…but in my analysis, it has only become more true:

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.
   -H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

One of the blogs at ZDNet.com points out something I have been aware of for quite some time, but haven’t posted upon. Perhaps I should start making some noise. From Tom Foremski: IMHO, “US chip leadership is in trouble - but business is good“:

The bad news is that US is likely to lose its lead in chip manufacturing expertise and that could be catastrophic to the US economy. The SIA and the chipmakers and other groups are lobbying hard in Washington D.C. to make sure that the US funds more basic research, invests in education so it has a highly skilled workforce, and can provide new ways to finance multi-billion dollar fabs.

“There is no other industry like the chip industry that has created so many jobs, and has contributed so much to the GDP of this country,” said Mr Scalise. So far so good, I said. Why should we be so concerned about the future when the US chip industry is doing so well?

Mr Scalise and the others, pointed out that it is becoming more difficult to manufacture in the US because of fewer science and math students, and the economic incentives are much less than those offered in other countries. Yet each chip fab provides significant economic value to the host country because of the infrastructure that grows around it. Many other countries recognize that benefit and are offering significant incentives for chipmakers.

One worrying trend is China. Mr Scalise and his team recently returned from a fact finding trip to China. He said that SMIC, the country’s largest chip maker, is able to take advantage of sweetheart financing deals. The government of a large province in China is building billion dollar fabs and it will lease them to SMIC. This means SMIC doesn’t have to raise billions in capital markets to finance its expansion. This is a significant competitive advantage for SMIC.

The reason I had an expatriate assignment in France was because the newest fab (aka “wafer fabrication factory”) for my company (Freescale Semiconductor) is there, in large part because of tons of subsidies from the French government. Many fabs are being built in China, as Foremski notes in his post. Aside from jobs lost in the US, do we really want to be exporting the basic technology that powers our smart-bombs, guidance systems in our tanks, fly-by-wire systems in our jets, essentially all the technology that gives our military a huge advantage on the battlefield to a power that arguably will be our greatest rival in the 21st century?

My vote would be no, even if my future employment prospects were not affected.

What do you think?

For want of a nail…

This is interesting news:

Intel’s cellular phone effort a huge failure

Darrell Dunn, InformationWeek
EE Times
(06/27/2006 6:05 PM EDT)

DALLAS — Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor company, on Tuesday finally owned up to one of the most colossal failures in that industry’s history when it unloaded its communications and applications processor business to Marvell for $600 million.

It’s not surprising that Intel tried to slip that announcement in under the cover of its much splashier Woodcrest server processor extravaganza on Monday. There undoubtedly was a lot of anguish in Santa Clara when Intel finally bit the bullet and dropped its long battle to gain a position as a provider of processors for cellphones.

Intel plowed multi-billions of dollars of investment into the market with a covetous eye towards what is one of the largest volume markets available to processor manufacturers. Research firm Forward Concepts estimates that 830 million cellphones shipped in 2005, and that within two years, more than 1 billion cellphones will ship per year.

Why is it interesting?

I can recall my trepidation when Intel entered the commincations and applications processor business. While TI is the leader in many segments of this diverse market, my company (Freescale Semiconductor) is a major player, and it is never fun to compete with a company that has a lot of cash to plow into R&D.

Apparently, money can’t always buy success, thankfully. An object lesson that end results often do not resemble the initial predictions.

From an article at MSNBC.com on the elimination of the taxes on telephone calls:

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who won approval of the ban in the Senate Finance Committee, said he didn’t want the Internet to fall victim to taxes like the telephone tax enacted for the Spanish-American War.

“That war ended two centuries ago, and Congress is just now getting around to getting rid of the tax,” Wyden said.

Senator Wyden apparently thinks that there were telephones around in 1806 and that the Spanish-American War (you know, the one with Teddy Roosevelt charging San Juan Hill) predated the War of 1812 (the one with Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans). Either that or he thinks it’s the year 2098.

Geez…

Please note, the title intends to refer to “Death of a Salesman” for reasons that will be obvious to any willing to do the research and make the connections.

