While I agree with the comments criticizing the standards, I'm a little surprised not to see anyone commenting on the make-up of the list of the countries who published the statement.
Of the countries on the list (South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Cuba), three (Venezuela, Cuba, and, lately, Ecuador) are countries whose foreign policy is centered around opposition to the U.S. In this case they happen to be on the right side of the issue, but I think that the people commenting on how these countries position is admirable should consider that maybe, just maybe, their position has more to do with politics than technology? That they need to be seen as being in opposition to a U.S. entity?
If the standard were actually good, but Microsoft (or some other U.S. company) stood to benefit, I think it is likely that those three countries would again be protesting, no?
Actually, I agree with the original poster, more or less. I read a fair amount of fantasy but find that sci-fi leaves me cold. The difference (at least for me)? Basically, fantasy does a better job with characters - for whatever reason the characters in sf novels tend to be paper thin. My personal theory is that this is because sf by its nature focuses on science, etc., rather than individuals per se, whereas fantasy is often about a quest or something, which is much more personal.
I do agree, though, that there's lots of sf which is basically a fantasy-type story in an advanced setting. However, even there I tend to find that the characters are poorly done.
(The text doesn't contain the graphs that were included in the original article, but they are interesting in that they could be criticized for much of the same sorts of things that graphs in use today are being criticized for - i.e., they carefully choose their starting/ending points to support the argument, etc.)
Here's an example of one sentence from the article:
"The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
Even if it were true that the concern over a coming Ice Age were not widespread among scientists at the time, a reasonable layman reading this article would believe it to be so. If there really were no scientists predicting this, was the journalist just making stuff up? (It does happen, but I haven't heard that in this case.) Or was the journalist talking to at least *some* scientists who thought that this might happen?
Global warming is clearly happening - it's not hard to see. I have lived almost all my life in the north of the US and the winters now are noticeably wimpier - I don't need a degree in meteorology to see it.
However, I don't think you are right to simply dismiss the "Ice Age" mini-scare of the 70s as not having happened.
If you don't speak French, I'll give a brief summary of his comments.
Basically, at the beginning he explains a bit about how it was designed. One point he made was that his reason for the foldable design of the wings was so that it would fit in the plane. The other interesting thing he said was that the design was effectively that of an airplane - with his body serving as the fuselage.
After the flight he just explains that after he jumped out of the plane he did a little half-turn to catch the wind. He also mentions that the wing unfolded nicely - and that when he kicked in the gas that he moved forward and he could tell that at that point he was flying. He said it was really cool, too. (Which I think we'll all agree is the case!)
Also - I'm not a native French speaker. I'm American but lived in Paris a couple of years - any native French speaker care to comment on the guy's accent? Is that a Swiss accent? (I'm presuming so, but I was curious to know from a native.)
Well, although it's a rare thing, the scientific consensus can get things wrong. And, in fact, they have goofed fairly badly on this same subject in the past. Have a look at this pdf from Newsweek in 1975 which warns about global cooling - it talks about the fact that the "evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it." It also says that meteorologist are "almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century." That time, the consensus was wrong.
Although I agree with you that many people are just burying their heads in the sand, there are actually reasons to be a little bit wary of the dire predictions.
Um, do you really think that the generals and decision-makers in *any* military organization are concerned about making sure the *other* side gets a "fair" shake?
No - they don't, and they shouldn't. Their job is to equip their forces with the best tools to win the fight. Giving the other side access to the same tools would be self-defeating, no?
It has been getting some coverage, but not a huge amount.
Otoh, I subscribe to the Journal of Foreign Affairs and they recently dedicated an entire issue to the topic - which is kind of impressive since they are only published every two months and so this represents about 17% of their entire year's publishing.
I don't think so. His initial definition of spread for a right triangle is the ratio of opposite side length over hypotenuse length. This *is* the sine, so for right angles his concept of "spread" is equivalent.
He extends this to triangles that are not right triangles, but the basic concept seems to be an extension of sine from a particular case to the general - not the reverse as you seem to be saying.
Maybe I'm missing the point, though - why do you see sines as being derived from (or the underlying concept for) sines instead of what I outlined above?
The professor seems to have found an interesting way to present trig - however, it should also be noted that he does actually rely on sines as an underlying concept.
