My former employer never came out and said it publicly but that is what they did. Also once they started hiring H1B staff we never got another decent raise and pretty much every year from then on we had benefit cuts. When the company got into financial trouble the layoffs were almost entirely from non-H1B staff. So what you are describing is pretty much exactly what happened there as well. So there are at least two companies that did that and I suspect we’d find a lot more.

The company I work for now issues people special travel laptops for international travel. They are imaged specifically for the trip with only the applications and data the person needs to do the specific job they are traveling for. When they get back any data that needs to be preserved is pulled off and the machines are reimaged. Things like this and just the general high risk of laptop loss in international travel are the motivations for doing all that. It used to be there was a small list of countries we did that for now their is a small list of countries we don't do it for.

In the article it says he is looking to pay himself a reasonable salary and to hire one additional full time programmer to assist with the development. Basically he wants to get back to the situation he had pre 2012 before his funding ran out and he had to lay off his staff. It sounds like after this he probably is OK for the time being. Though he is going to need to maintain similar levels of funding going forward if he is going to be able to hire staff.

It seems to me that the more interesting question is how many of the other important open source projects are in the same position? Is there a better way to fund them? I mean this guy made his funding goals by getting the media to talk about the situation back in December. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable model.

The article says that the creators of this envision it as a structural element of buildings. Where you would have an entire wall made of this material that gets soaked with water to cool the space when it gets hot. I have not dealt with a swamp coolers but I have dealt with humidifiers quite a lot. The one thing that I have observed is that every part that gets wet grows a colony of who knows what pretty fast if it isn’t regularly cleaned. In a lot of systems you have a pad, which is frequently structured very similarly to this material, which has to be replaced because there is no real way to clean the interior surfaces. Well with this stuff they are talking about taking that pad and making a permanent wall out of it. My prediction is that anybody who used this would end up with a huge mold filled science experiment in a fairly short time. The closest thing I can see to being able to really clean that would be to periodically saturate the wall with some sort of chemical cleaner. I could see these printed ceramic structures being used to make swamp coolers, and humidifiers, more efficient but use outlined in the article just seems like a bad idea.

I am not sure this is a sign of an attempt to silence this guy. A few years ago I had something very similar happen to me, and I am not a blogger with enemies. This was before we got cable Internet in my area. My employer had put a fractional T1 line in so that I could work from home when I was on call. Somebody came along cut the cable off the back of my house pulled the whole thing up all the way back to the box behind the row of houses and took it. They guy who came from the phone company was of the opinion they wanted the copper. From the way the guy talked it sounded like it was a fairly common occurrence. Copper prices are much higher now than they were back then. So it is entirely possible that somebody wanted the cable but it was just too hard for them to pull up. That fits the description of the damage in the article.

The article makes it sound like the various groups are mostly lining up on the side that donates to them. So groups that are supported by Comcast, and the other ISPs, are against title II regulation and those that are supported content providers, such as Google and Facebook, are for it. At the very least that creates the appearance that their positions might be for sale. Though it is possible that they just solicited companies they agree with for donations. Which of those you believe is going to depend upon your opinion of the people involved and both could be true since we are looking at a bunch of different groups.

I have to admit that this is very similar to my thinking on this. A man that shows you a device whose exact function he refuses to explain that does some miraculous thing is always to be suspected. History is full of such conmen. Just watch an episode of “Mysteries at the Museum” and odds are it will feature at least one of them. The sad fact is that no matter what the researchers find we can’t trust it unless he allows them full and unfettered access to the entirety of the process. Allows them to see the entire apparatus explains how it works and allows them to test it in a setting completely outside of his control. Better yet if he wants us to believe this he should hand these scientist the plans and let them assemble their own machine from parts not sourced from him and let them test it. If he is worried about his technology he should have them sign very strong non-disclosure agreements and non-compete agreements. Setting up a test where they just monitor the outcomes isn’t a valid test due to the potential for fraud. His current behavior comes off as the behavior of a conman. If he isn’t a conman he would be well advised to stop acting like one and allow some real testing of his machine. Nothing would make me happier than to find he’s just a paranoid fool who made a world changing discovery. I am just not betting on it.

Just from reading these articles over the years, watching the news and my general observations I think their motivations are fairly clear. Powerful entrenched economic interests such as the entertainment industry, news media and financial industry all feel threatened by the freewheeling ways of the Internet. Those interests are demanding action from the government to protect their economic models. Governments fear terrorists. In some ways they fear them more than the public does as nothing motivates politicians more than preserving their power and position. None of them want to be the one that didn’t foil the next big attack. Governments also fear the free flow of information among the public. That fear manifests in places like China with the Great Firewall and similar technologies deployed in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. It also manifests in things like so many countries attempting to develop things like ability to turn off the Internet. In the Western countries it seems to be manifesting as this desire to monitor everything and everyone. My gut feeling on this is that their proposed strategies for dealing with these things do more harm than good. I guess that is not surprising in my view considering fear, especially irrational fear, is not a good basis for developing public policy.