—

Blogworld is all abuzz at the unexpected death of Rob Smith, the Acidman of Gut Rumbles, and it should be no surprise give the wide swath he cut with his take-no-prisoners style against anything or anyone who “chapped his ass” where he often wounded his friends even more than his enemies.  I had a few run-ins with Rob, and I am still uncertain if I had made it to the Austin blog-meet if I would have shaken his hand or punched him in the face upon first meeting.  I suspect he wouldn’t have cared which greeting he got from me, as long as I noticed him.

While he was not involved in my starting Random Fate, Rob did encourage more than one person to start a weblog, and in my early, halcyon days of blogging I read the musings of Acidman every day. Time passed, blogworld evolved, life happened, and eventually I stopped reading Gut Rumbles.  Mere existence has enough drama in it for me that I felt no need to be a spectator to a train-wreck that was entirely preventable, and Rob’s joy at living up to his self-appellation of “Acidman” grew tiresome.  Endless vitriol corrodes the soul, and mine has enough holes eaten out of it already that I decided I cannot and would not suffer any new erosion.  This is not to say I celebrate his passing, for I do not.  Every death diminishes the world in some way, often in fashions unrecognized.

Beyond the sadness associated with any death, in this case there is a greater tragedy.  Rob leaves behind a young son in addition to his adult daughter, a son who had become estranged from Rob because of circumstances related to his divorce.  Now, Rob’s son will never have the opportunity to truly know his father, a loss that I recognize is incredibly deep because I see it through the lens of the recent death of my Dad.  I had the opportunity to truly know my Dad as an adult, and in the last 20 years he and I had a relationship that was more along the lines of a true friendship rather than one of father and son.  Sadly, Rob’s son never had much of a chance to know his father in the past few years, and now the opportunity for him is gone.

It is not on behalf of the dead for whom we need to mourn, it is those left behind.

Technorati Tags: weblogs

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
   -James Thurber (1894 - 1961)

Technorati Tags: quotes

One of the basic realities of American life is that all of us have to deal with beliefs we disagree with.
   -Eliza Byard

Technorati Tags: commentary, quotes

President Bush has proclaimed that he would like to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but he claims he is waiting upon a ruling by the Supreme Court on how to treat the prisoners held within.

This is rank ingenuousness of the worst kind.

He did not wait for a ruling by the judicial system before creating this prison that was explicitly placed in Guantanamo Bay in order to be outside the jurisdiction of the United States judicial system, so the butt-blanket he is trying to knit now using the excuse of the lack of a Supreme Court ruling is beyond idiotic.

Are his supporters and the base of the right wing really so stupid as to buy this along with the sudden pressure in both houses of Congress to pass anti-gay marriage and anti-flag burning amendments as true commitments to their fundamental beliefs?

Anyone willing to do the math in a non-idological fashion has concluded that the United States lost the “moral high ground” when Guantanamo was decided upon as an extra-legal location to hold prisoners.

“Moral equivalence” has no place in a world of propoganda and Orwellian-speak.

We have descended into a Hell of our own making, through our own ill-considered actions.

No matter that we are all “on the same side”… that “side” has perpetrated acts that we proclaim are morally repugnant when performed by those we call our enemies. Are they not repugnant when we ourselves act in that fashion?

Choose…. hypocrisy or moral equivalence, for there is no other option in the deadly zero-sum game that our so-called “leadership” has created for us with our consent, a consent given voice through our votes for President and our Senators and Congressional Representatives in 2004.

Every nation has fallen from its peak, from thousands of years BC to the twentieth century, the fall of empires can be traced easily to over-reach and hubris.

Sadly for the nation I love, I foresee that within twenty years our dominance will be lost, although we will not recognize it for likely forty years from now, and it all could have been prevented, but for the short-sightedness of those who choose ideology over reality.

Technorati Tags: commentary

I’m not sure how to write this post.

