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Howard proudly announced that "At no stage did this latest vessel reach Australian territorial waters. As a result questions of application for asylum status do not arise." Um, Mister Howard? That means that the act of stopping that ship in international waters was piracy. Now I know that the people of Australia take pride in the fact that Australia was once a penal colony, but that was a long time ago. You're supposed to be civilized now. (discuss)
Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to start sucking up. There are sites out there which are not noticeably better than their peers who are nonetheless famous and get a lot of traffic, and I'm going to have to start reading them myself and see if I can find things to say about them in hopes that they'll notice the refers. Your basic A-listers. The Clique. The Insiders. (None'a you slobs; you're all C-list like I am, living out here in the Web ghetto.) Maybe I'll even write to them when I do it to make sure they know. There's one guy who is not mediocre that I've been trying to woo but haven't gotten any response from. (He's too busy curing sick kids, which I must admit is a better use of his time than reading my drivel.) Damn. It just goes against the grain; I've never been one to try to suck up to an in-crowd. It just feels so... so... so high school. Darned if I know what to do. How low will I go? How slutty will I get? Stay tuned. (Hey, maybe I can get Kottke to link to me! Whatcha think? All in good fun, Jason -- I didn't
But there was a declaration about slavery. "Slavery is a crime against humanity and should always have been so." Indeed. Does this mean that the African nations will finally move to end slavery in Africa, where it exists to this day? Will the African nations pay reparations to the slaves they free? (Fat chance.) (discussion in progress)
There are three aspects of it which worry me. They are taking another virus and transplanting genes from SIV into it so that the other virus creates SIV antigens and sensitizes the innoculated monkey. The concern is that they may in fact create a completely new and virulent disease while doing so. A second concern has to do with mutability. One of the reasons HIV is so scary is that some aspects of its genome mutate easily, and it in fact does change its antigens readily. This approach can only innoculate against known antigens; if a new one shows up then that version of the virus will not be stopped by the existing vaccine. But my biggest concern is the fact that in most of the tested monkeys the effect was not to eradicate SIV but merely to reduce the viral blood load. In other words, they become chronically infected, and they're also carriers which can spread the disease to other monkeys, whether vaccinated or not. Suppose that the same situation applied with a hypothetical human vaccine, that everyone who got vaccinated became a carrier. While that would reduce the toll of death and disease, it would also open the floodgates of infection rate, and soon you'd reach the situation where humans would have to be vaccinated to survive. There are a lot of technologies that support us, without which many of us would die, but I don't really know of any which are required to sustain us all. But maybe I'm being too worried here. After all, a vaccine might be viewed as simply another step on the way, to be followed later by something else which actually could cure the virus entirely and convert infected vaccinated individuals from carriers to clean. The big question now is whether the approach demonstrated with the monkeys can be converted into a working vaccine for humans, and how well it will work against HIV. (discussion in progress)
"If one truly believes in an all-powerful deity, and one looks around at the condition of the universe, one is drawn inescapably to the conclusion that God is a malign thug." But the "problem of pleasure" for a mechanist isn't a problem at all. It's completely explicable, and in fact it would be very surprising to a mechanist if there were no pleasure or fun or joy. We enjoy things because creatures who enjoy the right things are differentially better adapted to survive and breed. It's as simple as that. The most obvious example of that is sex. People who are driven to have sex a lot are more likely to create offspring than those who are not. (I think that is apparent.) Whatever it was that drove them to have sex will thus be passed on disproportionately to the next generation, if it was indeed genetically controlled. Do that for a thousand generations and nearly everyone within that breeding pool will inherit whatever it was. But "having sex" is a very complex thing in creatures with brains like ours (or even in brains like those in crocodiles), and whatever it is that drives them to have sex is also going to have to be in the brain since it requires complex behavior and cognition. It happens to be the case that it is enjoyable -- but that isn't the only way we're motivated. We're driven to seek out pleasure but we're also driven by pain, or rather by the avoidance of pain. Pain is common enough for children that they rapidly learn what not to do. We are careful to not injure ourselves or do things which have a high chance of injury because we know that doing so is going to hurt like mad. Sometimes both pleasure and pain drive us in the same direction. Eating is such a case; it's clear that creatures who don't care about food are less likely to survive than those who are driven to make sure they get an adequate diet, and again they are more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation. Not eating is unpleasant and physically painful; hunger drives us to eat. But eating a bland and unvarying diet is neither painful nor pleasurable -- "bread and water" is a sentence to boredom, not to suffering. Pleasure causes us to seek out a varied diet, because a varied diet is more healthy for us than a bland uniform one. Humans who eat only one thing will suffer from dietary deficiencies. But it wouldn't be appropriate to use pain to drive a creature to seek sex, because pain is debilitating and the opportunity to have sex routinely isn't going to exist. Pain is used to drive things which are important every hour or every day, while