As a general rule I agree that the US Bureaucracy is surprisingly honest. In my experience most corruption in US projects doesn’t come from the bureaucracy but from congress. US government procurement rules are designed to pay off the various political power blocks associated with darned near every person in congress. The rank and file government employees know it is corrupt but they have to follow the law as written. For some items these rules very likely double the cost.

We have been watching these sorts of things come out of Australia for years. The labor government was at least as bad about it with their black lists and various censorship schemes. In the article also notice that the bill has the support of both the conservative government and the labor establishment. So blaming this on the conservatives seems questionable. A more accurate assessment is that the Australian government is just prone to this sort of behavior. As for as I can see there is no party, other than the greens, who are really against this stuff in Australia.

We have the same problem in the US. The Republicans passed the Patriot act and the Democrats have embraced and expanded it. The sad fact is that people in power benefit from very strong intelligence services and powerful state apparatus. The fact that these things can harm the public doesn’t seem to enter into the equation.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say shareholders are shortsighted. It really depends upon who your shareholders are. If your shareholders are hedge funds or people like Carl Icahn then they are as you describe. If your shareholders are individuals or things like pension funds with long time horizons they frequently don’t think that way. I think, in my case anyway, I tend to view it as you describe most of the time because the shortsighted investors are the ones we see the most in the news. They are the ones destroying companies or making obviously bad decisions that get into the press. The other kind of investors don’t make it into the news and you never hear about the companies that are just chugging along for generations.

My fear is that the shortsighted shareholders are becoming more prevalent. Though I don’t have any proof of that other than the general trend of the news. The problem is the news often provides a false view. If you listen to the news, for example, you’d think violent crime is running wild. Yet the statistics are that violent crime is way down. It just looks like it is running wild because of the 24 hour news cycle where every bad thing in the country gets reported over and over again. I wonder whether we are seeing a similar phenomenon with financial news where the actions of the bad players are being magnified because of the 24 hour news cycle.

Fascism is not "a form of capitalism" it is another form of socialism. The difference is that that under communism the means of production are outright owned by the state where as under fascism the preserve the illusion of individual, i.e. capitalism style, ownership. Actual economic control economic control under Fascism is actually state controlled. So it is not accurate to claim that Fascism is a form of capitalism it is more accurate to say it is a variation of Socialism. Just as Communism and the post war European economies are all variations of Socialism.

As whether Communism requires tyranny it would seem that in practice it does. Simply because there are no examples where both Communism and freedom have co-existed for any significant period of time. From the evidence of what has happened it would appear that the level of control required by Communism, and Fascism for that matter, is simply unachievable without coercion. Entire populations simply don’t like surrendering complete control over their lives to the government. So no matter how high minded the Communist authorities start out they invariably have to adopt tyrannical policies in order to enact their program. Simply because there are always too many people who do not want it to enact it any other way.

Where Socialism has managed to exist without becoming a tyranny is in places like Europe. Where they adopt a limited amount of Socialism but still allow people to pretty much live as they like. Socialism without freedom and a certain amount of Capitalism ends up in tyranny. Capitalism without a certain amount regulation and government intervention, i.e. Socialism, ends up in a different kind of tyranny. Fascism and Communism are just variations on the same theme and both invariably lead to tyranny.

Whether you have to drive around a military base depends upon where you are. Here there are several large military installations in and around a densely populated metro area. One of the main roads goes by not one but two of them. There simply isn’t a realistic way to avoid them here. I’d have to drive 50 miles or more out of my way every day to avoid them. Even then half the metro area would be off limits to me. So whatever they are doing I am pretty much going to have to accept it because I am probably driving into and out of their area 10 times a day. So I am really hoping it is just for base security.

Depends upon the circumstances. When I was in high school I knew a guy who had a fairly serious alcohol problem. One night he had gotten drunk and was walking along the side of the road and just staggered into traffic at the wrong moment and got run down. The woman that hit him was just driving along and he just stepped in front of her. Under those circumstances it was just a terrible tragedy. There were no charges of any kind for the woman.

Prior to 2011 there had not been a significant earthquake in my area for a bit over 100 years. When the quake hit in 2011 what we discovered is that pretty much nobody was prepared for an earthquake. Fortunately the damage was mostly restricted to building damage. In particular we have a lot of masonry structures in Virginia and some of them got damaged. The front steps to my house suffered some cracking and the sidewalk is not at a slight angle that wasn’t there before the quake. I am eventually going to have to get that fixed.

I do have some general emergency supplies. Water, good radio, good flashlights, fresh batteries, a supply of medications, and some food that doesn’t require cooking. Things which are useful in any emergency but which could also service in an earthquake if needed. That stuff came in handy in 2012 when we had a Derecho come through. That took out power, phones (both mobile and land line), knocked down trees and uprooted the sign at the Wendy's. Some people were without power for over a week from that.