Why High Tech Manufacturing Jobs Aren’t Coming Back to the U.S.
January 22nd, 2012Via: New York Times:
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
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“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”
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Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.
Britain: Undercover Police Had Children with Activists
January 22nd, 2012Via: Guardian:
Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.
In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children’s mothers for many years.
One of the spies was Bob Lambert, who has already admitted that he tricked a second woman into having a long-term relationship with him, as part of an intricate attempt to bolster his credibility as a committed campaigner.
The second police spy followed the progress of his child and the child’s mother by reading confidential police reports which tracked the mother’s political activities and life.
The Roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador’s Civil War
January 22nd, 2012Via: Salon:
A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s
Bain, the source of Romney’s fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry’s words, “vulture capitalists.”One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on “foreign seed money from Latin America” but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.
Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a “black box,” all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known.
Sorry iBooks, Paper Books Still Win on Specs
January 22nd, 2012Apple’s vision for ebooks is to make them like webpages, complete with embedded music, videos, lectures, 3D models, etc; the more distracting, the better.
One of the most irritating experiences that I can think of is being interrupted as I’m trying to concentrate. When I sit down to read a book, I don’t want my focus shattered every few seconds or minutes by dazzling whizbangery. Apple, though, wants to turn reading into an experience akin to watching an episode of The Three Stooges. BONK! BANG! Slap! Nuck. Nuck. Nuck.
This is how we need to engage kids today, Apple tells us.
I’m only able to use the web because I’ve learned how to employ browser extensions to make webpages quiet and still by default. As I read about Apple’s iBooks technologies, I mainly thought about how I’d block elements to prevent them from distracting me as I tried to read! Of course, that’s not possible.
Since this nonsense is being mandated in schools, what will be the long term consequences of children spending even more time looking at screens? Apple doesn’t have any options for reading its locked-down content on anything other than conventional computer screens. At least with E-ink and other electronic paper displays, one gets an experience that’s more similar to reading text on regular paper.
What will be the long term consequences of children reading ebooks with stuff spinning and blinking right next to the text that they are supposed to be comprehending:
Mayer and Moreno have studied the phenomenon of cognitive load in multimedia learning extensively and have concluded that it is difficult, and possibly impossible to learn new information while engaging in multitasking. Junco and Cotten examined how multitasking affects academic success and found that students who engaged in more multitasking reported more problems with their academic work. (Wikipedia: Human multitasking)
But that dazzling, distracting iCrackPad vending machine is the future of learning? It’s the answer to decades of disastrous, lobotomizing sKo0l?
Like the author of the piece below, I also think that ebooks are inevitable. This shift to video game style learning is well underway. But if something like the Kindle is disturbing, this iBooks thing is an order of magnitude more so. It’s not some sci-fi dystopic concern that’s always 20 years out.
They’re gunning for your children’s minds with this right now.
Via: The Verge:
In the wake of Apple’s announcement of iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the latest version of iTunes U, I’d like to take a moment to step back and look at the technology they all look to replace: paper.
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So while much of the coverage of yesterday’s announcement focuses on the exciting new ways that e-readers enable students to interact with texts, we should also be sure to give paper books their due. This isn’t a Luddite rant about how gadgets are destroying our inherent humanity and it’s not an ode to the wonderful smell and feel of an old book: it’s a clear-eyed look at how well paper technology has served us for millennia and how we need to be careful in our headlong rush to replace it.
Related: Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Former Liberian Dictator Charles Taylor Worked for CIA
January 22nd, 2012Via: Boston Herald:
When Charles G. Taylor tied bed sheets together to escape from a second-floor window at the Plymouth House of Correction on Sept. 15, 1985, he was more than a fugitive trying to avoid extradition. He was a sought-after source for American intelligence.
After a quarter-century of silence, the US government has confirmed what has long been rumored: Taylor, who would become president of Liberia and the first African leader tried for war crimes, worked with US spy agencies during his rise as one of the world’s most notorious dictators.
The disclosure on the former president comes in response to a request filed by the Globe six years ago under the Freedom of Information Act. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy arm, confirmed its agents and CIA agents worked with Taylor beginning in the early 1980s.
Research Credit: ottilie
Kill Hollywood
January 21st, 2012Via: Y Combinator:
Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.
That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
Related: Google Backing Original Shows for YouTube — Lots of Them
Military Vehicles on Train Near Santa Cruz
January 21st, 2012Definitely the most tanks you’ll see on a train today.