pleasure is used to drive things which are important over the long run but which aren't urgent on a day-to-day basis. Pain drives us to eat every day, while pleasure drives us to seek out a varied diet over the long run. We don't have to eat a varied diet every day (the FDA notwithstanding) but if we eat a confined diet for years we're going to get sick from scurvy or rickets or any of a number of other diseases like that. A guy who is doubled-over from blue balls is likely to be more susceptible to predators, which would decrease his chances of passing on his genes. (If he gets eaten by a lion before breeding, his genes stop with him.) So there is a certain amount of unpleasantness to not having sex ("Damn am I horny!") but not to the point of actually being physically painful. It makes more sense to motivate a creature to have sex by making it pleasurable, when combined with a general drive in the brain to seek out pleasurable activities. Sex is critical over the long run but not critical day-to-day, which means it is better motivated by pleasure than by pain. Of course, the ability of genes to control how brains develop is less than you might think. Our genes don't contain a blueprint for the brain's wiring; the process is much more complicated than that and the actual kind of information transcribed in our genes can't control it that closely (let alone hold that much information at all; the genome is huge but not THAT huge). In order for us to enjoy sex (or a varied diet) we have to have the generalized ability to enjoy -- which is to say that we have to have a pleasure center in our brain, some circuit which, when tickled (no matter how) causes the brain to say "I like that; let's do it again." That is, in fact, what the pleasure center is; its real function is to cause us to repeat some activity. The subjective experience of "enjoying it" is beside the point as long as it makes us repeat behaviors. In a sense, in fact, it's tautological; we must necessarily describe it as "pleasure". But with structures as complicated as the human brain, there will be emergent properties, and other things will have the ability to stimulate that same pleasure center, things not directly controlled by the genes, or things controlled by the genes which happen accidentally to do so. As long as they don't cause harm, they will not be selected against by evolution. If they do cause harm, eventually (ten thousand generations) they'll be weeded out of the population. (For example, opiate addiction. The human race didn't discover opium long enough ago for it to have made a serious evolutionary effect on us yet -- but it will, unless we control it other ways. People easily hooked on heroin do not tend to breed as often or as successfully.) And if, no matter why or how, it turns out to enhance survival and breeding success, then it will spread in the population over time. It doesn't matter what it is as long as it means that you or your close relatives will have more babies. (That's why being an aunt or uncle is fun. Nieces and nephews carry some of our genes, though not as much as children do.) I believe that Sean's confusion about this (and that of the columnist he quoted) stems from a misunderstanding of how a strict mechanist views the world. Evolution is not "random"; it's just that it isn't planned. It's possible for non-random things to also not involve planning (e.g. crystal growth). It is inevitable that creatures with complex brains will feel both pain and pleasure precisely because these things influence behavior, and the critters that feel them (and feel them for the right things) will be better adapted to survive and pass on their genes. But it isn't the subjective experience of pleasure and pain which are important, it's behavioral effects of motivation and avoidance. The subjective experience is, in a sense, a side effect. (discussion in progress)
We're also about to find out whether the law does, too. A woman has filed suit against the producer of a CD which uses copy protection claiming that the company selling it should be required to say so on the product label. Her argument is that she wanted to listen to it on her computer and can't do so because of the copy protection, thus the company didn't provide sufficient information to make it possible for her to determine if the product would serve her needs. If she wins and if all copy-protected CDs have to say so on the label, the record companies will face a boycott of protected titles -- until someone cracks it, and then it will be moot. (discuss)
Back in the bad old days, there used to be all kinds of places in the laws of some states where certain things were declared to be illegal based on the race of the participants. Of course, that required a legal definition of race, and the definition of "negro" was anyone who had at least one great grandparent who was negro. (No-one seems to have noticed that this definition is recursive.) This was, of course, deeply offensive on a number of levels. The odd thing is that this seems to be exactly what those trying to seize on Woods are doing: since he is half black he's black. The people of Thailand respectfully disagree. Woods is reported to be something of a national hero there, and his wins and losses are followed closely since, of course, he's Thai. To me, though, he's just an amazingly talented and poised young man that I enjoy reading about and watching on TV. I hope that's not just because I can't claim him to be white. (I don't recall thinking of Arnold Palmer as a credit to the White race, so maybe I'm off the hook here.) (discussion in progress)
Of course, if we want to talk about moronic TV game shows, the absolute nadir had to be Supermarket Sweep. Imagine if you will a studio audience sitting on bleachers near the front of a grocery store, and carefully placed cameras permitting viewing of the entire place. Three contestants are given shopping carts and given a small number of minutes to fill them with whatever they want from the store and get them back to the front. Each gets to keep whatever they collect, but whoever's basket rings up to the highest price gets a special prize. (I don't even remember what it was anymore.) The problem was that there was an optimum strategy and once it got found the game ceased to be interesting: head the for the meat section and load up on steak. At a buck a pound (this was a long time ago, folks) you could rack up a lot of dollars very fast there. The show organizers tried to offset this by hiding coupons elsewhere in the store which were worth bonuses in hopes of getting the sweepers to go somewhere else, but it never worked. These stores didn't have a liquore section; if they had, that would have been the place to go. Load up on the Amaretto and Cointreau! (discuss)