You see, I have many sources of frustration, ranging from computer issues (I absolutely HATE Windows, but Mac OS X as it behaves on my 2 year old PowerBook isn’t making me a fan of it, either… to make a too long a story short, every computer system I have is misbehaving in some fashion, whether by being far slower than it should be given the memory and processing power available, or requiring a reinstall for causes I deem far from sufficient for a modern OS) to issues too personal to write about here, not mentioning my irritation with those who seem to think they are far more qualified to interpret scientific data than those who actually have both graduate degrees and experience in the areas that they themselves lack.

Just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it has equal weight with those who actually know something about the subject, or even more weight than those who know how to extract real trends from chaotic data because it is what they are paid for (in other words, not to be too arrogant about it, people such as me, who are highly paid to extract the reality from the muddle of conflicting results, compensated because the success of the company depends upon the correct interpretation of hazy fogs of probability).

Yet, there are those who proclaim “global warming is nothing but a liberal dream” or “racism doesn’t exist in the United States” or “raising the minimum wage will not reduce the number of unskilled jobs available” in pure defiance of the available data because their ideology over-rules any rational interpretation of the data.

With ideology rather than reason determining the predominant view, how can we ever hope to chart the most beneficial path for our nation?

At one time, for an all too brief period between the US Civil War and the 1980s, there was a genuine effort to examine data on a scientific, non-ideological basis, but since the Reagan era, everything, and I mean everything, has become politicized, from the potential benefits of a vaccine that prevents cerivical cancer that according to anti-sex extremists would supposedly promote promiscuity, to the obvious (to anyone who truly examines the data with a non-ideological view) effects of global warming, to the intelligence that warns us of the actions of potentially hostile governments. The effects of viewing intelligence data through a lens designed to see only what the ideology wants to see has gotten us into the situation in Iraq, where through both misguided philosophy coupled with incompetence we have prosecuted a successful military campaign that is without precedent that has mutated into an equally unprecedented, incredibly incompetent and subsequently unsuccessful occupation, a situation that was warned against beforehand with rare prescience, which makes the indictment of incompetence all the more relevant and damning.

In consequence my frustration builds, arising from my own personal issues to those of a more global nature; where entropy is not the root cause any more so than the incompetence that apparently rules over all, seemingly going beyond the demon god Murphy with his law of “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” to a state of “anything that is wrong will be decided as the course of action.”

So, where do I go from here, without my head exploding from the pressure?

Damned if I know…

Technorati Tags: commentary, opinion, personal

My father died early in the morning of December 26 this last year. My last words to him were on Christmas Day, when I told him I loved him.

This is my one solace in his loss.

Be sure to tell those you love how you feel, and don’t do it only on some special day. Never let them forget how important they are to you.

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He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
   -Dr. Samuel Johnson (1707 - 1784)

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“The accused is a non-ape and therefore has no rights under ape law.”

This is a line from the original Planet of the Apes movie that has more resonance now than even in the era in which the movie was made.

The themes explored in this movie are remarkably much more relevant now than they were almost 40 years ago.

For those who have limited imagination, think of Guantanamo and our collective reaction to those whom our government has stated, often with no evidence beyond hearsay, are our enemies.

Think.

I find this sad, especially since the non-subtle way in which the themes are presented and explored in this movie (from my viewpoint, although perhaps not from that of others) almost four decades old are still not understood by the majority.

Unfortunately, the lessons have been forgotten, moreso in the last half-decade than in entire the three decades prior.

In these days where, when presented with a true threat of an enemy who uses terrorist tactics, although not of the magnitude presented by those who can profit politically from exaggeration is still indeed a true danger, we instead spend the time of Congress on amendments to our Constitution forbidding gay marriage and flag burning, the old saying of “three steps forward and two steps back” is no longer a sufficient solace.

Watch the movie, think about the true issues confronting us, think about the actions taken by those elected to represent us, and then decide whether our supposed representatives deserve to keep their posts.

It is up to you.

Technorati Tags: commentary

…that not being charged with a crime does not mean that no crime was committed. It merely means the prosecutor feels he does not have enough evidence to get a conviction.