Via: YouTube:
VoIP POTS Adapters
January 20th, 2012I’ve finally had it with Telecom’s criminal line rental fees. I’ve been testing a VoIP provider’s (2talk) softphone over my mobile broadband connections and it works fine. Using VoIP for our telephone service will save us at least NZ$50 per month.
Ok, so I need a POTS adapter. The Linksys SPA2102 is widely available in NZ and it definitely works with my VoIP provider. If you know a better box for the money, let me know. (The OBi110 seems pretty good, but I’m not sure if it would work with NZ POTS phones.)
Feds Claim Ex-NSA Analyst Had Top-Secret-Plus Info on Home Computers
January 20th, 2012Via: Politico:
Computers seized from a retired National Security Agency analyst’s home in 2007 contained information that is classified at a level beyond “top secret,” officials said in court filings Tuesday.
A prosecutor and a senior NSA official made the claim to a federal court in Baltimore in response to a motion ex-NSA analyst Kirk Wiebe filed in November, demanding that the Federal Bureau of Investigation return items seized from Wiebe’s Westminster, Md. home four-and-a-half years ago.
“Documents [found on hard drives in Wiebe’s home] contain information that is currently and properly classified TOP SECRET//SI/REL to USA, FVEY,” the deputy chief of staff for signals intelligence policy and corporate issues in NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate wrote in a declaration. The NSA official who signed the declaration (posted here) gave his name solely as “Steven E. T.,” in keeping with an NSA policy of not publicly identifying most of its employees.
“Steven E. T.” did not detail the nature of the ostensibly classified documents, but explained that “SI is an SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) compartment used to protect especially sensitive communications intelligence information.” FVEY stands for “five eyes,” a restriction limiting disclosure of information to officials of the U.S. and four key allies who cooperate closely with NSA: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
According to sources familiar with the case, Wiebe’s home was searched pursuant to a search warrant issued in 2007 as he, several other NSA veterans and a former House Intelligence Committee staffer were investigated in connection with leaks related to the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and claims of mismanagement of NSA programs. Wiebe was never charged with a crime. Justice Department officials say the probes are now closed.
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Wiebe said Tuesday that he was troubled by the government’s claim that his computers had critical secrets on them.
“I am dismayed to hear the government thinks there is classified information on either or both of my two computers. Frankly, I wouldn’t put classified information on my computers. After 32 plus years in the business, you don’t do that sort of thing, and – again frankly speaking – I could not conceive of a need to ever do so,” Wiebe told POLITICO via e-mail. “I have no idea what documents the government is referring to and I am more than a little surprised to hear the government thinks I have ‘150 pages of NSA information’ on one of the computers.”
“Secondly, the government does not say I put classified information on my computers, just that there is some there, in the government’s opinion,” Wiebe said. He said it’s possible the government concluded that information not considered classified previously or that was never removed from NSA is now classified.
Federal Prosecutor to Take 5th Amendment in Fast and Furious Probe
January 20th, 2012Via: Politico:
A senior federal prosecutor in Arizona intends to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights rather than testify before a House committee next week looking into the Justice Department’s handling of the Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation, the prosecutor’s attorney told Congress in a letter on Thursday.
On Wednesday, House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa issued a subpoena to Patrick Cunningham, the chief of the criminal section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona. The deposition subpoena came after a plan to have Cunningham appear for a less formal interview fell apart.
Sources say Cunningham is concerned that he’s caught in a pincer of sorts between senior Justice Department officials in Washington eager to shift blame to lower-ranking staffers and Congressional investigators eager to see heads roll over the investigation, which allegedly allowed more than 1000 weapons to cross the border into Mexico despite suspicions they were destined for drug cartels.
“Department of Justice Officials have reported to the Committee that my client relayed inaccurate information to the Department upon which it relied in preparing its initial response to Congress. If, as you claim, Department officials have blamed my client, they have blamed him unfairly,” Cunningham’s personal attorney, Tobin Romero of Williams & Connolly, wrote to Issa.
“As a professional courtesy and to avoid needless preparation by the committee and its staff for a deposition next week, I am writing to advise you that my client is going to assert his constitutional privilege not to be compelled to be a witness against himself,” Romero wrote. “My client is, in fact, innocent, but he has been ensnared by the unfortunate circumstances in which he now stands between two branches of government. I will therefore be instructing him to assert his constitutional privilege.”
