eldavojohn writes “You might be familiar with Donald Knuth from his famous Art of Computer Programming books but he’s also the father of TeX and, arguably, one of the founders of open source. There’s an interesting interview where he states a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have predicted. One of the first surprises to me was that he didn’t seem to be a large proponent of unit tests. I use JUnit to test parts of my projects maybe 200 times a day but Knuth calls that kind of practice a “waste of time” and claims “nothing needs to be ‘mocked up.’” He also says that methods to write software to take advantage of parallel programming hardware (like multi-core systems that we’ve discussed) are too difficult for him to tackle due to ever changing hardware. He even goes so far as to vent about his unhappiness toward chipmakers for forcing us into the multicore realm. He pitches his idea of “literate programming” which I have to admit I’ve never heard of but find it intriguing. At the end, he even remarks on his adage that young people shouldn’t do things just because they’re trendy. Whether you love him or hate him, he sure has some interesting/flame-bait things to state.”

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Employees, Workspace, Politics

In the April 23, Wall Street Journal, Senator Sherrod Brown, (D) Ohio, made a realistic assessment of current government trade policy and how it is diluting the strength of our country. I think that Senator Brown was just a bit gentle with his words, and understandably so when given his position. Suffice it to state that I agree with him for the most part, but he should have just cut to the chase. The American working class has been sold out. He also failed to make one critical point about NAFTA. It was his party and the guidance of Bill Clinton that navigated that document into law.

Partisan politics aside, I believe that current American trade standards are something we need to be ashamed of. As a free market capitalist, I have nothing against the survival of the fittest in the worlds of manufacturing and business. However, we’re beholden to good sense to provide a level playing field and to maintain benchmark standards. In that regard, American workers have been shorted. Our trade deficit is a testament to the decline of the American Dream. It’s a dream, while not referred to by that name, that resides in the hearts of workers the world over. Every parent wants their children to have a greater degree of opportunity and safety than they had.

For me, the crux of the matter is easy. While analysis tends to indicate that industrial globalization actually is improving living standards on a worldwide average, those workers with a higher standard of living fall victim to the averaging. I have argued long and hard that the focus should be to help the world reach upward to our own standard of living. We should not compromise our own standards to make someone else’s relatively better. We should guide them to accomplish what we’ve.

Call me a protectionist, a knee-jerk conservative, a labor lackey, or imperialist pig. The fact remains that as the workers of other countries see (slightly) improved living conditions at the expense of American workers, the standard defined as average slowly declines for all.

Gary Sattler is a freelance blogger. He’s a quarter century veteran of the manufacturing arts.

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U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs

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betaville points out comments AT&T filed with the FCC in which they denied throttling traffic by resetting P2P file-sharing connections. Earlier this week, a study published by the Vuze team found AT&T to have the 25th highest (13th highest if extra Comcast networks are excluded) median reset rate among the sampled networks. In the past, AT&T has defended Comcast’s throttling practices, and stated it wants to monitor its network traffic for IP violations. “AT&T vice president of Internet and network systems research Charles Kalmanek, in a letter addressed to Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa, said that peer-to-peer resets can arise from numerous local network events, including outages, attacks, reconfigurations or overall trends in Internet usage. ‘AT&T does not use “false reset messages” to manage its network,’ Kalmanek said in the letter. Kalmanek noted that Vuze’s analysis said the test ‘cannot conclude definitively that any particular network operator is engaging in artificial or false [reset] packet behavior.’”

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and other lawmakers are pushing legislation to limit the power of the say secrets doctrine in blocking lawsuits. The doctrine has been used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card in cases like the EFF’s warrantless wiretapping lawsuit. This new legislation would make it harder for the administration to invoke the doctrine, and provide new allowances, such as using attorneys with security clearances to enable the lawsuits to go forward even when the issue is appropriately raised.” Update: 04/28 16:58 GMT by KD : The New Yorker is running a detailed piece, State Secrets, by Patrick Radden Keefe, about how the use of the say secrets doctrine is playing out in one particular case.

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Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes “There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet’s activity, legal and illegal, flows through these ‘choke points,’ and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data, which is already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity.”

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Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, sends us to DarkReading for a backgrounder on new rules from the FTC, taking effect in November, that’ll require any business that handles private consumer data to check its customers and suppliers against databases of known online criminals. Companies that fail to do so might be liable for big fines or jail time. In practice, most companies will contract with specialist services to perform these checks. Yet another list you don’t want to get on. “The [FTC’s] Red Flag program… requires enterprises to check their customers and suppliers against databases of known on the web criminals — much like what OFAC [the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control] does with terrorists — and also carries potential fines and penalties for businesses that don’t do their due diligence before making a major transaction.”

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Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, points out a story about the Russian government’s interest in expanding anti-extremism laws to include the blocking of websites and ISPs. The laws would match those already in use for the country’s print media. Russian world wide web users may soon be forced to deal with the same issues facing Chinese citizens. Quoting: “An official at the Russian prosecutor’s general office, Vyacheslav Sizov, told the Russian-language newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that any web site that’s determined to host what he terms ‘extremist material’ would be blocked from being accessible from within the Russian Federation. Given the Putin government’s history with the media, ‘extremist material’ may be very broadly interpreted as any content unfriendly to the interests of the Russian government.”

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An anonymous reader writes “The bill to ban genetic discrimination in employment or insurance coverage is moving forward. Is this the death knell of private insurance? I think private health insurance is pretty much incompatible with genetic testing (GT) for disease predisposition, if stated testing turns out to be of any use whatsoever. The great strength of GT is that it will (as technology improves) take a lot of the uncertainty out of disease prediction. But that uncertainty is what insurance is based on. If discrimination is granted, the person with the bad genes is out of luck because no one would insure them. However, if that isn’t granted, the companies are in trouble. If I know I’m apt to get a certain condition, I’ll stock up on ‘insurance’ for it. The only solution I have the ability to see is single-payer universal coverage along the lines of the Canadian model, where everyone pays, and no one (insurer or patient) can game the system based on advance knowledge of the outcomes. Any other ideas? This bill has been in the works for a while.”

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Rambus has won its appeal in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision said that it wasn’t sufficient to prove that Rambus lied or harmed competitors; the FTC had to prove that it harmed consumers in order to fall under anti-trust law. This is, unfortunately, a very hazardous ruling in light of some of Microsoft’s activities relating to OOXML because it raises the bar on the proof required to act against such behavior. However, the ruling in the Rambus case was merely vacated and remanded for further proceedings, not overturned. So, if the evidence warrants, the lower court might be able to decide that consumers were actually harmed by Rambus’ conduct and rule against them. Alternatively, this ruling could be appealed to the Supreme Court by filing a petition for a writ of certiorari, but the Supreme Court only allows a few of those per year.”

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