I read the article and part of hist concept of spread for an angle is the ratio (in a right triangle) of the side opposite the angle to the hypotenuse of the triangle. As I recall from my high-school geometry classes, though, this is exactly how the sine is calculated. (The cosine is the adjacent side divided by the hypotenuse.)
The interesting thing about his approach, though, is that he defines the concept of spread so that there's no need to refer to the underlying sine concept and the calculations are all (relatively) simple algebra - squaring and addition and subtraction. I would like to read some more and play with it a bit - the fact is I still have bad dreams about those damned trig identity tables, which I never really successfully felt comfortable with!
There is a great book about the history of the NYC subway called "722 Miles", by Clifton Hood. (That being the length of install track - which if laid out in a straight line would take you all the way to Chicago!)
The book, which is available at Amazon, covers the types of mass transit systems that existed in NYC before the advent of the subway, and also covers the politics of getting big changes made, etc.
Another truly fascinating aspect of the book is where the author talks about how much of an impact the subway had on the development of the city.
I saw your post and was a little surprised because of the similarity of your setup to mine. I live in a 5-floor building, you see, and we kind of have a little "community" here ourselves. There are six rental units in the building and three of us share an Internet connection. (We also have an antenna hanging out the window so that we have wireless at the cafe down the block.)
Now, I understand that you said that you have access to place equipment in various places. My personal preference is against wireless. You get interference and/or flaky connections at points and personally I would (again, if you do have access) lay in physical cable (cat-5). If the various individual apartments want to put in their own local wireless, that's cool. But when you begin to worry about walls and other impediments, I think you're better off linking the various apartments onto a physical cable backbone and then letting the wireless points be stationed in each apartment.
My next-door neighbor has the actual physical connection to the outside world, for example. I get reception that is often good (but often not) in the front room of my aparment, which is near the base station. In my back room, I get CRAPPY reception from his base station, but I can see my downstairs neighbors base station. Two points here - firstly, he has his own base station because down one floor and over one apartment his reception was bad, so he decided to get his own base station hanging off the cable that he already had in his apartment. Secondly, I can see his base station in my back room but haven't given him my MAC yet (which is my bad)- he's doing MAC filtering - and so I don't have access to his net yet. The point is, that I think it would be easier for everyone to have their own local base station inside each apartment - they can place it where its best for each of them individually.
I know I haven't really been talking about budget issues in the above - mostly about architecure. However, if you put a router in each apartment, and a base station, and some category 5 cable, then you'll have a good network and I don't see it costing anywhere near 7K. Both base stations and routers have become cheap (especially routers) and so I think you could definitely keep the cost under $200/apartment.
well, those are my thoughts. have fun - sounds like a cool project!
I basically liked the movies. I am not a purist. Nonetheless, there were a number of changes that I didn't like and I'm surprised that you can't find people who objected to them.
For example, in the movie, Frodo and Sam are accompanied by Merry and Pippin (and assisted by Fatty Bolger) because they suspect something is afoot and think that Frodo might be going off on something dangerous by himself. They accompany him on his journey precisely because they are his friends and are unwilling to abandon him to face things alone. Their motivation is loyalty. In the movie, though, it is quite different. Merry and Pippin happen across Sam and Frodo when they are already leaving. They have no clue what's up (making them look a lot less clever than they were in the book) and they accompany him just kind of sort of because. Their motiviation is a lot less noble and I was disappointed by this since I think it made them seem like lesser characters.
Also, in general, I've met lots of people who didn't like the dwarf jokes. (Dwarf-tossing jokes? Please.) I admit that I've also met people who liked the comic relief.
I'd have to watch it again to come up with a better list, but this is just off the top of my head.
The one change that I can definitely endorse is the amplification of Arwen's role. I still remember being surprised when reading the book for the first time by her "sudden" importance in the Return of the King.
My favorite limerick (prompted by the fact that the university that the professors are from is the University of Aberystwyth):
There was a young girl from Aberystwyth
Who took grain to the mill to get grist with.
The miller's son, Jack,
Laid her flat on her back
And united the organs they pissed with!
(Apologies to anyone from what I am sure is a very nice town, but I couldn't help passing this one on!)
Article in NY Times, too
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
check out this link in the NY times as well: www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/science/11QUAR.h tml
Your comments are good as far as they go, *but* they can be taken too far.