But when layoffs get too dramatic they can have other effects. Motorola has announced yet another negative earnings forecast and announced yet another round of layoffs. The total has now reached 32,000, a mammoth number of employees. Sometimes when a company has bad news to announce financially they'll couple that announcement with an announcement of layoffs in hopes of convincing the market not to devalue the stock too heavily. But when layoffs get as deep as they have now at Motorola, the effect on the corporation as a whole can be debilitating. At this point, layoffs at Moto are approaching something like 25% of its whole workforce. That has the effect of seriously impeding the people who are left behind. Every workflow in the company will have to be redesigned, and a lot of essential knowledge is going to walk out the door carrying pink slips. A layoff this deep can cause damage to efficiency that can take years to recover from. It also causes demoralization and fear. One of the things that keeps a company going is loyalty. If your people are just working for a paycheck, you're in trouble. You need them to believe in the company and to really like what they're doing, to believe that what they're doing is important -- because that means they'll do more than just the minimum necessary to get a paycheck every two weeks. But people don't make that commitment for no reason -- it's a two way street. People make a commitment to a corporation because they think the corporation is committed to them; it is ultimately selfish. People make that commitment because they think they'll ultimately benefit from it, with promotions and more desirable job assignments. When a quarter of the workforce is laid off, the remaining ones will spend their time worrying about whether they'll be next, if not this year than next or the year after. Why put out extra effort when there's no possibility of advancement because of it? There is no longer a feeling that the company is committed to me so why should I be committed to the corporation? Productivity will fall for this reason, too. But the greatest danger is brain-drain. The advantage of using a layoff for reduction instead of attrition is that it permits you to get rid of the least valuable members of your staff. Attrition usually involves people leaving who have the best opportunities elsewhere, which means you're losing the most desirable members of your team. We'd all like to believe that everyone is equally valuable, but it simply isn't true. For a company the size of Motorola there are two to four thousand people who are the life-blood of the company. These are certain mid-level and senior engineers and researchers, some mid-level and high-level executives, certain marketers and sales folk. Not every engineer, nor every manager, of course. But when times get really bad at a company and there are too many layoffs, these people may decide that the fun is over and that there are better opportunities elsewhere. People like this never have any trouble finding other jobs even during bad economic times; they stay because they want to. And if you lose a substantial number of these critical people (half, maybe) then your corporation is dead, a hollow shell of itself simply waiting to die. That's what happened at Palm; the core group of engineers and managers which made it great left en mass and formed their own company. Palm has been drifting aimlessly ever since, recycling past glory. The creative spark at Palm is gone. I fear that Motorola has now reached the point where this kind of defection will become a real issue. It's not the kind of thing which will be obvious for a long time; design starts by these movers and shakers will continue to emerge for a year or two, for instance. This kind of lobotomy may take a year, and it may take three years for its effects to become apparent. In the long run the way it manifests is as a leveling of growth and an increasing number of failed projects and a rising perception that the company just doesn't seem as vibrant and dynamic as it used to be. Think "IBM before Gerstner" or "Apple before it was acquired by NeXT". I think that is Motorola's future. These two cases are instructive because they do show that it's possible to turn this around. And part of that is to stop using layoffs, so as to rebuild employee morale and loyalty. When the problems in a business are sufficiently serious, they can't be addressed with layoffs. Something more radical is required; the business itself needs to be redesigned. Motorola will need to reexamine itself and decide just what kind of company it needs to become, since it's apparent that the current company is failing. This probably means shedding entire businesses -- selling them if possible, shutting them down if necessary -- and maybe even creating new ones. Gerstner's genius at IBM was to recognize that value-add consulting was the future of the company, and under his tutelage it's become the company's fastest growing business segment and soon it will be the largest one, too. For all that I despise Steve Jobs, it is unquestionably the case that he brought fire back into Apple. Much less well publicized was the fact that NeXT also infused Apple with a new dose of movers and shakers, electrifying the organization. Apple is still a wood chip on a stormy sea because it is too vulnerable to mistakes or decisions by other companies, but its turnaround has been nothing short of miraculous. Motorola could turn around, too -- but not the way it's going right now. Any further layoffs will damage the company, not make it more healthy. It's time to make big decisions, like the one everyone knows they should have made a long time ago to get out of the IC business. That's the only thing that can turn Motorola around. (discuss)