Those cheering the supposed exoneration of Karl Rove should keep that in mind, for they throw rocks at their political opponents using the same accusations of charges and crimes.

While the Commissar of The Politburo Diktat rightly points out that there is indeed a real threat from groups who use terrorist tactics, calling it a “war” is wrong on many fronts, not limited to the terminology alone, but also because the strategy and tactics we are using are appropriate for wars past, not the “21st Century Thinking” that those who are promoting the so-called “War on Terror” like to use as a club against their political opponents.

Strategy and tactics, the line between the two is always blurry, and one affects the other, often in ways far wider ranging than those who believe they have control of how the conflict is waged comprehend.

Exactly what kind of conflict are we currently engaged upon? It is not a “War on Terror” as claimed by those who want to frighten us, even from the simple semantic viewpoint that one cannot engage upon a war against a tactic. Aside from the difficulties of definition that the single-minded have, an understanding of the nature of the conflict is required before the correct strategy and tactics can be determined and used.

An example, the Cold War, we must ask ourselves, exactly how did we win it?

For once, the semantics were correct, it was indeed a Cold War, except for the isolated hot spots of Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, limiting that count to the significant conflicts of that struggle where although many died or were wounded physically and mentally, the numbers were still in very small proportion to the magnitude of the contest. This is not to minimize the lives lost or ruined, but we did call it the Cold War, even when it heated up in some areas.

Think about the semantics both past and present, now we want to declare a “War on Terror” to rally the population to a particular viewpoint.

But the question remains, how did we win the so-called “Cold War” that wasn’t so cold after all?

As currently presented, we are in a war of ideologies, a war of ideals, markedly similar to the Cold War. So did we win that conflict merely by spending the Soviet Union to death?

I think not.

Contests of ideals are not won by money alone, no matter what economic theory says.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.
—
There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.
—
The moral is to the physical as three is to one.
   -Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)

Our “War on Terror” is not a war with a nation, we do not have the simplicity of the Second World War to comfort us, nor do we have the easy bipolarity of nations aligned with Communism or Democracy as we liked to frame the Cold War. Instead, we have the blowback from our actions in the Cold War, a conflict that arose from the unlikely alliances we made during those years of seemingly clearly defined good and evil when we made pacts with one devil to defeat another seemingly greater evil, yet somehow the numbers butchered by our allies may have matched or even exceeded those murdered on an industrial scale by our World War II enemies.

Examine the recent battles and their wider effects.

First, the suicides in Guantanamo make a fine example of how the battles are being waged, and lost, by the United States. While the government of the United States is distancing itself from the comments of a diplomat claiming the suicides were “good PR” for the jihadists, the assertions by the military that the suicides were “an act of asymmetrical warfare” draw more ridicule than sympathy from the world. Our nominal allies, the Saudis, are questioning whether the prisoners truly committed suicide or were murdered in the course of torture.

Are we able to win any kind of moral victory in any sense of the word “moral” while maintaining a deliberately extra-legal prison at Guantanamo? Regardless of the protestations of those who want vengeance, not justice, it is important to remember that upon embarking on a course of revenge, one should first dig two graves.

What is the wider meaning in a society that claims that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men?

Remember, if we are in a war, it is a world-wide war, a war of ideas and ideals that is fought in the hearts and minds of the world, not on some physical battlefield.

A second battle did indeed take place upon a battlefield, but its effects have strategic rather than merely tactical implications. Haditha, this incident may or may not become iconic, but even without the perspective of history and assuming that all sides are telling their truth in the matter, the effects are not positive for our cause. Some of the marines involved are stating they followed the rules of engagement, and there is no reason to doubt that they adhered to orders. It raises the question of what determines the rules of engagement, what the fundamental goals and rationales are that drive exactly how the rules are written. Any humane commander wants to preserve the lives of his men, and if anything after all our proclamations of the need for “21st century thinking” that apparently involve negating the 19th century ideals underlying our Constitution differentiates ourselves from our enemies, it is our unwillingness to sacrifice our own men for insufficient cause.

