad working definition: let engineering take up the slack.
The point, anyway, is that the new Kansas tongue-twister is not an improvement. It's inelegant, obfuscated, over-specific and (consequently) incomplete, particularly in its serious omission of peer review.
Haven't you considered that they have too much to do? (They are not full-time 'creationists')
Actually, Dembski and Behe are full-time academics studying (respectively) information theory and molecular biology applied to ID. (Johnson is an academic lawyer here in Berkeley.)
I'm sympathetic to the argument that they have too much to do. So do I, really.... however, the fact is that the science they put into their emails was just plain wrong (for example, Dembski came up with a completely specious probabilistic argument against evolution), and when I started to question their errors, they clammed up.
Academics can be busy, but when errors are pointed out in their work, either they respond to the criticism or they're a fraud.
If the reality is a wording that is clearer and more complete, is that not better?
How could anyone think this new definition is clearer? It has three times as many syllables.
It's not "more complete" either. Adding a roll-call of methodologies (measurement, hypothesis testing, etc) only begs the question of what has been left out. Like peer review, parsimony (aka Occam's razor), mathematical modeling...
The phrase "more adequate explanations" is the real zinger. Who decides what's adequate? How is "more adequate" clearer than "natural"?
These ID guys are America's shame. I once tried engaging some of them (William Dembski, Michael Behe, Philip Johnson) in email discussions. None of them would go beyond one or two emails once they figured out I wasn't on their team. They have an extreme agenda and everything they say/do/propose should, IMO, be regarded with extreme suspicion.
"I have a vision: a zombie on every desk, and in every home"
Bioinformaticists (and spies) use this a lot
on
The Future of Databases
·
· Score: 5, Informative
most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers
Bioinformatics databases are a good example of this.
DNA and protein sequence databases are often searched
by approximate string-matching algorithms based on
"dynamic programming" to
hidden Markov models and other
stochastic grammars.
Historically, drug target-hunters in Big Pharma created a market for accelerated hardware to facilitate dynamic programming searches, some of which (e.g. Paracel's Fast Data Finder chip) was originally marketed to government agencies who, um, shared an interest in approximate string-matching;)
Maybe because billions of your tax dollars were funneled to Afghanistan by the CIA during the Reagan area, supplying mujahedin with shoulder-launched anti-helicopter missiles, specifically to bleed the Russian economy out of its ass?
Lots of molecular biologists would say the same thing (perhaps not in the way you meant it). Francis Crick apparently thought genomics was way overhyped.
Seriously though, I sometimes wonder why anyone bothers writing another bioinformatics howto book when
Durbin et al (apologies for amazon link) is still unrivalled. Maybe also Felsenstein for phylogeny, MacKay for general probabilistic modeling... anyone recommend anything for the coalescent? Microarrays? Image analysis? I could post book refs for these, but I'm not as fluent in those areas.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.bugmenot.com/
That's odd, 'cause I use my PS2 to play UK DVDs, and my Mac to play US DVDs, listen to the radio and watch TV over the net. Oh yeah, and I play video games and browse the web on my Treo, as well as for phone calls, emails and SMS.
Guess that means I've been re-engineered in my sleep....
do you really think consoles are going to remain somehow immune from the trends of convergence and virtualisation that characterise other platforms?
I guess it could happen, as e.g. cellphones also rely on signed apps to maintain a (somewhat flimsy) quality standard for their s/w. however, it seems much more like a blip to me.
spoiler...
For me, the main plot surprise of Ep VI was the path to immortality as discovered Qi-Gonn (related by Yoda)... this explains what Obi-wan was doing on Tattooine all those years, and contrasts very nicely with Palpatine's claims that the dark side leads to immortality (Darth Plagus etc.)
Also explains how Obi-wan was able to say to Vader "strike me down and I'll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine", without Vader understanding what he meant.
that to me, as a Force junkie, was worth the price of, um, my DSL connection
Actually, it's an informed one. HTH
Notice how there are 5 syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. This is the norm for haikus, at least the simple ones that get play outside of Japan.
