Case in point:  Recently, Microsoft announced they would build a research and development centre in Vancouver, and in turn use that operation to recruit and nurture smart people from around the world who were being prevented from entering the US due to immigration hassles.  Microsoft said it as plainly as they needed to:  they had effectively tapped out the supply of smart software people trickling out of U.S. universities, and thanks to increasing costs and constrains imposed by the U.S. INS,  it was just too difficult to fill that void with educated foreigners ; both  which circumstances put U.S. -based tech companies at a pretty significant disadvantage.

From the perspective of those seeking to put Vancouver on the map as far as software and product development is concerned, this served as a tremendous endorsement, and a opportunity which could be seized upon by the local tech community.

The conditions themselves, in turn, couldn’t really be better for any company big or small to operate a research and development centre in a Canadian city in general, when the strength of the dollar, the numerous government incentives such as SR&ED, and Canada’s liberal immigration policies regarding talented individuals such as Engineers.

These are conditions that Canada should capitalize on, specifically by relaxing further the immigration policies regarding software engineers and marketers, creating temporary work visas which can be turned around at the port-of-entry and can serve as a gateway to permanent residency (such as we have with NAFTA), and actively promoting the Canadian tech industry to workers abroad.

The benefits of these preconditions are obvious: diversity of talent equals an increasing wealth of ideas, knowledge, and research — which would ensure that tax credits like SR&ED pursue increasingly meritorious ideas and opportunities. It would also take advantage of a significant mis-step by our friends south of the border.

On my personal blog, I rarely restrain myself from criticism of the Bush government and US foreign policy. So my bias is well-known.. 🙂

As the US Economy is jerkily shifting from a decades-long manufacturing cycle, as the UK did through the 1980s, to a nation that generates the greater part of its wealth from intellectual labours, their leadership is ignoring the obvious: the country lacks enough talent to conceive and build this new intellectual, cultural economy.

It says something about Bush’s vision for America that while he posits an amnesty bill for the millions of illegal and largely unskilled immigrants coming from Mexico and Latin America, he imposes and reduces a cap on legal immigration visas for skilled workers, such as the H-1B.

They U.S. is turning away creative minds (including engineers) at the border, throwing millions of babies out with the bathwater, as they attempt to ebb the flow of “good” jobs being taken from America’s labour force and handed to foreigners. At the same time, those jobs are in turn being fully-outsourced to foreigners residing overseas, as companies attempt to cope with the fact that they can’t meet hiring goals for specialized positions.

In today’s market we compete equally for dollars and for workers on a global stage. When a company outsources its call centre, which uses largely unskilled labour, to India that should not be considered a problem for an advanced nation like the U.S. But when a U.S. company outsources R&D to India (or in this case, Canada) it should be considered a crisis. Microsoft’s move, from a U.S. perspective, is just exactly that. And it shows the grit which companies like Microsoft will go to route around the damage that is Bush’s immigration policy.

The Bush government, by limiting H-1 Visas and making it generally difficult to become a productive, creative resident of their country, has created a window which Canadians can and should exploit to bring talent to our nation: talent which will be trained and coached at the expense of U.S. companies, and will eventually spin out of these R&D centres and create their own new companies sparking new innovation.

This process can be exemplified by the number of Canada’s technology startups (meritorious or not) created by former Nortel executives throughout the last 10 years. That these have all represented a substantial increase in value for Canadian economic development, and the collective intelligence of our software community in general, would be tough to question.

With the quantity of resources available to technology entrepreneurs in cities such as Vancouver, the real challenge today is spending it effectively by hiring talented individuals.

So as our dollar approaches parity with the U.S. dollar making our salaries competitive, as our quality-of-life (particularly in Vancouver) far exceeds that of technology meccas like Seattle and Silicon Valley by all apparent measures, and as our government’s financial support for entrepreneurship continues to give a stage-to-orbit boost for many different ideas, the only pennies needing to drop really are a more sophisticated approach to valley-style Venture Capitalism and continuing expansion of immigration policies to support innovation.

With those two tweaks to our existing structure, a lot will change in the fortunes of Canada’s (specifically Vancouver’s) technology entrepreneurs.

In the meantime, bring more Microsoft’s to the suburbs of Vancouver. They will import some of Canada’s more brilliant Entrepreneurs and their co-workers at U.S. expense for our future benefit.

-Ian.

Over at NewTeeVee there’s an interesting post by Jackson on the struggle that the MPAA et al have had coming up with a specification for allowing you to make “managed copies” of your purchased content. Of course, the fact that each successive specification is cracked within weeks of its drafting would deter the efforts of any organization compelled by logic and customer responsiveness, but this is the MPAA we’re talking about.