If the rules of engagement were followed, and it is worth repeating, there is no reason to assume they were not, regardless of any supposed cover-up of any civilian, non-combatant deaths, for that would involve the collusion of many higher up the command chain than those directly involved in the incident itself. However, what were the rules of engagement focused upon? Preserving the lives of the soldiers involved, minimizing civilian casualties, or trying to strike a balance between the two?

It is a complex situation, but ultimately in the world, not limited to our own, ADD age, the simple explanation is the one that influences the most hearts and minds, and the simple explanation is that of a wanton massacre, whether officially sanctioned or not, and in either case it reflects badly upon us.

At the end of the Cold War, how was the United States perceived by the world? The conception of us was significantly more positive than that of the Soviet Union, and it was based not in any small part upon the actions of the USSR upon both its own citizens along with how that government acted in the world at large.

How did we win that war?

He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.
   -Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)

Our greatest danger of losing came when we reacted out of fear.

What has been our reaction to September 11, 2001?

Fear.

In that response we have given our enemies their greatest victories. It is not for naught their tactics are called “terrorism” for their goal is to strike terror in their opponents, and we ourselves have served their ends to far greater an extent than they could have hoped in their wildest dreams.

Consider our reactions and subsequent actions, and think about the larger picture, and decide if our actions are truly carrying us towards victory.

Technorati Tags: commentary, history, Iraq, Iraq Occupation, Iraq War, opinion, terrorism, War in Iraq, War on Terror

I’ve had my DVD of The Blues Brothers playing this afternoon, and I didn’t realize how well they re-mixed the music for the Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Plus, who can forget the great line, “It’s 106 miles to Chicage, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

Wow, I love modern technology, especially when it is used to enhance listening to great music like this. Now I need to get some of those DVD-audio or SACD disks that are 5.1 surround sound, it’s amazing! Some music was meant to be listened to live, but if you can’t get it life, 5.1 surround sound comes close to the old ad, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” (for those of you old enough to remember the old cassette tape commercials)

Technorati Tags: music, music technology

Taxation WITH representation isn’t so hot, either.
   -Anonymous

When our computers lock up or display odd behavior that we want to eliminate, we often reboot, restarting the system in the hope that reloading the operating system will remove the source of the aberrancy.

Sometimes it is a television series that is in effect “rebooted” such as the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, about which one of the lead actors issued the caveat to “not watch” if one was a huge fan of the original and could not stand the prospect of a significant change in details even if the original concept was preserved.

There are time when I wish we could reboot to the years immediately following World War II, up to around 1968 or so, because despite the abuses of the “Communist threat” for political purposes, there was an optimism that would not die until the early days of the Nixon administration, a vision of the future that while limited because of the social attitudes of the time still contained an incredible optimism that has been lost in our age of irony and nihilism.

There was once a time when we believed that even it certain rogue agents of our government might act in ways contrary to our fundamental values, those bad acts would be completely repudiated by those elected to represent and act on our behalf, Now, we are left with the ambiguity of a government that seemingly is searching for legalistic loopholes in treaties to allow sanctioned abuses of those held by agents of our government, acts that once would have been beyond the pale.

Unfortunately, we cannot reboot, we cannot reset the attitudes of the world, nor can we reject the actions of the government we elected and who many still support, no matter how vile or abhorrent the acts committed. We have made our bed, now it is time to lay in it and accept the consequences. We should recall that all dominant powers have had their fall, and all fell due to the internal contradictions and errors of the leaders who could not understand history. Our fall will be determined by the same factors, and it is our responsibility.

Technorati Tags: commentary

Astronomers have an unusual problem that those of us who have to clean our houses wish we had: they are not seeing enough dust, at least in the supernovae they are examining.

What are the implications?

An article at ScienceDaily explains it well.

Technorati Tags: science

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
   -H. L. Mencken

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Not a license plate, nor some fictional spaceship, but a bipolar emission nebula.

There is beauty everywhere if you look.

Technorati Tags: geek cool, astronomy