That's all well and good, and gets them off the hook on this particular lawsuit, but I wonder if they've really thought through the ramifications of that position. eBay fraud has been a problem for a long time, and now eBay has taken a position in court that it isn't responsible for anything sold on its site. This could erode the confidence of bidders, and without bidders there will be no eBay. Is this a pyrrhic victory? (discuss)
Umm, what racism is anyone else's business? What shall we talk about? (discuss)
People sometimes ask how any company can topple a seemingly insurmountable industry leader, like say Intel. Much celebration has been made in recent years (and rightfully so) about how AMD has come out of no-where and challenged Intel frontally. Little is made of the fact that ARM has stealthfully managed to sneak in from below. Right now there are more than ten times as many ARMs made each year than Intel's entire output of x86's -- and ARM doesn't even own a fab. It just licenses its designs to others for use in their devices. Even Intel is an ARM licensee, and one of the major producers of ARMs. Who says the Brits can't do high tech? (discuss)
Update: The Attorneys General are going along with it. Now to see what the EU thinks. Update 20010907: As expected, the slashdot thread is full of people who are pissed off about it. But one poster says "Justice is the most important point here." He has a strong sense of moral outrage but a poor understanding of the law. Antitrust law has nothing to do with justice in the sense that he's using it, to mean that those who act wrongly should be punished. Antitrust law has nothing to do with punishment and indeed it cannot because it's Civil Law. If there were punishment involved it would have to be Criminal Law and the entire trial process would have been different. Among other things, the burden of proof would have been on the Government and the threshold of proof would have had to be much higher, and the Government would not have been able to force executives of the company to testify (such as the legendary Bill Gates deposition where he couldn't understand the meanings of basic words).
[In the 1960's there was a culture shock problem when Japan emerged as a major business presence and US businessmen started dealing with Japanese businessmen big time. (Japan is, of course, not Islamic but it's a similar kind of problem.) There kept being cases where a deal would be struck and then fall apart and the Americans would decide the Japanese couldn't be trusted and the Japanese would decide the Americans were uncultured boors. Turns out that in traditional Japanese culture it's considered impolite to say "no" to someone, so they've learned ways of shading "yes" so that some forms of it mean "no"; the idea was that if someone said "yes" quite reluctantly then the other party would get the message and drop it. But the Americans heard "yes" through their translators and assumed they had a deal; the nuances and cultural context didn't get translated. There was actually a thriving business for a while in consultants who actually understood Japanese culture and would coach American businessmen through negotiations with the Japanese. In the long run, the problem was solved by the Japanese learning that Americans weren't offended by hearing "no" but were offended by what they perceived as liars, and also learning that the Americans are uncultured (in the sense of being unsubtle) but are not boors -- merely straight talking and honest. As the Japanese learned to open up and express themselves honestly, the problem disappeared.] Now I've been observing the Taliban making the same kinds of blunders, if blunders they be. It depends on your point of view. This article may or may not be reporting on a trial balloon coming from the Taliban itself; if it is, then it is naive in the extreme from the point of view of this westerner. It suggests that the Taliban might be willing to trade the 8 western charity workers for Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is currently in US prison. He was convicted for the bombing of the World Trade Center and is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole; he's also a crony of Osama bin Laden, who is hiding out in Afghanistan. However, it's also possible that this proposal hasn't come from the Taliban but has come from Abdel-Rahman's relatives. Regardless, it represents a cultural misunderstanding of canyon-like proportions. There is no chance, none whatever, that the US would consent to such a trade. Any serious attempt to propose this to American diplomats would be greeted with scornful laughter. This isn't the Cold War, where the US and USSR would trade spies with each other; we are not going to trade cold-blooded murderers for missionaries. If Abdel-Rahmen's bombing had been successful, he would have toppled that building and upwards of ten thousand people might have died. Fortunately, the engineers designed better than that and the structure was never in peril. We're supposed to trade away someone like that? They're lucky we didn't execute the bastard. (discuss)
I just read this BBC article and had that reaction to it, though what I was actually experiencing was culture shock. It is talking about how they're going to limit the ability of people to buy second homes in cities inside the National Parks, so as to make sure that the local residents aren't priced out of the market and prevented from themselves continuing to live there. That all makes sense in the microscopic, but my first reaction was "Cities in National Parks?" But I guess, upon further consideration, that it does make sense. England has been settled for a long time; it's been civilized, more or less, since Emperor Claudius. To me, a "National Park" means Yellowstone or the Everglades or Banff: large areas of wilderness preserved for the future. But that really isn't possible in England. There isn't any virgin wilderness left there. (Heck; there isn't any virgin wilderness left in Massachusetts, and that's been "civilized" a heck of a lot less time than England.) In the Canadian Rockies, there are four contiguous National Parks: Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay and Banff. From the northern tip of Jasper to the southern tip of Banff is a distance of about 420 kilometers. Starting from the center of London, that would take you to the Scottish border (at the Solway Firth). Between them they cover more than 20,000 square km. That's 8% of the total land area of the UK (and would probably approach a quarter of England proper). It's obvious that a park complex like that simply isn't possible in England. So if you want to have a reasonable sized National Park there, either you're going to have to gerrymander like mad (like Acadia), or you're you're going to have to accept that there will be cities in it, which is apparently what the the pragmatic Brits seem to have done. That then raises the question of what the role of the city is within the Park; is it an intruder or actually part of the ambience? Do you regulate it to preserve the life of that city in pristine condition? What a strange concept! What a meaningless noise! (discussion in progress)