The problem is that the RIAA/MPAA cabal have effectively tied their own hands, by petitioning the supreme court in their fruitless pursuit of Peer-to-Peer networks for a judgment. They may have, way back in 2005, gotten more than they bargained for when Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter said:

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”

Oops. Now the MPAA and electronics manufacturers, under such a sweeping definition, could themselves become liable for the copying and redistribution of material. In fact, they can’t produce a standard which they know has been haxx0red and unleash it on the market.

And as EFF’s Susan Crawford has pointed out, they’re in league with even the network carriers to take us all backward in time. In draft language, the FCC is asserting that it:

(a) has authority to adopt such regulations governing digital audio broadcast transmissions and digital audio receiving devices that are appropriate to control the unauthorized copying and redistribution of digital audio content by or over digital reception devices, related equipment, and digital networks, including regulations governing permissible copying and redistribution of such audio content….

This means that they will be ceaselessly back to the drawing board perfecting easily-hacked technologies, and layering their media with difficult to use interfaces, handshakes, and protocols (as I found out when I had my my run-in with HDCP). The result is that media coming through official retail channels such as Best Buy or the iTunes Music Store that you try to watch on your PVR or HD-DVD player will be more difficult to view and manipulate than the DIVX-encoded material you download by fiddling with a BitTorrent client.

P2P has traditionally existed aside from the mainstream by nature of the fact that it’s a fairly high-friction model for obtaining and viewing digital content. You might not have the right CODEC libraries to view your favourite British TV show, or you might have trouble configuring your linksys router so that all the P2P traffic passes through to the right computer in your house optimally, as examples.

Traditional media (DVDs, Cable TV, etc.) have always dominated the mainstream because they’ve been easy to handle, easy to watch, and of course easy to get. For some of us, that convenience in itself is the primary value of such media, and why lots of us still buy stuff at Best Buy even when we can and do also use file sharing networks like eDonkey.

But imagine if the stuff you bought at Best Buy no longer worked together without Herculean effort. Imagine if the HD-DVD you brought home or the Streamed HD Movie you paid for on your PVR were hobbled by characteristics that made them hard to use. Furthermore, ask yourself why, after ten years of Pay-Per-View Movies, we still have video rental stores?

The answer is the consumer market’s innate resistance to difficulty, and our desire to not have the means in which we consume information dictated by the CEO of some sandbagged, heretofore unknown, media company.

When the media companies set the barriers higher and higher for consuming their material the old-fashioned way, they’re practically begging the mainstream, using the Internet, to route right around them. When they make us all experts in HDCP handshaking, HDMI systems integration, and the finer nuances of Dolby versus DTS Surround Sound, they lower the barriers to grabbing and viewing our entertainment and information on that most dreaded of all platforms: the computer, and the internet.

And despite 20 solid years of effort, media companies have been profoundly unsuccessful in combating what we do on our computers once we get their stuff in our hands. And even with a Bush government, the DMCA, and legions of lawyers they have had little concrete impact except to increase the friction and lower the value of the mainstream consumer media.

I can see this through to its logical conclusion. Computers, software, and the internet will increasingly transact our consumption of movies, music, and what we will one day say we used to call “TV shows”. The big media distribution companies will increasingly become unnecessary, and will have cut themselves out of the action.

And in my view, they’d deserve it.

-Ian.

Pay no attention to the captains of industry robbing the larder, kids, Al Queda’s gonna get ya!

Love,

George, Donald, and Dick.

PS – Sorry about the no job no money thing.

-Ian.

Pay no attention to the captains of industry robbing the larder, kids, Al Queda’s gonna get ya!

Love,

George, Donald, and Dick.

PS – Sorry about the no job no money thing.

-Ian.

Actually, you can spot CNN’s woody from here: This is a great confluence of Bush-Doctrine era news stories. They figured out a way to aggregate all of Donald Rumsfeld’s morning press conference agenda items into one:

– Gun control (or lack thereof) and its benefit to fortress America (just TRY to fuck with the postal service, Mr. Annan!) – Postal Worker violence is totally under control — we’ve put it to productive use! – The UN is irrelevant and can’t even defend itself against a lone gunman, let alone a warmongering dictator bent on global nuclear destruction – More tragic events in New York — close the stock exchange! Schedule another rock concert! – Those damned immigrants we just can’t trust anymore — let’s round up all the Koreans now – Another graphic illustration that the Axis of Evil intends to disrupt homeland security

It’s perfect! Oh, ok… pardon my cynicism.

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncidW8&e=2&cidW8&u=/nm/ 20021004/ts_nm/un_shots_dc

Postal Worker Fires Shots at UN, No One Injured Thu Oct 3, 8:28 PM ET

By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A postal worker jumped the fence around U.N. headquarters and fired several shots in the air on Thursday, striking the building at least twice and sending U.N. staffers scurrying for cover.

The man, identified as Steve Kim, 57, and believed to be of Korean descent, threw leaflets in the air containing a rambling, handwritten message about human rights in North Korea ( news – web sites) before being grabbed by security agents.