It's pretty evident by now that "simple" is your metier, but haiku is a rich and varied form including renga, haikai and.... oh, what the hell.
I said "Haiku" and you jumped. That's entertainment enough for me. Let's see what you do if I say "shotgun enema".
Race is a well-defined concept, not including nationality.
That's where you're wrong. (Actually, that's just one place you're wrong, but the day is short.)
Race is a construct. It's quite common for people in other countries to talk about, e.g., "the Elbonian race" where Elbonia is your country of choice.
You think it's well-defined because your ideas are spoon-fed and your critical thought has sputtered out.
One day, my countrymen will get rid of this program and by extension, you.
Too bad fuckwit, I just got my green card approved yesterday.
As far as roasting me goes, hell, this is Slashdot. Flamewars are one of the main amusements around here. Why hold back?
I spent six years posting on alt.nuke.the.USA. Slashdot is tame. (As are you)
Obviously not you, 'cause you don't give a toss about science or education or international competitiveness. But, you do seem to be enjoying your wet dream about being part of a superpower. Hope that keeps working out for you. May you never wake up!
Race can mean nationality, fool.
As for your weirdo comments about "science", if it's necessary to bring in foreigners for temporary research purposes, I'm pretty sure a special visa can be created for that without throwing you in with the H1-Bs.
H1-B's were created for professional visitors like me. Get a clue and come back here when your ad hominems are more sharply honed, and I'll be happy to roast you some more.
It's not that I support H-1Bs, but that I think we need to concentrate on exactly these issues of universal rights, rather than complaining about the lost jobs. Please see my latest reply to AKAImBatman for a fuller discussion of this.
love and kisses, crypto-house-slave on an H-1B
...
Now do you want to tell me that this picture is all rosy? Or are you willing to open your eyes and note that there may be issues here?
No, of course there are issues here. For example, effective indentured servitude is indeed an abuse of the H-1B system. I personally can't imagine how you think American visas are "designed for international co-operation"; anyone who's spent hours in the "non-US Citizens" line at a US airport (even pre-2001) knows better, but never mind this.
What I am trying to do is cast a different light on the issues. Let's step back, for a moment, from this tricky question of who's projecting onto whom, and consider some history.
In 1870, the Irish labor union "The Secret Order of the Knights of St Crispin" went on strike in a shoe factory in North Adams, MA. The factory owner, Calvin Sampson, responded by using the railroad to bring in a contingent of 75 Chinese strikebreakers from San Francisco. This was an amazingly effective tactic. The Knights made an abortive attempt to bring the Chinese into their union, but it failed, and Sampson's tactic became a model for other East coast entrepreneurs.
The history of race relations in the US can be viewed in these terms: exploitative bosses using race as a divide-and-conquer tactic. The writings of Ronald Takaki on this subject make a good read, and he's a Berkeley local :-)
Now, to me, the fundamental problem here is not that the Chinese were prepared to work for less than the Irish, but that the Irish labor union failed to build an effective dialogue with the Chinese. Indeed, they lacked a clear ideological underpinning for such a dialogue. Presumably (and now I freely admit I may be projecting) it was quite hard for them to separate the issue of "the Chinese should have the same rights as us" with the issue of "the Chinese shouldn't be taking our jobs".
I see the same confusion in the present dialogue. To use two examples from your post: The fact that local, qualified workers exist is not a huge issue to me. The fact that the foreign workers aren't getting the same rights as the local workers (such as free movement from employer to employer) is an issue.
I'm not accusing you of hating immigrants (honest), nor am I looking through rose-colored glasses and saying no problem exists. I'm simply suggesting that we need to disentangle these two issues, and reduce the emphasis on "American jobs". Otherwise, we'll end up like the Irish shoemakers of St Crispin, unable to talk to the Chinese.