My father died of cancer. The doctors gave him as much Demerol (a synthetic opiate) as he wanted to keep him out of pain. They gave my mom big boxes of the drug and syringes so she could inject him regularly. Of course he got addicted to the stuff, but what of that? There was no chance whatever of him recovering, and it kept him comfortable during his final months. The addiction was a medical non-issue. I'm glad it happened that way. That was 1971. About ten years later things had changed. The father of a friend of mine also died of cancer, but for him he would only be given a shot if he complained loudly and had his wife drive him to the doctor's office. Then they'd give him one shot which might last six hours, after which the pain would return. What changed during that time? The War on Drugs. The Nixon administration decided to get tough on drug addiction and clamped down. One of the myths going around was the idea of doctors being legal drug peddlers and writing prescriptions for addicts, so they imposed all sorts of paperwork on doctors. Whenever a schedule 1 drug was prescribed, the doctor had to fill out forms to justify it, and if it was found that the doctor was wrong then the doctor could lose his license to practice and perhaps even face criminal charges. This covered, in particular, the use of opiates for pain relief. So if a doctor under-treated pain, then all that happened was that one patient suffered. If he over-treated pain, he could lose his license and perhaps even his liberty. Which side would you err on? Yup, so did they. Easily the most egregious example of this is a medical procedure called debriding. In burn patients, there is dead tissue at the site of the burn and it must be removed; otherwise gangrene can set in and the patient can die. But this is an unbelievably painful process, because it means that the burn area has to be vigorously scrubbed to make the dead tissue come off. And we're talking open raw flesh here; all of us have had minor burns and we know how sensitive they are; that's nothing compared to a 3rd degree burn which may be several inches in size or may cover most of the patient's body. And in the 1980's this operation was routinely done without anesthetic. (Indeed, the result differs little from a Dark Ages torture called flaying which was one of their favorites because it was so effective at inducing pain in the victim.) I don't understand why such people weren't juiced with Morphine first. I find it nearly inconceivable that medical technicians could do that to people without feeling bad. I think part of the problem is that medical workers get used to being around pain in others -- it is, after all, a daily occurrence for them. And it's easy to rationalize: debriding a wound really does save the life of the patient. You have to be cruel to be kind, and all that. Moreover, except in cases of shock pain itself doesn't kill. It's a symptom, not directly a problem; fixing the problem will make the pain go away -- eventually. I think they get inured to it. So I can't say I'm surprised to learn that the same attitude has filtered down to treatment of children. And the American Academy of Pediatrics (and the American Pain Society) have now come out with a new policy stating that pain in children, even minor pain, should be treated more aggressively. I fully agree. It isn't possible to prevent pain entirely (a shot of anesthetic itself hurts) but it can be reduced in many cases. But it would help if Congress were to reduce the regulatory burden on doctors trying to use opiates. Doctors would use Morphine more (as they should) if they didn't fear the consequences of doing so quite as much. The evil of doctor-pushers is much less than the evil of unnecessary pain in innocent victims of injury. (discussion in progress)
Manufacturing output is falling, and there have been a lot of layoffs. When a company decides to lay people off, inevitably it will lay off the ones who contribute least to its economic well-being and keep the people who contribute most. In other words, it lays off the least productive workers and keeps the most productive ones. That would mean that the average productivity of the remaining workers would be higher than before the layoff, but not because the productivity of any individual worker necessarily increased -- indeed, it probably decreases somewhat because of disruption of the business. So I'm not sure that this statistic really tells us anything. (discuss)
That's mainly because the decoy can be kept secret and that the decoy doesn't have to be deployed system-wide. But countermeasures to the decoy do have to be deployed system-wide once the decoy is discovered. If every time I upgrade 5% of my missiles you have to upgrade 100% of your anti-missiles, I can spend you into the ground. If you only upgrade 5% of your anti-missiles, then when I launch my upgraded missile it may not go where the upgraded anti-missiles are, and the non-upgraded anti-missiles may not be able to stop my attack. You can't know where I'll aim, so your entire system has to be able to deal with it. But I don't have to upgrade all my missiles, because as attacker I have the initiative. This is one of about four major reasons why the missile defense system is a foolish waste of time and money. But this principle applies to all kinds of things. It applies in the commercial world, too. If one company can deploy a product cheaply and rapidly, and if