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Comment Re:More US workers == offshoring?? (Score 1) 484

I think I can explain the idea. H1B visas are not green cards, companies like them because once they sponsor someone that person either keeps working for the same company or goes home. Companies like this because it makes the person wholly dependent on the sponsor company, read really low wages. Except the catch is eventually lots of these people do go home, bringing their technical skill and company IP with them. As the process continues you get net talent drain out of the U.S., the U.S. citizen was never given a chance to learn the job and those skills hours go back offshore. Back when there were very few real opportunities back home the process was slow, but as the process continues over time there are more and more options back home and each new returnee further enables the next one. That is why you are now hearing more so many stories about workers repatriating, at the end of the day most of them really would prefer to live and work in their native communities. That is why most technical organizations advocate green cards over H1B, if the person is really that good, why not give them the option of staying. Companies don't like it because once they get over here, they can't keep them unless they pay competitive wages.

Comment Open source medicine, the time has come (Score 1) 164

For about 20 years I have felt that the solution to spiraling costs in medicine is to enable collaborative or "open source" type research. There is no doubt that the free market, where true competition takes place, can compete to produce medicine very cheaply if allowed to, but the basic research needed does take real effort and the resulting patents, though needed under the current system, end up being very expensive for the end user. The natural remedy crowd has long rightly claimed that there are many natural remedies available that can never get the funding needed to pass FDA approval because there is no profit in doing so. Likewise the information revolution has made even development of high tech remedies within the reach average individuals and communities. I call on us all to consider how the approval process could be adapted to keep safeguards in place, yet enable collaborative open source medicine to be researched and produced. If people are motivated to help out Wikipedia out of simple community altruism, consider how motivated people would be to help cure diseased afflicting loved ones! I think there is also a valuable place for government and university funded labs to perform much of the basic research needed.

Comment Re:If NK did it, explain this one.. (Score 1) 282

I can prove what I said. Note I didn't say NK has NO computer hacking resources, but rather that they have far fewer than other countries. Consider how few people even have internet access in NK, or even a computer. The ones who do may be perfectly competent, but I would simply assert that if NK was able to pull this off, any number of other countries or organizations (hacktavists and rival corporations included) could clearly have easily pulled this off also. Us not knowing for sure if it was an inside job or not to me means we need to know a lot more about the hack before pointing the finger. What do we really know, that there was some Korean words in the code and some code fragments looked reused from another attack we think came from NK. But, the Korean language thing gets me, do government employed hackers really not sanitize their code? I will grant NK had a motive of a kind, maybe in NK they don’t know about that Streisand Effect, but it isn’t like Sony has no other enemies. I think we are jumping to conclusions.

Comment If NK did it, explain this one.. (Score 4, Informative) 282

So I hear it was an inside job, how did NK get a spy infiltrated into Sony so quickly? Does NK really have that many spy assets all over the U.S. that they can whistle up as needed? Or was this an elaborate operation set up when the movie was first announced and they managed to infiltrate a NK citizen into Sony pictures in the time it took the make the movie? How does this all actually go down? FYI, NK is pretty computer illiterate over all compared to most countries and nearly every country on the planet is better positioned than NK to pull this stunt off along with a whole bunch of independent yahoos. Unless there is U.S. born traitor working for NK, seems that the possible suspects could be narrowed down pretty quickly. I am NOT saying NK was framed, but I AM saying there are a lot a people out there to do stuff for reasons I wouldn't and more real data is needed.

Comment All advances destroy more jobs... ...at first! (Score 1) 688

That is what is meant by more efficient, if it took more effort to do something it wouldn't be a technological advancement What happens is that now you find you can do more and new things that were impossible or at least unfeasible before. Technology IS very disruptive, lots of people get displaced and of necessity the values of jobs change drastically. Basically jobs that can be done by robots should, it is a losing proposition to try and work cheaper than a robot, while jobs that still require a human need to be recognized as comparably more expensive. The key to our future is understanding that this disruption is a real effect and that it helps people both individually and as a whole to aid this transition and to ensure that people have the money to buy the new products being produced, after all if one has the money to buy chairs neither people OR robots will be making chairs. Unions probably have the most important role in this change, though Government and Business need to participate also.

Comment Re:All parasites aspire to be symbiotic (Score 1) 172

Actually one reason I bring this up is I have wondered if one way to prevent many diseases is to ensure the ecological niche they want to take is already occupied by a much more benign organism. So it would simply be harder for the pest to gain a foothold in the first place. Probably not totally particle with viruses, they are inherently predatory on cells, but maybe bacteria...

Comment Re:All parasites aspire to be symbiotic (Score 1) 172

Well, kind off, I admit to overstating my case. None the less even carnivores, which of course eat their prey, can still have a symbiotic relationship with another species. In addition, recent research seems to indicate HIV and Ebola are recent mutations and basically maladapted viruses. Well adapted organisms tend to a beneficial equilibrium.

Comment Re:Is it true... (Score 1) 355

I think the major mistake you are making, which is a mistake of so many people who to try to make cultural/ethnics arguments, is a failure to understand how fast the modern era is moving and how quickly changes have occurred. If you look at the situations in these countries, they aren't really all that dissimilar (accounting for cultural differences) to situations in European nations not all that long ago. I would say they are factually a couple hundred years behind in some places, but compared to the whole of human history, that is a very small percentage behind. Basically the proven increase in IQ over the last hundred years in "modern" nations proves that we lack the ability to really know what can and can not be accounted for by culture.

Comment The logical flaw (Score 2) 335

The flaw in their logic is this, we don't really care I if works every time, just most of the time. So if the robot can do the right thing more often than not, rather like people, to such a degree that we view it as being a net benefit, we are willing to accept the occasional mistake or failure for a net overall viewed good. So they would have to prove the program would fail more often than succeed, which they probably can't. That said, I DID wish it were possible enforce Asimov's laws of robotics. Maybe some day..

Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 2) 72

What nonsense, who would vote this up? To be sure, younger voters were less pro Democrat in the last election (not unexpected as all voting segments were less pro Democrat), but they were still majority Democrat by a wide margin. So I hardly think Democrats would want to suppress Facebook voting efforts because the young aren't pro Democrat enough, how does that even make sense?

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