Kim is a resident of Des Plaines, Illinois, near Chicago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in New York.

He has been an employee of the U.S. Postal Service since 1988 and is currently a mail processing clerk at a Palatine, Illinois, plant, postal officials said.

The gunman was believed to have fired seven shots, U.N. security chief Michael McCann told reporters.

At least two bullets struck the 18th and 20th floors of the landmark U.N. Secretariat building on Manhattan’s East Side, piercing windows and “narrowly missing several employees,” but causing no injuries, he said.

While several U.N. staff members were receiving medical attention, none was wounded by the gunfire, McCann said.

U.N. spokeswoman Nanci St. John, who watched the incident from her third-floor office, said the man had already thrown down his gun when apprehended.

“There was a man firing into the air. He fired several shots, then threw his gun down and was grabbed by security guards,” she told Reuters.

The man, about 57 years old and wearing brown slacks and a blue shirt, began firing his .357 magnum revolver just after 1 p.m. EST while standing on the broad circular driveway in front of the U.N. Secretariat.

‘A CITIZEN OF UN’

The incident was over in less than a minute.

The 38-story building houses the 15-nation Security Council and thousands of offices for U.N. staff as well as Secretary-General Kofi Annan ( news – web sites).

The gunman’s two-page message was written in English in neat but tiny, dense lettering and signed, “a citizen of UN, Steve Kim, Oct. 2, 2002.”

“North Korea … is groaning under the weight of starvation and dictatorial suppression. They don’t have even the most basic of human rights since all things body and spirit plants and plows belong to one named greatest general Kim Jong Il,” the message said.

“It is our understanding he came here to make this statement on North Korea,” McCann said. “We don’t see any logic to his bringing attention to that cause in this manner.”

The shooting occurred as the Security Council was discussing arrangements for sending weapons inspectors back to Iraq after a four-year absence.

The gunman put up no resistance as security agents ran toward him with guns drawn. The first officers to reach him were from the U.S. Secret Service and the State Department diplomatic security service, joined shortly afterward by U.N. security guards, witnesses said.

“The response here was very quick, by both U.N. and U.S. security officials,” McCann said. “Their response was very brave and very quick and very appropriate.”

He said U.N. officials turned Kim over to the FBI ( news – web sites), which was processing the arrest.

The FBI later said he would be charged in Manhattan federal court on Friday.

———–

– Leo Szilard, one of the creators of the Atomic Bomb

On 4/10/02 1:57 PM, “Mike Masnick” wrote:

> Blowing up towers full of civilians getting ready for their
> day of work is wrong. Raping someone is wrong. Walking into a festive
> holiday dinner and blowing up civilians is wrong.

Firebombing the entire city of Dresden in the dark of night because you’re not sure where the ball bearing factory is located is wrong. Dropping the second, larger atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing or injuring more than 300,000 people while the Japanese were already suing for peace was wrong. Dropping the first one without any warning whatsoever is also wrong.

I defy you to explain to me how a family that has been torn apart by murder committed under a formal declaration of war is better off than a family that has been torn apart by murder committed as an act of terrorism.

Even in World War II the Geneva Convention was eventually cast aside as both the Allies and Axis bombed and strafed civilians. Attempts to frame wars with “rules of engagement” falsely elevate war to a noble act and mask its obvious savagery.

War is hell. Terrorism is war. They are both murder.

Apparently, according to the Bush government, Terrorism and War are just fine until they occur on American soil and end American lives. After September 11, only a non-American can hold that opinion, of course, for reasons well-covered on this list.

Blow up more buildings, I say. Blow up the Empire State Building, blow up the CN tower, blow up the Petronas twin towers, blow up the Vatican, and blow up Big Ben. Blow up everything until we get it through our thick bloody heads that we are all in this together, that violence begets violence, and that murder by any means and within any context is still murder.

Maybe once every one of us on the planet are all touched by the savage, brutal death of a loved one we’ll realize the vicious cycle that is spawned by intolerance. Either that or we’ll all be dead and I suspect that the planet will be better off for it.

-Ian.

Well, apparently all those cheques the Microsofties sent down to Texas for the Bush/Cheney campaign have paid off. Within months of taking office, the winds of political change have blown in favour of Microsoft and the court order to break them into itsy bitsy little pieces is off. Effectively, the Microsoft Antitrust Case — once the most significant tribunal of our times, has been smote by the Bush government.

Where Clinton/Gore punished MSFT for their ignorance of the political process, Bush/Cheney exploited their need to play catch-up and save their company.

It’s really amazing how clear the ties have been, since they’ve taken office, between Bush campaign funding and how public policy has tipped in favour of their supporters.

Perhaps it’s good public policy, though.. Microsoft may yet lead a charge in the rebuilding of the tech economy. In the interim, though, they’re gonna squash a lot of bugs without fear of reprisal from a favourable government.

-Ian.