the commercial countermeasure from an opposing company is expensive and time consuming, then the former company has an advantage. That is the situation that the RIAA is facing now. Having slain Napster by attacking it with lawyers, it is now facing other companies who are trying to do exactly the same thing. But those companies have learned from the Napster debacle and have elaborate defenses. One in particular has its main server located on the island of Nevis, in the Caribbean, and it is a directory server for a series of distributed main servers in diverse locations. The system has no central control and the company itself isn't incorporated in the US. Its software is designed in such a way that it isn't possible to institute centralized filtering control, and the traffic on its system doesn't all pass through a single point. Thus it would not be possible to issue a court order to it comparable to the one that Napster received to either filter or be shut down. Filtration isn't possible and neither is shutdown. And in any case the company isn't located in the US and it's not clear that US courts would even have jurisdiction. But the real point is expense at the margin: it is cheap and fast to set up this kind of system, but slow and expensive for RIAA to sic its lawyers on it. It took RIAA two years to kill Napster. In the last six months at least four replacement systems have popped up. If a new file-sharing system can be created in six months but it takes two years for RIAA to prevail in court, then RIAA will win the battles but lose the war. It looks like they're beginning to realize it, too. (Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys, I tell you.) (discussion in progress)
Well, they actually are going to evacuate the villages and release the water, though a lot less violently, and I think it's cool. Unfortunately, some people in harm's way refuse to leave; I hope it doesn't go wrong and kill them, but if that does happen they'll have no-one to blame but themselves. (discuss)
This article, unfortunately, perpetuates the understatement that a simple diet would make a difference. I expected better of Nature. We're not talking about simply slimming down, we're talking about a level of food intake which would eventually kill you. In any case, this research is still much too preliminary to be converted to clinical practice. (discuss)
Dell is in the lead. It is currently outselling Apple in that market by 3:2. Apple is in the lead. Its installed base in the market remains twice what Dell's installed base is. You pays your money (to Gartner) and takes your choice. But if I were the two companies in question, I'd much rather be ahead in sales than in installed base. If the current state of affairs continues for the long term, Dell's installed base will catch up with Apple. Moreover, no company makes money off installed base; it's only benefit is to encourage repeat sales, which doesn't seem to be working sufficiently for Apple. So I have to say that this is good news for Dell. (discuss)
It also describes this as being a boon for cell phones, something I know a great deal about. It will permit much faster CPUs to be put into cell phones without raising the price, it says. But there are three constraints on the CPUs used in cell phones: price, speed and power consumption; and of the three the last one is actually the gating factor. In the cell phones I used to work on, we were running the CPU at less than 20 MHz even though it was capable of going 200 MHz. That's because higher clock rates burn more power and our battery was tiny. We did everything we possibly could to reduce power consumption. It may be that GaAs will provide 35 times the CPU speed (though I'm skeptical about a number that large: 7 GHz??? in a cell phone???), but cell phones don't need blazing CPU speeds. (Our CPU spent 99% of the time halted.) GaAs isn't going to reduce power consumption per unit computing by 35-fold; I am not sure it will reduce it at all, in fact. GaAs has a lot of virtues but I never heard that low power consumption was one of them. This is the case for nearly everything which runs off batteries, by the way; the CPUs in such devices rarely run at even what current technology permits. Raising the clock ceiling is unimpressive if no-one is pushing the ceiling anyway. Even PDAs don't push the clock ceiling; the CPU in an iPaq runs about 235 MHz (IIRC) which is fast by PDA standards but isn't remotely as fast as it could run. (I'm virtually certain the CPU they're using is capable of twice that speed.) They also claim that it's going to reduce price. I don't see how; what does GaAs bring to the table which will reduce die sizes or increase yields, which is what would be needed to reduce price? The only claim they make that I believe is increased computing speed, but the kinds of embedded devices they want to target with this aren't pushing the state of the art in that regard yet anyway. Motorola has found a very fine solution -- but it's not a solution to a problem that embedded devices have. Their marketing department needs to look again at their technology and figure out who really needs it. (discuss) Update: Ah. Apparently what's going on is that this new hybrid process can produce parts with GaAs performance for a tenth of what a pure GaAs process would cost, and that's their justification for "cheaper". It's not clear that the hybrid process would be cheaper than the pure silicon process used now, however, so in practice it's not clear that it would really reduce costs given that no-one in that business is using GaAs anyway. Update: OK; I probably should have gone to EETimes first. A cell phone chipset is actually three chips. One is huge and has the CPU and all the digital circuitry on it and represents the majority of the price. The other two are RF parts and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they're currently fabricated with a pure GaAs process, since analog microwave is hard to do in silicon. This new technology will make those two parts cheaper, but they're a minor part of the total expense of the chipset, which is a minor part of the cost of a phone. Reducing the cost of those parts will result in a fraction of a percent reduction in the sales price a cellphone, but it will probably get used nonetheless.