Perhaps you feel exactly the same way. If so, I apologise for the redundancy.
As for your discussion of outsourcing, I'm unable to comment on the quality of coders from Bangalore. Otherwise, it just seems to me like the same thing on a global scale. Good question: how can we build a dialogue with these workers, to create global standards and rights? Bad question: how can we stop low-skilled hacks stealing our jobs? (And no, I'm not claiming you said either one of these; they're just illustrative.)
Viewed from this perspective of workers' rights, I think the idea that H-1Bs are "bad for the economy" is a bit of a distraction, though yes, you could probably phrase it in these terms. Oh, and by the way, regarding your opinion of higher ed: sounds pretty bad down your neck of the woods. Please, encourage your kids to come to Berkeley. I for one try not to turn out "degreed idiots". HTH
An A/C made the reasonable point that the H1-B program *could* lead to actual immigration, which *could* lead to a positive result. However, I disagree (and will do so politely, because I respect the poster's point of view, even though I disagree with it):
First of all, we already have programs for handling permanent immigration. People can apply for a green card and get admitted; it happens all the time and is how things are SUPPOSED to work. There are quotas, and a certain number of people are admitted, naturally -- you can't admit EVERYONE or half the rest of the world will be depopulated and this country will be an overcrowded hellhole.
I'm glad that you're being so polite now crazyphilman, though I do miss your entertaining "SO FUCK OFF foriegner" haikus.
I suggest that you actually go and talk to some people who've immigrated to America. Your opinions are basically out of touch with reality. Many people do go from an H-1B to permanent residency (a green card). It's substantially harder to get a green card when you're trying to come from overseas.
America is not as friendly to immigrants as you might think. The Bush administration, in particular, has made things very difficult for visitors, especially short-duration visitors. As a result several international scientific conferences, formerly based in America, have moved overseas (e.g. the protein structure prediction competition, CASP). This is a bad thing for America, which traditionally recruits heavily from abroad, especially in science. Yep, I know you don't like it, but it's true.
Forget it. You're obviously stuck on the silly idea that I see immigration and all that goes with it as "bad". H1-Bs are not immigration, neither is outsourcing. There are very real issues with these systems that *will* result in further economic crashes if left uncorrected, but feel free to think it's about protectionism and anti-immigration stances.
Well, I'm getting that it's guest workers that many people don't like, rather than immigrants. However, while the visa system may (at a high level) be broken, I think the distinction between the two "types" of worker (at a low level) is virtually impossible to make. In my case, and in the case of many others I know, I am on an H-1B and have been for some time; many of us came over on H visas and then decided to stay, so forgive me if I don't quite get your point.
Basically, and I realise you're being relatively polite so excuse my bluntness, but you're just focussing on the wrong thing. You say that further economic crashes are likely due to "these systems", which is fair enough, but you're fixated on this one aspect of the system that concerns your nationality and the sanctity of your borders. Rather than, for example, social/democratic aspects of the system, such as international workers' rights.
I'm still waiting to hear truly positive suggestions about all this. Change some of those H-1B visas to immigrant visas? Sure! Insist that these other countries have a similar social contract to the US, and pay similar taxes? All for it! Stabilise the global economy? Wonderful! Trouble is, I'm not hearing any of that. I'm just hearing "those damn H-1Bs" and, now, "but, hey, don't get me wrong; I'm not anti-immigration".
As someone whose national heritage includes the White Australia Policy and Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, I'm just telling you, I think you're looking at the wrong thing here.
1. If you're an H1-B, you're NOT an immigrant, you're a guest worker. You don't belong here, and the only reason you ARE here is lobbying by high-tech companies and their greedhead owners. SO FUCK OFF.
2. American universities should hire their own U.S. grads, not arrogant foriegn fucks who have the nerve to talk shit on Slashdot about their situation. SO FUCK OFF.
3. What, weren't there any jobs in Australia? People down there find you as annoying as we do? Why come here, why not just work in your own fucking country? FUCK OFF.