Yes, it is true that a proof might be mistaken and that the mistake might not be caught. This is much like the scientific process, though, in that later work which builds on it can lead to a result which is inconsistent with other accepted proofs, leading to the original proof being re-questioned. Just as in science, the bedrock proofs, from which other proofs build, are constantly being implicitly re-tested.
I agree that you can never be 100% certain of anything (other than the base axioms which are simply defined as being true), but the probability asymptotically approaches 100% the longer that the proof stands without producing a contradiction of some sort.
To me, it's like what Popper said about the scientific process - things can be disproved by coming up with a counter-example, but you can never definitively prove something because that would imply testing/checking all possible situations - an impossibility.
But, to say that this means that "truth" is "socially constructed" takes this too far. It appears to imply that *any* result could be arrived at and be allowed to stand. Since math is a competitive process (like science) in which you can make your reputation by showing that an accepted "fact" is not really true, any statement which doesn't have some intrinsic merit will eventually be shown to be bogus.
Many of the thinkers who have come up with these theses of "socially-constructed truth" tend to come from the "soft"-er disciplines, such as lit crit and philosophy. I think that many of them suffer from a sort of "credibility envy" in which they are uncomfortable with the fact that the results of their studies are not accorded the same degree of respect as those of say, physics, or math. Therefore, in order to elevate their disciplines to the same level of respect as the "hard"-er disciplines, they need to show one of two things - either that their disciplines are just as rigorous as the "hard"-er ones, or that the so-called "hard" discplines aren't really all that "hard" and are in fact just "soft" disciplines in disguise. They have opted for the second line of attack.
Yes, the proof is only for n=3. Poincare's original conjecture was only for n=3, but was later extended to be for all n. The other cases have been proven already, so this proof takes care of the remaining (original) case.
If you're interested in reading up on it a bit, the link in the original post to "http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PoincareConjecture.h tml" is excellent. (And it's where I learned the above stuff about the various cases.
Has anybody out there read Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio? This discovery of control genes in action in an evolutionary time-frame (their existence was already known - concrete examples were missing, though) makes the thesis of Bear's book even more interesting.
SPOILER'S FOLLOW
Well, actually, it's not a huge spoiler. Part of his idea for the book is that evolution is a bit more self-controlled than the standard version of evolution (gradual accumulation of kazillions of tiny changes). The existence of proof that mutations in certain control genes can introduce relatively large-scale changes in relatively short time-frames fits in nicely with his idea.
It's definitely a good book and stimulation reading. It was an interesting experience to read his theorizing and then turn around and see some actual science producing something that might fit into his ideas.
"And why is this fair? This is what I am saying. Why should you be plugged in 24/7 to get a good salary? Basically you are saying that you are forced to sacrifice salary because you want to spend time with your child."
Well, suppose you were the person who was working like a dog. How would you feel if someone working plain old 9-5 got the same pay? I think that would be perceived as unfair.
"Why not get that good salary AND spend time with your kid? Are corporations blind to this?"
Um, corporations don't exist for the purpose of providing their employees with a generous salary for a light work load. Their purpose is to turn a profit. The corporations are not blind - they are quite clearly looking at those things which affect the bottom line.
The one thing that I found interesting in Schneier's article was that Gates's memo says that pay will be tied to a product's security. If this is actually implemented as a policy internally (and is not just for public consumption) then this could actually changes things. People will go to great lengths to get their bonuses - I've seen this in real life.
I'm still skeptical about Gates's commitment to this, but it wouldn't be the first time the company was turned on a dime by the BG (Bill Gates or Big Guy - whichever you prefer) - remember that they did this for the Internet as well, which they originally missed the boat on.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with the comments criticizing the standards, I'm a little surprised not to see anyone commenting on the make-up of the list of the countries who published the statement.
Of the countries on the list (South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Cuba), three (Venezuela, Cuba, and, lately, Ecuador) are countries whose foreign policy is centered around opposition to the U.S. In this case they happen to be on the right side of the issue, but I think that the people commenting on how these countries position is admirable should consider that maybe, just maybe, their position has more to do with politics than technology? That they need to be seen as being in opposition to a U.S. entity?