They're listed in order of creation. It's interesting that the first three are from the 19th century, the next three from the 20th, and the last one is 21st century.(discussion in progress)
Sometimes I understand mergers; sometimes the businesses augment each other nicely. But sometimes it makes no sense to me at all. This one I don't understand. It will be interesting to see what happens to the stock of both companies tomorrow. (discussion in progress) Update: NYT coverage. Update 20010904: Well, the market has spoken: HWP is down 18.14% and CPQ is down 10.28%.
Update: I know! Schools!
But that's not the trial I'm interested in. At the same time as these eight people were arrested, the Taliban
Of course, it's a lot easier to deal with it if you grow up in it, but even such folks screw up all the time. But in a country like China, which has introduced a stock exchange, it's hardly a surprise that it's rigged and there's a lot of stock manipulation going on, which means that small investors are getting taken. The best defense when you're free is to develop a healthy skepticism about things -- but when it's a new experience, where are you to learn that? (discuss)
Probably the strangest reason is that a couple of years ago, Russia itself said it wanted to join NATO. (That was a mind-boggling concept for someone like me who grew up during the Cold War.) It's also the case that Russia has been trying off and on to dominate the Baltic states for hundreds of years. But the real reason for the Baltic States to fear Russia is because there are substantial minority populations of ethnic Russians living in all three countries left over from when they were part of the Soviet Union. World-wide, there have been just too many cases in recent years when countries have used perceived mistreatment of such ethnic minorities in neighboring states as a justification for military operations -- most notably Serbia attacking everyone in sight for "oppressing" their Serbian minorities. Also, when a nation's economy is crumbling and there is unrest at home, demagogues will sometimes start a war as a way of trying to unite everyone in patriotism; that's why Argentina attacked the Falkland Islands, for instance. Given the combination of how unstable things are in Russia right now and an unhappy ethnic Russian minority in the Baltic states, Russia's still considerable military capability is a very real concern for those new nations. (discuss)
After the establishment of Islam by Mohammed, the Arabs finally got organized and became a power. Bursting out of the desert, they conquered all of the Middle East, Turkey, and all of North Africa extending all the way to the Atlantic. They then crossed Gibralter and conquered most of Spain, which is where the events portrayed in Othello take place. These Arab invaders were referred to as "Moors", a word which comes from the same root as the modern nation name "Morocco" (the nation of the Moors, more or less). In other words, a Moor was an Arab: a dark skinned caucasian. Of course, nothing says that traditional racial classifications are binding on modern presenters of historical drama. There are five ways that race can be handled in historical drama: without change, transplant, being color blind, satirically, and tokenism/misinterpretation. The first is obvious, of course: if the part calls for a white man, cast a white man. If it calls for a black woman, cast a black woman. Transplant is interesting and can be very successful. Kurosawa transplanted King Lear into medieval Japan and converted the daughters into sons in his great film Ran and to my mind the result was even more successful than the original. Much of the character motivation in the film just makes more sense to me in the context of the early part of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Of course, that meant that every part was cast with Japanese actors, and all the dialog was rewritten into Japanese -- yet the essence of the play was preserved and even enhanced. I have seen this kind of thing done several times, with varying degrees of success. Probably the most famous was the transplantation of Romeo and Juliet into the Brooklyn slums in West Side Story. When casting is color blind, the results can be a bit jarring. Every once in a while some opera company decides to try to actually put on an entire production of Wagner's "Ring". (Sometimes it destroys them, since it is a major undertaking.) About fifteen years ago this was done and televised, and I watched and taped it. The second of the four plays is Die Walküre, and one of the characters in it is Sieglinde. Wagner was a notorious bigot, and all the main heroic or sympathetic characters in The Ring were envisioned by him as being played by whites with blonde hair and blue eyes. Yet for this particular presentation, a stunningly lovely black woman was cast as Sieglinde. After a momentary shock, the beauty of her voice and performance as she sang suspended my disbelief and I went with the flow. (I regret that I don't recall her name; I'm not much of an opera fan and don't keep up with who's hot.) Frankly, I don't think she was cast to make a statement; she was cast because she was the best person available for the role, being one of the top altos performing in the world at