Ben Slade

From The Rolling Stone:

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

According to an article at TruthOut.org, NAFTA may actually be a significant factor in the illegal alien problem in the US.

While my gut says that free trade is generally good, this article does make some powerful points.

From the article:

While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA's ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:

• NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven Mexican farmers off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder so many Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their "death warrant.")
• NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
• Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the government-sponsored crushing of union organization, has resulted in sweatshop pay along the border where wages now typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

A great article on the unfortunate scenarios that are likely for Iraq from TomDispatch.com :

To understand what Iraq will look like, recall the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-1990, a brutal struggle that left perhaps 200,000 people dead in a far smaller country. That war dragged on for fifteen years, during which Lebanon's many-sided political culture constantly realigned itself like a reshaken kaleidoscope.

From the article DST Extended by Four Weeks in U.S. Starting in 2007 (on About.com):

President Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act, which extends Daylight Saving Time (DST) by four weeks from the second Sunday of March to end on the first Sunday of November. Extended Daylight Saving Time will begin in March 2007.

Has anybody thought about how much this is going to screw up computers? Think of Y2K lite. And it's not just a one time change:

Originally posted on SlashDot.org:

EmagGeek writes "The FCC implemented a Report and Order on Reconsideration (R&O on Recon) that uses some of the same exemptions for junk faxes that currently exist for the Do Not Call list.

The new rules specify that junk faxers can claim an Existing Business Relationship (EBR) to justify flooding you with junk faxes. Under the new rules, a junk faxer could visit your website and call that an existing business relationship.

My response to a question originally posted on Artima.com. The original question asked whether there is a divergence between software researchers and practitioners:

"I think you're heading towards the area of Industrial Psychology. My understanding of that field is that it's concerned with the human interactions underlying the manufacturing process.

I think this gets to the point that true "computer science" is a very specific field that concerns proveable algorithms, while the larger discipline of software development is (should be) much closer to industrial psychology.

See an overview of the Congressional Action on Research and Development in the FY 2006 Budget here.

A great summary of the 2006 US science budget. Basically, most things were stable, but all the increases went to military weapons development (which is not research). From the web page:

The federal investment in research and development (R&D) hits another record of $134.8 billion in FY 2006, a $2.2 billion or 1.7 percent increase over 2005 (see Table 1 and Figure 1). But 97 percent of the increase goes just to the two areas of DOD weapons development and NASA next-generation space exploration vehicles. Funding for all other R&D programs collectively barely increases, and will fall nearly 2 percent after adjusting for inflation. Congress provided $2.5 billion more than the Administration request, primarily for defense, to improve on an even gloomier 2006 proposal (see Figure 2). After 9 years in a row of increases, federal R&D dips slightly in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars

As usual, Paul Krugman in the NY Times, has razor sharp analysis of economic problems in the US:

What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite...

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

From InformationWeek (02/20/06), by Eric Chabrow:

The U.S. patent system needs serious reforms in both the system itself and the quality of patents. Many ongoing tech-related patent infringement lawsuits serve as testimony to the patent system's shortcomings, specifically its inability to keep pace with IT advancements.

The foundation for this lamentable state of affairs was set down over the past 20 years as the courts bolstered the rights of patent holders while simultaneously loosening the standards for granting patents. There was a 73 percent increase in U.S. patent applications between 1995 and 2005, and software patents now account for roughly 10 percent of all issued patents, according to Internet Patent News Service editor Gregory Aharonian.

An article in the NY Times describes how cell phone companies have spent nearly $10 billion to update cell phone networks to handle higher bandwidth video and music data, but customers aren't really interested. A few quotes:

"The big problem is how hard it is to navigate the stuff, and they hit you with these extra charges, so you don't want to use it."

"With individual subscribers spending less on standard voice-only plans, the carriers are banking on consumers to move rapidly to more expensive 3G services and do more than talk on their handsets. But the experience of carriers that introduced 3G services in Japan, Korea and elsewhere is sobering. In those countries, it took years before phones and plans were cheap enough to entice consumers to use the new data features, and even longer before carriers saw any return on their investment."