If the standard were actually good, but Microsoft (or some other U.S. company) stood to benefit, I think it is likely that those three countries would again be protesting, no?
Actually, I agree with the original poster, more or less. I read a fair amount of fantasy but find that sci-fi leaves me cold. The difference (at least for me)? Basically, fantasy does a better job with characters - for whatever reason the characters in sf novels tend to be paper thin. My personal theory is that this is because sf by its nature focuses on science, etc., rather than individuals per se, whereas fantasy is often about a quest or something, which is much more personal.
I do agree, though, that there's lots of sf which is basically a fantasy-type story in an advanced setting. However, even there I tend to find that the characters are poorly done.
Actually, it's not entirely bullshit. There was a lot of talk about this at the time.
Here's a link that contains the text of the Newsweek article that talks about this.
http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
(The text doesn't contain the graphs that were included in the original article, but they are interesting in that they could be criticized for much of the same sorts of things that graphs in use today are being criticized for - i.e., they carefully choose their starting/ending points to support the argument, etc.)
Here's an example of one sentence from the article:
"The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
Even if it were true that the concern over a coming Ice Age were not widespread among scientists at the time, a reasonable layman reading this article would believe it to be so. If there really were no scientists predicting this, was the journalist just making stuff up? (It does happen, but I haven't heard that in this case.) Or was the journalist talking to at least *some* scientists who thought that this might happen?
Global warming is clearly happening - it's not hard to see. I have lived almost all my life in the north of the US and the winters now are noticeably wimpier - I don't need a degree in meteorology to see it.
However, I don't think you are right to simply dismiss the "Ice Age" mini-scare of the 70s as not having happened.
If you don't speak French, I'll give a brief summary of his comments.
Basically, at the beginning he explains a bit about how it was designed. One point he made was that his reason for the foldable design of the wings was so that it would fit in the plane. The other interesting thing he said was that the design was effectively that of an airplane - with his body serving as the fuselage.
After the flight he just explains that after he jumped out of the plane he did a little half-turn to catch the wind. He also mentions that the wing unfolded nicely - and that when he kicked in the gas that he moved forward and he could tell that at that point he was flying. He said it was really cool, too. (Which I think we'll all agree is the case!)
Also - I'm not a native French speaker. I'm American but lived in Paris a couple of years - any native French speaker care to comment on the guy's accent? Is that a Swiss accent? (I'm presuming so, but I was curious to know from a native.)
Actually, especially today, I would have put this in the "Oooh! I want one for Christmas" department!
Merry Xmas everybody, and my fingers are crossed that next year my wife will get me one of these!!!!
How is this a geek issue?
Where's the nerdy slant?
It's not that it's not interesting - but should it be a Slashdot article?
Daily Kos, maybe, but not Slashdot.
Well, although it's a rare thing, the scientific consensus can get things wrong. And, in fact, they have goofed fairly badly on this same subject in the past. Have a look at this pdf from Newsweek in 1975 which warns about global cooling - it talks about the fact that the "evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it." It also says that meteorologist are "almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century." That time, the consensus was wrong.
- coolingworld.pdf
Here's the link:
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/newsweek
Although I agree with you that many people are just burying their heads in the sand, there are actually reasons to be a little bit wary of the dire predictions.
Check my name.
Does bharatm perhaps have a bug in his/her spell-checker? "sofware" bugs?
No - "software bugs".
Um, do you really think that the generals and decision-makers in *any* military organization are concerned about making sure the *other* side gets a "fair" shake?
No - they don't, and they shouldn't. Their job is to equip their forces with the best tools to win the fight. Giving the other side access to the same tools would be self-defeating, no?
It has been getting some coverage, but not a huge amount.
Otoh, I subscribe to the Journal of Foreign Affairs and they recently dedicated an entire issue to the topic - which is kind of impressive since they are only published every two months and so this represents about 17% of their entire year's publishing.
The plural of "madame" is "mesdames". (This is due to the fact that it's a composite word "ma dame", i.e., "my lady".)
I don't think so. His initial definition of spread for a right triangle is the ratio of opposite side length over hypotenuse length. This *is* the sine, so for right angles his concept of "spread" is equivalent.
He extends this to triangles that are not right triangles, but the basic concept seems to be an extension of sine from a particular case to the general - not the reverse as you seem to be saying.