that time. Then there is satirical casting. The best example of this is the play The Mikado which is ostensibly about Japan but was actually a satire about Victorian England. Which is why you have the Emperor of Japan singing about punishing billiards sharps by condemning them to play "On a cloth untrue, With a twisted cue, And elliptical billiard balls!" Hardly something the real emperor would have been concerned with. As a result, no-one pays the slightest attention to the ostensible race of any of the characters, and casts anyone they feel like. I also once saw a small play done in Boston which was based on the legendary cartoon strip "Krazy Kat", which was superb, by the way. It was definitely low budget but there was charm to it. Now Kokonino County was a pretty surreal place anyway, full of strange characters like Peking Duck and Don Kyoti. In this production all the supporting actors played multiple parts. One of the supporting actors was a beautiful Chinese-American woman with a lovely face and a figure to die for. (I'm a sucker for Chinese women. Always have been.) One of the great plot arcs in Krazy Kat was when the gorgeous Fifi the French Poodle came into Kokonino County, and all the male characters went ga-ga over her. Naturally, this Chinese woman played Fifi -- and she was superb. Her French accent was flawless, and she had the moves (and the equipment to make them). The jarring contrast between her Chinese features and her complete absorption into a stereotypical French babe-type character (because, of course, Fifi the French Poodle was a stereotype anyway) just made the performance that much more hilarious. It was an inspired casting choice! The problem comes with the last form way of dealing with it, and Othello is the prime example. The character of Othello seems to have become reserved for Negro actors, almost their entitlement in the canon of Shakespeare. This is not transplantation, because the play is otherwise usually presented straight. It simply doesn't make sense to me. It's not that I object to black actors playing the part so much as that it doesn't seem to be possible anymore for anyone else to do so. If you were really trying to do the part racially accurately, you'd cast an Arab. If you were trying to come close, you'd take a caucasian actor and put makeup on him. Olivier did that in 1965; has any major white actor played Othello since then?. (discussion in progress)
I think it was a foregone conclusion that this was going to happen. The whole point of the affirmative action program was to artificially raise the number of minority students by accepting less qualified ones in preference to better qualified majority (read "white") applicants. When that program was terminated and when the universities switched to using qualifications to make the decision, in some cases they were going to take those white applicants instead. It really would have been quite surprising if the number of minority students hadn't fallen. That is not the issue. The actual issue is twofold: is it ever legal to discriminate on the basis of skin color? Surely few would contend that it's legal to discriminate in favor of light skin color, but is it legal to discriminate in favor of dark skin color and against light skin color? For that is what "affirmative action" amounted to. "We'll discriminate against 20-something whites in order to make up for the fact that we discriminated in favor of 40-something whites and 60-something whites." The reason that is illegal is that the 20-somethings are not the same people as the 40-somethings, and this violates the 14th amendment rights of the 20-somethings. Nathan got an unreasonably good deal, so we're going to screw over his friend Jeremy just to make it even. It's only fair, right? Well, not to Jeremy. There's also the moral question of what this was attempting to accomplish, and it came down to global versus individual treatment. The goal of affirmative action was to accomplish a greater goal of moving minorities into the professional class, and to do that those in favor were willing to accept that individual white students would lose out. Some opponents of affirmative action are racists, but many are simply interested in seeing individuals treated fairly irrespective of the global results. I believe that admission into universities, and indeed everything, should be race-blind. I certainly don't think that there should be discrimination in favor of whites, but equally I don't think it is right to discriminate against them. And it is impossible to discriminate in favor of any group without discriminating against at least one other. If there was illegal and immoral discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in the past, the solution is to eliminate discrimination, not to discriminate the other way for a few generations "to make it even". A white baby born in 1983, who is now trying to enter college, had nothing whatever to do with apartheid in the 1950's or the KKK in the 1920's, and she shouldn't be punished because her skin color happens to be the same as that of the people who really did do those things. Punish her when she does something wrong; don't punish her because she's part of a group. (discuss) |
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