industry, so it's not automatically a competitive disadvantage. (2) Thought experiment: imagine China as a black box with inputs and outputs. From the point of view of China, sending us useful goods (which we'll use up and then dump in our landfills) is a lot like just taking those goods and dumping them in the ocean. As far as China is concerned, nothing would be very different if all the ships just sank before they arrived here. (3) It's a strange war, though: you don't have to worry about them invading us if they win. What would they steal? Our consumers? My friend from high school and one-time employer, David Slik, made a presentation about the company he founded and still works for. Bycast makes high-end clustered "cloud" storage systems that are apparently so reliable that some of their enterprise customers have stopped making backups altogether... after thoroughly testing Bycast's fault recovery mechanisms, of course. Call me crazy, but I've never really seen the point of so-called "parser generators" and "lexical analyzer generators" in real life. Almost any file has syntax that's so simple, it's easy to just parse it yourself. And languages that are more complicated or have tight parser performance requirements - like C++ compilers or Ruby interpreters - tend to have hand-rolled parsers because the automatic parser generators can't do it. So who benefits from automatic parser generators? I don't know. I feel like I'm missing something. This feeling came up again the other day when I