Maybe I'm missing the point, though - why do you see sines as being derived from (or the underlying concept for) sines instead of what I outlined above?
The professor seems to have found an interesting way to present trig - however, it should also be noted that he does actually rely on sines as an underlying concept.
I read the article and part of hist concept of spread for an angle is the ratio (in a right triangle) of the side opposite the angle to the hypotenuse of the triangle. As I recall from my high-school geometry classes, though, this is exactly how the sine is calculated. (The cosine is the adjacent side divided by the hypotenuse.)
The interesting thing about his approach, though, is that he defines the concept of spread so that there's no need to refer to the underlying sine concept and the calculations are all (relatively) simple algebra - squaring and addition and subtraction. I would like to read some more and play with it a bit - the fact is I still have bad dreams about those damned trig identity tables, which I never really successfully felt comfortable with!
Interesting.
There is a great book about the history of the NYC subway called "722 Miles", by Clifton Hood. (That being the length of install track - which if laid out in a straight line would take you all the way to Chicago!)
The book, which is available at Amazon, covers the types of mass transit systems that existed in NYC before the advent of the subway, and also covers the politics of getting big changes made, etc.
Another truly fascinating aspect of the book is where the author talks about how much of an impact the subway had on the development of the city.
A great read.
Anyway, in case anyone's interested.
I saw your post and was a little surprised because of the similarity of your setup to mine. I live in a 5-floor building, you see, and we kind of have a little "community" here ourselves.
There are six rental units in the building and three of us share an Internet connection. (We also have an antenna hanging out the window so that we have wireless at the cafe down the block.)
Now, I understand that you said that you have access to place equipment in various places. My personal preference is against wireless. You get interference and/or flaky connections at points and personally I would (again, if you do have access) lay in physical cable (cat-5). If the various individual apartments want to put in their own local wireless, that's cool. But when you begin to worry about walls and other impediments, I think you're better off linking the various apartments onto a physical cable backbone and then letting the wireless points be stationed in each apartment.
My next-door neighbor has the actual physical connection to the outside world, for example. I get reception that is often good (but often not) in the front room of my aparment, which is near the base station. In my back room, I get CRAPPY reception from his base station, but I can see my downstairs neighbors base station. Two points here - firstly, he has his own base station because down one floor and over one apartment his reception was bad, so he decided to get his own base station hanging off the cable that he already had in his apartment. Secondly, I can see his base station in my back room but haven't given him my MAC yet (which is my bad)- he's doing MAC filtering - and so I don't have access to his net yet. The point is, that I think it would be easier for everyone to have their own local base station inside each apartment - they can place it where its best for each of them individually.
I know I haven't really been talking about budget issues in the above - mostly about architecure. However, if you put a router in each apartment, and a base station, and some category 5 cable, then you'll have a good network and I don't see it costing anywhere near 7K. Both base stations and routers have become cheap (especially routers) and so I think you could definitely keep the cost under $200/apartment.
well, those are my thoughts. have fun - sounds like a cool project!
I basically liked the movies. I am not a purist. Nonetheless, there were a number of changes that I didn't like and I'm surprised that you can't find people who objected to them.
For example, in the movie, Frodo and Sam are accompanied by Merry and Pippin (and assisted by Fatty Bolger) because they suspect something is afoot and think that Frodo might be going off on something dangerous by himself. They accompany him on his journey precisely because they are his friends and are unwilling to abandon him to face things alone. Their motivation is loyalty. In the movie, though, it is quite different. Merry and Pippin happen across Sam and Frodo when they are already leaving. They have no clue what's up (making them look a lot less clever than they were in the book) and they accompany him just kind of sort of because. Their motiviation is a lot less noble and I was disappointed by this since I think it made them seem like lesser characters.
Also, in general, I've met lots of people who didn't like the dwarf jokes. (Dwarf-tossing jokes? Please.) I admit that I've also met people who liked the comic relief.
I'd have to watch it again to come up with a better list, but this is just off the top of my head.
The one change that I can definitely endorse is the amplification of Arwen's role. I still remember being surprised when reading the book for the first time by her "sudden" importance in the Return of the King.
My favorite limerick (prompted by the fact that the university that the professors are from is the University of Aberystwyth):
There was a young girl from Aberystwyth
Who took grain to the mill to get grist with.