I think that about covers it.
Yeah, I think it about does. The bits I put in bold are what I think are the most telling lines in your post.
I'm reposting what you wrote in full, not to play flame games (got tired of those in grad school) but to illustrate how thin this veneer of protectionism really is, and what lies underneath it: pure racism.
I'm sorry you think I'm arrogant. I think you are either afraid (perhaps because you've been out of work for a while) or just immature. You certainly don't have a clue about how science works, which IMO makes your Slashdot activity more inappropriate than me. Regardless of the fact that I am "foriegn" (LOL)
ROTFL
So now I'm a crypto-slaver because I think free movement of labor should be a corollary of freedom of markets. Absolute classic, Vicissidude, I salute you.
BTW, wikipedia's discussion of protectionism includes explicit discussion of outsourcing. So, you may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Some day I hope you'll join us, and the world will slave as one.
Well, I'm still failing to see how it's "corrupt" or illegal for universities (or companies for that matter) to hire the best people they can at salaries they're willing to accept. Universities are supposed to serve the public by hiring good researchers and teachers, not by providing cosy jobs to locals.
No-one says it's corrupt for companies to sell their products to as many people as possible, at the highest prices they can fetch. Globalisation of trade doesn't seem to bother people, until you get to the catch: free movement of labor.
I'm entirely opposed to sweatshops and exploitative labor practises, but this shouldn't be confused with the isolationist, backward attitude that US jobs should be reserved for US workers.
See the "view from the Ivory Tower of UC Davis" comment further below: that poster makes lots of good points.
I'm a UK/Australian citizen who was hired to UC Berkeley last year as a tenure-track prof in computational biology. I'm currently on an H-1B visa.
These accusations of "empire-building" are just silly. Academic departments in every university around the world have a responsibility to hire the best people that they can. The market is, and always has been, an international one.
What's really behind this clamor about "H1-Bs and outsourcing" is (IMNSHO) a protectionist mindset that harks back to the US's century or two of isolationism. So other countries are cheaper? Try some positive remedies, like devaluing the dollar, or lobbying other governments to adopt progressive labor laws, or even taking a long hard look at the consumerist values of US society or (hey, while we're at it) the way the CIA has been quietly toppling socialist governments for the past 50 years so that the IMF can march in and "restructure" their economies along more "competitive" lines.
All of the above would be better than the current, idiotic mantra of "keep them foreigners at bay until we gets our jobs back". By no means restricted to the US, I might add, but particularly ugly coming from Americans who already enjoy significant advantages over citizens of other nations, thanks in large part to their aggressive militarist foreign policy. (I might add that as a software engineer, I'm particularly distressed to hear so much of this sort of talk coming from a supposedly educated professional group.)
Don't whinge about immigration. It's pathetic. Immigration's what makes America great. Sure, there is a huge gap between government investment in high schools and the bounties that (e.g.) U Chicago will pay for Nobel prizewinners, but capping immigration isn't the answer. For heaven's sake people, get some perspective.
Yeah, but don't assume that all vegetarians are trying to "minimize the number of animals that die on account of their diet", rather than (say) protesting the cruelty/consumerism of the meat industry, or avoiding flesh for nutritional/health reasons, or siding against the prevaling Judaeo-Christian ideology towards animals, or making some other political point; or even just avoiding meat for purely personal, subjective reasons that they may not even advertise.
Besides, the death of the animal you're eating is something you have direct control over. The deaths of rodents/insects/etc due to industrialized agriculture, that you're referring to, are a secondary effect. Arguably this is a separate issue that could be separately addressed, e.g. by eating organic food or joining a co-op where you have more control over where your veggies come from.
Not that I'm accusing you of this specifically, but it does always surprise me how many omnivores assume they know exactly why all vegetarians choose the diet they do. Often, they start attacking your reasons for it based entirely on their prejudices. It can be pretty funny actually (on a good day).