The miller's son, Jack,
Laid her flat on her back
And united the organs they pissed with!
(Apologies to anyone from what I am sure is a very nice town, but I couldn't help passing this one on!)
check out this link in the NY times as well:h tml
www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/science/11QUAR.
Your comments are good as far as they go, *but* they can be taken too far.
Yes, it is true that a proof might be mistaken and that the mistake might not be caught. This is much like the scientific process, though, in that later work which builds on it can lead to a result which is inconsistent with other accepted proofs, leading to the original proof being re-questioned. Just as in science, the bedrock proofs, from which other proofs build, are constantly being implicitly re-tested.
I agree that you can never be 100% certain of anything (other than the base axioms which are simply defined as being true), but the probability asymptotically approaches 100% the longer that the proof stands without producing a contradiction of some sort.
To me, it's like what Popper said about the scientific process - things can be disproved by coming up with a counter-example, but you can never definitively prove something because that would imply testing/checking all possible situations - an impossibility.
But, to say that this means that "truth" is "socially constructed" takes this too far. It appears to imply that *any* result could be arrived at and be allowed to stand. Since math is a competitive process (like science) in which you can make your reputation by showing that an accepted "fact" is not really true, any statement which doesn't have some intrinsic merit will eventually be shown to be bogus.
Many of the thinkers who have come up with these theses of "socially-constructed truth" tend to come from the "soft"-er disciplines, such as lit crit and philosophy. I think that many of them suffer from a sort of "credibility envy" in which they are uncomfortable with the fact that the results of their studies are not accorded the same degree of respect as those of say, physics, or math. Therefore, in order to elevate their disciplines to the same level of respect as the "hard"-er disciplines, they need to show one of two things - either that their disciplines are just as rigorous as the "hard"-er ones, or that the so-called "hard" discplines aren't really all that "hard" and are in fact just "soft" disciplines in disguise. They have opted for the second line of attack.
Yes, the proof is only for n=3. Poincare's original conjecture was only for n=3, but was later extended to be for all n. The other cases have been proven already, so this proof takes care of the remaining (original) case.
h tml" is excellent. (And it's where I learned the above stuff about the various cases.
If you're interested in reading up on it a bit, the link in the original post to "http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PoincareConjecture.
You know, this has always been one of the reasons that I don't like the Mac approach. Basically they say:
*we* will make all the choices ahead of time and they will be right. you just sit back and accept what's handed down from on high.
I've never liked this approach for the arrogance of it.
Has anybody out there read Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio? This discovery of control genes in action in an evolutionary time-frame (their existence was already known - concrete examples were missing, though) makes the thesis of Bear's book even more interesting.
SPOILER'S FOLLOW
Well, actually, it's not a huge spoiler. Part of his idea for the book is that evolution is a bit more self-controlled than the standard version of evolution (gradual accumulation of kazillions of tiny changes). The existence of proof that mutations in certain control genes can introduce relatively large-scale changes in relatively short time-frames fits in nicely with his idea.
It's definitely a good book and stimulation reading. It was an interesting experience to read his theorizing and then turn around and see some actual science producing something that might fit into his ideas.
"And why is this fair? This is what I am saying. Why should you be plugged in 24/7 to get a good salary? Basically you are saying that you are forced to sacrifice salary because you want to spend time with your child."
Well, suppose you were the person who was working like a dog. How would you feel if someone working plain old 9-5 got the same pay? I think that would be perceived as unfair.
"Why not get that good salary AND spend time with your kid? Are corporations blind to this?"
Um, corporations don't exist for the purpose of providing their employees with a generous salary for a light work load. Their purpose is to turn a profit. The corporations are not blind - they are quite clearly looking at those things which affect the bottom line.
The one thing that I found interesting in Schneier's article was that Gates's memo says that pay will be tied to a product's security. If this is actually implemented as a policy internally (and is not just for public consumption) then this could actually changes things. People will go to great lengths to get their bonuses - I've seen this in real life.
I'm still skeptical about Gates's commitment to this, but it wouldn't be the first time the company was turned on a dime by the BG (Bill Gates or Big Guy - whichever you prefer) - remember that they did this for the Internet as well, which they originally missed the boat on.