Anyway, you're right that this is somewhat off-topic for the hunting discussion. To be honest I don't see much to discuss there. While hunting may well be a useful form of culling, hunting with remote-control robot guns is clearly lame, sick and pathetic. It distances people from nature, and encourages the view that people can use technology to lord it over animals however they please. I have absolutely no problem with government restricting this kind of activity. Same goes for hunting with packs of dogs and upper-class twits (but that's a different story for the UK crowd...)
Or take the study of something like Bucky Balls, which are hardly natural (though I think I do remember reading they appear somewhere naturally in very rare cases).
Basically a lot of science is going way beyond studying "natural" things and so I find that definition kind of useless.
Sure, it's "kind of useless", but now you're just criticising the existing definition without even proposing anything else. Buckyballs and pollution may not be all that "natural", but is "adequate" any better as a description?
(In fact, I would argue that anthropogenic environmental change, just like e.g. emergent viral epidemiology, is covered by the remit of natural science. As for Buckyballs, and other eclectic synthetic chemistry projects, they might be closer to engineering than science, though the two are closely related.)
Frankly, there are as many definitions of science as there are interested parties. For example, the NIH talks in terms of medical utility, the NSF likes novelty, etc. Plenty of scientists still think in terms of the "natural world" and I don't think it's a bad working definition: let engineering take up the slack.
The point, anyway, is that the new Kansas tongue-twister is not an improvement. It's inelegant, obfuscated, over-specific and (consequently) incomplete, particularly in its serious omission of peer review.
Actually, Dembski and Behe are full-time academics studying (respectively) information theory and molecular biology applied to ID. (Johnson is an academic lawyer here in Berkeley.)
I'm sympathetic to the argument that they have too much to do. So do I, really.... however, the fact is that the science they put into their emails was just plain wrong (for example, Dembski came up with a completely specious probabilistic argument against evolution), and when I started to question their errors, they clammed up.
Academics can be busy, but when errors are pointed out in their work, either they respond to the criticism or they're a fraud.
How could anyone think this new definition is clearer? It has three times as many syllables.
It's not "more complete" either. Adding a roll-call of methodologies (measurement, hypothesis testing, etc) only begs the question of what has been left out. Like peer review, parsimony (aka Occam's razor), mathematical modeling...
The phrase "more adequate explanations" is the real zinger. Who decides what's adequate? How is "more adequate" clearer than "natural"?
These ID guys are America's shame. I once tried engaging some of them (William Dembski, Michael Behe, Philip Johnson) in email discussions. None of them would go beyond one or two emails once they figured out I wasn't on their team. They have an extreme agenda and everything they say/do/propose should, IMO, be regarded with extreme suspicion.
"I have a vision: a zombie on every desk, and in every home"
most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers
Bioinformatics databases are a good example of this. DNA and protein sequence databases are often searched by approximate string-matching algorithms based on "dynamic programming" to hidden Markov models and other stochastic grammars.
Historically, drug target-hunters in Big Pharma created a market for accelerated hardware to facilitate dynamic programming searches, some of which (e.g. Paracel's Fast Data Finder chip) was originally marketed to government agencies who, um, shared an interest in approximate string-matching ;)
Maybe because billions of your tax dollars were funneled to Afghanistan by the CIA during the Reagan area, supplying mujahedin with shoulder-launched anti-helicopter missiles, specifically to bleed the Russian economy out of its ass?
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/16352/
Lots of molecular biologists would say the same thing (perhaps not in the way you meant it). Francis Crick apparently thought genomics was way overhyped.
Seriously though, I sometimes wonder why anyone bothers writing another bioinformatics howto book when Durbin et al (apologies for amazon link) is still unrivalled. Maybe also Felsenstein for phylogeny, MacKay for general probabilistic modeling... anyone recommend anything for the coalescent? Microarrays? Image analysis? I could post book refs for these, but I'm not as fluent in those areas.